Category: Uncategorized

Tracking the anklebiters

Because it is getting increasingly difficult to keep track of exactly which anklebiter is avoiding what question, I’ve decided to add this handy little reference link to the sidebar so that the keepers of the hammer will know whose comments to continue deleting until they either back up their naked assertions or retract them. It’s always illuminating to see who can actually support their assertions and who doesn’t even make any attempt to do so. Unsurprisingly, it is usually the mindless critics who have proven incapable of constructing the most rudimentary arguments in support of their positions.

BANNED

Beelzebub: Trolls under a variety of pseudonyms. Real name Hunt Stoddard.
Pawn Takes Queen: Aka “passerby”.
Modernguy: hates Spacebunny
Bearded Spock: Also used a variety of names. Appears to be from Finland. Markku’s evil twin?
Will: aka Dan aka Alauda: the SF/F literary troll and legendary committer of “So, what are your names, wayfarers?”
Unger: Free trader given to emotional incontinence and demonstrably false assertions.
Tad: aka “Writer Gawking”. Homosexual with affinity for Paris and 25 comments/post
Phoenician:
Whatever/Pharyngula reader and librarian who favors the term “dipshit”
and can’t tell the difference between California and Massachusetts, or
between science and ethical justifications to not use science.

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

Holla: Doesn’t know what an “anecdote” is.
George: Doesn’t know what “hearsay evidence” is. Asserts atheists get divorced less often than self-identified Christians.
Depkey: Joseph from CL’s blog. His cunning plan is to troll with what he calls a Taylor persona.
James May: Monomania about certain SFWA writers.

If you have to ask, you aren’t

The New York Times unwittingly underlines the fatal flaw in the multicultural mass immigration:

In the United States, citizenship once granted is never questioned, said Mr. Overbeek of VU University. “But in Europe it’s never quite established, no matter how long you’ve been here. Here it’s still, ‘When did you get here, and when are you going back?’ ”

East of Amsterdam, in Almere, the youngest city in the Netherlands, 30 percent voted for Mr. Wilders. Shopping in the city center, Raihsa Sahinoer, 24, born here of Surinamese immigrants, was not surprised. “Wilders says we all have to go back even if we were born here,” she said. “It’s not only about Muslims, it’s about colored people, too.”

She lives as the Dutch do, she said. “But they tell us if you’re colored, you’re not Dutch.” Does she feel Dutch? “No,” she said, then paused, then asked: “What is Dutch?”

This is exactly what I have been trying to explain with regards to mass immigration. A woman from Suriname, a man from Mexico, a child from Sweden, none of them has any understanding, or even reason to understand, the various aspects that went into making up historical American society regardless of how long they live in the United States. That is why they are absolutely guaranteed to transform it, to destroy it, even when they admire it, if they arrive in sufficient numbers. A garden that can survive the arrival of ten or twenty grasshoppers without incident will be totally destroyed in rapid order by a swarm of locusts.

The interesting thing is that the Dutch are actively turning against multiculturalism and mass immigration even though the ethnic Dutch are still 80.9% of the population with an immigration rate of 2.55 migrants per 1,000 inhabitants. Contrast this with the USA, where only 72.4% of the population is even white and the immigration rate is 4.18% per thousand.

And, of course, the US immigration debate is going in precisely the opposite direction than in Europe, with Democratic and Republican immigration enthusiasts alike lauding the Obama administration’s decision to stop deporting illegal aliens.

Bowing to pressure from immigrant rights activists, the Obama administration said Thursday that it will halt deportation proceedings on a case-by-case basis against illegal immigrants who meet certain criteria, such as attending school, having family in the military or having primary responsible for other family members’ care.

The Wangst that Comes After

I am beginning to conclude that SFWA President-For-Life John Scalzi needs to sit Mr. R.S. Bakker down for a remedial lesson in handling criticism. I’m not saying Bakker is quite as wangsty as the hapless Laurell K. Hamilton, as was most famously exhibited in her post-Incubus Dreams meltdown, but he’s definitely beginning to show serious indications of having the potential to go critical.

Consider, compare, and contrast the two.

Hamilton: I’m sure there are other books out there that will make you happier than mine. There are books with less sex in them, God knows. There are books that don’t make you think that hard. Books that don’t push you past that comfortable envelope of the mundane. If you want to be comforted, don’t read my books. They aren’t comfortable books. They are books that push my character and me to the edge and beyond of our comfort zones. If that’s not want you want, then stop reading. Put my books away with other things that frighten and confuse or just piss you off.

Bakker: (1) “These guys are strictly bush league in comparison. There’s nothing anybody’s said that has prickled enough to jarr me from my experimental mindset–yet…. And as far as the books go, I actually think this stuff demonstrates that my writing, for better or worse, is rich enough to support a wild, wild variety of competing interpretations. And most important of all, that it’s actually reaching people who can be outraged.”

(2) “Reading Theo’s review, and you would think someone was being raped every other page (rather than every other other page)! Not only did the sex really, really, really stand out for him, but it really, really, really offended him as well, apparently enough to overpower what he did like about the books. Fair enough, I suppose, but given that the first book is called The Darkness that Comes Before (!), and given that the irrational springs of human action are a primary focus of the book, and given that sex is one of those springs (history and appetite are everywhere: if anything there’s far more ‘history porn’ in the books than sexual porn), you would at least think that he would reference this connection… I guess he missed it.”

You really have to have read Incubus Dreams to appreciate the full humor of Hamilton’s rant. How hard does she believe people have to think in order to keep straight who is putting what where? But first, oversensitive, self-important authors, GET OVER YOURSELVES ALREADY! To quote the immortal words of Robert Anton Wilson, “Nietzsche masturbates too much.” Here is an important guideline for the author who is disappointed with a review: if your response to criticism of your work contains the words “comfort zone”, “interpretation”, or “push”, or if you write more words in response to a review than were contained in the actual review, you are officially engaging in authorial wangst. Cease and desist. It is unseemly and neither enhances your reputation nor improves the content of your books.

Second, Bakker is demonstrating an increasing degree of delusion in repeatedly claiming that no one has presented any arguments to him. He has required basic factual correction about nearly everything he assumed about me, all of which was part of a totally irrelevant ad hom response anyway. (One wonders what his response would have been if I’d actually ripped his three books as I have in the cases of Jordan and Goodkind.) Bakker is too parochial – and I mean that in the original sense of the term, as he is quite literally a provincial and for all I know still lives with his mommy in his childhood Canadian home – to grasp that the scope of my international perspective absolutely dwarfs his “I went to grad school in America and my professors told me all this neat stuff” point of view. What Bakker has only imagined and theorized and read about second-hand is part of my actual experience; the most remarkable thing about humanity around the world is how strikingly similar the attitudes of the Japanese rice farmers are to the dialect-speaking mountain clans of northern Italy and the tobacco-growing farmers of southern France. The same holds true for the self-overrated educated classes from Harvard and ToDai to Oxford and the Sorbonne. Seeing a guy who didn’t manage to complete a doctorate at Vanderbilt and can’t tell the difference between a libertarian and a fascist attempt to strike the conventional pose of the latter is simply… well, it’s a little ironic, anyhow.

Two days ago, I was having dinner with a European ambassador to a large South American country and attempting to convince her, and the international hostage negotiator on my other side, that trained, intelligence-enhanced sharks equipped with laser harnesses were the answer to the growing Somali ship-jacking problem being discussed.* Yesterday, I was lifting weights with an unemployed African who lives on social benefits and is hoping to somehow avoid eventual deportation. Today, I’ll go to the recycling center to ask the captain of my calcio team, who is one of the trash men, what time we play our first game of the season. This range of experience does not tend to lend itself to a closed mind. Bakker doesn’t realize that what he decries as “certainty” is actually nothing more than experience-informed probability calculation and pattern recognition. There is no reason one cannot take a logically sound position with confidence without having to assume the total impossibility of error in doing so.

Third, Bakker can afford to pretend – and it is a pretense, nothing more – to be uncertain about everything because he is a fantasy writer and his positions on pretty much everything are inconsequential. Those of us who deal with objective real-world issues such as the current price of gold, the ForEx rates, and the $53-trillion inflation/deflation question on a regular basis understand that there are situations concerning which one must make black-and-white decisions even though any degree of certainty about what will happen tomorrow is utterly impossible. To claim that any sane economist, or any trader, is prone to an unusual degree of epistemic arrogance is not merely stupid, it is profoundly ignorant. Take that most iron-clad law of economics, the Law of Supply and Demand. I can cite multiple exceptions to it, beginning with Veblen and conspicuous consumption, off the top of my head. Even that most closed-minded of economists, Paul Krugman, may sound absolutely certain in his assertive, Nobel Prize-winning pronouncements, but he sounds that way even as he changes his definition of inflation from one column to the next.

This is why Bakker’s entire attempt to respond to the Black Gate review in the form of an ad hominem attack is not only irrelevant and pointless, it is also incorrect. Note that Bakker’s pretentious blathering about “epistemic arrogance” is simply a variation on the left-wing meme du saison, epistemic closure. I would venture to bet, as Nate has already noted, that I have publicly changed my mind about more intellectually significant issues than Bakker ever has about anything. That’s a verifiable claim of fact: has Bakker ever a) changed his public position on the legitimacy of a war, b) changed his public position on a core element of his philosophy as I have with regards to Ricardian free trade, the core mechanism for the Austrian business cycle, and before that, Chicago School monetarism or c) actually made a substantive case for any of his ideological assumptions such as human equality, female suffrage, or what he describes as “moral realism”? Should Bakker’s fanboys be able to demonstrate otherwise, I will readily admit I am wrong… but if they cannot, will they admit that Bakker is?

The primary difference between Bakker and me is that he insists on operating in relative ignorance while avoiding the use of objective metrics that can be verified by third parties. I do not. I read his books before I reached any conclusions about them. He merely scanned my blog before retreating to his fainting couch. La, such fascism , such conservatism, among the radical libertarians – Mussolini wept! I tend to doubt Bakker has ever given as serious credence to someone whose foundational assumptions fundamentally challenge his own as I did in my recent interview with the Post-Keynesian economist Steve Keen. I suggest Mr. Bakker should listen to that interview before he further embarrasses himself with more idiotic accusations concerning my “epistemic arrogance”; even if he doesn’t understand economics well enough to comprehend the vast gulf that separates the Austrian from the Post-Keynesian, he is intelligent enough to be aware that there is a substantive difference between the two competing viewpoints.

The fact is that Bakker’s books, while intelligent and laudably ambitious, are nowhere nearly as deep and complex and sophisticated as he would apparently like to believe. The fact that the reader does not pick up one aspect or another doesn’t make a book brilliant or render its review incorrect; the Black Gate reviewer of Summa Elvetica erroneously, and rather hilariously, concluded that the philosophical arguments for the Elvish soul that were presented in the structural form of the arguments from the Summa Theologica were actually written by Thomas Aquinas, and yet his review was a fair and judicious one that managed to precisely identify the primary flaw in the book.

Bakker needs to grow up, both intellectually and emotionally. He’s not a misunderstood genius whose transgressive work outrages the morally repressed plebs even as it opens their conservative eyes to astonishing new philosophical insights. Hell, judging by the Internet reaction, my WND columns are far more outrageous and eye-opening than anything Bakker has ever written. The concepts he is utilizing are neither new nor difficult for anyone with a +1SD IQ to grasp. His inclination for sockpuppetry is childish and misguided, his sensitivity rivals that of an emo chick, and his philosophy is juvenile. And yet, he has genuine talent for writing intelligent fantasy. So, there is still hope for him, as he certainly wouldn’t be the first writer to look back on what he once considered deep and meaningful brilliance with a mortified shudder.

Any idiot can be uncertain. “I dunno” is not an indicator of superior intelligence and there is nothing intrinsically intelligent about doubt. The imperative is to learn enough to be able to ask the relevant questions, which then provide a solid foundation for ascertaining the highest-probability answers.

*Much hilarity ensued when the hostage negotiator pointed out the fatal flaw in my plan. He expressed a certain disinclination to find himself 20 years from now wearing an armored scuba suit while negotiating underwater with superintelligent, laser-armed sharks in order to get his client’s ships back.

UPDATE – Sweet Friedrich Nietzsche, but R. Scott Bakker really can be a wangsty little girl. Now he’s whining that I have “lot’s and lot’s of theories” about him, which is ironic considering the amount of erroneous psychobabble he has been directing in my direction from the start. I have no theories, I have merely read his books and observed his behavior. But, since I make a practice of answering questions, I’ll go ahead and answer the one he wrongly imagines I have been avoiding.

“What makes him think he’s won the Magical Belief and Identity Lottery?”

Oh, I don’t know. Out of nearly 7 billion people, I’m fortunate to be in the top 1% in the planet with regards to health, wealth, looks, brains, athleticism, and nationality. My wife is slender, beautiful, lovable, loyal, fertile, and funny. I meet good people who seem to enjoy my company everywhere I go. That all seems pretty lucky to me, considering that my entire contribution to the situation was choosing my parents well. I am grateful and I thank God every day for the ticket He has dealt me. If I’m not a birth lottery winner, then who is? The kid in the Congo who just got his hands chopped off and is getting raped for the fourth time today? To paraphrase the immortal parental wisdom of PJ O’Rourke, anyone in my position had damn well better get down on their knees and pray that life does not become fair.

As for belief, I don’t concern myself in the slightest with the perfect correspondence of my beliefs with What Is So or not. They either do or they don’t, but regardless, the Absolute Truth of Creation doesn’t depend upon what I happen to believe it to be at the moment and I don’t think such correspondence is even theoretically possible. Bakker simply doesn’t understand that I don’t believe his opinion, my opinion, or anyone else’s opinion matters in the least, except in how they happen to affect our decisions and subsequent actions. See Human Action for details. If Bakker genuinely wanted to figure out my core outlook on life, he should have simply listened to Sunyata in the first place rather than waste his time on perusing the blog.

Mailvox: book assistance

AA is searching for a book:

In the 1970s, I read a dystopian novel that I’d like to find again. It was one of the First wave of “Eco-Disaster” novels, I think. The only things I remember are everybody wearing filters on their mouths, so they could avoid breathing in (and possibly killing) gnats and bugs, and a version of the Model T Ford being the only “allowed” form of transport.

The Characters used the Model T to get to and from some “Quasi-Religious” meetings that took place in the forest. Thin info, I know. I remember it as being a depressing, and sad book. That said, I’d really like to find it and read it again.

Do you have any Idea what it might be. Maybe someone in the Dread Ilk might have a Clue?

No clue. I’m sure I never read anything like that. Anyone among the Dread Ilk recognize his description?

Perhaps I was wrong

A few days ago, I mentioned that I am working on a “maxi-sequel” to Summa Elvetica entitled Arts of Dark and Light. Because it is going to be sizable, I was under the impression that Marcher Lord would have little interest in it and that I would have to publish it as an ebook. Which, of course, is completely fine with me.

However, it turns out that SE’s publisher, Marcher Lord, has recently published an 1,100-page omnibus edition of a trilogy written by Kathy Tyers. And it also turns out the main man at MLP is actually more than a little interested in AoDaL, so there is a reasonable possibility that it will be conventionally published when it is finished after all. We haven’t worked out any of the details yet, and nothing is set in stone, but I thought some of you would be interested to know that there is a decent chance the next book set in Selenoth will be available on dead tree as well as digital.

By the banksters, for the banksters

Karl Denninger puts his finger on why the bankers and their public servants are desperately pushing for inflation:

These policies are not born out of ignorance, they’re intentional frauds.

We keep hearing that we can’t have “deflation” as that’s “terrible”, but exactly who is it terrible for? It certainly isn’t terrible for the prudent saver – the Senior Citizen who has been systemically and serially financially raped by those very same “captains of finance!” Yes, it’s terrible if you took on debt you can’t afford but exactly why should you be protected from your own stupidity whether you’re that borrower or lender – and using debt to pull future earnings capacity from the future or speculate is factually stupid!

Further, is it really “deflation” when you simply reverse the inflation of the last ten years, say much the last 30? Why is it perfectly ok to steal half or more of someone’s saved money, but when they might get that stored value back it’s suddenly a national calamity to be avoided at all costs?

The answer is perfectly clear. Because those responsible for the theft are in charge and they don’t want to give up their ill-gotten gains.

On surviving gossip

And it doesn’t require Hercule Poirot to determine why men might be disinclined to pay attention:

The typical woman spends five hours a day – more than a third of her waking hours – chatting and gossiping, a study has revealed. Whether at home or work women natter for about 298 minutes every day, it found. Discussing other people’s problems, who is dating who and other people’s children form the basis of most of the chat.

One of the things I find fascinating about social etiquette is the way that what is frowned upon in the Bible, considered a mortal sin by the Catholic Church, and considered to be a deathly bore by nearly half the population is nevertheless considered nearly de rigueur in casual social situations. Many women don’t seem to understand that gossip is actually less interesting and more painful to most men than listening to an engineer with Asperger’s drone on about thermodynamics or tax law is to most women.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I still laugh every time I think of my father’s summary of a dinner in which he was seated between two well-known social butterflies. “Now I know what Hell is like.”

Now, I don’t personally have a problem with the aforementioned female nattering so long as I am not expected to listen to it. I am fortunate in that Spacebunny has a relatively low tolerance for it herself. And sometimes, if it’s occurring in the background while I am reading a book or something, it can even be amusing to track the circular pattern as two women run out of gas on a subject, cast about for a new one, and then find their stride again by simply revisiting a topic that has been discussed already, in some cases repeating the previous discussion almost verbatim. It’s hilarious.

This repetition makes no sense to men because they don’t derive the same chemically-derived sense of pleasure from a communication process that has been discovered to release oxytocin and serotonin to the brain. But once you realize that women who are repeating themselves in this manner are simply doing the equivalent of a lab rat repeatedly hitting the bar that provides it a nice hit of coke, the whole thing makes a lot more sense. This may help explain why women have a tendency to keep repeating an ineffective punchline when they’re telling a joke or story as if it’s going to be funnier the second or third time. It appears to be a technique that works effectively in gossip mode that doesn’t translate well to storytelling mode.

On the other hand, if a woman wishes to be taken seriously by men, she has to avoid doing this sort of thing in front of them at all costs. There are few things that will relegate a woman to the “pay no attention ever” zone faster than being the sort of woman who is unable to discuss anything except people that she knew in high school or college. Sometimes, when listening to a female acquaintance babble and burble on about complete strangers, it takes every bit of my conscious focus to refrain from politely asking “on what planet do you believe that I give even the most infinitesimally airborne, electroniscopically small flying fornication about these people, who, based on the distressingly fulsome stream of data you have so thoughtfully provided, are not only terminally uninteresting but quite clearly retarded as well?”

Or, alternatively, pretending to be plastered to a rock like the woman in Aliens.

Anyhow, in the same way it behooves the intellectual to learn something about sports, television, or current events in order to be able to function in society, it is wise for the gossip to do the same in order to not be a crashing, soul-killing bore that no one with an IQ over 100 takes seriously.

The basic social principle by which I operate is one I believe to be both effective and fair. If you don’t subject me to a monologue or dialogue about the personal affairs of people I don’t know or don’t care about, I will not subject you to a monologue on the rules of Advanced Squad Leader, the argumentative structure featured in the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, or the way in which a Japanese naval invasion of the American West Coast in 1942 was an extremely remote improbability bordering on the impossible, being militarily useless, logistically problematic, and historically unplanned. That seems fair, doesn’t it?

And thanks to technology, there is an even better solution now readily available to all and sundry. If people insist on being rude enough to engage in conversations that are intrinsically exclusive by nature, just whip out your phone or ebook reader and happily ignore them. This is particularly effective if one is being subjected to the most extreme form of gossiper, the “performance conversationalist”. I’m not saying that men can’t be crashing bores too. Of course they can be; I probably have exceptional potential in that line myself. But there is no reason why female bores should be suffered with any less reluctance and resistance than male bores.

A good start

I have to admit, Rick Perry’s “mistake” is the first thing he’s done that makes me want to think he might not be a complete disaster as president. (Of course, this posturing is merely for the Tea Party, in private he’s kowtowing before the Fed like all the other candidates not named Ron Paul.) But the neocons and neoclassicals were quick to leap to the defense of Ben Shalom:

On Monday, 24 hours before the Rasmussen poll would show him up 13 points on Mitt Romney after only three days in the GOP presidential race, Rick Perry made a mistake. He answered a question in an Iowa field about the Federal Reserve with a waspish threat to Ben Bernanke — something about how in Texas the Fed chairman would be “treated ugly” if he printed more money.

“Horrifying,” shrieked Binyamin Appelbaum, The New York Times’ chief Washington correspondent. The economist Nouriel Roubini raged that Perry belonged in a mental institution — after he compared the Texas governor to the Norwegian mass murderer…. Yesterday, in refusing to apologize for what he said, Perry didn’t even suggest he’d been speaking lightly. He said instead that this — Fed policy, presumably — was something about which he’s passionate.

Actually, Perry’s comment about Bernanke’s near-treason is a little careless. The man’s policies aren’t “almost” treasonous as they have without question been to the severe material detriment of the USA and given his expert PhD credentials, there can be little question that his decision to enact those policies was intentional. He has done far more harm to America and Americans than 100 bin Ladens could have ever done, and worse, he telegraphed his intention to do so before he was appointed to his present office.

I am not arrogant

John Scalzi argues the case:

As there already exists a “McKean’s Law” with respect to words (“Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error”), allow me instead to suggest what I will henceforth label “McKean’s Inversion,” to wit:

The adjective a person says they are is frequently the thing they are not.

To put it in writing terms, it’s a fine example of “show, don’t tell.” Classy people don’t need to assert they’re classy, they do classy things. Funny people don’t have to assure you they’re funny, they simply make you laugh. Kind people don’t need to verbally advertise their kindness, because it’s evident in their lives. All of which is to say the way to be seen as funny, or kind, or humble, or classy, is to be that thing. And if you are, chances are pretty good other people will note it.

My take? McKean’s Inversion applies to idiots, the deceitful, and the insecure. The idea that every cocky chick magnet is a loser with a hard drive full of Japanese schoolgirl porn, that every strutting All-Star is a bench-warming fraud, and every salty ex-Ranger is really a blustering coward is a bizarre mix of Churchianity and middle class fear of failure. The flaw in the logic is that while X people don’t need to assert X, this does not in any way justify the conclusion that they cannot assert it or that asserting it – a few highly specific cases aside – necessarily implies its negation.

Who were three of the most infamous trash talkers in the history of the NBA? Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Gary Payton. Shall we therefore conclude that they were inferior basketball players? What was the most famous of Babe Ruth’s 714 home runs? The one he hit in the fifth inning of Game 3 of the 1932 World Series, otherwise known as his “called shot”. Any high-performance competitor knows there is nothing more demoralizing to an opponent than telling him exactly what you’re going to do to him and then doing precisely that, because it drives home the fact that he hasn’t been tricked or outmaneuvered somehow, he has been beaten by someone who is completely out of his league.

The fact that the mediocre often overrate themselves doesn’t mean that the superlative are unaware of their own superiority or are unwilling to admit it. I have never seen false modesty among the genuinely superior; it is, however, quite commonly seen among the merely competent who utilize it in an attempt to be perceived as better than they genuinely are.

The nonsensical aspect of McKean’s Inversion can be seen in the way that my assertion of my own superior intelligence and breathtaking arrogance is a) sometimes interpreted as evidence that I am really not all that intelligent while b) never being taken as evidence that I am not arrogant. In other words, it is applied in precisely the same uneven manner as the references to my family by critics who like to stress my relationship to one nationally-known individual, (usually apropos of nothing), while never, ever, mentioning my equally close relationship to another, internationally-known, individual.

The proof is always and only in the pudding. “The adjective a person says they are” carries no intrinsic meaning in and of itself, but merely offers a useful means of ascertaining that person’s integrity and capacity for self-judgment when the adjective is compared with independent observation. I happen to consider people who overrate themselves to be self-deluded and a little pathetic, but I believe people who habitually underrate themselves to be dishonest, manipulative, and intrinsically untrustworthy. And I am much more wary of the latter than the former.

There is nothing humble about telling lies to make yourself look better in others’ eyes.

In defense of the differently attracted

The American Psychological Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1975. Now, as many sane observers warned at the time, it appears to be looking to do the same for pedophilia:

Researchers from several prominent U.S. universities will participate tomorrow in a Baltimore conference reportedly aiming to normalize pedophilia. According to the sponsoring organization’s website, the event will examine ways in which “minor-attracted persons” can be involved in a revision of the American Psychological Association (APA) classification of pedophilia.

B4U-ACT, a group of pro-pedophile activists and mental health professionals, is behind the August 17 conference, which will include panelists from Harvard University, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Louisville, and the University of Illinois.

B4U-ACT science director Howard Kline has criticized the definition of pedophilia by the American Psychological Association, describing its treatment of “minor-attracted persons” as “inaccurate” and “misleading”…. On their website B4U-ACT classifies pedophilia as simply another sexual orientation and decries the “stigma” attached to pedophilia, observing: “No one chooses to be emotionally and sexually attracted to children or adolescents. The cause is unknown; in fact, the development of attraction to adults is not understood.” The group says that it does not advocate treatment to change feelings of attraction to children or adolescents.

The chickenhawks have a valid point. If society accepts the redefinition of homosexuality as “normal” on the basis of its practitioners being “born that way”, then it has absolutely no reason to condemn pedophiles who are also “born that way”.

For a society to accept open homosexual identification as a normal is a strong indication that it has entered its death spiral. This doesn’t mean it is necessary to drop brick walls on people as soon as they evince interest getting a Pete Rose haircut or watching the Oscars. Just as a society can survive a small percentage of immigrants, it can thrive and prosper so long as homosexuality remains aberrant and circumspect behavior.

This ceases to be the case once what was decentralized and aberrant behavior is transformed into an open and celebrated interest group with a monomaniacal interest in continually expanding its “rights” to the detriment of the traditional societal norms. If this isn’t apparent to you yet, perhaps it will once the law, in its infinite wisdom, determines that a middle-aged pedophile has a constitutional right to marry a collection of boys under the age of ten.

The Slippery Slope is not a logical fallacy. It is, rather, a correct use of logic to provide a reasonable guide to choose between possible future events. Advocates of normalizing homosexuality and homogamy argued that their reasoning would not be used to attempt to normalize pedophilia and polygamy. It is worth noting that subsequent events have proven them to be totally incorrect.

PPPS – A virus scan, two reboots, and everything is accessible again.