Author: VD

Long live the new sacrificial lamb… until November, anyhow:

Rudy Giuliani, who bet his presidential hopes on Florida only to come in third, prepared to quit the race Tuesday and endorse his friendliest rival, John McCain.

While I’m still standing by my 2003 prediction of a president Rodham-Clinton, my ability to read the tea leaves with regards to the Republicans hasn’t been very good. I initially thought Pataki might be the unelectable Republican selected to take the fall, (although I did suggest Giuliani as the other probability, as he indeed turned out to be), but as I noted before the primaries began, Giuliani was such a horrendous candidate that he couldn’t even fulfill his appointed role.

But Democrats need not fear, both McCain and Romney are eminently capable of being defeated in the same landslide that was intended for Giuliani. It doesn’t actually matter which of them is nominated to play Bob Dole redux. (Rameshh Ponnuru notices the similarity as well, although I doubt he is fully aware of its significance: “It has seemed a bit like the 1996 race. McCain is Dole: the old war hero who has run before, who does not enthuse either economic or social conservatives but has a pretty conservative record.”)

Giuliani’s theme of “I saved New York City” was always self-destructive. Given how a significant portion of the rest of the country feels about NYC, it probably cost him more votes than it gained him, especially in a state with no shortage of people who are happy to have shaken its dust from their flip-flops.

Unlike the shrieking mob of panic-stricken primates, Thoughts and Ideas had the bright idea to actually read the book(!) before attempting to reach any conclusions about it:

A common mistake in this debate–or indeed any debate–is to argue exclusively from one’s own perspective. Quoting verses from the Bible is ultimately ineffective to someone who views it with the same amount of respective as one would regard the Weekly World News…. Vox steers clear of this trap and meets the atheist charges head on. The results are glorious to behold, though a tremor of pity may escape the human breast if one glances at the slain trinity. It’s not just that Vox is intellectually honest whereas Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens are not. Vox has clearly read books relating to the subject matter–his knowledge of history is especially keen–whereas it appears that his opponents have assembled books after a series of college bull sessions and limited research, probably involving Wikipedia.

Sam Harris is clearly the biggest breaker of the laws of logic; as such, he takes the lion’s share of the blows. Vox points out twelve glaring errors from his two books, before tackling the “striking”–Dawkin’s term–argument of the superiority of atheism, based on a survey of crime data from red states and blue states. As Vox points out, the argument is idiotic, and proves nothing; but Harris is so mindbogglingly incompetent that the data actually suggest the opposite of what Harris claims.

This hilarious quote pretty much sums up the slack-jawed, vacant-eyed response by the Dawkins cheerleading club upon learning about TIA. I very much enjoy the way they keep delving into my old op/ed columns like an old Roman priest digging through sheep innards, trying to interpret the auspices.

This is the craziest thing I’ve seen in a long time. What on earth is he talking about?

Only one of them seems to have even a glimmering of a clue: “Worrisome… This again shows that the atheists in this forum are far too quick to mock and dismiss opponents.”

Bring it, bitches. And when you slink off wet, silent, and stinky, just remember, that’s Eau de Vox Day you’re wearing.

So my wolf and I have our home base in Everlook at the moment and I decided to grab one more set of beads to complete a second set of five before heading back to Felwood. We rode over to Winterfall Village to do the dirty deed and I had just sent the wolf to tank on a Den Watcher when suddenly a panicked gnome burst from the nearby gates of the village, running right past me with no less than three angry Den Watchers and a Shaman in hot pursuit.

The guild encourages acts of good citizenship, which is one reason it’s highly regarded on the server and never lacks for new members. So, I jacked up the armor, sent the wolf after one of the Den Watchers and ice-trapped the one I’d already engaged. Fortunately, the gnome had hurt them a bit, so my first multi-shot dropped two Den Watchers right away and my wolf and I were able to kill the Shaman and other Den Watcher before they finished off the gnome or the one I’d first attacked escaped the ice. The little guy and I took out the trapped one together, then he went on his gnomish way and I scored the set of beads for which I’d come in the first place. Of course, I found the whole thing hilarious and related the story to my guild. While they obviously found it amusing, (a frightened little gnome running from a pack of giant furry monsters is inherently funny) there was nothing but the online equivalent of blank stares when I concluded the little tale by saying “Exit village, pursued by Ursa”.

My sense of humor is just vastly unappreciated.

The Mad Aussie is a prophet: “A black man tried to take something from a white woman, so they all clutched their purses tighter and voted against this vote rapist.”

We’ve all witnessed scenarios where, on the playground little girls are being taunted by little boys while both girls and boys stand idle, afraid to speak up or even cheering. Or, in the workplace males tease young and older female co-workers; make obscene gestures, inappropriate comments, laughing and expecting (often correctly) that everyone will join in. Then there was that movie where Jodie Foster portrayed the true story of woman who was ganged raped in a bar while others looked on and encouraged the realization. Still others pretended the rape didn’t happen. In short, gang raping of women is commonplace in our culture both physically and metaphorically.

This past week, we witnessed just such a phenomenon involving men who are afraid of a powerful woman. Hillary Clinton, in her quest for her Presidential nomination, has in fact endured infantile taunting and wildly inappropriate commentary. Indeed we have witnessed almost comical attacks by John Edwards who in turn sided with Barak Obama as both snickered at Clinton’s “breakdown,” which consisted of a very short dewy-eyed moment.

And yes, this would be reason #9,740….

And don’t mind mucking about with markup languages and all that, I could use a volunteer to do the .pdb version and another to tackle the .lit. I’ve already got a crude .pdb together sans footnotes and italics, but I doubt I’ll get around to the .lit since the copy of Readerworks Standard I downloaded isn’t permitting the importation of OpenOffice-generated Word format files. (Tries to remember why he cares about Microsoft Reader anyhow… right, this is not the time for techno-snobbery.)

The PDF and RTF versions are good to go, however, so if people want to convert it into other, more obscure etext formats, the means to do so are there.

It occurs to me that in yesterday’s interview, I forgot to mention my other reason for making the ebook downloads available to all and sundry. The downloads eliminate the atheist critic’s main excuse for not reading the book before criticizing it. No one will be able to hide behind a disinclination to fund my lavish lifestyle when there is no need to do so in order to read the book; this should help expose the spurious ones of the sort we’ve seen already.

UPDATE – AD says he’ll tackle the .LIT. If you want to volunteer for the PDB, do it here, please don’t email.

GC wants to know what I think of WND’s lack of support for Ron Paul:

I read recently your words of endorsement for Ron Paul. They were as eloquent as Dr. Paul is the man for the times. But I wonder, how do you square the lack of coverage of Dr. Paul by WND/Joseph Farrah with your own personal views. Isn’t what WND is doing as it relates to Dr. Paul no different than what the MSM media are doing? The cynical, and increasingly more likely, scenario is that Mr. Farrah is doing nothing more than providing a faux side for people to join to do battle against “them” (the Democrates, especially Hillary) when in reality, the republicans are just as corrupt.

Every right-wing pundit I listen to, every conservative columnist that I read all said/say they would immediately jump on the band wagon of a candidate if he would merely support the constitution. Along comes Ron Paul and all those same guys simply pretend he doesn’t exist. What gives?

I would love to see you write an article examining this phenomenon. Corner some of these guys and force them to come clean on why they are ignoring the only guy in the race among either of the two major parties who everyone KNOWS will follow the constitution to the letter.

First, WND has collectively demonstrated more support for Ron Paul than nearly any other site featuring political commentary. Both Ilana Mercer and I have endorsed him, and if it’s not as big a news item as our colleague’s endorsement of Mike Huckabee, well, neither one of us is as famous as Chuck Norris nor did Ron Paul score an upset win in Iowa. Second, I’m hardly in a position to complain about what WND’s editors elect to put on their front page now, am I?

As for those supposedly right-wing self-proclaimed conservative pundits, well, as I have said before, it pains me to have to point out to adults that sometimes people say things that are not true. The truth is that most of the conservative commentariat is not conservative. Most of them do not support the U.S. Constitution. This is easily verified by simply comparing their written positions on various issues with the Constititution. And the same is true of the “conservative” politicians they support, from George W. Bush to John McCain and Mitt Romney.

That’s not the case with Mr. Farah. He’s honest, but he’s a journalist by trade and training and so tends to think about politics in horse race terms. This means that he’s not inclined to support the best guy regardless, but rather the best guy he considers to have a decent chance. Since Ron Paul has never really fit that description, he’s just not inclined to give him the time of day. This makes sense from his primarily tactical perspective.

Being rather more inclined to view things from a strategic perspective myself, I see absolutely no benefit to a Republican win in 2008 anyhow. The economic, political and military winds are seriously ill-omened and whoever wins will be held responsible for the consequences over the next decade. This is the best possible time for pundits to hold to pure principle; the fact that none of them are doing so despite having such a great excuse is less a condemnation of principles which very few of them happen to hold anyway, (most columnists care less about who wins than they do about being able to say they backed the winner), but rather a demonstration of their inability to think beyond tomorrow. I’ve found it very interesting to see that many of the commentators I most respect have tended to either support Ron Paul or refrain from endorsing anyone.

NM fails to see what the fuss is all about:

I do not see anything wrong with the argument that Richard Dawkins has used as described in your article:

“If there are a billion billion planets and a one-in-a-billion chance of life spontaneously arising on a planet, then life must exist on a billion planets throughout the universe.”

I will only recommend adding the phrase “with high probability” at the end. It is not enough to say that the argument is wrong. You have to point out the fallacy in the argument.

This email just SCREAMS social autism. First, that’s not the argument, it’s part of the setup for the actual argument. Second, I wasn’t criticizing Dawkins for being incorrect, I was mocking him for getting so excited about pointing out the TOTALLY FREAKING OBVIOUS. This would probably have been more clear if I’d quoted the entire paragraph from TIA:

Schützenberger’s contempt for Dawkins’s mathematical abilities is well-founded, as it’s generally not considered to be a good idea to adopt a casual approach to mathematical probability, as Dawkins does with the “one in a billion” chance of something like DNA spontaneously arising which he invents ex nihilo, before reaching the shocking statistical conclusion that if there are a billion billion planets and a one in a billion chance of life spontaneously arising on a planet, then life must exist on a billion planets throughout the universe!

Dawkins is genuinely surprised by his astonishing discovery of mathematical division, so much so that he repeats it twice. Did you know that if there are four fours* of books and a one in four chance of a book being written by a New Atheist, then there must be four New Atheist books? Sweet St. Darwin of the Galapagos, is this really what passes for a public intellectual today?

* Or sixteen, as we non-dysnumeric individuals usually describe it.

People sometimes wonder why I demonstrate such open contempt for atheism. I don’t fear atheists, I certainly don’t respect most of them – although I do respect atheist individuals such as Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Dennett and Brent Rasmussen, who have earned it – and I find that the lay atheist, like his heroes, tends to be incredibly obnoxious. Mono Ape provides an excellent example of why this contempt is not merely justified, but demanded. It would be easy to think that he is simply stupid based on the way he relies on assumptions, intuition and faulty logic rather than simply looking at the available evidence, except that one runs into this behavior time and time and time again with outspoken atheists. Combined with their usual assertion of rational superiority and their demonstrated knowledge of common atheist talking points, this behavior increasingly tends to indicate intentional dishonesty rather than mere ignorance or unintellligence. Mono Apes quotes my interview with Joseph Farah and writes:

“… Dawkins’s stupid assertion that a religious upbringing is worse than sexual child abuse”

Professor Dawkins has never said any such thing. He had said that labelling a child ‘Christian’, ‘Muslim’, etc. is “a form of abuse”.

He did say it, by his own admission. He also wrote it: ““Once, in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, as horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing up the child Catholic in the first place.” – Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 317. Dawkins then spends nine pages half-heartedly defending this assertion without ever examining the long-term psychological damage of sexual abuse. Strike one.

“Dawkins thinks humanity should follow Darwin just long enough to cast off Jesus Christ, then ditch Darwin in favor of following Richard Dawkins’ opinion on life, the universe and everything”

A ludicrous assertion without a shred of evidence to back it up.

First, it’s bizarre to insist that one must present documented evidence in every op/ed column and interview. And there’s loads of evidence to back this up in, unsurprisingly enough, Richard Dawkins’s writing: “‘Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.” That is G.C. Williams’s recommendation today and it is mine.” – Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain, p. 10. And in The God Delusion, he pushes his form of secular humanism, including his personal recommendations for replacing at least four of the Ten Commandments in favor of commandments that he, the Archbishop of Oxford, has penned.

• Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of your business.
• Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species.
• Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
• Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.

So, rather than using “reason, science and historical documentation” to argue “the atheists into an inescapable corner”, you’ve employed blatant and crude straw men, ad hominem and hysterical, baseless assertions? Doesn’t bode well for the quality of the rest of the book, does it?

“blatant and crude straw men, ad hominem and hysterical, baseless assertions” is a very strange way to describe accurate summaries supported by direct quotes from the original sources. I will leave it to the reader to determine how this bodes for my book. Sadly, Mono Ape is far from the first to attempt criticizing it without bothering to read it.

“… atheism will never be a widespread phenomenon”

Someone better ‘phone Sweden and let them know – up to ~80% of Swedes profess no belief in gods, fairies, etc.

Actually, the Eurostat report to which Mono Ape is obviously referring reports that “23% of Swedish citizens responded that “they believe there is a God”, whereas 53% answered that “they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force” and 23% that “they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life force”.” 100-(53+23)!=~80. First Harris, then Dawkins, now this guy… what is it with atheists and their math delusions? As I noted in TIA, the highest percentage of reported atheists anywhere in the West is the 32 percent reported in France by a very questionable Financial Times poll which is more than 2x the largest number reported in every other study, including much more extensive ones.

The ‘irrational’ atheists will look forward to dismantling the rest of the book when it becomes available for download.

I have no doubt whatsoever that they will do a similarly thorough and conclusive job of it, in keeping with this spectacular example.

Is Mono Ape ignorant or intellectually dishonest? I really don’t know which is the more appropriate description of this feeble attempt at a critique of an interview, you’ll have to decide for yourselves. But I have no need to create strawmen to attack, to be honest, the straw men I’d construct would almost surely be sturdier and more viable than the cases presented by the living, breathing atheists who seek to criticize me.

JS asks about comparing religions:

Vox, after reading your article I thought I’d ask how to choose which God(s), Religion, Denomination and Sect to choose from since they each make the claim that they are the unadulterated word of god as spoken to his chosen prophet. Deviance from the doctrines of each of the above results in a fiery end for all eternity; as does belief in any of the other belief systems. Mormonism is getting a lot of attention recently and I can honestly say that I admire Mormons for their family values and the moral backbone they seem to foster in their adherents. However, many of the claims of their prophet are demonstrably false despite the religions overall success.

So how does one choose? Especially since the stakes are so high?

Carl Sagan said it best in his baloney detection kit: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence – period. So far we only have the scientific method – with all its flaws – to help use explain natural phenomena and improve our lives. It offers no moral teachings or social fabric to knit our societies together with…only explanations. The best course for the religious is to adopt the “non-overlapping magisteria” model of religion and science. They really do operate in two separate domains. Religion functions on unquestionable faith and absolutes. Science works on constant questioning and probabilities.

I agree with you that Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris are at least misled in their belief that rhetoric and reason can neuter religion. Nor do I believe that it would be a good thing for society as a whole to do so. But the whole polarity between “Irrational Athiests” and “Irrational Theists” leaves out the majority in the middle who don’t believe in either. Theists and Athiests can be moral, rational, upstanding citizens and – statistically speaking – overwhelmingly are.

Actually, as anyone who has examined various religions from Christianity to Nzambi Mpunguism, they really don’t. I recommend JS look into precisely who spoke to Mohammed, which of the Judeo-Christian God’s many prophets one has to consider “his chosen one”, and the Jewish concept of the afterlife. To be blunt, he’s simply repeating a Sam Harris talking point here, it’s evident he doesn’t actually know what he’s talking about.

Shall we offer dueling Carl Sagan quotes? Sagan also said “An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. Now, it would be first necessary to define what is and what is not an “extraordinary claim”, then detail precisely what “extraordinary evidence” would suffice to meet any such claim. And once this is defined, then surely some extraordinary evidence would be necessary to explain why the normal standards of historical, testimonial and scientific evidence which have proven satisfactory for everything else in human history have suddenly become a post-1987 imperative on the sole basis of a dead pop astronomer’s say-so.

JS doesn’t seem to realize that this is simply more of the rhetoric that he is, quite rightly, dismissing from the New Atheists.

The best test of a religion is that suggested by the Apostle Paul. Judge a man by his fruits, judge a faith by its fruits as well. Science alone is a very poor yardstick upon which to rely for guidance, it is like attempting to determine WHERE you are driving with nothing but a speedometer for guidance. (Note that I said nothing but a speedometer, this includes the position of the sun outside, etc.) It may be very precise while simultaneously leaving you stranded in the middle of nowhere.

I don’t believe in non-overlapping magisterium, but rather that Science and Religion – particularly Christianity – are complimentary tools. It makes no sense to try to cut down a tree with a hammer, nor is it very effective to use a screwdriver to pound nails. Religion helps Man know what to do, Science gives him the best possible means to go about doing it.

Now, atheists certainly can possess virtues, unfortunately, consistency and rationality are seldom among them. This has little to do with their lack of belief in God, it is mostly because they are human. The great problem with atheism is that its practical form – secular humanism and the various societal utopianisms – depend entirely upon a false foundation of an imaginary human rationality.