Author: VD

In some ways, McCrazy is even less conservative than the Lizard Queen. There is nothing conservative, nothing at all, about the idea of bringing the Imperial World Democratic Revolution to the Middle East for 100 years. If you liked the performance of Bush the Younger, then you’ll love John McCrazy:

During the 1990s, when most Republican politicians were against nation-building and extravagant interventionism – perhaps in reaction to the Clinton administration’s taste for both – McCain, in the words of John Judis, sought “to differentiate his views from those of other Republican presidential aspirants and from the growing isolationism of House Republicans” from “within a larger ideological framework. That ideological framework was neoconservatism.”

The Weekly Standard became McCain’s Pravda, and he began consulting regularly with Bill Kristol, who soon became a close adviser. Neocons Marshall Wittmann and Daniel McKivergan – two close friends of Kristol’s – were hired by McCain, and the former became one of his top advisers during the presidential campaign. The neocons, having destroyed the presidency of George W. Bush, have already found another willing host, and they are primed and ready for another go.

The thing that I find interesting is that although I left the Republican party in 1990, I still maintained some lingering emotional ties to it and tended to find a degree of satisfaction in Democratic electoral defeats even though I wasn’t voting for any of the Republicans on offer. But the current presidency and the rise of the neocons managed to sever those ties entirely. I have no interest in thinking about how to save the Republican party, assuming that can even be done at this point, let it crash and burn along with the lethal ideological parasites that infest its brain.

Unfortunately, even the probable Republican crash-and-burn will likely not suffice, for as Justin Raimondo points out, the unconscionable neocons, like rats, won’t hesitate to leave the ship they sank in favor of boarding the next.

If and when the Democrats take the White House, you can bet your bottom dollar the neocons will have some kind of presence, whether it’s in the form of a few mid-level bureaucrats placed in sensitive positions or in top spots close to President Hillary or Obama. They’re already crawling all over the DLC, and they’ll find their way into a Democratic White House via the interstices between pure politics and policy wonkery.

It should be interesting watching the Left go berserk as it gets betrayed in much the same manner that Bush betrayed conservatives. And at the behest of much the same crew.

If you’re at all interested in writing, or even simply better understanding the various forms of genre fiction, you will not want to miss the OC’s lecture on Advanced Scribbling 301 being conducted at his blog:

Comedy and horror are two sides of the same coin. Both depend on timing; both depend on setting the reader up for the emotional payoff; both deliver the ending with a twist. Twist it one way and it’s comedy: man slips on a banana peel, falls down, and loses his dignity. Twist it the other way and it’s tragedy: man slips on a banana peel, falls down, fractures his skull on the sidewalk and dies. Twist it a notch past tragedy and it’s horror: man slips on a banana peel, falls down, is impaled on a picket fence, and as he’s dying the psycho killer who placed the banana peel there in the first place emerges from the shadows to lick his dripping blood.

Me, I’m not so much of a fan of dripping blood. I went for comedy.

But, here’s another heretical little secret for you. Science fiction writers like to gas on about how SF is “the literature of ideas.” The more honest statement is that SF is the sanctimonious member of the horror, comedy, and adventure family. In short fiction especially, it is far more about setting the reader up for the emotional spike than it is about exploring any breathtaking new frontiers of speculative thought, and it’s far more acceptable to end the story with an ironic twist or a disquieting ambiguity.

John Derbyshire makes an uncharacteristic error of logic:

You have to wonder how these people with such contempt for science and scientific method can ever summon up the courage to get on a plane. I guess aerodynamics, medicine, electronics, geology (you want petroleum, right?) and other useful fields are exempt from the critique, like Japanese businessmen being “honorary whites” in apartheid South Africa. Very convenient.

It’s hardly convenient, it’s a simple matter of observing whose models are precise and reliable, and whose are not. As I wrote in the chapter on Daniel Dennett, in reference to his doxastic division of labor:

Dennett also digs another logical hole for himself when he admits that only a tiny fraction of humanity understands what he describes as “the ultimate talismanic formula of science,” Einstein’s E=mc2 equation. He has no problem with the fact that most people are content to accept this scientific dogma on faith and leave the burden of understanding the details to the priesthood of scientific experts, then, seventy-seven pages later, turns around and declares that it is personally immoral for the religious faithful to practice this very same division of doxastic labor by placing trust in their pastors, priests, rabbis, and imams to make their moral decisions for them.

Dennett attempts to justify these contrary stances by stating that the difference is that the scientific priesthood really know what they’re doing, that they understand their formulas and use them to achieve amazingly accurate results, while the religious priesthood do not. But Dennett is demonstrably incorrect on both scores. Dennett’s two favorite sciences, cognitive science and evolutionary biology, are primarily distinguished by the way in which no one understands exactly how anything works nor has managed to construct any significant formulas, let alone achieve any results demonstrating the precision of the quantum electrodynamic calculations cited in Dennett’s example. Dennett himself confesses that human consciousness is a mystery, a phenomenon that people don’t even know how to think about yet, and while he is rather more sanguine about the achievements of evolutionary biology, he admits that the science which began with the Origin of Species still regards the way in which species begin to be a mystery, too, albeit one with more of the details filled in.

So while some sciences have proven themselves worthy enough of our complete confidence that we need not trouble our pretty little heads about them, to claim that we are justified in placing blind trust in cognitive scientists, evolutionary biologists, and sociologists because physicists really know what they’re doing is absurd.
– TIA p. 184-185

Bonus points to be awarded to those noting the startling departure from conventional evolutionary apologetics in the linked exchange. I need to alert my TENS instructor, he’s out of date!

As you all know, I have been a Ron Paul supporter from the very start. And while I continue to wish Ron Paul every success in both his presidential and congressional campaigns, the fact is that my official endorsement is still available due to the Paul campaign’s entirely understandable disinclination to waste any time defending my various controversialities to the dim-witted and the reading-comprehension challenged lot otherwise known as the mainstream media. I have no problem whatsoever with their decision and fully respect it, on the other hand, I feel that it would be irresponsible to not do something with my unoccupied endorsement considering the immense weight of my opinion on the matter with the American electorate.

I am, of course, vehemently opposed to the Lizard Queen and the only thing about her I can wholeheartedly endorse is our shared appreciation for attractive young women. Since she seems disinclined to publicly advertise that aspect of her lizardliness, I imagine that she, too, would fail to properly appreciate my endorsement of her campaign.

Like everyone else, I don’t know much about the Magic Negro except for the fact that his fellow senator assures us that he is a black man who showers regularly, is unlikely to steal the silverware and seldom bursts into spontaneous rap. Also, he is audacious enough to “hope”, although the American public remains in blissed ignorance of precisely what he is so audaciously hoping for. While I am generally pro-shower, I don’t know if there’s enough there there to even justify an opinion of the man, let alone an endorsement.

McCrazy would certainly make for an entertaining president as he pursued Osama bin Laden TO THE GATES OF HELL!!!!!! That being said, I’m not sure that being unashamedly mentally unbalanced is particularly desirable in a national leader and “the lesser of two evils” equation is really rendered incalculable by McCrazy since he is not so much the lesser of two evils as the more unstable of two evils. And if the nation is united in its collective decision to walk down the left-hand path together, I feel that we would be wise to do so with vigor and to actively embrace the greater evil rather than the lesser. Also, I have to assume that a candidate of ancient and unabashed evil is unlikely to have any significant problem with controversial endorsers.

Therefore, I have decided to endorse a truly great and fearsome evil, Dread Cthulhu, for president in 2008. For as it is written, that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange æons even death may die.

From an atheist… or maybe an agnostic of sorts. I have to admit, I’m not exactly sure when The Great Agnostic became classified as an atheist either:

The Irrational Atheist is a succinct rebuttal to what I felt were apparently bad arguments from little tomes of regurgitated atheist liturgy. None of the refuted authors offer the power of voice or intellect that past freethinkers have.

This is the sort of book I have been waiting for since first reading The God Delusion, and moving on to Letter and god is not Great. The book itself is not surprising, but the source from which it comes is a surprise. I expected the heretical community to be up in arms against a group of best selling authors who in my opinion have done more to make unbelievers look like assholes than to give atheism any new ideas, or even a refreshing take on old ones. Instead of the likes of a more secular author, a Jennifer Hecht or Susan Jacoby, it has taken a libertarian Christian to point to the elephant in the room. It was about time someone did.

I have to confess, I didn’t really understand what the publisher was getting at when they wrote something about the book being a surprise… from my perspective, it seemed obvious that a Christian would be opposed to the New Atheism and marshal arguments against it. So, where’s the surprise? Now, I think I understand that from their entirely secular point of view, they truly didn’t believe that a God-addled theist would be capable of looking at the situation from a purely logical, scientific and historical perspective. Which I’d like to say is spectacularly unfair, except that from what I’ve seen post-publication, it’s at the very least true as often as it is not.

On a tangential note, this is the root of my dislike for theologians and scientists alike. Both groups are intrinsicly gnostic and insist on communicating with outsiders solely in their own intentionally obscure, jargon-ridden language, then complain when they are inevitably misunderstood. I see this behavior as being not only pointless and self-defeating, but inexcusably obnoxious.

Maureen Dowd complains about the unbearable hardship of being a wealthy white woman:

The joke goes: “Obama is just creaming Hillary. You know, all these primaries, you know. And Hillary says it’s not fair, because they’re being held in February, and February is Black History Month. And unfortunately for Hillary, there’s no White Bitch Month.”…

Those close to Hillary say she’s feeling blue. It’s an unbearable twist of fate to spend all those years in the shadow of one Secretariat, only to have another gallop past while you’re plodding toward the finish line. I know that the attacks against powerful women can be harsh and personal and unfair, enough to make anyone cry.

There’s another word for those who understandably cry at the “unbearable” realization that they might not get what they want. That word is “children”. Dowd is just projecting here anyhow, the legend of the crying crocodile notwithstanding, everyone knows that reptiles don’t actually shed tears. That glistening people keep detecting in Hillary Clinton’s eyes is nothing more than the light reflecting off her nictitating membranes.

I still expect the Lizard Queen to be made president one way or another. I don’t put much stock in all the distracting “primary” activity meant to occupy everyone’s attention, so the Magic Negro’s sweep of three states means about as much to me as John McCrazy’s, which is to say virtually none. I’ll be delighted to be proven wrong, of course, but until I see an actual human being sworn into office, I’ll have my doubts.

UPDATE – one of my favorite historians agrees. VDH concludes, on the basis of recent history:

The Clintons will do anything—anything—to win the nomination for Hillary, the popular vote be blasted. The filing of lawsuits, the dangling before the noses of superdelegates of various irresistible blandishments—whatever it takes, the Clintons will do. Without compunction. Even with a certain glee. Regardless of the popular vote going into the convention, therefore, Hillary Clinton, and not Barack Obama, will emerge with the nomination.

JK is of two minds:

And… doesn’t he mean the Four Horsemen of the Bukkakelypse?

This is precisely why I find you both an inspiration AND an embarrassment to Christianity and decency. Why does someone like you do this so consistently? I said to someone recently, I am glad that Vox is on our side, but I am glad I don’t know him personally. Like the famed Gurkhas of world war II – they liked the results but turned a blind eye to their methods. C’mon Vox, leave the trash talkin to the heathen – you are a King’s son.

P.S. I am a third through the book and loving it. Good Job.

I have to admit, the bit about being an embarrassment to decency made me laugh. For all that I’m eminently civilized, I’m not always terribly keen on decency. The truth of the matter is that I am the precise opposite of Richard Dawkins. He’s a culturally Christian atheist, while I am a culturally godless Christian. There’s a lot about modern American evangelical culture that gives me the creeps and has since I was a child. One of the benefits of a blog is that it gives the regular reader a series of snapshots of the psyche of the blogger, and although we can successfully disguise ourselves for a while, the true picture tends to emerge over time. It’s not always a pretty one either.

I do not hold myself up as any kind of model. I harbor no ambitions to lead anyone anywhere and my heartfelt desire is to be left alone to pursue my amusements and intellectual activities in peace. What you see may not be the entire picture, but it is a relatively accurate one. Like many, if not most intellectuals, I am an arrogant, cruel and vulgar individual with a few positive attributes that make me tolerable in moderate doses. Age and Jesus Christ have certainly had an ameliorating effect over time, but our relationship with God does not change who we are, it changes what we become. I understand why I tend to put off proper Christians and prissy atheists alike, but I can’t say I regret it much, if at all. We are all sundered beings, called by light and tempted by shadow. One minute we nobly rise above our shallow and fallen natures with the aid of a gracious God, the very next we squeal with the ecstatic delight of rolling like swine in our own shit.

I could try to deny that and pretend that I am better than I am – I do, to a certain extent – but the only person I would fool in the end would be myself. If occasionally the stench of soul-rot is a bit strong hereabouts, well, it serves as a good reminder that no man is worthy of the faith and adoration of his fellows, no man but the one whose Way we attempt, each in our mean and stumbling way, to follow.

Let’s face it, propriety nearly always loses out to personal amusement when adjudicated in my civil court. And in the interest of honesty, I have to point out that as much as I’d like to, I cannot take credit for coming up with the aforementioned appellation, although I am delighted to know that I played some small part in inspiring that flash of brilliant insight. I am a King’s son, to be sure, but keep in mind that for every noble Black Prince there is an exasperating Prince Hal.

Anyhow, I’m glad JK enjoying the book thus far regardless. I think I can assure him that there will be bits that he will like very much indeed, and other bits that will make him cringe. The important thing is to understand that in this particular case, the one truly can’t exist without the other.

I once calculated that the average teacher’s IQ is in double-digits. As it turns out, teachers don’t appear to require the use of what little intelligence they’ve got:

John Corcoran graduated from college and taught high school for 17 years without being able to read, write or spell. Corcoran’s life of secrecy started at a young age. He said his teachers moved him up from grade to grade. Often placed in what he calls the “dumb row,” the images of his tribulations in the classroom are still vividly clear….

Corcoran is now an education advocate.

It figures. Kids would be much better off if we burned down the schools, paid bounties on education professionals and let them play XBox 360 and outside games for eight hours a day.

AC take exception and he has a valid point:

In his column, Vox Day misstates the position of the Jewish Encyclopedia regarding the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. He makes the assertion that the forcibly converted Jews of Spain were actively encouraging the Muslim leaders to invade and re-conquer the Iberian Peninsula and that this was the practical reason behind Isabella’s persecution of the them. He states that “…it was known that some Jews were encouraging Muslim leaders to attempt the recapture of al-Andalus.”

As evidence for this he cites the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia which reads… “It remains a fact that the Jews, either directly or through their coreligionists in Africa, encouraged the Mohammedans to conquer Spain.”

If you read the entire entry in the 1906 version of the Jewish Encyclopedia you will find that statement, but Vox Day misattributes it to the period of Ferdinand and Isabella. It is actually a statement regarding the period of the eighth century, following the particularly brutal persecution of the Jewish Community by the Christian Visigoths. In fact, if you go on to read the rest of the entry, it directly addresses the question of the motive of the King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. It reads:

“The reason alleged for this action in the preamble of the edict was the relapse of so many “conversos,” owing to the proximity of unconverted Jews who seduced them from Christianity and kept alive in them the knowledge and practises of Judaism. No other motive is assigned, and there is no doubt that the religious motive was the main one.”

This is a clear case, Vox Day is in error in citing this passage. The Jewish Encyclopedia in no way attributes the expulsion of the Jews in Spain to a conspiracy by the Conversos and the Muslim powers on the Iberian Peninsula. In fact, it directly contradicts the point. Vox Day makes a libelous and slanderous charge against the forcibly converted Jews of Spain. His implication that this charge is backed up by a respected Jewish historical source document is as despicable as it is untrue.

I did screw up and the quote is certainly misleading, albeit unintentionally, and yet my case remains the same. I had originally thought that the quote – which I first saw on Wikipedia – applied to the proposed re-capture of Spain and wrote the paragraph accordingly, but upon checking the encyclopedia to verify it later, I learned that it actually applied to the initial Moorish invasion. Unfortunately, I forgot to go back and fix the sentence. I’ve already added the corrected sentence to the errata as well as a clarified footnote, both of which should be in the third printing. “[I]t was known that some Jews were encouraging Muslim leaders to attempt the recapture of al-Andalus…. The conquered cities Cordova, Malaga, Granada, Seville, and Toledo were placed in charge of the Jewish inhabitants, who had been armed by the Arabs.” That, along with the clarified sentence, should make it perfectly clear that I’m referring to the actual eighth-century invasion and not the feared fifteenth-century one.

However, AC is incorrect to rely upon the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia’s errant insistence upon a solely religious motive behind the expulsions. Compare its conclusions with those of Henry Kamen, the Jewish historian whose seminal work published in 1997 is my primary source on the subject:

Jewish Encyclopedia: “The reason alleged for this action in the preamble of the edict was the relapse of so many “conversos,” owing to the proximity of unconverted Jews who seduced them from Christianity and kept alive in them the knowledge and practises of Judaism. No other motive is assigned, and there is no doubt that the religious motive was the main one.”

Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision: “No less mistaken is the claim that the crown’s purpose was to achieve unity of faith. The king and queen were neither personally nor in their politics anti-Jewish. They had always protected and favored Jews and conversos. They might be accused of many things, but not of anti-semitism.” p. 26

Jewish Encyclopedia: “The number of those who were thus driven from Spain has been differently estimated by various observers and historians. Mariana, in his history of Spain, claims as many as 800,000. Isidore Loeb, in a special study of the subject in the “Revue des Etudes Juives” (xiv. 162-183), reduces the actual number of emigrants to 165,000. Bernaldez gives details of about 100,000 who went from Spain to Portugal: 3,000 from Benevente to Braganza; 30,000 from Zamora to Miranda; 35,000 from Ciudad Rodrigo to Villar; 15,000 from Miranda de Alcantara to Marbao; and 10,000 from Badajoz to Yelves. According to the same observer, there were altogether 160,000 Jews in Aragon and Castile. Abraham Zacuto reckons those who went to Portugal at 120,000. Lindo asserts that 1,500 families of Jewish Moriscos from the kingdom of Granada were the first to leave the country…. These estimates must be regarded as a minimum; it is probable that at least 200,000 fled the country, leaving behind them their dead and a large number of relatives who had been forced by circumstances to conceal their religion and to adopt the dominant creed.”

Henry Kamen: “In total, then, the Jews of Spain on the eve of the expulsion of 1492 numbered just over eighty thousand souls, a far cry from the totals offered by their own leaders or by most subsequent scholars…. Between those who converted and those who returned, the total of those who left Spain for ever was relatively small, possibly no more than forty thousand. The figures place many of the historical issues in perspective.” pp. 23-25

Now, I admit that Kamen only suggests that the expulsions were “in part motivated by the fear of Jewish collaboration with the Muslim kingdom of Granada, then under attack by Ferdinand’s forces”, and he believes the role of the Inquisition was paramount. But, as I showed in TIA, Kamen failed to notice the obvious link between the bloody fall of Ferdinand’s city of Otranto to the Turks on August 11, 1480, and his sudden naming of the inquisition’s first inquisitors less than seven weeks later, after two years of total inactivity on that front. Given Kamen’s convincing demonstration of the absence of both an anti-semitic motive as well any royal profit motive, plus the military motivation that is generally accepted as the reason for the later expulsion of the moriscos, the only logical conclusion is that the primary motivation underlying both the Jewish expulsion and the Spanish Inquisition that followed was the reasonable fear of a second successful Jewish-Muslim alliance against the newly united Christian crowns of Spain, as I described in both TIA and yesterday’s column.

The movie industry has got to be one of the most shady businesses this side of drug trafficking and sex slavery. What on Earth can New Line be thinking, first trying to stiff Peter Jackson and now refusing to pay the Tolkein estate?

The estate of “Lord of the Rings” creator J.R.R. Tolkien is suing the film studio that released the trilogy based on his books, claiming the company failed to pay a cut of gross profits for the blockbuster films. The writer’s estate, a British charity dubbed The Tolkien Trust, and original “Lord of the Rings” publisher HarperCollins filed the lawsuit against New Line Cinema on Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court….

“The Tolkien trustees do not file lawsuits lightly, and have tried unsuccessfully to resolve their claims out of court,” Steven Maier, an attorney for the Tolkien estate based in Britain, said in a statement. “New Line has not paid the plaintiffs even one penny of its contractual share of gross receipts despite the billions of dollars of gross revenue generated by these wildly successful motion pictures.”

Maier also claims the film studio has blocked the Tolkien estate and the other plaintiffs from auditing the receipts of the last two films.

Yeah, that’s the way to treat the very architects of your greatest success. How incredibly insane! I’ve been contacted five or six times to have one or another of my properties optioned for film, and New Line’s latest debacle is only one of the many reasons that I don’t even bother responding. Even if the project achieves the rare success, most of the benefit isn’t yours anyhow. Film is an expensive, outdated, and moribund industry anyhow so I’d much rather give a machinema company permission to do something with my stuff than waste any mental bandwidth on the freakshow that is Hollywood.