Author: VD

Voxicon

This Voxological lexicon may be of some utility when reading this blog:

Aprevistan: One who subscribes to some form of Open Theory or opposes the concept of an omniderigent God on Biblical grounds.

Atheist, High Church: An individual lacking god belief who is college-educated, self-identifies as an atheist and subscribes entirely to a materialist model of the universe, rejecting all supernatural concepts. Usually subscribes to “Enlightenment values” as well as secular humanism, considers himself rational and is often evangelical or militant about his lack of god belief.

Atheist, Low Church: An individual lacking god belief who does not self-identify as an atheist, usually has not completed college and does not possess a conscious model of the universe, although assumes an essentially materialist one. May or may not reject the supernatural and is not terribly interested in abstract concepts. Doesn’t know what “Enlightenment values” are, doesn’t care, but generally subscribes to a belief in evolution and trusts in science. Not the least bit evangelical or militant about his lack of god belief.

Atheist Dance: Changing the definition of atheism depending upon what the atheist is attempting to prove or disprove at the moment.

Broken Bamboo: A defensive argumentative technique which asserts that the non-atheist is attacking a strawman position instead of an actual atheist argument, even when the argument attacked is a specific argument made by a well-known atheist in one of his best-selling books.

Captain Underoos: Mitt Romney

CCD: Confront, Cow, Destroy. One of Vox’s favored methods of removing intellectual legitimacy from an opponent. First, challenge the claims made by the opponent. Second, intimidate them by demonstrating a superior understanding of their own arguments. Third, demolish whatever respectability they may have in the eyes of others by showing their verifiable errors of fact and logic.

Circle Jerk: The action when one Horseman publicly reviews, critiques or judges another Horseman’s work, especially when one Horseman judges the quality of another Horseman’s judgment of the quality of his own work.

Climacaustal: A member of the pseudoscientific cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Change. (AGW/CC)

Defiance on Hill 1917: Any of the various arguments used in a futile attempt to separate atheism as a belief system from the historical fact that regimes ruled by atheists have committed a statistically disproportionate amount of atrocities. This can take the form of a No True Atheist argument, a Rage Against the Facts argument or the “Communism is a religion” argument.

Extinction Equation: Sam Harris’s central argument from The End of Faith, which states that Science plus Religious Faith equals Imminent Human Extinction.

Four Horsemen of the Bukkakelypse: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Less Dennett, also known as the Unholy Trinity.

Fowl Atheist: Pharyngula blogger Paul Myers, an outspoken atheist afraid of public debate.

Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome: The lethal disease that strikes female pioneers. Named after Kara Hultgreen and Madame Curie, the syndrome has struck down numerous brave women on the frontiers of female innovation, including the first woman to use a washing machine, who tragically drowned in it, and the first Roman woman to eat reclining on a couch, who choked to death on a grape.

Magic Negro:Barrack Hussein Soetoro/Soebarkah/Obama

Magic Negro Part II: Republican Edition: Hermain Cain

ND-TENS Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

TENS: Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

TE(p)NSBMGDaGF: Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow.

Omniderigence: The concept of an all-acting God who is responsible for all human decisions, actions, and historical events, large and small. Also known as the God of the Perfect Plan or the Swallow-slaying God.

Omniderigiste: One who subscribes to omniderigence.

Voliscience: The ability to know whatever one wishes to know at any given moment. This is distinguished from omniscience, which requires knowing all things at all times.

Irratheist: An atheist who asserts the superiority of atheism on the basis of its supposed foundation in science and reason while simultaneously defining atheism as being a concept strictly limited to the absence of a belief in the existence of God, thereby accepting the validity of atheist belief in astrology, Buddhism, reincarnation, Heaven, Hell, pagan gods and every other supernatural phenomena or concept currently unknown to science. This is usually an extreme example of a Fighting Withdrawal argument, but can, in some cases, represent a genuine intellectual position.

Science Reason: The pagan god of the science fetishists and militant atheists. Its great prophet UberDawks has revealed that it will one day push out IDIOT FUNDIES from the shiny, sexy, secular society that will be established after the Singularity.

Fighting Withdrawal: An argumentative technique often used by atheists which involves defending a position or an individual by sacrificing the larger part of the defended position or the defended individual’s arguments, usually without understanding that the sacrifice has been made.

Silence That Gun: A post-argument technique utilized by many atheists of falling silent and disappearing rather than conceding the point when their arguments have been refuted. This can also apply to book reviews.

Subtraction Fallacy: An argument made in near-complete ignorance of Christian theology in which it is argued that atheists only believe in one less supernatural deity than Christians. Also known as Stephen F. Roberts’s One Less God argument.

Rage Against the Facts: A counter-ontological argument which states that because the atheist cannot understand the logic which would explain the nature of the relationship underlying an observed causation, said causation cannot exist, all supporting empirical evidence notwithstanding. Also known as the “In the Name of” argument.

Hume’s Last Gasp: A logically fallacious and anti-scientific assertion about the varying nature of the quality of evidence required to prove the verity of one claim versus another claim. More commonly known as the Extraordinary Claims concept.

Marinello: A bizarre defensive response which involves accusing the accuser of being/doing precisely what he has just accused the defendant of being/doing . Example: “I’m not 0-10, you’re 0-10!”

MPAI: Most People Are Idiots.

Scientage: The body of scientific knowledge.

Scientody: The scientific method.

Scientistry: The profession of science. (This refers to the labor performed by sufficiently credentialed scientists, not an expression of quasi-religious faith on the part of the scientific faithful.)

Scienthology: The practice of a division of doxastic labor which involves blindly placing one’s uninformed faith in the opinions of scientists, particularly those opinions which are advertised as a “scientific consensus”. Also includes the fetishistic worship of a romanticized Platonic ideal of science, primarily by those lacking professional scientific credentials.

Unholy Trinity: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens

Lizard Queen: Hillary Rodham Clinton

Euzi: A politician, bureaucrat, or supporter of the European Union.

APHORISMS

Get up. Don’t argue, don’t complain, and don’t cry. Just get up and go on.

Never assume error, inquire to confirm it.

Reason can no more deliver operative moral systems than socialism can provide functional pricing models.

A ruthless commitment to logic and truth tends to be persuasive over time because the human mind can only stand so much cognitive dissonance before it either begins to break down or accept that which is both logical and observable.

Secular societal suicide

England fails the mating challenge:

The proportion of men and women getting married is below any level found since figures were first kept nearly 150 years ago. And the number of weddings held in 2006 was the smallest since 1895, when the population was little more than half its present level….

There were 236,980 marriages, the fewest since 228,204 were recorded in 1895, a year in which Oscar Wilde was sent to Reading jail, W.G. Grace scored his 100th century and Queen Victoria had still to celebrate her jubilee. In 1895, there were around 30 million people in England and Wales compared with more than 54 million now.

Of course, they can always import more third-worlders, that seems to be working really well. Celebrate barbarity! That is to say, diversity!

Voxonomics 1-2

Last week’s podcast was well received, so we shall continue with the experiment. This week’s interview is with Peter Schiff. Download Voxonomics 1-2.

By the way, if anyone is feeling ambitious and wants to transcribe the podcasts, send me the transcripts and I’ll post them here. I don’t have the bandwidth at the moment, or, to be honest, the inclination.

The atheist dance

The Corner atheists concur. When godless atheists kill, it can’t possibly be their godlessness that’s to blame in any way. No matter how often they do it. No matter how reliably predictive the “atheist in power” model is:

I hit the trifecta — Mark K., John D., and Andrew S. all taking exception to my noting the Godless Red Chinese murdering Tibetans.

And on those occasion that atheist regimes murder specifically “in the name of atheism”, they are, of course, practicing a religion of atheism and are therefore No True Atheists. I love the way the New Atheists have been routed so thoroughly that atheists such as the Rational Response Squad and John Derbyshire are now openly claiming as atheists those who believe in reincarnation, evil spirits, astrology and a whole host of supernatural concepts. It’s a beautiful Fighting Withdrawal that abandons both the militant New Atheists and secular scientists with whom they previously identified.

In any event, Derbyshire gets it wrong. The Tibetan Buddhists are no atheists by any definition. “And although the original teachings of the Buddha do not mention a creator or other deities, Tibetan Buddhism embraces a vast pantheon of divinities. These supramundane beings derive from the intersection of many sources and influences, both native and external.“

Shake it, baby.

The Vault

SI’s Vault is pretty slick. I vividly remember this playoff game and Bobby Bryant taking the blocked kick back for a touchdown.

The scoring in pro football games generally features spiraling passes from quarterbacks like Tarkenton to smooth-gaited receivers like White, but Allen won the game over the Rams as surely as Bud Grant is a duck hunter. He did it just when the Vikings were reeling back on their own one-inch line in the first quarter, shoved up against their funny old end-zone bleachers by the Rams. After a 54-yard drive, the visitors were lined up and ready to get at least three points for their efforts.

Suddenly, it wasn’t a Los Angeles field goal at all, it was a 7-0 Minnesota lead. The center’s snap to the Ram holder, Steve Preece, was true enough, and Tom Dempsey’s leg did reach the ball. The thing was, Dempsey’s leg got there at the same time as a purple-shirted blaze wearing No. 25.

The emotional case for “science”

A Mad Biologist sticks a philosophical gun to his forehead and splatters the room with what previously passed for his brain:

The other thing we evolutionary biologists don’t do enough of, and this stems from the previous point, is make an emotional and moral case for the study of evolution. Last night, I concluded my talk with a quote from Dover, PA creationist school board member William Buckingham, who declared, “Two thousand years ago someone died on a cross. Can’t someone take a stand for him?”

My response was, “In the last two minutes, someone died from a bacterial infection. We take a stand for him.”

The moral case for evolution? The EMOTIONAL and MORAL case for evolution? You can go ahead and write off TENS now, because what was once merely worthy of skepticism is rapidly approaching utter farce. With defenders like this, one need not even pay any attention to those openly attacking the theory, however credible or crazy they might be. So much for the claims to be objective science, this is most remniscent of Richard Dawkins’s howlingly ludicrous conclusion of his “unrebuttable” central argument of The God Delusion:

6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

In summary, because Richard Dawkins believes we should not give up hope that something we do not currently know might possibly exist because we have some partial explanations for other things that we do know exist, we must therefore conclude that God does not exist. This is total logical incompetence on a grand scale, which the Mad Biologist approaches in abandoning all claims to the scientific method in order to make a moral case for the meaningless transition of one form of organic material into another. He might as reasonably assign color ex nihilo to the fate of the bacterially infected deceased as assign any meaning to it, let alone attempt to build a moral case for a “scientific” theory from it.

Needless to say, PZ Myers actually thinks both Dawkins’s and the Mad Biologist’s lines of “reason” are brilliant. It’s simply astonishing. And by all means, I should very much like to see these clueless fetishists attempt this line of biological evangelism, it should make for extraordinarily amusing blogfodder.

Reading Wrath

Flicka reviews The Wrath of Angels:

Theodore Beale describes himself as a writer of Christian Fantasy, and certainly The Wrath of Angels can fit into that category. I think that if you do not consider the Bible to be absolute truth then you will enjoy this tale as fantasy. But any student of God’s word will immediately recognize within the characters and story a comprehensive theology through which the doctrines of angels, sin and forgiveness are illuminated, fleshed out, and animated. And as such The Wrath of Angels is more Christianity-Imaginatively-Expressed than Christian Fantasy.

I enjoy Beale’s wonderfully descriptive style. His narrative is like the fluff of beautiful imagery sandwiched between hard slices of fast-paced action scenes. He has an impressive and thoroughly enjoyable vocabulary and brandishes words as deftly as The Lord Of Chaos does his sword. Thankfully, missing from his style are the ubiquitous fragmented sentences just to make a point, and the one sentence paragraphs as though every statement were a profundity, and the italicized sentences to reveal the mind of the charatcter that litter so many pages in contemporary fiction. Out of the midst of the many references from sources as varied as archaic literature to contemporary rock bands, along with the thoughtful, observant unfolding of his tale, emerges a unique and strong voice.

Flicka wrote this review a while ago, but I hadn’t seen it, so it was a nice surprise on the Original Cyberpunk’s shiny new site. I’m quite pleased with how Wrath has been received, although it seems I may have been a bit too clever for my own good in burying the subtext too deeply for anyone to notice. The plot point that Flicka mentions as not being explained might be a little more obvious if one understands my background in economics and my interest in currencies… there is a whole level to the novel that literally no one has noticed despite a few – quite clearly ineffectual – hints about its existence.

So far, so good

Remember this challenge?

According to the “scientific” forecast, housing prices were to stabilize in late 2007 and hold firm in 2008. Here’s the November 2007 forecast for 2008: “Existing-home prices are expected to decline 1.7 percent to a median of $218,200 for all of this year and hold essentially even in 2008 at $218,300. Wow, what precision! To a tenth of a percent! The February report comes out this week… let’s just say that instead of $218k, I’m expecting a decline that would project to $175k or less by the end of the year. But what do I know, I’m not an “expert” paying close attention to the “science” of the housing market, after all.

From the February 2008 NAR report: “The national median existing-home price for all housing types was 195,900 U.S. dollars in February, down 8.2 percent from a year earlier when the median was 213,500 U.S. dollars.”

At this rate, we could get down to 175k before August.

The superiority of Ron Paul

The Lizard Queen on Alan Greenspan:

But he has a calming influence still to this day on Wall Street — don’t ask me why because I never understand what he’s saying — but nevertheless people respond to that Delphic oracle approach.

Hillary really is an idiot. Not because she doesn’t understand the first thing about economics – we already knew that – but because the correct thing to do when you don’t understand the very simple monetary policy that he is discussing is to laud his “masterful” performance in soothing the troubled waters of the markets.