There has been a good deal of speculation, some of it bordering on the apocalyptic, concerning what Barack Obama will do if the American people are foolish enough to give him another four years to preside over them. Obama says that he would grade his performance as “Incomplete,” thereby indicating that he has plans he has not yet been able to fulfill. But what are those plans? And has he truly given us any indication of them in his recent speech to the Democratic National Convention?
Category: Uncategorized
NFL 12 Week One
And after an offseason nearly as tumultuous as last year’s, we’re back again. I don’t know about you, but I’m curious to see how all the rookie quarterbacks do. We can be certain that one or more will be stars and others will be busts, but no one knows who will fall into which category.
As for me, I really just want to see some improvement from Christian Ponder and a fully recovered AD. A win over Jax would be nice, of course, but that’s almost of secondary interest at this point. We already know the Vikes are rebuilding after missing their one-year window of opportunity in 2009, but do they have anything from which to build? That is the question.
A chimpanzee on Mozart
INTJ keeps digging herself deeper in her attempt to argue that Western culture is not superior by the high standards of her snowflake morality:
Hahaha. You attempted to strawman me by bringing up Hitchens. I pointed out that my type precludes me from caring what happened to Hitchens’ argument, so instead you cry “appeal to authority” where there is none.
Untrue. You didn’t point out that your type precludes you from caring what happened to Hitchen’s argument, you pointed out that your type allows you to make sure your conclusions are internally sound. You claimed that your conclusions are internally sound because you are an INTJ, but you have provided absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they are, in fact, internally sound. That was the logical fallacy identified. Furthermore, you cannot reasonably claim I attempted to strawman you until you show your argument about the horrific nature of Christianity and Islam is any different than Hitchens’s argument. He makes very similar claims to yours, although he is honest enough to include Judaism. It would certainly be interesting to hear your argument that Christianity requires genocide when the only examples are Judaic.
Actually, I can appeal to the highest authority there is (and the only valid authority at that): human reason. I can convince the average person that slavery, rape, and genocide are wrong under any circumstances. All you’ve got is a book written by a bunch of uncivilized tribal barbarians.
You are a very ignorant person. So, you consider reason more authoritative than science? How very medieval of you. More authoritative than history? How very stupid of you. And to claim that science and history are totally invalid authorities only shows that you are in well over your thick little head. Reason is not an authority at all, it is simply another tool. I can use it to convince the average person that slavery, rape, and genocide are moral imperatives… nor would I be the first to do so.
If the rules condone such things, fuck the rules.
Profound, very profound. As I said, your whole snowflake morality boils down to “me no likee”.
Whatever helps you sleep better at night. Personally, I bow to no one that is morally reprehensible. Not Rob Pardo, not you, and certainly not your genocidal friend.
Non serviam. That’s hardly new. To whom do you bow?
Could there possibly have been more straw in this man?
Whoosh! No wonder you don’t appreciate Western culture. It would be like asking a chimpanzee for his view on Mozart.
Snowflake morality
Some of you may find this exchange at Susan Walsh’s place to be as familiar as it is amusing. INTJ attempts to call JutR and me to account on the basis of our bigoted belief in the superiority of Western culture:
The level of arrogance and superiority you seem to have for Western culture is frankly shocking to me. I have better things to do then to have a lengthy argument about your bigoted views, but I’ll throw in a couple of points:
First, if the Bible and the Quran are interpreted literally, both Islam and Christianity are absolutely horrific religions. Christianity has no right to hold the moral high ground here. The only difference between the two religions is that radical Islam is far more prevalent and powerful than radical Christianity. But this has nothing to do with religion. The only reason for this is Cold War politics. It was the American government that propped up reactionary governments like the Saudis, and it’s the America and Israel that funded jihadist groups in the Middle East to destabilize pro-Soviet governments.
Second, it is clear cut that the West as a whole is far more promiscuous than the East, reflecting a cultural legacy of individualism. This culture had its pros (such as work ethic, meritocracy) and cons (promiscuity, narcissism). But there’s no question that the West is more individualist, and in America in particular, more materialist due to the consumer society.
I’ve spent time in enough third-world shitholes to vastly prefer Western culture to all of the alternatives, yes. I’m not excusing the USA’s insane meddling in empire and the West is now indubitably in decline, but if you’re going to defend cannibal cultures and pagan ones that couldn’t figure out the wheel, running water, or the rule of law, well, I’m simply going to laugh at you. Perhaps when the West collapses economically and you end up in a part of it dominated by non-Western cultures, you’ll learn to appreciate what was once Christendom.
Oh, this should be amusing. By what universal moral standard are Islam and Christianity “absolutely horrific”? Your personal and subjective one? Some pagan Indian one? If you are clueless enough to try to claim they are self-condemning by their own standards, this is going to get very embarrassing for you very fast. You would appear to be unaware that Doug Wilson absolutely handed Christopher Hitchens his head on a platter when Hitchens tried to make this very argument.
Cannibal cultures? Seriously? You should at least reread what you type before you post such shit.
You conveniently overlooked the conditionality of my statement: “if the Bible and the Quran are interpreted literally”. Yes, slavery, rape, and genocide are horrific according to my own moral standard. Do you disagree with this aspect of my own moral standard? If so, feel free to fuck off.
What, you didn’t hear about the German who got eaten earlier this year in Papua New Guinea? It’s not “shit”, it’s historical fact and it is still happening today. Do you really not know that albinos are being slaughtered across Africa and even in Europe now for “muti”? Or that the UN confirmed that pygmies were being eaten in the Congo in 2003?
I didn’t overlook it at all. In fact, the literal interpretation of both the Bible and the Koran is obviously assumed if one is going to judge their respective moralities by the standards imposed by the respective scriptures. And you call yourself an INTJ….
Who cares about your stupid little personal moral standard? It is no more valid to the other seven billion people on the planet than Hitler’s, Stalin’s, or anyone else’s who doesn’t subscribe to an objective one with a universal warrant. “Fuck off if you don’t agree with me” is a borderline retarded argument, but by all means, feel free to run away crying like a little girl who can’t make a rational case for her own position if you like. And you should care what that fool Hitchens did, because he was trying to defend exactly the same position you appear to be holding.
As an INTJ, I come to my own conclusions and make sure they’re internally sound. Hitchens may or may not share my conclusions, and may or may not have sound reasons for those conclusions. Either way, I don’t care, as I do not attribute much value to Hitchens’ political/philosophical activity.
And I’m not arguing with you when I tell you to fuck off. I’m simply following my own “not very valid” moral standard, which requires me to take react aggressively to those who aren’t against slavery, rape, or genocide.
You may subscribe to the moral standard as literally expounded in the scripture of the Bible, which includes Exodus 21, Numbers 31, and Deuteronomy 20 & 21. If so, I repeat what I said earlier: feel free to fuck off.
An appeal to the authority of your personality type. That’s certainly a creative logical fallacy. Since you are the author of those conclusions, no doubt you are the ideal person to be certain your conclusions are internally sound.
How very admirable [. I suppose I must be doing the same thing, although my unique and subjective moral standard requires me to point and laugh at philosophically ignorant individuals who genuinely believe they have constructed a sound and logically consistent moral standard when they are doing little more than attempting to rationalize their feelings. Seriously, speaking as a fellow INTJ, you’re really letting the side down here. In fact, we appear to have a real conundrum here, as I can appeal to the same authority to which you are appealing in defense of a very different conclusion.
I most certainly do. God’s Games, God’s Rules. Even Socrates couldn’t quibble philosophically with that; it solves the second horn of his false dilemma. To paraphrase the voice in the whirlwind, who do you think you are, creature, to judge your Maker? You are like an NPC on a World of Warcraft server shaking its fist at Rob Pardo, demanding to know why it has to watch orc after orc after orc die at the hands of invading parties, seeing them rise again from the dead only to die in agony once more. Slaver! Murderer! Genocidal Maniac! And then Pardo flicks a switch and that entire universe vanishes in an instant.
Greenberg interview
In case you missed the live stream of the interview I recently did with Brian Greenberg in Philadelphia, the MP3 can be downloaded here. In the event anyone is moved to do a transcript of it, please send it to me and I will post it here… sans the copious and extraneous “you knows”.
Stupefying Stories September 12
The Original Cyberpunk is on a serious roll of late. He is releasing new anthologies faster than I can write short stories to celebrate them. Here is a description of the new September 2012 edition, now available on Amazon.
The STUPEFYING STORIES “Pirates and Dragons” edition is chock-full of all-new tales of dastardly pirates, lonely dragons, quarrelsome petty gods, meddlesome slimy aliens, and profoundly philosophical chickens. Featuring “Riddle Me” by Richard Zwicker, “Corsairs of the Concrete Sea” by Thoraiya Dyer, “The Thundering Dragon of Heaven” by Michael Matheson, “God Mic” by B. Sanford, “The Thirty-Ninth President and the Fourteenth Tentacle” by Theodore Carter, “Thief of Hearts” by Auston Habershaw, “In the Castle of the Assassins” by Melissa Embry, “The Lord of Flocks” by Alison Pentecost, and “The Little Thief” by Phil Temples. From a road in the middle of nowhere to the day after tomorrow, from a shattering tale of First Contact to the long-suppressed story that finally makes it possible to make sense of the events of the past thirty-five years, you’ll find it this time out in STUPEFYING STORIES!
If you like good old school SF/F, check it out. Stupefying Stories is rapidly becoming what Asimov and Analog were back when I was a kid.
Unemployment is down!
The BLS reports unemployment has dropped .2 percent, to 8.1 percent. That’s good, right? The recovery is on the way! Well, not so much:
The reason the unemployment rate “edged down” is that 1.483 million people gave up and exited the workforce! The Department of Labor Lies doesn’t count anyone who gives up any longer, so the “unemployment rate” is claimed to have decreased. But what’s worse is that there were a net 868,000 fewer people with jobs in August over July, despite there being 212,000 more people of working age in the population. That’s right — net-on-net over one million fewer people (adjusted for population change) were working last month.
This is precisely why I said that it is more informative to look at the Employment-Population Ratio in the Greenberg interview last night. The U3 figure is very easily gamed by simply not counting people who are not employed as unemployed.
Choking on the red pill
At Alpha Game, I consider one of the more problematic Churchian lies, namely, the idea that women of the Church are particularly attracted to men of strong Christian faith:
This may be among the most bitter of the various aspects of the red pill for some men, particularly Christian men, to swallow. It’s a message we hear from Christians and Churchians alike, that women will be attracted to men who are godly pillars of the community, that being “sold out for Jesus” is not merely an attractive feature, but the most definitively attractive aspect of a man for a Christian woman.
There is one serious problem with this. It is not true.
I have no doubt there will be many Christian women who disagree with this. I would simply ask them to honestly ask themselves if their strong Christian husband would be as sexually attractive to them if he was every bit as faithful and godly he is now, but lacked his other attractive attributes.
Nor do I intend to pick on women here – let’s face it, it’s pretty clear when I’m doing that – it is merely that the Church does not teach women it is their faith that is their primary appeal to men. It does, however, teach men precisely that.
Disengaged
I told you last year that Obama doesn’t really want to win the election. I’ll bet he’s now wishing he’d gone with his original impulse, which was to find some excuse to gracefully evade the nomination and go on the international speech circuit.
Obama at the DNC: That’s it? It would have been better had he not spoken. Seriously. Like an aging rock star, President Obama, in a downsized venue, with downsized proposal and spewing downsized rhetoric only reminded us how far he has fallen from the heady days of 2008. The man, the agenda and the aura are faint imitations of their 2008 incarnations.
– Jennifer Rubin
I was stunned. This is a man who gave one of the great speeches of our time in 2004. And he gave one of the emptiest speeches I’ve ever heard on a national stage… There was nothing in it…
– Charles Krauthammer
The president’s aides understood they could never re-create the power of the past but hoped to convince voters that more has been done than commonly recognized. The “promises kept” theme was intended to address the same swing voters Mr. Romney sought last week to win over. Mr. Obama directly acknowledged the disappointments…. The president appeared to become emotional toward the end of his speech as he spoke of wounded veterans who somehow managed to walk and run and bike on prosthetic legs. He said he did not know if they would vote for him, but added that they nonetheless gave him hope that difficulties could be overcome.
– The New York Times
the president often felt flat, rote, and unconvincing — almost as though he wasn’t quite convinced by his own arguments and promises, and felt a little awkward selling them to us…. I think that while this convention helped the Democrats overall, the president himself delivered one of the weakest major performances of his career.
– Ross Douthat, The New York Times
Rubin, Krauthammer, and Douthat could be dismissed as Republicans simply looking to criticize the rival presidential candidate were it not for the New York Times article saying essentially the same things between the lines. The striking thing about the NYT’s summary of Obama’s speech is the complete lack of superlatives that characterizes their normal coverage of Obama. If they could have found something, anything, to inflate and praise in his speech, they would have done so. But they didn’t, because Obama gave them nothing.
Obama is disengaged and he is too much of a narcissist to throw himself into a campaign that he doesn’t even want to win. All he wants at this point is to avoid an embarrassing landslide in the presidential vote; one potentially informative metric might be to compare how many Democratic candidates for other offices appear on stage with him during the last three months compared to past presidential campaigns. I’ll bet Obama doesn’t appear with half as many candidates this fall as he did in 2008 or George W. Bush did in 2004.
The immoral mind of Marc Hauser
It’s a serious blow to the “morality evolved” crowd when one of its chief proponents, Harvard’s Marc Hauser, has been found to have engaged in scientific misconduct in attempting to find evidence to support his theories of moral evolution:
Marc Hauser, a prolific scientist and popular psychology professor who last summer resigned from Harvard University, had fabricated data, manipulated results in multiple experiments, and described how studies were conducted in factually incorrect ways, according to the findings of a federal research oversight agency posted online Wednesday.
The report provides the greatest insight yet into the problems that triggered a three-year internal university investigation that concluded in 2010 that Hauser, a star professor and public intellectual, had committed eight instances of scientific misconduct. The document, which will be published in the Federal Register Thursday, found six cases in which Hauser engaged in research misconduct in work supported by the National Institutes of Health. One paper was retracted and two were corrected, and other problems were found in unpublished work.
Although Hauser “neither admits nor denies committing research misconduct,” he does, the report states, accept that federal authorities “found evidence of research misconduct.”
According to the federal findings:
-Hauser fabricated data in a 2002 Cognition paper that was later retracted, which examined monkeys’ ability to learn patterns of syllables. He never exposed monkeys to a particular sound pattern described in the experiment, despite reporting the results in a graph.
-In two experiments, researchers measured monkeys’ responses to patterns of consonants and vowels, a process called “coding” their behavior. Hauser falsified the coding, causing the results to pass a statistical test used to ensure that a particular finding was not just a chance result. Colleagues coding the same experiments came up with different results. Hauser “acknowledged to his collaborators that he miscoded some of the trials and that the study failed to provide support for the initial hypothesis,” the report said.
-A paper examining monkeys’ abilities to learn grammatical patterns included false descriptions of how the monkeys’ behavior was coded, “leading to a false proportion or number of animals showing a favorable response,” the findings stated. In an early version of the paper, he falsely reported that all 16 monkeys responded more strongly to an ungrammatical pattern than a grammatical one. Records reviewed by investigators found that one monkey responded in the opposite way and another responded equally. Hauser claimed that the behavior was coded by three scientists, when in fact he was the only one who measured their behavior. Then, when the manuscript was revised, he provided a false numerical description of the extent of agreement among multiple observers in coding behavior, despite being the only observer. All issues were corrected before publication.
I’ve read Hauser’s Moral Minds twice, and while it is head-and-shoulders above the likes of Dawkins and Harris, I did not find his arguments particularly compelling, for the most part, not that I wasn’t above citing them in my incomplete debate with Dominic.