Category: Uncategorized

The World War on Christianity

Never forget that the spirit of the world hates Jesus Christ and hates the Christian for refusing to submit to it, for refusing to be a part of it.

Across the world this week, hundreds of millions of us will be singing of that
“silent night, holy night” in the town of Bethlehem. But as Christmas approaches, with its beguiling promise of “peace on earth and
mercy mild”, how many of us will reflect on the words of our great Christmas
carols and be reminded that Christianity was a faith born in the East? How
many of us are aware that, while the first Christmas took place in the
Middle East, there today that same faith is under threat?
Last week, the leader of the Catholic Church, His Holiness Pope Francis, chose
to cast light on this dark story of persecution by taking to Twitter to warn
that we “cannot resign ourselves to think of a Middle East without
Christians”. Later in the week, Prince Charles warned that “Christians in the Middle East
are, increasingly, being deliberately attacked by fundamentalist Islamist
militants. Christianity was, literally, born in the Middle East and we must
not forget our Middle Eastern brothers and sisters in Christ”.

Don’t forget your brothers and sisters in Christ in the Middle East, in North Korea, in China, and in Africa. Pray for them. Pray that their persecutors will be won over by their faith, even as the Apostle Paul was won over by Stephen the martyr.

As the A&E affair demonstrates, one day you may need them to pray for you.

Mailvox: improving dialectic

JB asks how he can improve his ability to debate:

Do you have any recommendations on reading material for improving one’s debate skills? I am aware of the most basic premise being the ability to reason, followed by a willingness to suffer defeat in repeated efforts. I am good at debating, but studying what you have posted, as well as other’s responses shows me that there is room for considerable improvement on my part. I am passably familiar with Socrates, Plato, Cicero, and Aristotle; the last of whom is cited considerably often on Vox Populi but I am interested in learning more. What do you feel are the best books to study on this? Can it even be learned through books or does one have to simply fight it out personally and learn by doing?

Given Scalzi’s inept appeals to his degree in alleged rhetoric; possibly this cannot be learned other than by doing. However if there are recommendations that you have for books on rhetoric and debate, I would be interested to hear them. After all, my default setting whenever I am interested in learning more about a subject is to buy multiple books on it; so I am hopeful that you might have some suggestions for reading material.

It’s important to distinguish between learning about something and actually doing it. Although not a basketball fan, I know a fair amount about basketball courtesy of Bill Simmons, a lifelong basketball fanatic. But nothing that I have ever read about basketball has improved my three-point shot.

As Michael Jordan once said after one of his returns from retirement, the best way to get in shape for playing basketball is to play basketball. I run twice per week in the soccer offseason in order to stay in shape, but no matter how good I am about my off-season routine, the first practice of the season is always the most painful.

Reading Cicero and Plato may provide you with some rhetorical and dialectical tools, but having those tools is not the same thing as knowing how and when to use them effectively. Indeed, reading about them while not putting them into actual practice may actually be detrimental to one’s ability to debate; as JB has seen with Mr. Scalzi, it can even contribute to a powerful sense of self-delusion in that regard.

I am a little concerned by JB’s assertion of being “passably familiar” with the four classic figures mentioned. One of the great intellectual diseases of our time is the idea that having heard of something, or knowing a little bit about it, is practically akin to having mastered the subject. So, my first suggestion is that JB actually read the Socratic dialogues, read Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Cicero’s De Inventione. Then read something more modern; here is a nice online guide to The Five Canons of Rhetoric.

This leads to one important guideline: don’t ever claim to know something that you do not, in fact, know better than your opponent expects. A skilled opponent will unmask you faster than you think possible; read my exchange with the atheist Luke for a particularly brutal example of that. On the flip side, I was amused when an online conversation between two evolutionists was brought to my attention, as one was warning the other not to be fooled by my claim to be relatively ignorant about TENS. But I wasn’t playing dumb, the simple fact is that I don’t know biology the way I know economics or the history of video games, so I have to approach the subjects differently.

In my opinion, the best way one can develop one’s debating skills is to practice by regularly taking on the most knowledgeable opponents one can find. Consider, for example, the qualitative difference between my exchanges with Nate, with Dominic, and even with Delavagus with my various run-ins with PZ Myers, McRapey, and Luke. I still disagree with all six of them on the subjects we discussed, but the former three knew what they were talking about while the latter three manifestly did not.

Here is my response to being asked a similar question about 18 months ago, which led to the “Dissecting the Sceptics” series of posts. If JB hasn’t read through it, I would recommend doing so.

“The first question I always ask myself is if the argument is primarily
factual, logical, or rhetorical in nature. The second question I ask
myself is if the author is likely to have any idea what he’s talking
about or not. And the third question is if I regard the author as being
trustworthy or not, or rather, if I believe him to be fundamentally
intellectually honest or not. These three questions determine how
carefully I read through an argument and whether I presume the author is
more likely to make a simple mistake or whether any apparent mistakes
are actually intentional attempts to sneak something past the
insufficiently careful reader in order to make a flawed argument look
convincing.

“The fourth question is what is the author trying to prove? This
question often can’t be answered initially, but I keep it in the back of
my mind for future reference. Once I identify the specific point that
the author is trying to prove, I can track back from it to see if a) his
logic is correct, and b) if that logic is soundly supported. It’s
important to keep in mind that the actual point that the author is
trying to prove is not necessarily the one that he appears to be trying
to prove in the title or introduction.”  

And for those who find McRapey’s argument by appeal to BA in Philosophy of Language from the University of Chicago convincing, it might be educational to read through “Dissecting the Sceptics” andsee what I do to “a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Chicago”.

The NYT dips a toe into HBD

Steve Sailer observes that the lead science writer at the New York Times is flirting with dropping the seventh veil of science:

Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory.

Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years—to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well.

Interesting to see it stated so clearly: “the consensus view cannot be right”. I imagine we’re going to be seeing that phrase on a regular basis over the next few years. Let’s list a few of the obvious candidates:

Racial equality (check)
Global warming
String theory
Evolution by natural selection
Neo-Keynesian economics
Monetarism
Sexual equality

Which one do you think will survive longest? I’m going to go with Neo-Keynesian economics. I bet they’ll be able to retrofit debt in there just well enough to remain nominally viable.

Fix insufficient permissions in Windows 7

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything about Linux. This is mostly because I haven’t been using it. Due to some development projects over the past few years, I’ve been stuck using Windows, so I’ve been using XP and resolutely ignoring every new operating system introduced by Microsoft in the meantime. Everything works fine, although I have not been able to update Skype since not long after Microsoft bought them.

This has actually been a material benefit to me, not an irritation. It works fine, and in addition to reasons that shall presently be made clear, I still enjoy all the old functionality of certain third-party programs that Microsoft has intentionally broken with its helpful newer releases. The lesson, as always: never, ever, trust Microsoft to do the sensible thing.

Apple pens in its users, domesticates them, and milks them, but at least it treats them nicely and makes them feel good about themselves. Microsoft is like a big, fat ex-boyfriend who shows up at his former girlfriend’s apartment drunk and unannounced, insists on having sex, then throws up in her bed after passing out. It’s more than just the regret one feels after being forced to deal with Windows, it’s the time one has to spend to clean everything up afterwards.

Now, Spacebunny runs Windows 7, and in the course of daily events she made the rookie mistake of allowing Skype to update itself. Naturally, the update immediately caused Skype to stop working on her machine. She tried a few things and then turned the matter over to me because I so enjoy trying to work around Microsoft’s idea of making the interface easier. The problem is a fairly common one and is described here by one of the many people who have run into this problem:

“Every time I try to download the newest version of Flash Player, I get
an error message stating that I have insufficient user permissions.  I
am using Windows 7, it’s my home computer, I am the administrator (I
know because I checked) and no one else uses my computer.  I’ve done
everything I can (including creating a new Admin account – still didn’t
work).”

None of the suggested fixes worked. So, I went through all the various suggestions I could find online, including those on the Microsoft Forum. Most of them were entirely worthless. Seriously, I want to punch the fat, self-satisfied power users who that telling people how to click through the relevant dialogue boxes is a legitimate answer. But the problem obviously isn’t people not knowing how to use the operating system, since many of the messages clearly indicate we’re dealing with people who know what administrator status is, the problem is that clicking through the obvious dialogue boxes doesn’t freaking work!

I did all the obvious things. I even downloaded a special program to unlock the folder, which unlocked the folder but still didn’t grant whatever privileges were deemed necessary to simply delete the damned file. Logging in as an administrator didn’t work, creating a new administrator didn’t work, running the installer as an administrator didn’t work, unlocking the folder didn’t work, absolutely nothing worked. Even Markku couldn’t figure out how to fix the problem within a Microsoft paradigm short of reinstalling Windows. That being said, he did come up with the ultimate answer from the start, which is often apt when one is dealing with a Microsoft product: the first step is to tell Microsoft to fuck off.

Let me explain. The core problem is that the newer Microsoft operating systems do something incredibly stupid. In order to navigate all the complex crap that now surrounds diverse aspects of the increasingly crufty operating system, many installation programs now create a virtual administrator that has control over the various files and directories being used during the installation process. This virtual administrator does not exist, and by virtue of not existing, is not synonymous with any of the actual human administrators who actually use the computer.

Perhaps you already see the intrinsic problem there. If something goes wrong during the installation or update process, the real administrators do not have access to the files that were under the control of this nonexistent administrator. The real admin can see what’s there, but he can’t do anything about it. He doesn’t have access and he can’t give himself access. And if that protected file or folder is one that is required by an application installer that has somehow gone haywire, the user is screwed and will not be able to reinstall or use that application without either restoring a previous OS state or completely reinstalling Windows.

Nice work, Microsoft. Very helpful. It’s just a brilliant system. Honestly, it’s enough to make me want to go back to DOS and stay there. Sure, point-and-click is nice, but it’s just not worth putting up with this sort of insane and totally unnecessary crap. The First Rule of Operating Systems should be this: stay the fuck out of the advanced user’s way!

Fortunately, as Markku pointed out, Linux doesn’t give a damn about all of Microsoft’s increasingly lunatic complexities. And thanks to the Ubuntu Live option, it is possible to boot the machine into Linux off a USB stick, then delete the directory reserved to the nonexistent administrator without otherwise affecting the machine or the operating system. The entire process was very easy:

  1. Download an Ubuntu desktop ISO onto your hard drive. 13.10 is current.
  2. Download Pen Drive Linux USB Installer
  3. Insert USB stick with at least 2GB free
  4. Run Pen Drive
  5. Select the downloaded Ubuntu ISO. Click start.
  6. Wait 6 mins for Pen Drive to set up the bootable Ubuntu on your USB stick
  7. Turn off computer
  8. Boot into Linux (may be necessary to hit F12 to choose boot option)
  9. Find your Windows hard drive
  10. Find the problematic file or folder and delete it
  11. Remove USB stick
  12. Reboot into Windows
  13. Run application installer again
  14. Run the application.
  15. Bask in the momentary techno joy.

The whole process took about 15 minutes, most of which involved downloading the Ubuntu ISO and installing it on the USB stick. I’m posting this here because I haven’t seen this solution anywhere on the Internet, and despite involving a second operating system, it is the cleanest, fastest, and most effective way I’ve seen to completely resolve an extraordinarily annoying situation.

Of course, you won’t find this solution on any Microsoft forum. Why not? It appears that they would rather force their users to reinstall their operating system than let them know about a fast and easy fix for a common problem they created.

Only racists will criticize this law

I am entirely confident that anti-racist activists will be quick to cry raciss of anyone who speaks out against this African law. And since it is progress, who can possible question this evidence of the way morality is evolving in Uganda.

Ugandan lawmakers on Friday passed an anti-gay bill that calls for
life imprisonment for certain homosexual acts, drawing criticism from
rights campaigners who called it “the worst in the world.” The legislations sets life imprisonment as the
penalty for gay sex involving an HIV-infected person, acts with minors
and the disabled, as well as repeated sex offenses among consenting
adults, according to the office of a spokeswoman for Uganda’s
parliament. The bill also prescribes a seven-year jail term for a person who “conducts a marriage ceremony” for same-sex couples.

Since we are often informed that wise Africans who take a village are our moral superiors, it would be a terrible moral failure were the US Congress to fail to pass a similar law.  After all, homosexuality activity is already criminal in 70 percent of African countries.

Rights roundup

An Approaching Earthquake in Economics

Recently, two fascinating admissions were made by two of America’s
most well-known economists. The first was made by Paul Krugman, the New
York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winner, who has, as a good
Neo-Keynesian, resolutely denied any possible link between the amount of
debt in the economy and the level of demand for goods and services. As
recently as March 2012, he was following Paul Samuelson’s literally
textbook lead concerning the economically innocuous nature of debt and
admitting “I guess I don’t get that at all.” But two weeks ago, he suddenly began singing a completely different tune.

Desperate Measures and the National Debt

In the fall of 2002, I observed the housing bubble and noted its
likely consequences for the future. In the spring of 2008, I warned my
readers that the consequences of that bubble were about to erupt, which
duly happened six months later, in October. What was it that concerned
me about the situation? And how was I able to see the problem coming
when so many mainstream economists did not?
The reason is simple. Mainstream economists, whether of the neo-Keynesian or the Monetarist variety, believe that debt is, in their words, “exogenous to the system”.

So, the gay thing backfired

They’ll just have to cry raciss instead:

“Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson made headlines this week for his anti-gay sentiments in a GQ interview. Now another statement from the interview — this time about the black community during the pre-civil rights era — is stirring more controversy.

GQ’s Drew Magary sat down with the “Duck Dynasty” patriarch for a candid interview about his road to fame. The 67-year-old journeyed from substance abuse to devotion to God to small-screen celebrity, all in the backwoods of Louisiana. According to Robertson, growing up in those Louisiana backwoods in the pre-civil rights era was not bad for black people.

“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person,” Robertson is quoted in GQ. “Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

Presumably the next accusations will be:

  1. anti-semitism
  2. anti-science
  3. evolution denier
  4. not a true Christian

Oh, wait, they already tried number four, didn’t they. I think this episode is actually a potentially positive one for American society, as it is making two things abundantly clear. First, give them an inch and they will not only take a mile, but will insult you in the process. Second, there is absolutely no reasoning with these people. They are an implacable enemy and no quarter should be shown to them even when they wave the white flag and start talking about negotiating a settled peace.

As Churchill once said of the Hun, he is either at your feet or at your throat. We can’t leave them alone because they won’t leave us alone. We can’t tolerate them because they will not tolerate us. So, root them out of your lives, stop supporting them, stop enabling them, and stop funding their assault on your beliefs, your family, and your faith. There are no fences upon which moderates can safely sit in a cultural war.

One of the few voices of reason on the Left grasps this and laments the totalitarianism of her own side. Camille Paglia writes:

“To express yourself in a magazine in an interview — this is the
level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my
liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have
supported and promoted over the last several decades,” Paglia said.
“This is the whole legacy of free speech 1960’s that have been lost by
my own party.

“I think that this intolerance by gay activists toward the full
spectrum of human beliefs is a sign of immaturity, juvenility,” Paglia
said. “This is not the mark of a true intellectual life. This is why
there is no cultural life now in the U.S. Why nothing is of interest
coming from the major media in terms of cultural criticism. Why the
graduates of the Ivy League with their A, A, A+ grades are complete
cultural illiterates, etc. is because they are not being educated in any
way to give respect to opposing view points.”

One cannot reason with totalitarians. One can only refuse to submit to them. And sooner or later, one must fight them.

UPDATE: The Robertson family stands fast:

“We are disappointed that Phil has been placed on hiatus for expressing
his faith, which is his constitutionally protected right.We have had a
successful working relationship with A&E but, as a family, we cannot
imagine the show going forward without our patriarch at the helm.  We
are in discussions with A&E to see what that means for the future of
Duck Dynasty.   Again, thank you for your continued support of our
family.”

Mailvox: Talk Scalzi

Rocean appears to have forgotten that I am far from the only critic of McRapey:

Scazli has a new response to VD up. In essence, he’s smart, he’s honest, and gosh-darn it people like him. Or more accurately, just more adolescent snark and word games.

I checked it out and I don’t believe the post to be a response to anything I wrote. I suspect his cryptic meandering may have been intended as a response to Heartiste, given the references to a “stupidsphere”. I don’t question for a moment that an effete young lad, abandoned by his father and desperately seeking both attention and approval from the women upon whom his path to a better life depends, would genuinely subscribe to the equalitarian claptrap he has espoused in public for years. That doing so would tend to put him in good odor with the gatekeepers and shambling shoggoths of Pink SF/F is mostly a matter of positive happenstance.

UPDATE: Or perhaps he is addressing Ed Trimnell, who recently wrote:

John Scalzi is a pure, coldly calculating opportunist who knows exactly what he’s doing when he writes blogs posts like “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is”. I suspect that Scalzi believes only a fraction of what he writes. 

Regardless, I found this admission from December 19th to be of more interest:

[T]his year, by blog readership looks like it end up lower than it was last year — about 7.5 million recorded visits for the year, as opposed to 8.1 million in 2012. I attribute this to a couple of month-long “semi-hiatuses,” during which I posted less while I was writing books or on tour, a theory borne out by looking at the monthly numbers (November, which was one of those months, had the lowest visitorship of any month in two years). However, this year I also added 15,000 Twitter followers, most of whom (so far as I can tell) are actual real live people and not Twitter bots, and my Facebook and Google Plus public pages also saw growth. (I should note 7.5 million visits still means 2013 is Whatever’s second best year ever, so I’m not exactly panicking over here in that regard. But again, the fact that my other online presences showed substantial growth works as an offset in any event.) 

Those of you who previously doubted me concerning my observations about Whatever’s declining traffic may recall the following statement, which I made here on December 10th. 

McRapey is unlikely to even hit 7.5 million Google pageviews this year; imagine how much more his readership would have declined if “those two sites” hadn’t mentioned him 145 times, to say nothing of the copious references on Heartiste and other sites.

As before, Scalzi is using “recorded visits” when a more accurate term would be “WordPress pageviews”. Translating the numbers into Google pageviews, he had 7.897 million pageviews in 2012 and he’s anticipating about 7.155 million in 2013. You knew he’d have an excuse for the decline and I was pretty sure “other online presences” would be one of them. But it’s not merely an excuse, it is a legitimate reason as well. Keep in mind that I’ve never once claimed that Mr. Scalzi is not influential in SF/F circles; he was able to arrange my expulsion from SFWA by threatening to quit, after all. My contentions have been limited to pointing out that McRapey is nowhere nearly as “huge” as he would have his fans believe, that Whatever averages less than one-twelfth of the claimed 50,000 DAILY READERS, and that his blog is in fact is considerably less popular than most of us thought until the end of last year.

Those who have mastered division will surely note that 7.155 million divided by 365 is 19,603, which would be considerably short of 50,000 even if Whatever had a 1/1 pageview/reader ratio. Which it obviously doesn’t.

That being said, I’m not surprised that Scalzi has done well on Twitter. Whatever will likely continue to decline in large part because Twitter is a medium much better suited to an approval-seeking narcissist with snarky little thoughts who is more interest in talking than listening, and whose primary interest in dialogue is receiving praise.

Technologies change. And one no longer requires a blog to post pictures of cats and repeatedly be told how awesome one is.

UPDATE: Sometimes, Johnny just can’t wait for the next back-pat and has to do it himself.  “I’m pretty smart”, he declares. Sure, not National Merit smart. Or even Mensa smart. But pretty smart. So he’s got that going for him, which is nice. Cocoa?

Pajamaboy!

Little known fact: Pajamaboy served in the IDF. You do NOT want to mess with him. He may look harmless, effete, and completely uninterested in women, but the heart of a true desert warrior beats inside.

Of course, this ad for Obamacare might look astonishingly asinine, but don’t be fooled. In truth, it is just one more brilliant meisterspiel by the greatest genius in the history of American politics and that is exactly what he wants you to think!

Loyalty

Dogs are the best:

A blind man who nearly died after falling onto subway train tracks
will get to keep the loyal dog who tried to save him — thanks to New
Yorkers who whipped out their checkbooks to help the duo stay together. Cecil Williams, 61 — whose 11-year-old pooch, Orlando, leaped onto
the tracks after his master fainted on Tuesday — said the lovable lab
will retire as a seeing-eye dog and become a pet with the help of
donation money.

Williams fell on to the tracks after he grew faint and lost footing
on the platform of the 125th Street station at 9:30 am on Wednesday.
Orlando jumped onto the tracks after him and began licking his face. A quick-thinking subway conductor then hit brakes of the train, which passed over both of them. Transit officials pulled Orlando out from under the train and
Williams was rushed to St. Luke’s Hospital while wearing a neck brace.

I tend to doubt my viszla would have had the courage to leap on the tracks in a similar situation. His usual method of confronting other dogs that represented a potential threat was to run behind me, peek out around one leg and growl. But if curling up in a blanket in front of a roaring fire would have saved me, he’d have been all over it.