Author: VD

Whether he runs against the Lizard Queen or the Magic Negro, McCain is a probable loser because his nominal supporters don’t support his policies:

A new survey I commissioned demonstrates how McCain’s malarkey about supporting enforcement has succeeded in duping a significant number of voters. The poll (complete results are here) found that only 34 percent of people who voted for McCain in the primaries and caucuses knew that he favored a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants (the word “amnesty” never appeared in the survey questions). Meanwhile, 35 percent of his voters thought he favored attrition of the illegal population through enforcement, 21 percent didn’t know his position, and (this is my favorite) 10 percent thought McCain’s position on illegal immigration was “a program of mass roundups and deportations.”

Most Republicans don’t know how bad McCain is, and they were voting for him in the primaries because they had come to understand how bad Giuliani and Romney were. Once his positions on free speech, guns and open borders become clear in the Republican vs Democrat part of the campaign, his support will quickly dissipate in favor of better third-party candidates and simply staying home. More than a few Republicans have learned their lesson from the Bush years; if you’re going to get Democratic governance anyhow, it’s much better to have its inevitable failures actually blamed on Democrats.

The usual arguments in support of the lesser evil will be made, of course, but there are fewer voters willing to accept that argument for the fifth straight election. At some point, consistently supporting the lesser evil will force one to confront the reality that one has been reduced to a servant of evil.

Kelly’s critique of TIA Chapter II is up on her blog:

Perhaps the most amusing aspect thus far is his total lack of comprehension regarding Euthyphro’s Dilemma, which dealt with the source of morality—not the existence of god(s). Beyond that, he practically asserts that some kind of resolution was reached in the dialogue and that, if applied to science, it could be extrapolated that science doesn’t exist. (This is the point at which I’m looking at my monitor with a look of amazement and confusion—what kind of thought process led him there?) No wonder he thinks that the execution of Socrates was a good thing, although he places it erroneously within the reign of the Council of Thirty, while Apologia clearly explains that it was a jury of 500 citizens who convicted him of impiety. That same document states an incident that Socrates had with the Council, and also that they had been ousted. It’s a common mistake given the proximity, so I guess we can cut him some slack there, likely never having read Socrates’ defense for himself. (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/)

Alright, I was wrong earlier. The funniest part of this chapter is when Day makes this statement: “…[T]he very existence of the Intelligent Design movement is a testimony to a respect for scientific methodology…” (p. 33) Excuse me? Their attempt to redefine science to include supernatural explanations is “respect,” but Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion was a useless distortion of science? Interesting.

His rhetorical question about the hazard posed to science by religion and the resulting “hostility” betrays his lack of awareness of just how detrimental religion has been to science.

I’ll have my detailed response later, but feel free to take out your own red pens in the meantime. For now, suffice it to say that she’s correct about who pronounced sentence upon Socrates – I noted the error in the errata a while ago – but her take on my supposed lack of comprehension regarding a famous “dilemma” again demonstrates the inherent danger of doing a chapter-by-chapter review without reading the entire book first. (See TIA Appendix B.)

With a low Cuss-o-Meter rating of only 6.2 percent, isn’t it good to know that your tender ears are safe here? Unlike that vulgar den of verbal filth known as Dr. Helen’s blog. I like to think of myself as the Emily Post of the Internet.

The NFL’s competition committee is considering an absolutely horrible idea:

“I think it’s a very bad idea,” Broncos owner Pat Bowlen said about the proposal, according to the Denver Post. “Especially when you’re in a competitive division,” Bowlen said. “It can be tough to have a good record when you have so many tough teams in your division. In my mind, the AFC West is a very competitive division. The fans are into the rivalries that exist in our division.”

Under the current proposal, teams No. 3 through No. 6 would be seeded in round one of the playoffs without regard to whether they won their division. The controlling factor would be the teams’ won-loss records.

First, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. There’s nothing wrong with the NFL playoffs, and eliminating the tradition and importance of the NFL divisions in order to have theoretically more competitive first-round games is simply stupid. There’s no guarantee that the games would be any more competitive anyhow, all this would do is eliminate the importance of winning your division and reduce the rivalry effect.

Does anyone doubt that the Seattle-St. Louis rivalry is more interesting now because they’re in the same division, even though there is no historical rivalry between the two teams? I certainly don’t pay any attention to Tampa Bay now since they’re no longer a threat to beat out the Vikings for the NFC Central, although I will readily admit that they never belonged in the old Black-and-Blue in the first place and I was glad to see them go to the NFC South.

The NFL’s four-division alignment was a great move, and it would be a shame to see them reduce the effect of establishing some good geographic rivalries for nothing. Teams that survive tough divisional battles should be rewarded, not penalized.

RWC informs us that John Hawkins got a little carried away by what one can only presume was a very positive response to his Unbearable Hardship of Blogging While Female series:

I follow your work and often agree. I’ve usually little to add to your commentary but I felt this story is of such import that you need to see it directly. It is good to see Right Wing News focused on the things that really matter to the Right in this country.

We’re utterly doomed.

Over the years, I have occasionally felt a few pangs of regret of abandoning the political party of my Reaganite youth. This is absolutely not one of them.

As with the universities, the influx of women into science is having the observable result of degrading its quality. This will only increase as political pressure from women causes Title IX to be applied to science as it has been applied to sports. By way of example, consider the recent study cited by Dr. Helen, wherein a scientific researcher named Coreen concludes that the inability of women to communicate properly is indicative of a male shortcoming. As one commenter, presumably male, rightly notes:

Let me make sure I have this right, it’s men fault for not reading subtle non-verbal clues by women who REFUSE TO BE CLEAR WITH VERBAL COMMUNICATION and it’s somehow a man’s fault? Anyone follow this logic? If you do, you’re a woman.

Regardless of your sex, if you fail to communicate your intentions accurately, then the fault lies solely with you. The whole study is a misconception, since even when a woman actually happens to know what her intentions are – and is willing to admit them to herself – it is often not in her interest to communicate them accurately to the other party. For example, a woman who wants a man to buy her a drink will send purposefully misleading sexual messages in order to obtain what she wants. Is it more accurate to say that the man mistaken her signal or has he been misled? In many circumstances, the whole point of non-verbal communication is to AVOID the accurate transmission of information and intent.

Spacebunny points out that signals are also culturally dependent and vary from individual to individual anyhow.

I’ve never had a problem with confusing friendly signals with sexual ones myself, mostly because I paid them no heed. If a man finds himself playing a reactive role with women, then he’s already behind the eight ball. And if she is really interested in a sexual or romantic context, there’s no need to worry about any entrail interpreting, as she will make the signal abundantly clear.

As well-loved as Pope John Paul II was, his successor, Pope Benedict XVI may one day be regarded as a far more important leader of the Roman Catholic Church. He is certainly revealing himself to possess an extremely formidable intellect. I don’t think many have yet realized that with his speech at Regensburg and his public baptism of Magdi Allam at Easter, he has responded to the decades-long advance of the Ummah by throwing down a gauntlet that is all the more serious for its non-violence. I suspect that this is not a man who thinks in terms of years, or even decades, but centuries.

European Christianity may be reduced to a few coals glowing in the ashes, but it is not dead, only marginalized. If the Catholic youth of Europe are offered a great task – to evangelize the Muslims whose restlessness threatens to push Europe into social chaos – many of them may heed the call.

As I wrote in 2005, “Now that everyone is talking about Europe’s demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity.” Today’s Europeans stem from the melting-pot of the barbarian invasions that replaced the vanishing population of the Roman Empire. The genius of the Catholic Church was to absorb them. If Benedict XVI can convert this new wave of invaders from North Africa and the Middle East, history will place him on a par with his great namesake, the founder of the monastic order the bears his name.

I can’t say how this will all turn out. But one thing I have learned from history is that its post-facto title of greatness tends to be bestowed upon those men who find themselves at the nexus of great events and rise to the occasion. Pope Benedict may be one such man, as he appears to following the very strategy that the Archbishop Peter Akinola recommended in response to the violent challenge to Nigerian Christians posed by the expanse of the Ummah there: “Make the church grow”.

It doesn’t significantly benefit the economy in the UK, nor in the USA either:

While all these factors can be said to point to the advantages of immigration in specific spheres, it is not the same as saying that immigration benefits the country as a whole because some, usually the poor, lose out to the competition; and, as output rises, it is consumed by the larger population. Taking all this into account, the Lords committee is expected to conclude that “the economic benefits of net immigration to the resident population are small and close to zero in the long run”.

This key conclusion demolishes the Government’s case for large-scale immigration. If it has not been to the economic benefit of the resident population, what has been its purpose?

The truth is that large-scale immigration is of benefit to a relatively small group of business owners in the service industries, which allows them to simultaneously lower their costs as well as increase the size of their potential market. Because service industries can’t go offshore to reduce the labor costs due to their location-dependent nature, they want to bring the offshore labor to them. Hence the political pressure for mass immigration. That’s why there are Somalis in Minnesota and no doubt some other third world group in Nebraska, in order to help the service industries, they have to be spread out all over the place.

This comes at the direct expense of the much greater part of the citizenry that does not own a service industry operation. It does make the services cheaper, but at the price of lowered wages for everyone and the net effect of the increased supply is also reduced by the increased demand.

Nicholas Kristof picks an odd time to begin worrying about democracy’s fundamental structural illogic:

Her broader point is that we as a nation will have difficulty making crucial decisions if we don’t have an intellectual climate that fosters an informed and reasoned debate. How can we decide on embryonic stem cells if we don’t understand biology? How can we judge whether to invade Iraq if we don’t know a Sunni from a Shiite?

The idiocy of the voting public is precisely what preserves our existing system of near-universal, but strictly limited representative democracy. It ensures that the best liars are always elected and fosters fundamentally dishonest government. Kristof probably sees no problem with his own voting, although I’ll bet he has no idea how inadequate a measure GDP is or how far off the current CPI is from measuring actual price inflation.

The masses are clueless, but specific groups within them are more short-sighted and self-centered than others. That was the whole point of limiting the vote to the least clueless 10 percent or so in the first place.