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The “skeptic” confesses

After all of his endless babbling about the necessity of uncertainty and the terrible dangers of certainty, to say nothing of his attempts to criticize others on the basis of their presumed certainty, the Prince of Wängst finally comes clean and admits that he is not, in fact, the skeptic he presents himself as being:

I’m a skeptical naturalist. Have been for quite some time now…. The fact is, I am dogmatic. I do have unwavering faith in a set of claims. I may affect suspicion of them, but FAPP, I use them as apodictic truths. So what are they? Since you can only criticize explicit assumptions, it would probably be a good idea to enumerate them here, if only to make the shape of my bias clear.

The No-Dogma Dogma

1) Not all claims are equal.

2) The world is ambiguous because it is supercomplex.

3) Humans are cognitive egoists. We are hardwired to unconsciously game ambiguities to our own advantage – to make scripture out of habit and self-interest.

4) Humans are theoretical morons. We are hardwired for groundless belief in invisible things.

5) The feeling of certainty is a bloody pathological liar.

6) Science is a social cognitive prosthetic, an institution that, when functioning properly, lets us see past our manifold cognitive shortcomings, and produce theoretical knowledge.

7) Contemporary culture, by and large, is bent on concealing the fact of 2, 3, 4, and 5.

These are the biggies, I think, the one’s that trouble me the most because I seem to repeat them ad nauseum.

It’s not exactly up there with the Golden Rule or the Ten Commandments, but at least it’s something, even if they are no more intrinsically valid postulates than “God created the Heavens and the Earth” or “The world rests upon the shell of a giant turtle”. What his dogma reveals is that he’s just another incoherent science fetishist wrapped up in philosopher’s clothing, which is pretty much what I’ve been pointing out since last August. The thing is, even when Bakker is coming clean, he’s still attempting to strike philosophical poses, as there is absolutely no justification for claiming that his dogma is “No-Dogma”. But let’s look at his seven claims.

1) Observably and logically true.
2) Begs the question and debatable at best. Complexity does not necessitate ambiguity.
3) Perhaps, but hardly a certainty. And is contradicted by four.
4) False. Most people are idiots whose actions are not in accordance with their objectives, but not all of them. One wonders what his metric is for supporting the claim of theoretical moronism. If it’s the philosophical definition of knowledge, then we know his claim is false.
5) Trivially true. What feeling is reliable? One seldom sees anyone building bridges using their feelings as a guide.
6) False. Science doesn’t allow us to see past our “cognitive shortcomings”, but rather, acts as a force multiplier for them.
7) False. To the extent contemporary culture is bent on concealing anything, which strictly speaking, doesn’t even make sense, it is demonstrably much more focused on 1 and 5 than any of the others.

It must be admitted that FAPP is an excellent description of Wängsty’s No-Dogma Dogma, especially if one loses the second P. And those with sufficient recall will no doubt note that none of this serves as any rational basis for claiming that certainty is more dangerous, or less moral, than uncertainty.

MF Global, Mark II

Ann Barnhardt says it’s time to get out of the markets entirely:

The Penson ship is going down, it appears. They were in trouble last year when MF Global happened and were looking to dump their European divisions, and they did bounce a bit after MF Global when they unloaded their Aussie holdings, but it looks like it is all but over for them. The stock is cratering, and there is chatter on the net that they are taking forever to get cash withdrawls out, posted and cleared. That’s a very bad sign. MF global was the same way in the weeks before the end. The extreme danger is that the CME is going to do with Penson what they did with MF Global and NOT backstop and keep customers liquid when the end comes. MF Global proved that the CME is no longer going to fulfill its fiduciary duty and will screw clients twelve ways from Sunday without hesitation. DO NOT get caught up in that crap. Just get out of the whole, stinking, festering, putrefied mess. Get out of the markets ENTIRELY.

If you’ve still got your money in the markets, you really need to think again. Something like 90 percent of the trading is now just machines trading with other machines. The brokers are using their customers’ money as a backstop and the regulators aren’t stopping them. You’d arguably be better off, and have a better time, simply going to Vegas and playing blackjack. No one knows when the entire mass of corruption and crap will finally melt down under its own weight, all we really know is that it’s eventually going to happen. But MF Global has taught us that there are no consequences for the financial industry’s criminal shenanigans. No one is going to stop them, most likely because everyone on the inside knows that as soon as the music stops, it all comes crashing down.

Greens causing local warming

This is an application of the “think globally, act locally” directive that I’d certainly never imagined:

Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world’s largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built. This could have long term effects on wildlife living in the immediate areas of larger wind farms. It could also affect regional weather patterns as warmer areas affect the formation of cloud and even wind speeds.

Almost 1 degree Celsius? That’s more warming than we’ve seen in the last decade. Now, obviously there aren’t enough wind farms yet to have a global impact, but if one considers how many would be required to replace conventional sources of energy, it should be obvious that this renders the Green energy program dead prior to arrival. I suppose that leaves Plan B: mass population reduction.

Mailvox: exposing the false skeptic

R. Scott Bakker asks why I believe his skepticism is nothing more than a pose:

And what is ‘faux’ about my skepticism?

That’s a fair question. I can count seven reasons right off the bat, but it’s hardly a comprehensive list.

1. His skepticism predominantly runs in one direction. This indicates that he isn’t actually a skeptic, he is merely using skeptical tactics as a tool in service to his dogma, his very conventional left-liberal dogma. When he talks about the “need” to challenge those who are certain of various things and the danger their certainty presents, he openly demonstrates his anti-skepticism.

2. He does not construct his arguments on the basis of what other people hold to be true. For example, when he has taken exception to what I have written, he does not exclusively utilize my beliefs, convictions, and assumptions, but instead attempts to criticize them on the basis of his own first-order beliefs. Again, he’s showing that he is a dogmatist, using dogmatic dialectic, not a skeptic using skeptical dialectic.

3. He makes absolutely no attempt to reach suspension of judgment. Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact, he repeatedly attempts to judge his interlocutors and place himself in an assumed position of superiority vis-a-vis them. I presume this is why he fears to engage in an actual debate, as opposed to his usual sniping and empty posturing.

4. He does not place competing dogmas in opposition to each other, but rather, attempts to change the discussion to a nonsensical one concerning second-order beliefs. He doesn’t seem to understand that repeatedly asking “why?” and “but how do you know that you know?” is a childish tactic, not a skeptical one.

5. He observably possess little imperturbability or tranquility. By this metric, even I am far more of a skeptic than he will ever be. I can only think of a few authors who are more sensitive and more prone to getting upset over perceived criticism than The Prince of Wängst. That’s how he earned the title in the first place!

6. He assents to many things that are unknown. His confessed faith in science, for example, is profoundly unskeptical.

7. He does not pay any observable heed to nature or the tradition of laws and customs. In fact, he even uses his faux skepticism as an excuse to attack traditional laws and customs as well as those who hold to them.

UPDATE – Cornucopia makes some fascinating admissions concerning the supposed skepticism of the Three Pound Brain gang:

I don’t know of anyone here who has used skepticism in such a way as “we cannot know for sure that water boils at 100 deg.” If that is actually true, nobody here really gives a damn. As far as I now it’s usually limited to categories of moral certainty and things like that, where skepticism may really could have an impact for the better. There’s the Hitler example and the Breivik example. What good might have come if these men had continued to second guess themselves and not convinced themselves they were sure of what they believed?

Maybe you’re generalizing a little too much, in which case I can see why a lot of what’s been said might seem hypocritical. True, a lot of people here are probably to the left of center, which by Phrrhonism standards is probably an off limits opinion. Oh well.

While it may be true that no one there uses skepticism in such a way, all that objection serves to do is prove my point that no one there is a philosophical skeptic. The attempt to limit skepticism to the categories “of moral certainty and things like that” is precisely why I am both mocking the TPB gang for its intellectual incoherence and condemning it for its intellectual dishonesty. There is absolutely no basis in skeptical philosophy for anyone to attempt to limit its scope to the realm of morality; the very idea that “skepticism may really have an impact for the better” on phenomena is itself intrinsically anti-skeptical! Cornucopia is admitting exactly what I accused Scott of doing: utilizing the pretense of skepticism in service of his own dogma.

He brings up two examples, Hitler and Breivik, and asks what good might have come of it if either man had been less sure of himself. Conversely, what if the Wehrmacht generals possessed more certainty, stopped second guessing themselves, and deposed Hitler before the Austrian Anschluss? That would have brought about precisely the same hypothetical good… never mind that preventing World War II and the Holocaust cannot be considered by the skeptic to be an abstract good in the first place. And what if the Norwegian left had been less certain about the good of multiculturalism and not permitted massive third world immigration? That, even more definitely than uncertainty on Breivik’s part, would have prevented the slaughter on Utoya island.

Does everyone see what I did there? That is actual skepticism at work. Balancing two ideas that are opposed to each other and thus reaching suspension of judgment. Philosophical skepticism isn’t something that one can simply apply here and there as one wishes to attack someone else’s beliefs. It’s a system, even an agōgē, if we are to believe Delavagus. What Cornucopia and Scott are advocating isn’t merely dogmatic, anti-skeptical, and incoherent, it’s also dishonest and intellectually reprehensible.

Seau suicide

Former pro football great and Oceanside sports legend Junior Seau has committed suicide, found at his beachfront home with a gunshot wound to the chest, according to multiple sources.

WTH? That’s the sum total of my reaction, except to note that the man could play the game.

The fictional memoir

Obama admits to writing fiction… how long will it be before he admits to NOT writing it?

One of the more mysterious characters from President Obama’s 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father is the so-called ‘New York girlfriend.’ Obama never referred to her by name, or even by psuedonym, but he describes her appearance, her voice, and her mannerisms in specific detail. But Obama has now told biographer David Maraniss that the ‘New York girlfriend’ was actually a composite character, based off of multiple girlfriends he had both in New York City and in Chicago.

The only real question here is if, by “multiple”, he meant “imaginary”, or if by “girlfriends”, he actually meant “boyfriends”.

The long night of nationalism is over

How can the Greeks be blamed for turning to hard-core anti-immigrant parties? They have not been given any other choice besides national suicide:

Reeling from a vicious financial crisis that has cost them pensions and jobs, Greeks have been turning away in droves from the mainstream politicians they feel have let them down. Another political force is trying to tap the void, with blunt promises to “clean up” the country….

Black-clad Golden Dawn members have been storming across the campaign trail across Greece, stopping to chat at cafes and shops, handing out fliers promising security in crime-ridden neighborhoods – and vowing to kick out immigrants. Greece’s borders, they say, must be sealed with land mines to stop illegal crossing into a country that became the entry point for 90 percent of the European Union’s illegal migrants. Authorities estimate there are about 1 million migrants living in this country of 11 million. Appealing to populist sentiment, Golden Dawn has been gathering donations of food and clothing to deliver to the needy while pledging to make politicians accountable for the crisis. Ordinary Greeks are struggling under tough conditions demanded for rescue loan deals that have pushed the country into a fifth year of recession.

Given that the mainstream parties have sold them out to foreign banks on the one hand and African immigrants on the other, then installed an non-democratic government, Golden Dawn is now the only option left for the Greek electorate. And if the ruling mainstream parties respond by attempting to violate Greek self-determination, they’ll be responsible for the violence that will inevitably ensue. What we’re seeing here is that democracy has always been a means to the mainstream rather than an end in itself. Make no mistake, that applies to the USA every bit as much as it does to the Greeks, the only difference is that since there is no American nation, Americans have tolerated a much larger immigrant invasion, in proportional terms, than the Greeks are willing to accept.

Dissecting the skeptics VI

Having shown the failure of Delavagus to defend Sextus’s defense against the charge of peritrope, we’ll now turn to his explication of the skeptics’ dialectical strategy, as described in To Unknow Our Knowing:

Classical Pyrrhonians argued ad hominem, not in the sense of the logical fallacy of that name, but in the sense that their dialectical strategy necessitates the exclusive utilization of the beliefs, convictions, and assumptions of their interlocutors. In other words, they construct their arguments on the basis of what other people hold to be true. In demonstrating to A the rational groundlessness of his belief x, Pyrrhonians draw exclusively from premises and inferential rules that are themselves accepted by A and that lead to the conclusion that A does not after all know x. At their most abstract, then, Pyrrhonian arguments depend only on our most abstract rational commitments. The Five Agrippan Modes (discussed in my previous post) are merely a handy formulation by skeptics of the rational commitments of non-skeptics (‘dogmatists,’ in Sextus’s sense). For those who accept their constraints, the Five Modes constitute part of the framework of any search for the truth. This is borne out by the fact that the vast majority of epistemological theorizing operates within the assumptions of the Five Modes, that is, such theorizing attempts to formulate a solution to the Agrippan challenge, rather than rejecting that challenge.

Thus, the self-refutatory character of skepticism demonstrates the self-refutatory character of all philosophizing done under the aegis of the rational commitments that give rise to the skeptical conclusion. The proponent of the self-refutation response to skepticism wants to say, in effect, “If the skeptic is right, then the skeptic is wrong.” But what the skeptical arguments in fact show is that if the skeptical arguments are right, then the dogmatists are wrong, for it is they who hold self-refuting rational commitments. At their most abstract, these commitments constitute the very framework of philosophico-rational thought itself.

Seen in this light, skepticism is simply philosophico-rational thought coming to an awareness of its own rational groundlessness.

I have to confess that either I am completely missing something here or Delavagus simply does not know what he is talking about. He claims that classical Pyrrhonians exclusively utilize the beliefs, convictions, and assumptions of their interlocutors, but his claim not only has absolutely nothing to do with any of nine of the Ten Tropes, it also stands directly in contrast with Sextus’s statements about rival philosophical schools. It seems to me – and there is an amount of additional evidence to support this – that Delavagus has failed to understand the Tenth Trope and how it is used to set competing dogmas in opposition to each other in order to reach suspension of judgment. Not only does this strategy not work when dealing with an internally consistent system, but even the examples given by Sextus fall significantly short of his claimed standard of competing dogmas of equal value. How can the myth of Cronus eating his own children possibly be given equal weight with the observed human custom of parents caring for their children? Does any skeptic seriously accept the Twilight novels as an equal counterweight to a scientific consensus? And more pertinently, how can Sextus’s explication of the difference between the Sceptical School and the philosophy of Heraclitus be characterized as making ANY utilization of the Heraclitan beliefs, convictions, and assumptions, let alone EXCLUSIVE utilization?

“For the Sceptic attacks all the dogmas of Heraclitus as having been rashly given, and opposes on the one hand the doctrine of conflagration, and on the other, the doctrine that contradictory predicates in reality apply to the same thing, and in regard to every dogma of Heraclitus he scorns his dogmatic rashness, and then, in the manner that I have before referred to, adduces the formulae “I do not understand” and “I determine nothing,” which conflict with the Heraclitan doctrines. It is absurd to say that this conflicting school is a path to the very sect with which it conflicts. It is then absurd to say that the Sceptical School is a path to the philosophy of Heraclitus.”


At least we can see that Delavagus is a good Pyrrhonian in this one regard: Sextus does not hesitate to engage in his own handwaving. Simply scorning various dogmas as “rashly given” is hardly a valid rebuttal, much less one based exclusively on Heraclitan beliefs, convictions, and assumptions, and moreover, demonstrates quite clearly that Delavagus’s description of the Pyrrhonian dialectical strategy is false. It very much reminds one of the Marxist claims of scientific socialism, which was also portrayed as being beyond criticism or refutation.

Furthermore, in his claim that Pyrrhonians “construct their arguments on the basis of what other people hold to be true”, Delavagus underlines the point I made about his previous post with regards to skepticism’s extremely limited scope and its total irrelevance to nearly everyone outside of the professional philosophical community. Have you ever seen a skeptic attempt to disprove Christianity by accepting the existence of the Creator God and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth? Of course not. In fact, what this shows is that Delavagus and the modern skeptics are engaged in one gargantuan bait-and-switch, in which they use a strategy of accepting one particular set of very specific philosophical assumptions by a very small group of people – those accepting both the philosophical definition of knowledge as “justified true belief” and the constraints of the Five Agrippan Modes – and then attempting to apply the conclusions they draw to totally unrelated beliefs held by entirely different people. This isn’t merely logically invalid, it is shamelessly deceptive and dishonest.

Delavagus then goes on to assert because the skeptic adopts the rational commitments of the philosophical dogmatist, “the self-refutatory character of skepticism demonstrates the self-refutatory character of all philosophizing done under the aegis of the rational commitments that give rise to the skeptical conclusion.” First, note that this is an admission that the skeptic has no commitment to rational thought. Second, there is a logical error here in that Delavagus is assuming that because the rational commitments gave rise to the self-refuting skeptical conclusion, they necessarily poison all other conclusions that are separately reached from the same foundation. But even if we set aside the eight errors we previously identified in reaching those conclusions, (which are perfectly capable of explaining why skepticism is self-refuting whereas rational thought is not), it should be obvious that the failure of one branch based on the foundation of rational thought doesn’t necessarily mean that all others must fail, especially since Sextus goes to some pains to illustrate the difference between skepticism and the other philosophical schools. The admission that skepticism is self-refuting doesn’t dictate that stoicism necessarily must be as well.

Either the skeptical conclusion is correct and thereby refutes itself along with all philosophico-rational thought or it is incorrect and therefore has nothing to say about it. The proposed defenses of “metaphilosophy” and “a way of life” don’t permit it to escape this dilemma, its only escape is one that Delavagus suggests, but is loathe to state clearly, namely, skepticism is not rational. And this brings us to the great irony of the modern skeptic, who as a general rule considers himself to be a great devotee of reason. The reality is that far from being an attack on religious belief or ideological dogma, skepticism is nothing less than a direct attack on reason itself.

Next section
Dissecting the skeptics VII

Previous sections
Dissecting the skeptics I
Dissecting the skeptics II
Dissecting the skeptics III
Dissecting the skeptics IV
Dissecting the skeptics V

A distinct scent of fascism

Loyalty Day? LOYALTY DAY?

In order to recognize the American spirit of loyalty and the sacrifices that so many have made for our Nation, the Congress, by Public Law 85-529 as amended, has designated May 1 of each year as “Loyalty Day.” On this day, let us reaffirm our allegiance to the United States of America, our Constitution, and our founding values.

It’s official. The USA has become a parody of its former self. Can you even imagine how the sort of people who voted for Obama would have reacted if Bush or Nixon had signed Loyalty Day into law? The limits on MPAI really appear to know no bounds.

Burying black crime

It is, of course, simply outrageous and reprehensibly raciss to notice that large groups of young Africans fail to behave like civilized people on a regular basis:

There’s outrage in Norfolk, Va., today after a white couple was attacked by a group of 100 black teenagers, and the local newspaper did not report on the incident for two weeks, despite the victims being employees of the paper. Even today, the Virginian-Pilot did not cover the crime as news, but rather as an opinion piece by columnist Michelle Washington.

“Wave after wave of young men surged forward to take turns punching and kicking their victim,” Washington wrote, describing the onslaught that began when Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami stopped at a red light while driving home from a show on a Saturday night.

“Rostami locked her car door. Someone threw a rock at her window. Forster got out to confront the rock-thrower, and that’s when the beating began. …

One wonders who these media folk think they’re fooling. Attempting to bury black-on-white crime isn’t going to reduce racial tensions, instead, it’s only going to make it worse when white Americans finally realize that their institutions are working against their interests and cannot be trusted. Today’s lesson is: don’t confront if you don’t carry.

Although, let’s face it, the attack likely could not have happened to a more deserving pair. The beaten white pair were reporters… and their own newspaper didn’t hesitate to throw them under the bus in the interest of burying black crime. (The fact that the idiot was unarmed and still got out of the car to confront an African mob pretty much guarantees that he’s a left-liberal.) One wonders if they are still the same smug, left-liberal anti-racists that they most likely were prior to the mob attack. It should be noted that the black teenagers obviously weren’t trying to seriously hurt the couple, they were just having fun. But, of course, that’s precisely the problem.

In discussing the attack on Twitter, one young gentleman declared “do it for trayvon martin”. It does not appear to have occurred to him that all “doing it” is going to accomplish is assuring that more young Africans end up like Trayvon Martin.