Category: Uncategorized

The Diversity Gospel

WATYF pointed out one of the many problems with John Piper’s claim of a Biblical mandate for diversity:

I think the most logical argument against “diversity” is found in Paul’s admonishment in Romans 12 where he says, “As far as it depends on you, live at peace with all men”. He tells us that we should act in such a way that would promote peace. Well, we know from several studies that “diversity” leads to a LACK of peace amongst men. We know that it leads to less trust, more animosity, and in many cases of very high levels of diversity, outright violence. If we truly want to live at peace “as far as it concerns us”, we would seek to promote peace between us and others, and that would be by preferring a homogenous society.

The real question is, “Why should we promote diversity?” According to what Biblical standard should it be pursued? If we can’t come up with one (which, as far as I know, there isn’t one in scripture), then we should consider just accepting the simple facts of the matter and doing what’s prudent.

There is another, related argument, which is Matthew 7:15-16.  “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles?”

Consider the present fruits of diversity in Nigeria:

A fresh load of battered corpses arrived, 29 of them in a routine
delivery by the Nigerian military to the hospital morgue here. 
Unexpectedly, three bodies started moving.
“They were not properly shot,” recalled a security official here. “I had
to call the J.T.F.” — the military’s joint task force — “and they
gunned them down.” 
It was a rare oversight. Large numbers of bodies, sometimes more than 60
in a day, are being brought by the Nigerian military to the state
hospital, according to government, health and security officials,
hospital workers and human rights groups — the product of the military’s
brutal war against radical Islamists rooted in this northern city. 
The corpses were those of young men arrested in neighborhood sweeps by
the military and taken to a barracks nearby. Accused, often on flimsy or
no evidence, of being members or supporters of Boko Haram — the
Islamist militant group waging a bloody insurgency against the Nigerian
state — the detainees are beaten, starved, shot and even suffocated to
death, say the officials, employees and witnesses. 
Then, soldiers bring the bodies to the hospital and dump them at the
morgue, officials and workers say. The flood is so consistent that the
small morgue at the edge of the hospital grounds often has no room, with
corpses flung by the military in the sand around it. Residents say they
sometimes have to flee the neighborhood because of the fierce smell of
rotting flesh. 
From the outset of the battle between Boko Haram and the military, a dirty war on both sides that has cost nearly 4,000 lives since erupting in this city in 2009, security forces have been accused of extrajudicial killings and broad, often indiscriminate roundups of suspects and sympathizers in residential areas. 

That’s precisely what history teaches us diversity brings.  Social science, too, has very reluctantly concluded that diversity is a powerful societal negative:

In recent years, Putnam has been engaged in a comprehensive study of the relationship between trust within communities and their ethnic diversity. His conclusion based on over 40 cases and 30 000 people within the United States is that, other things being equal, more diversity in a community is associated with less trust both between and within ethnic groups. Although limited to American data, it puts into question both the contact hypothesis and conflict theory in inter-ethnic relations. According to conflict theory, distrust between the ethnic groups will rise with diversity, but not within a group. In contrast, contact theory proposes that distrust will decline as members of different ethnic groups get to know and interact with each other. Putnam describes people of all races, sex, socioeconomic statuses, and ages as “hunkering down,” avoiding engagement with their local community—both among different ethnic groups and within their own ethnic group. Even when controlling for income inequality and crime rates, two factors which conflict theory states should be the prime causal factors in declining inter-ethnic group trust, more diversity is still associated with less communal trust.

Lowered trust in areas with high diversity is also associated with:

  •     Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.
  •     Lower political efficacy – that is, confidence in one’s own influence.
  •     Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.
  •     Higher political advocacy, but lower expectations that it will bring about a desirable result.
  •     Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).
  •     Less likelihood of working on a community project.
  •     Less likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.
  •     Fewer close friends and confidants.
  •     Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life. 

So, there is no Biblical justification for Piper’s invented mandate and a clear connection to massive, wide-scale violence as well as a whole host of observable evils.  Moreover, Piper’s teachings on the matter are contrary to that of his father and consistent with the beliefs of a broad spectrum of evil individuals from the African slave traders to the secular globalists.  It should be readily apparent at this point that “Christian Diversity” is a false and ascriptural teaching.

Moreover, in the discussion it was easy to see how The Responsible Puppet immediately resorted to evasive dishonesty in defense of his “Christian” position.  His claims to ignorance were remarkable given his insistence that diversity must be intrinsically good; a nonsensical position given his claims to know nothing about racial differences.  It took repeated questions before he would even admit to the utterly obvious fact that European civilization is superior to other civilizations, so great is his worldly fear of admitting that there are substantive differences between different human sub-species.  He openly declared that he had to be very careful about saying anything about the subject.  “What I’m doing is answering the question very carefully, which I think
is warranted in this situation. And I’ll continue being careful….”

This, too, is another relevant argument.  Why is such care warranted?  Why must he be so careful?  Why is he afraid? Something gave him that spirit of fear.  And yet, Timothy 1:7 says: “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”

The Diversity Gospel asserted by Piper and exhibited by the Puppet is fearful, weak, and weak-minded.  And therefore we know it does not come from God.

The conspiracy theorists were right

As I have repeatedly written, the Conspiracy Theory of History is the only one that stands up to critical analysis.  Not only that, but the closer you look, the more readily apparent the various conspiracies become.  Matt Taibbi, who has been doggedly investigating the world of high finance since the 2008 crisis began, finally throws up his hands and admits what was always readily apparent to the sufficiently logical:

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of
the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you
an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but
your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this
out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories
spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest
banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three –
and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have
been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around
with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”)
worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into
public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in
history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of
magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has
leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker
of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities
for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess.
Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at
ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to
manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to
calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations
and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their
use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market,
meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100
times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this
scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks –
including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal
Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global
interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have
already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive
manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were
caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year,
to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial
acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there
may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix
suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and
price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall
Street culture.

Nor should it come as any surprise that the chief role of government in all of this has been to enable and defend the conspirators.

“But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of
March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been
so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against
the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants’
incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money
because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever
thinking the banks were competing in the first place.”

The reason all of this information is finally coming out is because the system is breaking down.  The scale of the efforts required to attempt salvaging the players precludes any ability to keep everything behind the veil of genteel respectability while the straightforward demands for access to taxpayer funds and bank deposits prevents any attempt to confuse matters by appealing to their complexity. 

Why big corporations welcome regulation

Karl Denninger explains the rationale underlying the unholy alliance between big business and big government in explaining why Amazon is welcoming online sales taxes:

Amazon, for its part, has engaged in this sort of screwball deal with its distribution centers in various states, arguing that this doesn’t give them nexus and thus they don’t need to collect tax.  When threatened they reply with the threat to close the center and fire the employees (who are residents of the subject state) or sue, which effectively stalls the clock.  This set of tactics has “worked”, because Amazon (and similar firms) are huge corporations with internal legal staffing that can fight these things and, at worst, delay the outcome driving up the costs for the states and there is virtually no chance that the company or its officers will be indicted by the states in question for tax evasion, as is the case for a small business.  The problem is that as these cases have gone on over the years it has become increasingly apparent that Amazon and these other retailers will eventually lose and be forced to both pay and collect the taxes and might be exposed to penalties, interest and retroactive tax billing for willful evasive activity.

So what Amazon appears to have decided to do is play screw the other guy by forcing them into having a “virtual” nexus that otherwise would not exist!  This is then sold to people as “fairness.”

It is nothing of the sort.

Amazon could choose to have distribution centers only in no-sales-tax states.  It could then tell the rest of the states to “pound sand.”  There is a long-standing US Supreme Court decision (“Quill”) that they can stand behind if they take this approach and are without question in the clear in doing so.  But by doing so Amazon would have a serious problem because transit time and cost become a big problem, and since everyone wants everything right now, shipping cost is a huge expense and getting larger, and Amazon sees both cutting that cost and increasing speed of delivery as a competitive advantage (it is) they want to open distribution centers close to the people who shop.

But that leaves them with a problem because to do that they create nexus, and with nexus comes compliance costs.  Since they’ve become increasingly unable to avoid this and meet their business goals they now seek to use the jackboot of government to shove it down their competitors’ throats!

Obviously, Amazon would prefer no sales taxes.  But if they’re going to have to pay them anyhow, then it is much better for Amazon if everyone, including their competitors, is forced to deal with the compliance costs that Amazon is much better suited to pay given its size.  Large corporations can more easily afford to comply with regulations, as the employees required to do so make up a much smaller percentage of their total workforce.

This is a relatively harmless example, but it should suffice to demonstrate the absurdity of pretending that big business is the enemy of big government.

Mailvox: the shortest genre

Phony is convinced he has evidence lending support to the myth of the Woman Warrior:

“The amusing thing is that throughout the comments, no one even stops to realize that the entire premise of women attempting to fight with swords is physically ridiculous. “

Nusaybah bint Ka’ab.

Dipshit.

Very well, let’s examine the military career of this famous female warrior, which is recounted on Wikipedia:

“Initially, Nusaybah was attending the Battle of Uhud like other women, and her intention was to bring water to the soldiers, while her husband and two sons fought. But after the Muslim archers disobeyed their orders and began deserting their high ground believing victory was at hand, the tide of the battle changed, and it appeared that defeat was imminent. When this occurred, Nusaybah entered the battle, carrying a sword and shield.

“She shielded Muhammad from the arrows of the enemy, and received several wounds while fighting.

“When a horse-mounted Quraish attacked her, she pulled on the horse’s bridle and plunged her sword into its neck, toppling the horse on top of its rider. Witnessing this, Muhammad then yelled for Abdullah to help his mother and the pair dispatched the struggling rider. The pair then circled around Muhammad, throwing stones at the advancing Quraish troops, until Muhammad noticed Nusaybah’s wounds and ordered her son to bandage them, and praised their heroism. Abdullah was wounded himself, as a Quraish cut across his left arm, and Nusaybah treated him and told him not to lose courage. Picking her sword back up, she was complimented by Muhammad on her own courage and he pointed out the man who had wounded her son. Advancing to him, she cut his leg off with a blow of her sword, and he fell to the ground where he was killed by other fighters.

“Nusaybah’s twelfth wound, cut across her shoulder by a Quraish named Ibn Qumiah, left her unconscious on the battlefield. When she awoke after the battle, her first inquiry was whether Muhammad had survived.”

So, this most exemplary of all women warriors managed to unhorse one rider and cripple one man in a tribal skirmish while trying to defend her family in a desperate situation.  If we are to take Nusaybah as sufficient justification for the plethora of female Conans that presently litter bad fantasy, we should also believe that it is perfectly realistic to have your average suburban mother throwing around Chevrolets.  This is akin to asserting that because a middle-aged woman shot a home intruder once, it’s perfectly realistic to write about female SEALs.

And note that this fearsome woman warrior took no less than twelve wounds, very nearly got herself killed, and never took arms again.  Courageous? Indubitably. A warrior? No. Not in the slightest. If this is the historical basis for women warriors, the genre is going to consist of a series of very slim volumes indeed.

Has Phony ever hit a woman?  Has he ever seen a woman’s head snap back, seen her knees buckle, and stood over her as she lays crumpled on the floor?  Has he ever bloodied a woman’s nose or blackened a woman’s eyes?  Has he ever toyed with a woman desperately trying to lay a hand on him before stepping forward and flattening her with a single jab?

I have. It wasn’t even amusing because it was so easy.  I had a harder time fighting a well-trained eleven year old boy.  I wasn’t even throwing any combinations or throwing my strikes at more than half-force, and that was still enough to lay them out. If you are a man who hasn’t ever hit a woman in the face, or if you are a woman who hasn’t ever been beaten up by a man, your opinion on the subject is guaranteed to be irrelevant. The cumulative difference in speed, strength, and mass simply has to be experienced to be believed.

I sincerely encourage anyone who wishes to write about women warriors to visit a full-contact dojo and ask to spar a few rounds with the opposite sex.  They will accommodate you and it will be an eye-opening experience.

Halfway to reality

Emily Asher-Perrin fails to think the matter all the way through:

Never mind the chainmail bikinis—what about those awkward breast plates
in armor that we see frequently in fantasy artwork and at the Ren Faire?
Whenever women complain about this convention, they are usually shot
down for trying to erase women’s true bodies, for insisting that women
make themselves more “male” in order to appear strong and capable…. Let’s begin by stating the simple purpose of plate armor—to deflect
blows from weaponry. Assuming that you are avoiding the blow of a sword,
your armor should be designed so that the blade glances off your body,
away from your chest. If your armor is breast-shaped, you are in fact
increasing the likelihood that a blade blow will slide inward, toward
the center of your chest, the very place you are trying to keep safe.

But that’s not all! Let’s say you even fall onto your boob-conscious
armor. The divet separating each breast will dig into your chest, doing
you injury. It might even break your breastbone. With a strong enough
blow to the chest, it could fracture your sternum entirely, destroying
your heart and lungs, instantly killing you. It is literally a death
trap—you are wearing armor that acts as a perpetual spear directed at
some of your most vulnerable body parts. It’s just not smart.

 That’s not to say that female armor cannot be shaped differently—in fact, it should be to account for differences in shoulder-to-waist ratios and more, as the military recently discovered. Some films decide to provide women with a shelf of sorts in the chest region and that choice, if well-designed, can be flattering as well as functional. But it still isn’t logical or necessary by a longshot.

So if you want to wear some sculpted armor to the Ren Faire because you feel fabulous-looking in it, go forth and have fun! But if you’re drawing lady soldiers, or creating female characters who are depicted as actual warriors, please err on the side of reality when designing their armor. Science says your boob plates are killing the women you hoped they would protect.

Of course, if we’re going to start bringing reality into swords and sorcery, we should probably also take into consideration the fact that even a large, well-trained woman couldn’t last thirty seconds against the average warrior.  The correct and realistic portrayal of an armor-era woman is either one who is dead and buried after her brief foray into warrior womanhood or at home, caring for the children that she started bearing in her teens.

Awkward and combat-inefficient breast plates are the least of the problem. What it is time to retire is the absurd and ahistorical “warrior woman”.

The amusing thing is that throughout the comments, no one even stops to realize that the entire premise of women attempting to fight with swords is physically ridiculous.  If you doubt me, just hand a sword to the closest woman the next time you’re in a medieval museum.

The threeway from Hell

What are the chances of any quality games actually coming out of a Lucas-Disney-EA alliance?  One in fifty quadrillion against?  One in an Oom Quatbog shreksillion against?

Electronic Arts announced today it has landed an exclusive multi-year agreement to develop and publish games based on Lucasfilms’ Star Wars universe. EA said the it will create and publish Star Wars games for a ‘core gaming audience’ across ‘all popular platforms’ and genres. The EA studios creating those ‘core’ Star Wars games are Battlefield developer DICE, Dead Space developer Visceral Games and Mass Effect house BioWare.

The developers sound all right, more than all right, actually, but that doesn’t mean these EA games are going to be seeing the A-teams from those developers.  In fact, given the way that the top dogs often move onto new projects after designing and/or developing their big hit, I would be surprised if the projects were even seeing B-teams assigned to them.

The decline of entrepreneurialism

Glenn Reynolds observes the current lack of startups with appropriate concern:

[T]he latest data indicate that start-ups are becoming rarer, not more common. A new report from JPMorgan economist Mike Feroli indicates that employment in start-ups is plunging. New jobs in the economy tend to come from new businesses, but we’re getting fewer new businesses. That doesn’t bode well.

In fact, it is yet another sign of a United States that is looking more like Europe: A society in which big businesses have cozy relationships with big government, while unemployment remains comparatively high. If you’re fortunate enough to have a job at one of those government-connected businesses, GE, for example, your situation is pretty good. If you’re a recent college graduate looking for work, your situation is not so great. If you’re a low-skilled worker, your situation is dreadful.

So what’s to blame for this change? A lot of things, probably. One reason, I suspect, for a job market that looks more like Europe is a regulatory and legal environment that looks more like Europe’s. High regulatory loads — the product of ObamaCare and numerous other laws — systematically harm small businesses, which can’t afford the personnel needed for compliance, to the benefit of large corporations, which can.

Likewise, higher taxes reduce the rewards for success, making people less likely to invest their money (or time) into new businesses. And local regulatory bodies, too, make starting new businesses harder.

But I wonder if the biggest problem isn’t cultural.

Reynolds is right to be concerned.  Entrepreneurialism is the engine of economic growth, technological advancement, and scientific progress. I suspect he is not only right, but that the cultural problem can be narrowed down considerably and connected to another recent phenomenon.  And, to be honest, I’m a little surprised that Reynolds didn’t make the connection, because that phenomenon is one of his primary bugaboos: the education bubble.

I started my first company when I was 23. It did rather well. But I would probably have been much more successful if I had followed the lead of Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and others and dropped out of school midway through my sophomore year.  With the considerable help of one of my father’s engineers, I’d designed an Ad Lib-compatible, stereo, CD-quality 16-bit, 16-channel sound board at a time when Ad Lib reigned supreme in the game’s industry with its MIDI card and Creative Labs had just introduced its first 8-bit, mono, 22 KHz Soundblaster.

We got two of the cards working over Christmas break, then I went back to school like a good little upper middle class worker bee and the project languished in a corporate bureaucracy that had no interest in game-related hardware until it died completely when the engineer who had worked on it left for another company before the summer.  Four and a half years later, Media Vision introduced its hugely successful Pro Audio Spectrum, which was almost exactly the same card we had built in the lab.

I’m not blaming anyone else for my failure to follow through on my ideas. It was my fault, no one else’s.  Let’s face it, if there is a theme to my life, that is it: once I have something working to my satisfaction, I tend to lose at least an amount of interest in it. But far from being encouraged to take advantage of the window of opportunity, I was actively discouraged from even the thought of dropping out of college.  I’d tentatively mentioned the possibility once we got the card working and it was greeted with what can only be described as unmitigated horror.  The idea that an intelligent individual from a good family would not be “educated” was simply not to be countenanced, and besides, I could always pursue the opportunity after I finished my degree in another two and a half years.

That seemed to make sense to me.  And indeed, it would have even been possible considering the timeline.  But opportunity doesn’t follow a nice orderly schedule, and as it happened, I never even looked at that sound card again.

The cult of the college degree is now even more widespread than it was back in the late 1980s, more people than ever are attending college, they are attending longer, and they are going into significant debt to do so.  This means that not only are more young men putting off their entrepreneurial activity for four to eight years during the most risk-friendly and most creative period of their lives, but they are far less able to afford to take risks once they graduate.

As a result, what we have now is young lawyers and MBAs in debt instead of young CEOs running their own startups.  Fortunately, the feminization of the university is beginning to cause young men to question the value of a college degree, so there may be a silver lining in the devolution of the academy.

The taxes and regulations aren’t helping either, of course. My father, for example, started three companies that employed hundreds of people and paid tens of millions in taxes.  He has spent the last six years living off the public dime, and in addition to the huge opportunity cost of locking him up, (which amounts to millions of dollars and scores of jobs), the actual cost of keeping him locked up in a Federal minimum-security prison amounts to about one-third of the amount he was charged with failing to pay.  Even if one is convinced he is the worst, most evil criminal of all time, from the macrosocietal perspective this is observably a case of society shooting itself in the foot.

So why should potential entrepreneurs bother?  It’s too much work combined with too much risk… and success only comes with even more risk. (My father’s imprisonment was the culmination of a battle with the IRS over an Irish subsidiary that began in 1992.) The younger versions of the best and brightest who once started companies are the most likely to see that it is now a better-paying, lower-risk option to get a glamor degree, join the parasitical class, and work up the hierarchy until reaching a position where one is able to use someone else’s organization to direct someone else’s money to one’s own pocket.  Why be an entrepreneur spending the next 10 years building a company when in the same amount of time you can expect to be an executive, or better yet, a consultant?

Why build when you can more easily and safely leech?

Now he’s just screwing with everyone

George Martin announces a new book in time for Christmas.  And a Westeros book, no less!

George R R Martin fans will have a new book for Christmas, with HarperVoyager releasing The Wit and Wisdom of Tyrion Lannister. The book was announced at HarperCollins’ showcase of autumn titles to retailers, held on Wednesday evening (1st May). The small, gift-format hardback title will gather together “clever and naughty quips” from the popular character from the A Song of Ice and Fire series, played in the HBO series by actor Peter Dinklage.

At this point, our best hope for ever seeing the series resolved may be for him to kick off sometime after Book Two is released, somehow leading to me being asked to finish the series by Harper Collins.  I’ll have to think about how I’d go about fixing all the unnecessary loose ends he created in tying the Mereen Knot, but I think the first thing I would do is kill off Reek and the Bastard of Bolton in an unfortunate accident involving chicken bones, a rich cheese sauce, and a sadistic feast-orgy.

The first fifty pages would make the Red Wedding look like a meeting of the small council to discuss regularizing the issuance of tax-farming licenses, as I methodically removed every tedious and extraneous perspective character added in the last two books from the mix.  Basically, I’d take the approach that David Brin took to the Second Foundation trilogy built upon the flimsy framework of the two Gregs, Benford and Bear, and do my best to quickly paper over the mess of the previous two books in order to get on with the story.

The blessings of diversity

In a previous post, the Responsible Puppet commented that one area where he agrees with John Piper and disagrees with me is on the subject of “Race: is Diversity good?”

I find the idea that diversity of race is considered a positive attribute for a society to be a fascinating argument, considering that it more or less flies in the face of the entire written history of humanity.  Regardless of whether one considers the relatively small Italian immigration into Constantinople, the larger scale Mongolian immigration into Russia and Eastern Europe, the European colonization of the Americas, or the much more recent immigration of the third world into Great Britain, the results are inevitably bad for the native population.

As this example from Brooklyn demonstrates, one can’t even count on the most rudimentary aspects of civilized society to be preserved once the demographic makeup of that society shifts beyond a certain point.  The mail was reliably delivered across a Wild and homogenous West when the technology was limited to horses, and yet this is nevertheless more than diverse 21st century Brooklyn can manage.

Snow, rain and gloom of night might not slow Brownsville mailmen down — but gangbangers sure will. Postmen are too scared to deliver letters and packages to one of Brooklyn’s most crime-ravaged neighborhoods, a US Postal Service worker told The Post yesterday….

“The postal workers have a right to fear for their life,” said Quantanya White, 38, a home health-care worker. “It doesn’t give them the right not to deliver the mail. Just because this place is bad, you’re not going to deliver the mail?

I should be very interested to hear the Puppet – or, for that matter, John Piper’s – explanation for why there is such a reliable correlation between the way in which a society functions and its demographic patterns.  Equality in Jesus Christ should not be confused with equality in anything else.  This should not be a difficult concept for anyone who isn’t willing to swap his heart surgeon for a fry cook with Down’s Syndrome on the basis of their mutual Christianity.

Fred Reed bites the Apple

His thought processes concerning his next computer are entertaining, if not, in my opinion, even remotely convincing:

I had no particular feelings about the Mac, for or against. I knew
that people who had them also had a peculiar emotional attachment to
them. It worried me, about the people, not the computer. I mean, a
carpenter doesn’t bond with his claw hammer. A friend once described
the MacIntosh as “a fashion accessory for the conforming
nonconformist.” Well, yeah. On the other hand, Mac-heads were usually
well on the bright side.

I was not interested in abnormal psychology, but in
computers, so I resolved to ask practical-minded friends, not
Mac-heards, about these fructiform machines. Actual Mac-users had the
chill objectivity I associate with Salafi terrorists. I started with a
buddy who does networking and data-base manage for medium-sized
companies. I knew he had a MacBook Pro. Did he like it?

He said, “It’s cute, well-designed, and I’d buy another one,
but when I have work to do, I need a PC.” Ah. Why? “Because the
network analysis software I need doesn’t exist for the Mac, and their
data-base and spread-sheet applications are toys.”

Hmmm. I didn’t want to analyze networks or fiddle with data
bases, which left “cute and well-designed.” Nothing wrong with that….

Meanwhile, I talked to a few more of the Salafi terrorists. It
didn’t help. If you want intelligent thoughts regarding the Mac, it is
better to talk to people who don’t have one. Attempts to probe the
consciousness of Mac-heads usually went like this:  Mac-head: “Mac is better.” Me: OK, how is it better? “It
just is.” Ah, I see. How is it just is? “It’s easier to use.” How is it
easier to use? “It just is.” “How is it just is?” Round and round the
mulberry bush.

They said things like “The Mac’s hardware is better than the
PC´s.” At this point I realized that most Apple cultists didn’t know
much about computers. For example, they didn’t understand that the
Macintosh is a product, while PC is a specification. Only Apple can
make a Mac. Anybody can make a PC. Thus on one hand you have
manufacturers on a level with back-alley abortionists who use cheap
power supplies that smoke like the audience at a Grateful Dead concert,
and hard drives with a Mean Time Between Failure of five minutes or
until next Wednesday, whichever comes first. On the other hand, you
have solidly built PCs such as Delll’s Latitudes, serious boxes aimed
at businessmen.

Give him six months and he’ll either be parroting the very cultists he mocked, or, like Spacebunny and a few others of my acquaintance, he’ll regard his brief period of Macintosh ownership as being the techno-analog of surviving cancer or a stint in a concentration camp.  But Fred is right in discerning that there is no one correct and objective answer, because it completely depends upon what one’s individual requirements and preferences are.

None of this should be in any way taken for a defense, much less endorsement, of Windows 8, you understand.