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50 Ann Coulter quotes

The Right Wing News compiles them. My personal favorites:

44) The common wisdom holds that “both parties” have to appeal to the extremes during the primary and then move to the center for the general election. To the contrary, both parties run for office as conservatives. Once they have fooled the voters and are safely in office, Republicans sometimes double-cross the voters. Democrats always do.

35) This is liberalism’s real strength. It is no longer susceptible to reductio ad absurdium arguments. Before you can come up with a comical take on their worldview, some college professor has already written an article advancing the idea.

24) Liberals use the word science exactly as they use the word constitutional. Both words are nothing more or less than a general statement of liberal approval, having nothing to do with either science or the Constitution.

3) Words mean nothing to liberals. They say whatever will help advance their cause at the moment, switch talking points in a heartbeat, and then act indignant if anyone uses the exact same argument they were using five minutes ago.

Steve Jobs is dead

It seems appropriate somehow, that he should die as his creation stands towering over the cratered ashes of the tech boom. It feels like a metaphor of sorts, but what precisely, I cannot say. As for me, I loved my Apple II and I loathed his lovely technofascistic vision.

“Such as it is”

Bernanke circles around the truth:

Europe has a debt crisis. America has a jobs crisis. Corporate profits could be in trouble. World financial markets are in turmoil. And no one seems prepared to ride to the rescue. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke bluntly warned Congress on Tuesday of what most of America has sensed for some time: The economic recovery, such as it is, “is close to faltering.”

“Such as it is.” For those of you who aren’t fluent in Fedspeak, allow me to translate:

There is no recovery. There never was any recovery and all of my talk of green shoots and economic growth was a failed attempt to raise those all-important animals spirits while I flooded the banks with money. But the happy talk isn’t working and is actually becoming counter-productive as the gulf between it and observable reality continues to widen, so I’m going to dial it back a bit in order to retain some semblance of credibility. God help us all, because I am totally out of ammo.

And this was an interesting admission: “I think people are quite unhappy with the state of the economy and what’s happening. They blame, with some justification, the problems in the financial sector for getting us into this mess. And they’re dissatisfied with the policy response here in Washington. And at some level, I can’t blame them.”

Yes, the massive borrowing that took the financial sector from 0.85% of the total U.S. debt to 32.66% in 2008 might just have a little to do with the current problem. But no, Helicopter, people aren’t protesting Wall Street because of 9% unemployment and slow growth, they’re protesting because they know Wall Street gambled big, lost heavily, and then robbed them and went back into the casino.

A mistaken assumption

I’ve noticed that some people are operating under the mistaken impression that I have to answer anyone’s questions. Let me make it perfectly clear for everyone. I don’t have to do anything. And, as I have already made clear in Rule 14, even if I do choose to answer a question or two, I’m not inclined to devote inordinate effort in explaining anything to the egregiously slow, the willfully or terminally stupid, or to permit any visitor here to assume a prosecutorial role. In fact, the more one attempts the latter, the less likely it is that I will even read one’s comments. Substantive criticism is not only fine, it is welcome. Acting officious or posturing as if you have any authority whatsoever is not.

Rule 14: It is my intention to give individual commenters up to three opportunities per post to criticize what I have posted there. Since I do not have any interest whatsoever in wasting time on futile attempts to explain things to the willfully obtuse, the intellectually underpowered, or the disingenuous, I will cease to engage with a commenter after he has committed three demonstrable errors of fact or logic in that comment thread. While I will identify those errors, I am not inclined to be drawn into tangential discussions of them. Attempts to claim that my refusal to further engage with a commenter whose arguments have repeatedly been demonstrated to be flawed are the result of cowardice or an inability to respond are false and will be deleted.

What some tend to forget is that thousands of people come here to learn what I have to think. They don’t come here to learn what random critic A or emotionally deranged person B have to say. So, I get a lot of questions directed at me, both in the comments and in my email. I ignore the majority of them because I simply can’t answer them all and when I do answer them, I answer most of them in a terse manner. For example, I presently have 27 emails saved because I would like to answer them but haven’t found the time to do so yet.

On the other hand, the commenter to whom I direct a question has usually already asked me several questions that were answered. He doesn’t have hundreds of people asking him questions and he has no one holding him to account. Furthermore, he does not have an eight-year history of reliably backing up his claims with evidence. And finally, as we have learned, there is a type of critic that is the shoot-and-run variety that is totally unwilling to stand by his own words.

Notice, for example, that whereas I answered R.S. Bakker’s ridiculous question that I initially believed to be rhetorical, the moment I started asking him questions central to his assertions, he dropped the subject and fell silent despite having implied that my failure to immediately answer his questions was meaningful. I shall leave it to the readers to decide what his failure to answer my direct questions means by his own metric.

So, that is why the unbalanced treatment of a) requiring commenters to answer direct challenges to their claims and b) ignoring questions directed at me is not only justified, but necessary. The fact that people can ask me questions about my posts is a privilege, not a right, as is commenting here at all. And the fact that I have answered a question, or two, or three neither means that I have agreed to a debate nor accepted a commenter’s status as some sort of special prosecutor.

And once you’ve shown that you’re clueless, I’m simply not going to pay much attention to what you write. There are too many other people who actually have something intelligent or interesting to say. This isn’t a public school, where the teacher has to devote all her attention to the retards and behaviorally challenged to the detriment of the rest of the classroom.

And on a tangential note, many of you need to stop using the term “logical fallacy” until you learn your logical fallacies. It is readily apparent that many of you do not know what is and what is not a logical fallacy. So, unless you can identify the specific logical fallacy that has been committed, I recommend avoiding use of the term. A logical error is not synonymous with a logical fallacy. Wikipedia has a list of logical fallacies here.

Breaking the law

In related news, bank robbers also reported they were worried about state plans to enforce the laws against bank robberies:

Effective Saturday, many of South Florida’s “No guns allowed” signs are gone. That’s thanks to a new state law imposing fines of up to $5,000 on county and municipal officials, and even threatening them with removal from office, if they enforce firearms and ammunition restrictions other than those spelled out by state statute.

The state legislation has been on the books since 1987. But because it did not contain any penalties until now, many local governments passed their own, more restrictive laws.

Now, do you suppose that the Federal Reserve and various federal agencies might be just a little more disposed to enforcing the various laws and regulations they are supposed to enforce if said laws and regulations came with penalties attached for not enforcing them?

PZ Myers Memorial Debate Round 3 – the judges

Alex: I’m still adding to my detailed notes, but I’ll make them available to anyone upon request.

1. The first attempt at explanation is almost invariably wrong. I find the hypothesis, as it relates to the question at hand, specious and unconvincing. Vox’s rebuttal was very slightly more convincing. Very small edge to Vox.

2. Proposition B, aka Vox’s Argument from Objective Morality. Vox carries the day.

3. Proposition A, aka the Ancient Aliens. Vox again.

Vox’s arguments are tighter, sharper, and more concrete. Round to Vox.

Markku: What I attempted to do in order to judge the debate format was to identify the specific attacks from Dominic, and the corresponding counter-arguments from Vox. Since Vox was on the defense, he merely had to counter the attacks in order to fulfill his responsibilities. The shortened forms displayed here should not be understood as capturing the argument but merely showing which part of the text I am talking about.

Dominic: no one does [have a complete model of what constitutes conciousness]

Vox: [I mentioned it] to demonstrate b) the materialist internal model cannot be assumed to be correct.

Vox from round 2: but their opinion is irrelevant at this point

Verdict: Successfully countered. Claim of irrelevancy is not a claim of your own explanation’s superiority.

Dominic: admitting that our moral sense is another part of our conciousness while having no idea what conciousness is composed of amounts to admitting B3 [“that the moral sense is informed by a source external to the conscious mind”] is false

Vox from previous round: we must decide if it is more likely that the signal is internally or externally generated. (?) And because this definitive moral law is constant and arbitrary, there must be a lawgiver capable of both defining and transmitting it.

Verdict: Vox defined the “signal” (the only part he claimed external) as where the moral sense’s information comes from, calling it moral law and merely calling its externality more likely. Not certain. Dominic just took what Vox had explicitly admitted and pronounced the claim, not unsatisfactorily proven, but false. Had it been the former, there could be sensible further debate about the evidence.

Dominic: [Freud vs. external moral law] is a false dichotomy.

Vox from round 2: Freud’s theory and its variants is the most established of the various internal models

Verdict: Models, plural, means admitting several options. No dichotomy.

Dominic: heterosexual attraction to the opposite sex [is internally generated] (…) It is just another desire, a consequence of biology

Vox: If this were true, Freud and his successors would not have had to construct their tripartite model in the first place

Verdict: Vox’s answer doesn’t hold water. Sexual attraction comes from id, as opposed to ego, according to Freud’s model. These are already two separate processes of mind, both seemingly pure biology. If we can have two, we could have three.

Dominic: Without further context, [aliens, plasma beings and time travellers] are equally plausible explanations

Vox: It is merely an object lesson in the importance of not leaping to conclusions or placing inordinate confidence in a tool that is inadequate for the task at hand.

Verdict: The agnostic option is in the middle, and doesn’t do the atheist any more good than it does the theist. What Dominic needs in order to do anything useful is to look at the options that don’t involve gods and argue why they are more plausible than the others. Nor does the mere existence of those options do any good to Vox, but he is not listing them to that end.

Dominic: The concept of gods are what we first postulated to explain the inexplicable. Consequently, the concept itself, is wrong.

Vox: But theists readily admit our understanding of the nature of the divine is far from perfect.

Verdict: Successfully countered. It was particular gods with particular features, responsibilities and names, which were arguably postulated to explain such things. Any of those things not only can be wrong, but must be in the overwhelming majority of cases. It is enough to satisfy Dominic’s principle.

Round goes to Vox

Scott: Dominic continues his argument that the first explanation is usually wrong. Nothing he says, however, is new, and I continue to disagree with it.

He does address me at one point, and while I don’t want to intrude on the role of the debaters, I feel that at least addressing why I don’t think his counter addresses my point will illustrate why I don’t find his argument convincing at large. (Moreover, Day makes similar points in his rebuttal.) I said: “[S]ure, people will color their experiences with the divine with trappings taken from their culture. But that’s just them trying to understand something far beyond their ken. People who first saw the sun imagined it was a guy in a chariot. Nevertheless, that they put it in terms of the familiar doesn’t show the sun doesn’t exist.”

To which Dominic responded: “For some reason, Scott was under the impression he was disagreeing with me here, but he made my point quite well. Yes, there is a Sun out there, but it sure as hell isn’t a guy in a chariot. It is something else besides a god.”

But that wasn’t my point. My point was the mere fact that we explain things in term of the known doesn’t prove that there isn’t something out there to be explained. Dominic said:
“Show me someone recounting an experience of being sexually molested by little grey aliens with big heads and huge hypnotic eyes who’d never heard of or been exposed to Hollywood films or other popular culture sources that tell us what aliens do and what they look like.”

In saying this, he was denying, so far as I can tell, the existence of aliens because people who “encounter” aliens explain those “encounters” in terms familiar to them. But, say I, this would be the same as denying the existence of the sun based on the fact that people used familiar terms to describe it. But the sun clearly exists. Ergo, this argument would prove entirely too much.

Note the fact that the sun is not a chariot in the sky is completely irrelevant. Of course it isn’t. But the operative fact is that the sun exists, despite our folk explanations of it. Gods, gods, or aliens, what have you, may exist in the same fashion, though we early on explained Him as astride Merkabah.

Dominic continues to harp on gods being the first explanation implies they’re wrong. What he doesn’t seem to grasp is that “God” is not some unique answer that was made for all time in Bronze Age Israel. The Christian God has greatly evolved since the gods of the Ancient Greeks, as has *Dyēus phter himself. Aquinas’s God is not Zeus. So I’m perfectly willing to except that the first answer is nearly always incorrect–but I don’t think that has any weight on the argument. Just because our first stab at what a God is is wrong doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist–which is what Dominic wants to infer. God just isn’t what was described by our first hypothesis. In the same way, our first stab at science was wrong–that doesn’t mean since as a whole is a failed hypothesis. Better hypotheses will be presented with time, just as more plausible gods are presented with time.

So while we can heartily accept Dominic’s observation that the first explanation is usually wrong–and it seems Day does as well–I don’t think that takes us where Dominic wants it to.

So, respectfully, I think the argument fails. In fact, I think Dominic at least twice now has attacked arguments out of context. He attacks Day’s Aztec argument, but not for the purpose for which Day advanced it. In the same fashion, he appreciates my sun-chariot argument as supporting his claim that the first explanation is wrong. But my argument was not addressed at that particular argument of his, so whether or not it supports it is besides the point–it is aimed elsewhere.

Dominic makes other points. He says the failure to explain consciousness does not mean that morality is external to humankind. I agree entirely. And Day seems to as well. But, and here I agree with Day, this certainly does not show it to be internal to humankind either. Day cites the failure to explain our moral sense through traditional models as pointing to something external. And well he should, because this is quite suggestive, and will be until: 1. a model of our morality produced through naturalistic processes is convincingly demonstrated; or 2. we find ourselves willing to accept that evolution produces some counterintuitive things that we, through lack of evidence and repeatability, may never be able to fully explain.

Does this show that God is the rule-giver? No. But it, coupled with evidence that God exists and has given rules, is not nothing.

Day repeats much of my own response to Dominic’s argument. His attack is far-ranging, and, though there are parts of it I disagree with–that science may have unexplored frontiers does not suggest to me it doesn’t have substantial authority in saying what does and does not exist–I think on the whole his response the stronger. Day seems to back off of previous statements that evil implies God, now content to say it implies external morality, whatever its provenance may be. But even if morality can exist without a creator–nonetheless, that it does exist gives one some pause in denying a creator entirely.

Round to Day.

As the judges scored the third round 3-0 in my favor, I will elect to present the argument for Round 4 and Dominic will rebut. This is the second-to-last round.

The age of debt and deceit

There is Paper Money, there is Fool’s Gold, and then there are macroeconomic statistics, which make the previous two look reliable:

The nation’s economy is managing to grow modestly, reports Monday showed, despite high U.S. unemployment and growing alarm about Europe’s debt crisis.

The nation’s economy is not growing. There is now a near-complete disconnect between the map and the territory. The debt-deflation monster has barely begun to tear apart the economy and already the BEA has devolved into a bizarre Orwellian MinEcon. This was inevitable, given the way Keynesians turned “animal spirits”, or as they are now known, “consumer confidence” into a fetish that articulated a concept of lying one’s way into prosperity.

No doubt future generations will look on the period from 1950 to 2010 as an age lost to deception, where growth was believed to be the result of debt and deceit, national prosperity the result of outsourcing jobs, and industrial growth through free trade. The observable fact is that there is another word for a “service economy” and that is “an unproductive economy with high unemployment”.

Occupy Wall Street

As police arrested hundreds of protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, more demonstrations began to spring up across the U.S.

The anger against Wall Street isn’t likely to burn out anytime soon. Not all, but most, of the US economic problems can be traced to the Wall Street casino and the refusal of the Wall Street bankers to accept their losses instead of forcing them on an unwilling public. The fact that the federal government connived with the bankers to do so doesn’t make the action legal or legitimate.

Every bank that received a bailout, direct or indirect, should be shut down, its executives arrested, and their bonuses seized. Remember, in 1946, the financial institutions accounted for 0.85% of all U.S. debt. Sixty years later, that percentage had risen to 32.7 percent, nearly three times more than the 11.6% owed by the federal government.

The government is far from innocent, but for the most part, it has exacerbated the debt-deflation problem that the bankers created. Occupying Wall Street should only be the beginning of the debt cleansing process. However, what neither the Occupy Wall Street activists on the left nor the Tea Party activists on the center-right appear to understand is that BOTH Wall Street and the federal government are responsible for the present situation.

Washington can’t fix Wall Street because it is wholly owned by the bankers. And Wall Street can’t fix Washington because Washington is already doing what Wall Street wants. As long as the left supports Washington and the right supports Wall Street, absolutely nothing with long-term positive economic effect can be accomplished.

Which, of course, is why I have been saying for years that there will be no solution until the eventual and inevitable system failure takes place.

Sam Harris is a psychopath?

It is science:

A study conducted by Daniel Bartels, Columbia Business School, Marketing, and David Pizarro, Cornell University, Psychology found that people who endorse actions consistent with an ethic of utilitarianism—the view that what is the morally right thing to do is whatever produces the best overall consequences—tend to possess psychopathic and Machiavellian personality traits…. Bartels and Pizarro found a strong link between utilitarian responses to these dilemmas (e.g., approving the killing of an innocent person to save the others) and personality styles that were psychopathic, Machiavellian or tended to view life as meaningless.

And there is your scientific connection between the man who advocates a happiness/suffering moral metric and the one who also advocates killing people for the mere possession of dangerous beliefs. They tend to be one and the same, and in the case of Mr. Harris, they are.

Week 4

Someone has to win in this week’s epic remake of Super Bowl IV, right? The question is which is the more immovable force, the Kansas City offense or the Minnesota passing offense.

With both Foster and Colston back from injury, I’ve elected to start the former and sit the latter. We’ll see how that goes.