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Mailvox: of bovine flatulence

I found this attempt to criticize the blog to be more than a little amusing, particularly in light of some recent discussions:

The whole website is one giant Straw Man. He makes entirely false claims of what secularists believe and then demolishes those, rather than bothering to listen to what they are actually saying. It’s rather like my saying “all conservatives believe that the moon is made of blue cheese” then producing proof that it isn’t. Any moron can do that – your man is a pompous buffoon, with grandiose overblown views of his own intellectual prowess.

The site is also littered with factual errors. For instance in the piece about the CERN experiments , he firstly demonstrates a complete miss-understanding of scientific method, before completely miss-understanding the relevance of the possible faulty connector. (In fact if the connector does prove to be faulty that would make the neutrinos faster, rather than slower as he seems to think.) There are other possible sources of error in the experiment, but the connector isn’t the issue that would bring the speed below light speed.

So in summary, it’s the perfect website for the modern conservative American. It has an overblown sense of its own importance and intellectual capabilities, and busies itself debates points that its opponents haven’t actually made. It’s like a blog version of Rush Limbaugh.

First, I should like to invite Purple Cow to “make entirely true claims of what secularists believe” so that he need not fear I am attacking any straw men in lieu of the correct targets. This is, of course, a blatant falsehood, and more than that, it is one habitually thrown out by many members of the godless Left whenever they wish to avoid having the errors in their arguments exposed in public. Longtime readers will recall that a number of TIA critics tried to make precisely the same Appeal to Nonexistent Strawmen despite the fact that I was directly addressing explicit arguments, complete with quotes, citations, and page numbers, that had been presented by the various individuals being criticized. This is the customary process:

1. Secularist 1 presents argument.
2. I demolish S1’s argument.
3. I later make reference to S1’s argument in rhetorical form.
4. Secularist 2 claims I am attacking secularist strawmen.
5. I invite S2 to present his argument.

6a. *crickets*
6b. S2 presents the same argument as S1.

I further note that this sort of response is precisely why I continue to publicly drive home the undeniable statistical probability of my superior intelligence, because the likes of the Purple Cow almost inevitably attempt to challenge it on the basis of absolutely nothing but an unconvincing pose of self-appointed intellectual superiority. This example is particularly amusing, because Purple Cow clearly didn’t even understand the rather important distinction between what I wrote about the CERN experiment and what I quoted ScienceInsider writing about it. [Hint: if it’s blue text in a white box, then I probably didn’t write it.] Purple Cow’s complaints about the “miss-understanding” of the scientific method and the “miss-understanding” of “the relevance of the possible faulty connector” simply don’t apply to me because I never said anything about either.

Moreover, Purple Cow clearly failed to understand that my point about the intrinsic unreliability of science and its consequent poor utility as a means of providing technocratic guidance to political governance, (and, of course, its ultimate reliance on the IT department), is valid regardless of what the effect of the faulty connector might have on the experiment. Purple Cow is yet another excellent example of the mid-wit who erroneously assumes that because he is more intelligent than the average 100-IQ individual, he therefore must have correctly grasped that which is clearly and incontrovertibly over his head.

I should also like to point out that contra the oft-heard Appeal to Nonexistent Strawmen, this is one of the only blogs of which I am aware in which contrary arguments presented by critics are published in full, unedited. So, I think it is not only false, but wildly dishonest, to claim that I avoid, in any way, the best arguments possessed by those who disagree with me.

Scientific Dilbertism

Remember, this is the very process by which most secularists believe society should be governed:

The CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva has confirmed Wednesday’s report that a loose fiber-optic cable may be behind measurements that seemed to show neutrinos outpacing the speed of light. But the lab also says another glitch could have caused the experiment to underestimate the particles’ speed.

In a statement based on an earlier press release from the OPERA collaboration, CERN said two possible “effects” may have influenced the anomalous measurements. One of them, due to a possible faulty connection between the fiber-optic cable bringing the GPS signals to OPERA and the detector’s master clock, would have caused the experiment to underestimate the neutrinos’ flight time, as described in the original story. The other effect concerns an oscillator, part of OPERA’s particle detector that gives its readings time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show.

What is clear from all of this is that the scientists and science fetishists fantasizing of a technocratic dictatorship that will usher in the shiny, sexy, science fiction, seculatopia of their dreams haven’t realized is that their totalitarian vision will ultimately be a dictatorship of the IT department.

Diverse applications

One of the remarkable shared idiocies of the left and right alike is their staunch refusal to understand that immigrants from foreign cultures will not only retain many of their traditions from their former societies, but will view Western traditions through their own cultural lens and will therefore tend to expand Western customs in various ways not always anticipated:

Dr Vincent Argent, who previously worked for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and is now a GP and consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, said he had “no doubt” that women were terminating pregnancies because of the sex of the baby and that he believed the practice was “fairly widespread”. This week The Daily Telegraph disclosed that women were being offered illegal abortions by doctors on the basis of the gender of the foetus.

Dr Argent said there were “an awful lot of covert abortions for sex selection going on” where women would have a scan or blood test to find out the sex, then ask for a termination without telling the doctor the real reason…. Dr Argent also disclosed that he believed that some colleagues had arranged terminations relating to the sex of the foetus and they felt it was reasonable to do so.

“I’ve had a consultant colleague in the North who expressed a view — that consultant was from an ethnic minority … He didn’t think it was ethically wrong because he thought that the cultural reason why some communities may prefer to have four male babies is as good a reason as the, if you like, the Anglo-Saxon cultural view, ‘Well I’m pregnant, I just don’t want it anyway.’”

Of course, they are absolutely right. If abortion is morally and legally acceptable, it is acceptable for any reason. In fact, there is no moral or legal reason why people shouldn’t offer financial incentive to encourage undesirable populations to obtain abortions. The federal government could even require abortions of all minority populations for those choosing to apply for welfare payments and there would be no logical or moral reason to oppose any such policy.

The disappearance of children with Down’s Syndrome is largely the result of abortion and pre-natal testing. So, we can anticipate that the more immigration that takes place into the West, the more the male-female ratios will come to resemble those in India and China.

The chickens begin to roost

Many will find this latest innovation in American law to be an upsetting or ominous development. I simply find it to be an entirely predictable and tremendously amusing one:

I have made a transcript of the Pennsylvania case in which state judge Mark Martin, a Muslim convert and U.S. Army reservist who served in Iraq, relied on a sharia law defense (as well as some evidentiary contortions) to dismiss an open-and-shut harassment case against a Muslim man who assaulted an atheist activist at a Halloween parade.

The victim, Ernest Perce, wore a “Zombie Mohammed” costume and pretended to walk among the dead (in the company of an associate who was the “Zombie Pope” — and who, you’ll be shocked to learn, was not assaulted). The assailant, Talag Elbayomy, a Muslim immigrant, physically attacked Perce, attempted to pull his sign off, and, according to police, admitted what he had done right after the incident. The defense argued that Elbayomy believed it was a crime to insult the prophet Mohammed (it is, under sharia law), and that because he was in the company of his children, he had to act to end this provocation and set an example about defending Islam.

As you will see, Judge Martin did not lecture the defendant about free speech or how disputes are resolved in a civilized country. He instead dressed the victim down for failing to appreciate how sensitive Muslims — including the judge himself — are about Islam.

Liberals and atheists have methodically waged war against Christianity while simultaneously attempting to limit free speech through enforcing politically correct sensitivity and free association through anti-discrimination laws. Apparently they never stopped to think that others were perfectly capable of learning from their example, others who are far more numerous, ruthless, and dedicated to their cause.

I believe it is now time for Western Christians and non-Christians alike to acknowledge that men such as Alexis de Tocqueville were correct and various concepts such as free expression, freedom of association, and other hallowed concepts of Western civilization simply do not translate outside of Western Christian culture. What was once theoretical is now empirical thanks to more than sixty years of evidence that strongly suggests conventional Western views of human liberty are simply not compatible with non-Christian, non-Western cultures.

For example, the concept of freedom of religion only functioned reasonably well so long as it was applied to a range of Christian denominations with a structural tendency to resist control by the state. It can no more be successfully applied to religious and quasi-religious belief systems that are closely intertwined with the state such as secular humanism, socialist atheism, or Islam than democracy can successfully encompass the participation of ideological parties devoted to communism, national socialism, or hereditary monarchy. This will, of course, fly in the face of many individual’s ideals, including my own, but observable reality has to trump the Platonic Forms when one is addressing practical public policy.

This doesn’t mean sacrificing any principles, quite to the contrary, it simply means ordering them in terms of their priority. And the primary principle of any Western society should be maximizing net human liberty within a structurally sound society capable of sustaining itself.

Mailvox: Richard Dawkins is not an atheist!

I’ve been getting a fair amount of email and one or two people have been dropping OT bombs in the comments concerning this discussion between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams:

There was surprise when Prof Dawkins acknowledged that he was less than 100 per cent certain of his conviction that there is no creator. The philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, who chaired the discussion, interjected: “Why don’t you call yourself an agnostic?” Prof Dawkins answered that he did.

An incredulous Sir Anthony replied: “You are described as the world’s most famous atheist.”

Prof Dawkins said that he was “6.9 out of seven” sure of his beliefs. “I think the probability of a supernatural creator existing is very very low,” he added.

While it pains me to have to defend the vastly overrated intellectual charlatan that is Richard Dawkins, I have no choice but to do so. Nothing has changed and Dawkins is being entirely consistent with his previously declared position of being a technically agnostic de facto atheist here. Consider these quotes from The God Delusion, published six years ago.

“The view that I shall defend is very different: agnosticism about the existence of God belongs firmly in the temporary or TAP category. Either he exists or he doesn’t. It is a scientific question; one day we may know the answer, and meanwhile we can say something pretty strong about the probability.”

“6 Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. ‘I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.'”

“I count myself in category 6, but leaning towards 7 – 1 am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.”

In fact, when Dawkins says he is “6.9 out of 7” sure of his beliefs, he is explicitly referring to this seven point system. So, Dawkins is not only holding his atheistic ground, he is actually strengthening it from 6.0 to 6.9 out of 7. While the fact that Dawkins declared himself a literal agnostic in the very book in which he declared the importance of atheist evangelism is both ironic and incoherent, it will surprise no one who has read the chapter of The Irrational Atheist entitled “Darwin’s Judas”.

This article very nearly approaches the Platonic Form of a non-story.

Ah, just loan them some more money

Greece will be fine. A little bureaucratic red tape is no hindrance to business. The Greek economy is merely a little light on liquidity, otherwise it would be growing like gangbusters.

As e-commerce continues to gain ground apace abroad, and even Greeks seem to be warming to the idea of Internet shopping, opening an online store based in Greece is no job for the fainthearted. “An online store is more complicated than a regular store basically because of the way payments are carried out,” explained Fotis Antonopoulos, one of the co-founders of www.oliveshop.com, which sells olive oil-based products such as cosmetics, mostly to foreign markets.

Antonopoulos and his partners spent hours collecting papers from tax offices, the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the municipal service where the company is based, the health inspector’s office, the fire department and banks. At the health department, they were told that all the shareholders of the company would have to provide chest X-rays, and, in the most surreal demand of all, stool samples.

Once they climbed the crazy mountain of Greek bureaucracy and reached the summit, they faced the quagmire of the bank, where the issue of how to confirm the credit card details of customers ended in the bank demanding that the entire website be in Greek only, including the names of the products.

I wish everyone who still believes that government can provide the solution to anything, including the very small number of tasks that the U.S. government is Constitutionally responsible for carrying out, was forced to open an online store in Greece before being permitted to vote.

By the time the Germans have finished looting Greece, it will probably be necessary for Greeks to have their stool samples manually extracted by American TSA agents contracted out to the IMF before they are provided with their licenses to collect a daily subsistence ration.

Mailvox: the purpose

Smiley asks about the meaning of it all:

What is your goal when you discuss something with someone here? For them to admit that they are significantly less intelligent than yourself?

As some already answered, the fundamental reason this blog exists is to amuse myself. But my primary goals when discussing something with someone here are to a) force myself to articulate my thoughts in a manner that others can understand, b) unearth any flaws in my reasoning and expose any errors in my information and my assumptions, and c) reach the most logically sound conclusions on the basis of the most solid evidence available.

None of this has anything directly to do with making people admit that they are less intelligent. That is completely unnecessary, as it is already statistically inevitable in the overwhelming majority of cases. As always, it is wise to have a look at the numbers before leaping to groundless conclusions. Sitemeter reports 7,876 average daily visitors here this morning. Even if we allow for this blog’s particular appeal for those possessing above-average intelligence, let us say three times more, this means that there are most likely between 10 and 20 people here who are either at or above my level. And, so long as no spatial reasoning is involved, there are likely even fewer at or above my functional level.

I don’t walk people into traps and show them to be incorrect and/or relatively unintelligent in order to get my intellectual rocks off, I do it because they are annoying me by wasting my time and everyone else’s with their stupid and obviously fallacious arguments. I find such arguments to be petty and irritating, and the only reason I address them at all is because so many other people readily fall for such nonsense unless they are conclusively shown how intrinsically nonsensical it is. With a few masochistic exceptions, most people have the good sense to learn to shut up and think twice before mindlessly yapping away again once they have had their noses rubbed in their own intellectual excrement.

Serious questions are completely fine. Admissions that one doesn’t understand something and would like a detailed explanation are fine too. But if you are going to challenge me and claim that you are correct, you had damn well better be ready with a solid and defensible case. I’ve been writing columns for 10 years and blog posts for 8 years with the knowledge that hundreds, if not thousands, of people would be going over them with a fine-toothed comb in search of any error, however minor, that they can exploit in order to discredit me and my conclusions. So, in addition to the advantage of raw cognitive firepower, I also have considerable experience in structuring arguments as well as anticipating how people will attempt to disprove or otherwise discredit an argument.

Now, I love it when someone surprises me with something clever that I hadn’t previously considered. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest to be shown to be incorrect and I have openly changed my opinion on far too many things for anyone to credibly claim it does. I used to believe in the drug war, I used to believe that women should have the right to vote, I used to believe there was solid evidence for evolution by natural selection, I used to believe in monetarist economics, I used to believe in free trade, I used to believe Socrates was a great philosopher, I used to believe the USA was the freest nation on Earth, I used to believe the North was right, I used to believe that the Bible was a load of feel-good nonsense designed to serve as an intellectual crutch for those too psychologically weak to face up to the nihilistic reality of the universe.

Of course, I believed all those things for the same reason I believed the crust was the best part of the bread. Someone told me once and I never thought the matter through for myself. So, I recognize when someone is not expressing the fruit of their own intellectual labor, but is merely parroting what they have been told by someone else, because I have been there and I have done that.

Winning hearts and minds

When your nominal ally’s soldiers are shooting your troops, I think it’s safe to say that the “hearts and minds” strategy isn’t working:

An Afghan soldier, apparently angry over the burning of Korans at a U.S. air base, fatally shot two U.S. troops and wounded four others, Afghan officials said. The International Security Assistance Force said in a statement two military personnel were killed in eastern Afghanistan Thursday by “an individual wearing an Afghan National Army uniform” but didn’t identify the troops’ nationality.

CBS News said an Afghan official said the dead and wounded in the attack in the eastern province of Ningarhar were American. The official said the shooting seemed to be motivated by the burning of Korans at the Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, but did not elaborate.

And they say it’s Ron Paul whose foreign policy is insane?

Pity the poor cam whores

Either Andon failed Reading Comprehension 101 or we are facing an imminent Internet tragedy:

jumping from high places – always fatal. injecting kids with vaccines – almost never fatal. comparison warranted.

The central problem with this critique is that the comparison that was made was not between jumping from high places and being vaccinated, but rather between being filmed and being vaccinated. Still, I should be truly fascinated if Andon genuinely wishes to argue that being filmed by a web cam is intrinsically more deadly than being injected with poison. Perhaps, I can only imagine, he subscribes to the notion of the camera stealing one’s soul?

And yes, as always, these are real critics and genuine attempts to “correct” my reasoning.

Dissecting Divine Hiddenness

This is one of the more feeble arguments against the existence of God I have encountered, but since I haven’t actually critiqued it before, I thought I would take the opportunity to do so now. From Wikipedia:

The argument from nonbelief (or the argument from divine hiddenness) is a philosophical argument against the existence of God, specifically, the God of theism. The premise of the argument is that if God existed (and wanted humanity to know it), he would have brought about a situation in which every reasonable person believed in him; however, there are reasonable unbelievers, and therefore, this weighs against God’s existence. This argument is similar to the classic argument from evil in that it affirms inconsistency between the world that exists and the world that should exist if God had certain desires combined with the power to see them through. In fact, since ignorance of God would seem to be a natural evil, many would categorize the problem of divine hiddenness as an instance of the problem of evil.

1. If there is a God, he is perfectly loving.
2. If a perfectly loving God exists, reasonable nonbelief does not occur.
3. Reasonable nonbelief occurs.
4. No perfectly loving God exists (from 2 and 3).
5. Hence, there is no God (from 1 and 4).

This argument is a dreadful one because it manages to be unrelated to the Biblical God as well as logically fallacious. Even if it wasn’t outright admitted in the very description, it is trivially easy to demonstrate that the argument cannot possibly apply to the Christian God by simple reference to the Bible. Contrast these two statements:

a) If there is a God, he is perfectly loving.
b) ““Because of all their wickedness in Gilgal, I hated them there. Because of their sinful deeds, I will drive them out of my house. I will no longer love them; all their leaders are rebellious.” Hosea 9:15

Since perfect love both proscribes hatred and is not equal to conditional love, the argument clearly fails to apply to the Biblical God at the very first step. As can be readily verified, the verse from Hosea is only one of the many verses in the Bible that describe, in some detail, those whom God hates, in some cases, with a self-described passion. Therefore, it is patently obvious that the argument from Divine Hiddenness has absolutely no relevance to the Christian God.

As is so often the case, the atheist argument is dependent upon an intellectually dishonest bait-and-switch. The argument doesn’t, and can’t, apply to the Christian God, and yet is presented as an argument against the Christian God, thus relying upon the failure of the interlocutor to notice the substitution of a hypothetical and nonexistent “perfectly loving god” for the actual God worshipped and described in the Bible.

Moreoever, the argument against the imaginary “perfectly loving God” even fails in its own right for the following reasons:

1. It is false to say that God must be perfectly loving since the available evidence, both observable and documentary, indicates that God is not.
2. “No reasonable nonbelief” does not follow from “perfectly loving”.
3. There is no evidence that reasonable nonbelief occurs. There is, to the contrary, considerable evidence that most nonbelief is both unreasoning and unreasonable.

To understand how astonishingly illogical the argument is, consider the following variant utilizing the same “logic”.

1. If there are frogs, they are purple.
2. If a purple frog exists, no ribbetting will be heard.
3. Ribbetting is heard.
4. No purple frog exists (from 2 and 3).
5. Hence, there are no frogs (from 1 and 4).

Thus by the Argument from Ranine Hiddenness we are able to conclude that no frog exists, even though our conclusion flies in the face of the observable fact that something out there – though clearly not a frog! – can be heard going ribbet, ribbet. And frankly, I think I’d be more impressed with the intellectual prowess exhibited by the average frog’s ribbets than by the cretins who produced this illogical drivel.

So, I will now pose the obvious question to Smiley, who was good enough to bring this argument to our attention earlier this week. Do you still find the Argument from Divine Hiddenness to be “infinitely more convincing than any argument ever proposed by any Christian?”

UPDATE: In the interest of spelling things out more slowly for those who are too ignorant to realize that the Christian God is the God of the Old Testament as well as the New, and are too lazy to bother looking up the various other references I mentioned, I will point out the obvious. “But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.” – Revelations 2:6.