Category: Uncategorized

A naked atrocity

There is delusion. There is self-delusion. And then there is Lena Dunham. Now, I have never seen Girls. I have no intention of ever seeing Girls. The idea of spending even a nanosecond watching Sex In The City with ugly New York City girls who are apparently even MORE retarded than Sarah Jessica Parker and company isn’t exactly on my list of Things To Do.

“I remember looking in the mirror as a kid and it would be like for an
hour at a time, and I’d be like: ‘I’m just so beautiful. Everybody is so
lucky that they get to look at me.’ And of course that changes as you
get older, but I may have held on to that little-kid feeling that was me
alone in my bathroom.”

Yes, lucky. So lucky. That’s the first thing that springs to mind. It doesn’t even look human. It looks like something out of Lovecraft. It looks like something that should be harpooned and processed for ivory and oil. It looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy was raped by a dugong. It looks like something that most certainly should not be displayed without clothes anywhere, least of all on television. If there is a rational argument for Sharia in the United States of America, this is it. Say what you will about Wahhabism, but at least in Saudi Arabia, they’d put a misshapen creature like this in a burqah.

Some say that beauty is on the inside. But when there is beauty on the inside, some hint of it always shines through. This abomination is pure self-centered ugliness seeping out from within.

Hollywood’s favorite monster

Granted, Mia Farrow is more than a bit of a nutcase. But given his confirmed behavior, there isn’t much reason to doubt the allegations that Woody Allen is a child molester are true:

Frank and Mia stayed close, however, even when she was married to the
composer-conductor André Previn, whom she divorced in 1979, after having
three sons and adopting three at-risk Asian daughters. She also
continued to see Sinatra throughout her 13-year relationship with Woody
Allen, which suffered a jolt when she found lurid photographs taken by
Allen of Soon-Yi Previn, one of her adopted daughters, then a sophomore
in college, on the mantel in Allen’s Manhattan apartment. Only a month
earlier, in December 1991, Allen had formally adopted two of Mia’s
children, 15-year-old Moses and 7-year-old Dylan, even though he was in
therapy for inappropriate behavior toward Dylan. In August 1992, after
disappearing with Allen in Mia’s Connecticut country house and
reappearing without underpants, Dylan told her mother that Allen had
stuck his finger up her vagina and kissed her all over in the attic,
charges Allen has always vociferously denied.

Ronan Farrow adds on Twitter: “Missed the Woody Allen tribute – did they put the part where a woman
publicly confirmed he molested her at age 7 before or after Annie Hall?”

Woody Allen isn’t funny. He’s grotesque. He’s ugly. He’s a whiny little sexually obsessed monster. His films are tedious, unimaginative, and narcissistic. And he’s a child molester. The fact that Hollywood sees in him a man worthy of receiving its tribute tells you all you need to know about that depraved Gomorrah.

Every now and then, I’m asked if I’m interested in optioning the film rights to my books, sometimes even by people with actual film credits. My answer is always no. Not merely no, but HELL NO! I want nothing to do with Hollywood. It’s not an accident or coincidence that Hollywood so often takes pure storytelling gold and turns it into filth. They are the anti-Rumplestiltskins. They love rolling in filth.

Mailvox: shut up, he explained

The Great Martini doesn’t permit his complete unfamiliarity with Sextus Empiricus get in the way of his expressing a demonstrably incorrect opinion about Boghossian’s clear-cut violation of Sextus’s Sceptical teaching of “suspension of judgment”:

He hasn’t seemed to run afoul of this yet — I just started reading the
Kindle version. Sextus advised suspended judgement but didn’t preclude
the assertion of claims, that seems to be how his skeptical philosophy
would be conducted. As far as I’ve gotten, Bog affirms Dawkins’ 1-7
level of belief, that Dawkins only claimed a 6, and that the definition
of “atheist” he wants to use is a person who doesn’t believe there is
enough evidence to confirm the existence of God. I’m sure he’s not
going to spend the entire book holding to strict suspension of judgement
(I mean the entire purpose of the book is to weaken the societal
influence of religion, which implies a judgement), but at least he seems
to be aligning himself with the skeptical stance from the beginning.

This is completely and utterly wrong. Boghossian has done nothing of the sort. Do you want to know why I am so openly contemptuous of so many people who are fairly intelligent and sound more or less reasonable? Do you want to know why I am inspired to describe myself as a superintelligence? The reason is that it often feels as if I am the only intelligent individual who writes these days who ever bothers to take five minutes to actually read the bloody material upon which I am intending to opine. I don’t know if it was TGM’s intent to defend Boghossian or if he simply happened to miss the obvious, but either way, it is readily apparent that he doesn’t know anything about the Scepticism of Sextus Empiricus.

Scepticism does not mean “I am dubious about X.” It does not mean “I am going to convince you that X is better than Y”. It does not mean “I will only believe X if there is sufficient evidence to justify it”. It means: “I have no opinion about either X or Y, and if you assert that X is better, I will argue that Y is better in order to produce a contradiction of equal weight and thereby allow me to suspend my judgment.” What virtually no one who talks about skepticism seems to understand is that for the Sceptic, suspension of judgment is not the method or the initial approach, it is the objective. If Boghossian was a genuine Sceptic, he would have presented an argument for the primacy of faith over reason to his atheist audience.

TGM is disputing this: “ Boghossian’s very stated purpose is in direct and explicit
opposition to everything Sextus Empiricus advises, beginning with
“suspension of judgment”.”

In the fourth sentence of Chapter One, Boghossian explains his purpose:  “The goal of this book is to… help [the faithful] abandon their faith and embrace reason.”

So, already we know that the Fifth Horseman clearly has an opinion on at least two things. Faith is bad by nature. Reason is good by nature. That this is a correct summary of his opinions on the two matters is confirmed repeatedly throughout the book. Now let us turn to Sextus Empiricus and the Outlines of Pyrrhonism.

Sextus: “He who is of the opinion that anything is either good or bad by nature is always troubled…. But he who is undecided, on the contrary, regarding things that are good and bad by nature, neither seeks nor avoids anything eagerly, is therefore in a state of tranquility of soul…. The Sceptic… rejects the opinion that anything is in itself bad by nature. Therefore we say that the aim of the Sceptic is imperturbability in matters of opinion.”

Boghossian reveals his clear-cut opinions concerning faith being bad by nature and reason being good by nature. He is not even remotely imperturbable with regards to either matter of opinion. Therefore he is not only troubled, but his very stated purpose is in direct and explicit opposition to the heart of what Sextus Empiricus teaches. Which is exactly what I stated in the first place. Boghossian can’t possibly be said to be “aligning himself with the skeptical stance from the beginning”, not when he is expressly violating the very aim of the Sceptic.

And, in doing so, the Fifth Horseman shows himself to be a fraud, given his risible attempt to claim the intellectual mantle of Sextus Empiricus. As it happens, I very much doubt that Boghossian has ever read anything Sextus wrote that isn’t on Wikipedia.

DH had a much more informed take on Boghossian’s little book:

This has all the hallmarks of petty atheism which has as its main feature a
stunning lack of scholarship and education. One of the main
attractions of the RC church is that despite all the many faults, and
theological questions I may have, the long and ancient history of
scholarship remains unbroken. Whatever you think of any given Pope,
it’s unlikely that anything he ever wrote would be so filled with rote
unverifiable garbage.

Oh, we haven’t even gotten to the juvenile, self-serving definitions of terms such as “faith”, “hope” and “atheist” yet. It is a stunningly dishonest little book and is unlikely to impress anyone with an IQ over +1SD who reads it with an open or critical mind.

The Fifth Horseman 1

Peter Boghossian has written a little manual on atheist evangelism that has concerned some Christians. Having read two of its nine chapters so far, I can assure you that it is simply a weaponized version of the same endless bait-and-switching upon which Messrs. Dawkins and Harris rely so heavily. However, given MPAI, I have no doubt there are living, breathing human beings who found Mr. Harris’s Red State argument as conclusive and convincing as Mr. Dawkins did, so it seems worthwhile to provide an inoculation to Mr. Boghossian’s poisonous little book as a public service.

This I shall do on the blog, going through it in much the same way various atheists went through the first three chapters of TIA before reaching Mount Chapter Four and running off to Las Vegas and so forth.

This book will teach you how to talk people out of their faith. You’ll learn how to engage the faithful in conversations that help them value reason and rationality, cast doubt on their beliefs, and mistrust their faith. I call this activist approach to helping people overcome their faith, “Street Epistemology.” The goal of this book is to create a generation of Street Epistemologists: people equipped with an array of dialectical and clinical tools who actively go into the streets, the prisons, the bars, the churches, the schools, and the community—into any and every place the faithful reside—and help them abandon their faith and embrace reason.

A Manual for Creating Atheists details, explains, and teaches you how to be a street clinician and how to apply the tools I’ve developed and used as an educator and philosopher. The lessons, strategies, and techniques I share come from my experience teaching prisoners, from educating tens of thousands of students in overcrowded public universities, from engaging the faithful every day for more than a quarter century, from over two decades of rigorous scholarship, and from the streets.

Street Epistemology harkens back to the values of the ancient philosophers—individuals who were tough-minded, plain-speaking, known for self-defense, committed to truth, unyielding in the face of danger, and fearless in calling out falsehoods, contradictions, inconsistencies, and nonsense. Plato was a wrestler and a soldier with broad shoulders. He was decorated for bravery in battle (Christian, 2011, p. 51). Socrates was a seasoned soldier. At his trial, when facing the death penalty, he was unapologetic. When asked to suggest a punishment for his “crimes,” he instead proposed to be rewarded (Plato, Apology).

Hellenistic philosophers fought against the superstitions of their time. Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and others combated the religious authorities of their period, including early versions of Christianity (Clarke, 1968; Nussbaum, 1994). They thought the most important step was to liberate people from fear of tortures of the damned and from fear that preachers of their epoch were spouting. Hellenistic philosophers were trying to encourage stoic self-sufficiency, a sense of self-responsibility, and a tough-minded humanism.

Boghossian starts off by trying to fire up the troops. They’re going to be as tough as street preachers and unemployed boy-buggering Greeks! More importantly, he also signals right away that he’s going to play very fast and loose with the readily verifiable truth, given that Lucretius (55 BC) lived before Jesus Christ, Sextus Empiricus wrote against mathemeticians and the very Hellenic philosphers Boghossian is lionizing, and Marcus Aurelius actually WAS the religious authority, being not only the Emperor of Rome, but a member of “all the priestly colleges” of Rome who was literally deified in 180 AD.

None of these four examples, not a single one, “thought the most important step was to liberate people from fear of tortures of the damned”. Sextus Empiricus, for example, declares that “the aim of the Sceptic is tranquility of soul in those things which pertain to the opinion and moderation in the things that life imposes.” Indeed, Boghossian’s very stated purpose is in direct and explicit opposition to everything Sextus Empiricus advises, beginning with “suspension of judgment”.

Boghossian intends to teach atheists how to become an evangelical. And I am going to teach you how to crucify and humiliate those evangelicals using the very tools to which Boghossian is fraudulently appealing. He may be an educator and a philosopher, with two decades of what already appears to be not very rigorous scholarship behind him, but then, I am a superintelligence who has already taken four atheist scalps.

The fifth one won’t be any trouble at all. The manual is nothing but rhetoric in the guise of dialectic, and as most of you have learned, rhetoric combined with actual dialectic will reliably trump the pseudo-dialectic.

Divisional round part 2

I hope that the playoff games to date have shut up the foolish advocates of re-seeding the playoff systems. I mean, with three games on the first weekend going right down to the wire, can they honestly pretend that anyone would have benefited from not granting home games to the division champions?

And the ease with which both New England and Seattle dealt with the winners of the wild card round further demonstrates that it doesn’t really matter who is playing on wild card weekend, as the home teams on the divisional round are the better teams anyhow.

I was impressed by both the New England running game and the Seattle defense. I hadn’t seen much of Seattle, and let’s face it, it didn’t take much to shut down Air Frazier this year. But their linebackers and secondary attack the receivers in a way that I haven’t seen since the 2000 Ravens. They can definitely beat the Broncos; the Patriots might actually prove the more difficult challenge.

Some will complain that Russell Wilson didn’t do much, but he did what he had to do when he had to do it. He looked like Fran Tarkenton at times, although to be a true Tarkenton scramble, the ball has to either end up a) a two-yard completion, or b) a touchdown. And while I’m glad that the Vikings got a nice bounty of draft picks in exchange for Percy Harvin, I couldn’t help but feeling bad for the guy. He’s a great player, but he just can’t seem to stay on the field.

Darth Vox

An amusing article on the creepy “Sith Lords of the Dark Enlightenment“:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Dark Enlightenment. The Empire is striking back. Much as Christianity grew out of the cult-sodden ferment of the Roman-occupied Middle East, the Dark Enlightenment has sprouted from the hyper-anxious anti-liberalism precincts in the darker recesses of the Internet.

So we’ve dug deep into the Web, where the movement lurks. We’ve talked online to its philosopher king, Nick Land, and we’ve conversed with his faceless adherents…. As the term suggests, the Dark Enlightenment is an ideological analysis
of modern democracy that harshly rejects the vision of the 18th century
European Enlightenment—a period punctuated by the development of
empirical science, the rise of humanist values and the first outburst of
revolutionary democratic reform. In contrast, the Dark Enlightenment
advocates an autocratic and neo-monarchical society. Its belief system
is unapologetically reactionary, almost feudal….

In the Dark Enlightenment, we seem to have stumbled across a place where
pseudo-intellectually grounded racism is flourishing in a way it hasn’t
since before World War II.

I have to admit, I’m more than a little bemused to be informed that I am a faceless adherent of some guy whose name I’ve literally never seen before. It’s also a little odd to see myself listed under Christian Traditionalists rather than Economists or even Masculinity; I am certainly a Christian but I’m hardly a Christian Traditionalist in the Chestertonian style. I also enjoyed the term “pseudo-intellectually grounded racism”. This is Left-wing shorthand for the writer’s confession that the position is an intelligent and well-grounded one for which he have no rebuttal, but with which he disagrees anyhow.

One would think that he would at least stop long enough to consider why it is flourishing, but his analysis doesn’t run so deep. Setting aside the author’s fumbling attempts to make sense of what is developing and provide a nonexistent structure to it, this bit particularly amused me:

Could the Dark Enlightenment become a major political movement?

Probably
not. To acquire momentum in the real world, the systems of modern
democratic capitalism would have to suffer a blow far more damaging than
any received so far.  

And, as we all know, that is inconceivable, since we all know that history is nothing but the chronicle of the inexorable progress towards modern democratic capitalism and the unending bourgeois paradise it entails. Perhaps he might like to consider reading The Return of the Great Depression. We are already five years into Great Depression 2.0. The systems of modern democratic capitalism are already flashing red blinking signals and we are now merely awaiting the blow that will cause them to collapse. What it will be, no one claims to know, but it is coming, sooner or later.

And the article wouldn’t have been complete without the mandatory bit of nonsensical finger wagging: “Universal equality and classical democracy are not synonymous with an
all-purpose, lowest-common-denominator leveling of mankind. Rather, they
speak only to an existential fairness in which each of us has the right
to value, direct and make meaning of our own lives.”

First, equality, universal or otherwise, doesn’t exist. This argomentum ad singulicornu is simply an irrelevant nonstarter. As for classical democracy, what does that have to do with the unelected European Commission, the unelected U.S. Supreme Court, the bifactional ruling party and the “first-past-the-post” parliamentary systems, all of which are meant to strictly limit democracy and forcibly prevent people from exercising their right to value, direct, and make meaning of their own lives.

But Mr. Sigl is right about in one thing. People would do well to take me and the other “Sith Lords” seriously. Because, as it happens, we are realistic and generally correct, on average, about the past and present states of Mankind.

Proofs of God’s nonexistence

What is funny about this compilation of atheist arguments of God’s nonexistence is that it is extraordinarily difficult to tell some of the real arguments from the parodies. It reminds me of one of the things I always enjoy about atheist testimonials, and why I think it can be very helpful for young Christians to be exposed to them, is that they reliably reveal how stupid and irrational the average atheist’s rationale for his disbelief happens to be.

A few of my favorites:

ARGUMENT FROM THE SAGAN STANDARD (I)
(1) Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
(2) The claim that God exists is extraordinary.
(3) Therefore, any evidence supporting it ought to be extraordinary as well.
(4) I’m not sure what I mean by “extraordinary.”
(5) But whatever you come up with, it’s not going to work.
(6) Therefore, God does not exist.

SIGMUND FREUD’S ARGUMENT FROM OEDIPUS
(1) The belief in God arises from the unconscious fear that your father
is going to castrate you when he finds out you have a desire to sleep
with your own mother.
(2) Obviously, only a crazy person would think that.
(3) Therefore, God does not exist.

ARGUMENT FROM INFANTILE INTELLIGENCE (I)
(1) Everyone is born an atheist.
(2) Therefore, we should think like that.
(3) Therefore, God does not exist.

SAM HARRIS’S IMAGINARY ARGUMENT
(1) Bad things happen.
(2) This means God is impotent, evil, or imaginary.
(3) If God is impotent, then He’s not powerful and thus doesn’t exist.
(4) If God is evil, then He’s not good and thus doesn’t exist.
(5) If God is imaginary, then God doesn’t exist.
(6) Now some theists claim God allows bad things to happen to bring about a greater good.
(7) This would mean God might still be omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and real.
(8) I don’t know any rational argument to disprove that.
(9) So, I’ll make this appeal to emotion: it’s callous to tell people that their suffering is meaningful.
(10) Therefore, God does not exist.

ARGUMENT FROM MODAL LOGIC (II)
(1) I am an atheist.
(2) I do not know what modal logic is.
(3) Any proof for God’s existence that uses modal logic is not understood by me.
(4) If I don’t understand something, then I can make fun of it.
(5) Therefore, God does not exist.

PARENTAL ARGUMENT (I)
(1) My daddy told me that God exists.
(2) I hate my daddy.
(3) Therefore, God does not exist.

RICKY GERVAIS’S ARGUMENT FROM HIS ELDER BROTHER
(1) I used to believe in God.
(2) But my older brother didn’t.
(3) My mom told him to be quiet.
(4) Therefore, God does not exist.

I think the philosopher is missing one very important argument, however, an argument so incisive and indisputable that it can be utilized to win any debate on any subject. It is an argument so powerful, so convincing, and so conclusive that frankly, I’m surprised none of the major atheists have considered resorting to it in order to convince the ignorant, bigoted, religious masses of God’s nonexistence.

JOHN SCALZI’S ARGUMENT FROM DEGREE
(1) I am an atheist.
(2) I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy of Language.
(3) From the University of Chicago!
(4) Therefore, God does not exist.

Divisional round

Everyone is expecting a Seattle-Denver Super Bowl, but both teams have vulnerabilities that could appear at the worst possible time. I think I’d like to see Brady and Belichick get one more ring myself. I’m just glad to see the Packers out of it, and it would be nice to see the 49ers lose this weekend too.

In any event, this is an NFL Open thread.

What happened to “never again”?

The Learned Elders of Wye had better speed up their exit plans if they’re going to continue to perpetrate materially traitorous idiocies such as this:

President Obama plans to nominate three people to the Federal Reserve’s
Board of Governors, including Stanley Fischer, former head of the Bank
of Israel, as the Fed’s next vice chairman, the White House said on
Friday…. Mr. Fischer, 70, would succeed Ms. Yellen in her current role. The
Senate confirmed Ms. Yellen as the Fed’s new chairwoman this week. She
will take over from the current chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, in February.
…

More importantly for Israel, Stanley Fischer won an appointment to the
Reagan administration’s U.S.-Israel Joint Economic Discussion Group that
dealt with Israel’s 1984-1985 economic crisis. … The U.S.-Israel
Joint Economic Discussion Group fundamentally transformed U.S. aid to
Israel forever.  Before the Reagan administration, most U.S. aid to
Israel took the form of loans that had to be repaid with interest.
 After the input of Fischer’s team, subsequent U.S. aid was delivered in
the form of outright grants paid directly from the U.S. Treasury—never
to be repaid or conditioned when Israel took actions the U.S. opposed.

Can you even imagine the widespread outrage if Haruhiko Kuroda of the Bank of Japan was appointed to the Fed and he promptly began sending billions of dollars to Japan? Or if Zhou Xiaochuan of the People’s Bank of China was named vice chairman and he subsequently began repaying US debt to China in gold and advanced weapons technology? Now keep in mind that Stanley Fischer is already guilty of literally giving billions to Israel!

It’s long past time for the USA to take two immediate measures. First, shut down all financial aid to Israel. The USA is bankrupt. So is the Federal Reserve, if its newly expanded balance sheet was marked properly to market. If Israeli citizens are convinced that inflation is good for the economy and they want to print money, well and good, but let them print shekels, not U.S. dollars.

Second, ban all dual citizenships. There is no such thing as a “dual loyalty”. It’s very clear that Stanley Fischer has no loyalty to the USA. His loyalty is to Israel. That’s perfectly clear. It’s even admirable. Would that his American counterparts felt so strongly about serving their own country. But it also means that he has no more place in a decision-making capacity for the US monetary system than Christine Lagard or Mario Draghi.

Now, let’s preemptively deal with the usual reaction. Are you tempted to call my position antisemitic? That’s not merely incorrect, that’s totally insane. Do you truly not see where this is leading? For the love of the God of Old Testament and New, the reason I’m speaking out against this is precisely because I don’t wish to see an American holocaust. I don’t want the children of my Jewish friends being made the scapegoat in reaction to the dreadful behavior of an insatiable, unconscionable elite. What is sickening, what is ominous, what is materially antisemitic is what the federal government has done by permitting Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, and Fischer to financially rape the American people.

This is all astonishingly short-sighted on the part of the Elders of Wye. Setting aside whether they can reasonably hope to successfully transfer their traveling game of three-card monte to China or India, even a bankrupt, post-collapse America will be filled with hundreds of millions of the same people who conquered the world in the 20th century, more or less without trying. And they are going to be very, very angry. They are going to be even more full of hate than the 20th century Germans were, because they are going to feel deeply betrayed. If an unfair post-war peace settlement created a sense of national fury, how much more anger will the bankruptcy and collapse of the union provoke?

In fact, having grown up in an End Times-conscious church, I can recall the eschatological enthusiasts discussing whether the King of the North was the Soviet Union or a united Europe. They often cited this passage from Jeremiah:

Behold, a people shall come from the north,
And a great nation and many kings
Shall be raised up from the ends of the earth.
They shall hold the bow and the lance;
They are cruel and shall not show mercy.
Their voice shall roar like the sea;
They shall ride on horses,
Set in array, like a man for the battle,
Against you, O daughter of Babylon.
The king of Babylon has heard the report about them,
And his hands grow feeble;
Anguish has taken hold of him,
Pangs as of a woman in childbirth…”(Jeremiah 50:41-43)

And yet, when I look at the events of recent years, it increasingly looks as if the most powerful nation that is the most likely to bear a tremendous populist grudge against Israel in the 21st century will be the United States of America.

Desperately seeking debt

It’s bad enough that the younger generation of Americans is being saddled with massive amounts of useless, permanent student loan debt. But this new concept of a multi-generational home mortage being broached in the UK is truly evil:

Forty-year mortgages that may take two generations to pay off could become the norm, ministers believe. Rising house prices will prompt more homebuyers to abandon traditional 25-year loans and opt for ever longer repayment terms, they say. Cabinet ministers who discussed claims of a new property ‘bubble’ this week believe a cultural shift is under way which means people are increasingly comfortable with extended loans.

They believe that in future householders may choose to pass on a house
with an outstanding mortgage to their children, who will pay off the
rest. ‘In Japan, the 40-year mortgage is the norm,’ said one Government
source. ‘Paying it off is a two-generation job for many families. If
house prices remain high, longer-term mortgages like those will become
more acceptable to people here.’

Imitating Japan, which has been stuck in economic stagnation and the highest proportion of debt-to-GDP, strikes me as an appallingly bad idea. And make no mistake, this is a short-term solution to a problem that is the result of the large-scale immigration into the UK as well as Russians driving up the London property market.

First it took one income to buy a house. Now it takes two incomes. Soon it will take two generations, assuming the system doesn’t collapse first. That which can’t continue indefinitely won’t.

Massive debt and native dispossession is one of the costs of free trade. But at least the indebted masses have the consolation of being able to buy cheap Korean flatscreens and poorly constructed clothes from China.