Category: Uncategorized

Mr. One-term

In fairness, he probably wasn’t even eligible for that one-term anyhow:

Contrary to pretty much every projection until now, Democratic control of the Senate is also starting to coming into question. While Mr Obama’s approval ratings have continued to fall, and now hover at dangerously close to 40 per cent according an ABC-Washington Post poll published on Tuesday, the fate of his former colleagues in the Senate looks even worse.

In the past few days polls have shown Republican challengers taking the lead over previously safe Democratic incumbents, such as Barbara Boxer in California and Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. Indeed, given the uniformly negative direction in the numbers, it is now quite possible the Republicans could win the Senate seats formerly held by both President Obama in Illinois, and Joe Biden, vice-president, in Delaware.

Add to that the continuing woes of Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic majority leader, in Nevada, where the Republican party’s recent nomination of Sharron Angle, a far-right and highly eccentric Tea Party supporter, appear to have had no positive effect on Mr Reid’s prospects, and the Grand Old party has a good shot at taking control of both houses of Congress. Worse for Mr Obama, political scientists say that at this stage in the calendar, there is almost nothing he can do about it.

Forget re-election, I don’t think Obama is even going to be on the ballot in 2012 regardless of whether Democrats lose the House or both the House and Senate. And this doesn’t have anything to do with various state efforts to force presidential candidates to prove their natural-born citizenship, I think that he’s going to face multiple challengers in the Democratic primary and end up withdrawing ala LBJ.

If you’re a Democratic politician, you have to be terrified right now. As bad as Obama has been for the country, he has been even worse for his political party. They’re facing a difficult choice between internecine insurrection and total obliteration in 2012.

Mailvox: catching up on history

BG asks about the Crusades:

I’ve been reading your blog, and comments, for years now, stealing countless hours of productivity from my employer. My brother-in-law, a younger man, who I don’t think is saved but is searching, just emailed me asking me to tell him about the Crusades. He said what information he has found so far has been confusing. I haven’t talked to him yet. He knows I know a lot, but I really haven’t studied the Crusades. Can you or one of the Ilk, please direct me to a good source? I don’t expect to take up your time, but any thoughts on the topic would also be greatly appreciated.

I would start with Stephen Runcimen’s three-volume History of the Crusades. I would then read John Julius Norwich’s three-volume history of Byzantium, which gives a solid background for the events that led up to the Crusades. What those ignorant of Byzantine history don’t understand – which is probably more than 95 percent of the people who bring up the Crusades in casual conversation – is that the Crusades were not an offensive campaign in any way, shape, or form, but rather a defensive one for which more than one desperate emperor of Byzantium had spent years pleading.

MN, on the other hand, has a pair of questions related to American history:

I’ve emailed you once before, and I just want to say thanks again for your blog and column. I’m 24 and I can honestly say that in the year or so since I started following your work, my critical thinking abilities have developed more than in the 12 years of public school and 4 of college combined.

Anyway, being that today is America’s Independence Day, I was thinking about its history, specifically the Civil War. I’m able to effectively rationalize most of my beliefs about it, but I am having trouble with a couple things that I hoped you might help with:

1. I believe I’ve recall you writing that had you been around in 1860, you would have fought for the South. I’m undecided on what I would’ve done. Certainly, the southern states’ sovereignty was being infringed and they had the right to defend it. However, how do you justify defending the institution of slavery? While I do not believe in human equality in any real sense, to my mind, the idea of slavery seems in blatant conflict with both the Declaration of Independence and the ‘Life, Liberty, and Property’ part of the 5th Amendment. I also believe that one of the few legitimate functions of our government is to uphold these basic rights, so in that sense, I can rationalize that perhaps the North was justified. The only counter I can come up with is that slaves were not considered citizens, and thus not afforded these rights.

2. I also believe you’ve called Lincoln the worst president in American history. Because he wiped his ass with the Bill of Rights and ended any notions of state sovereignty, I agree with you to a point. Its to a point because, from some things I’ve read, Lincoln’s plan had he lived was to ship all of the slaves back to Africa or the Caribbean as part of the reconstruction progress. In my opinion, this would absolutely have been the correct move, both at the time and in hindsight from 2010. If this is true, can you really call Lincoln the worst president ever, or were his violations of the Constitution too egregious to overcome? I can’t say that he’s worse than guys like FDR, Wilson, or Obama.

My answer to question one comes in two parts. First, as a libertarian, I would prefer an institution of voluntary private slavery to the present system of federal slavery that is in effect today. Either I own myself or another party does. If I am prevented from selling something, in this case my body, then it is obvious that I do not legally own it. Someone else does. In the present United States the government claims legal ownership of its citizens, as evidenced by the Selective Service Act and the income tax, so it is a little bizarre for present-day involuntary slaves of the state to posture about their opposition to historical involuntary private slavery. Note that the fact your owner has not elected to draft you is of no more significance to your legal and factual status as a slave to the state than the fact that the owner of a field slave in the 1800s did not require him to work in the fields on a particular day.

As to the second part, state sovereignty is not conditional. For good or ill, either it exists or it does not. Also, slavery could not possibly have been the primary issue inspiring secession due to the fact that four slave states remained in the Union. But regardless of whether or not slavery was the secondary or tertiary factor beyond the pre-war economic rape of the South by the North, that is totally irrelevant with regards to the question of whether a sovereign state had the right to secede from a voluntary union or not. The great evil of the Civil War and the irrelevance of slavery can be seen by the fact that the Union is no longer voluntary, but is imposed by force to this date even though private involuntary slavery is now a dead issue.

Regarding the second question, my opinion of Lincoln has absolutely nothing to do with his plans regarding the former slaves. The reason he is by far the worst president is because he murdered the American Republic and imposed the American Empire on the American people at a tremendous cost in American blood. He was America’s Caesar, and like Caesar, he received a fitting reward for his treasonous crime against his country.

UPDATE – In answer to the inevitable and illogical argument that the Southern States secession was all about slavery, consider the following analogy. Suppose you want to fly a flag, as permitted by the rules of your homeowner’s association, but the committee that runs the homeowner’s association suddenly decides they don’t want you to fly one. They show up at your house unannounced to inform you of their decision, then barge into your bedroom in order to confiscate any flags that they might find. If then you punch the head of the committee in the face, was your desire to fly a flag the cause?

Hmmm

Read this list of personal characteristics:

Witty, i.e. smart
Irreverent
Secure
Sadistic
Perceptive
Impulsive
Narcissistic
A natural at negging
Ridiculous in his peacocking
A terrible relationship prospect

Now, that list could have been compiled 15 years ago to describe me with the exception of the Peacocking and the Impulsive. Probably more smart than witty, more’s the pity, but there you go. Anyhow, based on how things turned out for Spacebunny and me, there just might be hope for Russell Brand maintaining a successful marriage. Or rather, there might have been were he not a Hollywood celebrity. I also think it’s interesting to note how his marital choice of Katy Perry, she of the execrable pop music and the evangelical Christian background, tends to underline the hierarchy of female attractiveness I explained a few days ago. Miss Perry’s expansive endowment notwithstanding, there is no way she is one-half as pretty as at least one-quarter of the girls to whom Mr. Brand has, in the immortal words of Lebronze, taken his talents.

Mailvox: the return of Uber Dawks

Apparently not content with demonstrating his complete ignorance of American history and PZ Myers’s confirmed cowardice, Uber Dawks has returned as part of his quixotic crusade to demonstrate that militant atheists are every bit as smart and educated as they are socially adept and sane.

After mockingly laughing my way through the two days worth of posts to your site that were inspired by my email, I’ve come to the conclusion that you and your “ilk” may be even more delusional than I could have ever imagined. When they discuss you at Pharyngula, I would think to myself that no one could be that obtuse, delusional and falsely magnanimous. Turns out that you are all that and more.

PZ afraid to debate you? Why should he debate delusional fundies like you? You wanna know why he doesn’t have to? Courtier’s reply. All you Christards have to contribute is philosophical flatulation about your phony baloney sky daddy. You have no objective proof of god’s existence at all. I challenge anyone on your site to give me one thing — one tiny piece of objective evidence for god that cannot be better and more fully explained by natural science.

Oh, and all your posters whining about the Christards label…sorry for being honest with you, but you are mentally handicapped if you actually believe that some bearded Jew (who probably didn’t even actually exist) came back from the dead 2000 years ago. So I called you a bad name, boo-hoo. You use negative labels for atheists all the time on your site.

Are you just not smart enough to see your hypocrisy? For all the self-promoting about your IQ, you could not on your best day come up with a universal neutralizer and falsifier for atheism the way Myers has done for theism with his Courtier’s Reply. That’s why conservative sky bully worshippers like you and philosophical liars like William Layne Craig aren’t fit to be in the same conversation with PZ Myers or Richard Dawkins.

In reading the responses from those two other atheists (assuming those emails were real, which I doubt) I have only one thing to say to them. Grow some balls. Stop bowing to the tyranny of the religious majority. You Christians and Muslims are destroying this world with your religious nonsense and killing everyone else in the process. Sam Harris wrote about conversational intolerance and possible retributive violence against dangerous religious groups, and what he says is true. Atheists need to speak out and show that we will no longer tolerate your fairy tales and your killing in the name of them. All atheists need to join together and drag all of you kicking and screaming from the Dark Ages into the modern secular age, whether you like it or not.

Fact is this: Atheists are winning. Look at Denmark or France or the UK. Your sky fairy is about to go bye-bye.

That idiotic cartoon you posted shows that you are as clueless about atheists as you are science. Atheists do not look like that at all. George Clooney, Bill Maher, Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters are all atheists. Brad Pitt is functionally atheist. Joss Whedon is a feminist and an atheist and has stated that knowing there is no god is “a very important thing for you to learn.”

These guys are famous, they get women and are nothing like that idiotic cartoon. What should I expect though, Mariano from TrueFreeThinker is nearly as bad as you are. He spends his time tossing philosophical chum into the water to be decimated by atheist piranha.

The problem is that you people with your god-goggles on can’t see reality. This is why Darwinian Evolution deniers, Global Warming deniers and Christian fundies go hand in hand. All of you are in the same boat and most of you are the same guy.

Best of luck. When you die, you pass into nonexistence. That’s it. Get over your fairy tales now and do something worthwhile like help save the environment.

Let’s count the most conventional signs of atheist cluelessness:

1. Thinks The Courtier’s Reply is meaningful – check!
2. Thinks the Dark Ages existed – check!
3. Doesn’t know what “evidence” is – check!
4. Science fetish – check!
5. Thinks religion is a serious global threat – check!
6. Thinks atheists are winning in Europe – check!

I have to say that the appeal to Brad Pitt and Joss Whedon is a new one on me. Wow! I will really have to rethink all of my most fundamental conclusions about life, the universe and everything. What use is Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas when you’ve got Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters!

And since he brought it up….

Why church women don’t like church men

Aunt Haley explains how Churchianity hinders happy marriages:

I’ve noticed that it’s fairly common in evangelical circles for a man to more or less prostrate himself at the feet of his wife’s saintly goodness, proclaiming some mixture of the following:

* I don’t deserve my wife.
* I was a mess before I met my wife.
* If it weren’t for my wife, I don’t know where I’d be right now.
* I don’t know what she sees in me.
* I’m an idiot, but for some reason, she married me.

Among Christian women, humility is an ENORMOUS turn-on and is considered an outward sign of inward maturity…. This “my wife is better than me” attitude is sad. It may be humble on the surface, but it’s really just a big fat ugly DLV.

Note that this is an indictment of Churchianity, not Christianity. There is an important difference. In Christianity, the husband is the head of the household. In Churchianity, the husband is the servant leader, by which it is actually meant that he is a servant rather than a leader. And no man who doesn’t know what he’d do without his wife possesses the confident and muscular faith that sustained the martyrs, crushed paganism, ended global slavery, and changed the world for the better.

Men and women are meant to complement each other. Women need men to help them improve themselves every bit as badly as men need women, if not more so. And yet, are the men of the church ever called upon to help their wives develop intellectually, to broaden their interests outside their personal relations, to maintain themselves physically, and to refrain from being caught up in the destructive spiderweb of gossip? Not that I’ve ever heard.

The abject pedestalization of wives in Churchianity doesn’t even make sense in conventionally omniderigent evangelical terms. If God gave you your wife, then who are you to assert you do not deserve her? Women want to be married to a man who is awesome, so it is an insult to her character, her intelligence, and her quality to claim that you’re some sort of lower being that she has kindly deigned to lift up out of pure altruism. And while it’s probably true that you’re an idiot, given MPAI, the fact of the matter is that she is almost certainly an idiot too. It’s no wonder many women of the church are discontent in their marriages, if their husbands can’t see anything of merit in themselves, how do they expect their wives to do so?

False modesty isn’t humility, it’s a deceitful facade presented by whiny and insecure bitches of both sexes and it has no place in a Christian marriage.

The fastest you’ve driven

Autopia asks:

What’s the fastest you’ve driven, what were you in (or on) and where were you when you did it? On a track, on a road, doesn’t matter to us. It’s not like we’ll call the cops.

155 MPH, 694, Porsche 944 Turbo.

Depressionistas

HH dives in:

I’m just over halfway through RGD, and I’m really enjoying the read and the information. I’ve just become interested in economics, and I haven’t yet read much from many of the people you discuss in your book, but it blows my mind how Krugman could seriously believe any of what he writes. It would seem more reasonable to think that he has a mental illness or is a sociopath.

And it belatedly occurs to me that perhaps I shouldn’t have sent a copy of RGD to so confirmed a pessimist as Derbyshire:

“The car has already hit the tree and the bumper is already in the process of buckling inward, so there is no time to turn the wheel or fasten seat belts. It is too late to do anything but scream.”

Thus writes Vox Day in his recent book The Return of the Great Depression. Are things really that bad? And going to get that much worse?

I’m betting that they are. That’s a novice bet, as I am not a trained economist. I base it on a complete lack of seriousness among our political classes. It is obvious that our governments, at all levels, are spending far too much; yet there is little evidence of anyone being willing to do anything about it.

I completely understand those who don’t buy into the economic crisis talk; I can remember back in college how Marxists were supposed to have predicted 12 of the last two crises. But this isn’t the usual airy conjecture about the effect of the rise of Japan or the implications of the Chinese currency peg. This is relatively hard economics based on straightforward math. Unless you seriously believe that an economy can support an INFINITE amount of debt, there is a breaking point. Precisely where that is happens to be unknown, but that doesn’t mean the point does not exist.

But it appears, as per Derb, that I am no longer an outlier… alas. It would appear that my days as a rogue contrarian economist defying the staid order of the mainstream Neo-Keynesian orthodoxy in a bold and sexually thrilling manner are at an end.

Mailvox: the loyalty proxy

Renee 84 sees a double-standard at work:

I find it interesting that it seems as if a man’s sexual history doesn’t seem to serve as a practical proxy for their sexual loyalty.

As a Christian, I know that God never proclaimed that ONLY women should be virgins before marriage, it applied to both males and females. So whenever I hear conversations from men around the blogsphere who have admitted to having casual sex themselves, lost their virginity at a young age, multiple partners at one time, etc, who call women sluts for having casual sex themselves, I pretty much think that they’re hypocrites.

I’m not one to look at a cad (basically a male slut) in a positive light. I hear all sorts of reasons for this type of double standard and many of them make sense. But in the end, in my eyes this doesn’t trump God’s Word and morals. They end of being almost excuses in a way.

It’s not so much that a man’s sexual history doesn’t serve as a practical proxy for their sexual loyalty, it’s that women don’t need the proxy because they place a much lower value on sexual loyalty than men do. It is perfectly clear that women are attracted to men with sexual experience and actively dislike men who don’t have it. It is primarily women who make fun of men who don’t have success with women, they are the ones who label such men losers. Indeed, as has often been seen right here on this blog, attacking a man’s sexual history and implying its brevity is a favored form of female insult.

So women are less concerned with sexual loyalty than with sexual status; on average they are very happy to trade an increased risk of sexual disloyalty for higher sexual status in the short-term as well as the long-term. (The reason that women who have sex with Alphas and Betas eventually settle for Deltas and Gammas is because they possess insufficient value to land the higher status men for anything beyond the short term.) There is really not much room for debate on this as there are legions of men with no sexual history and low sexual status available at every geek-related convention and yet not even the most desperate woman would consider seeking a husband there.

I have no doubt that Renee84 regards studs in a negative light intellectually, but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t emotionally and physically attracted to them in the same way that most women are. If it were true that women were genuinely repelled by studs, they would flee from rock stars and pro athletes in disgust rather than throwing themselves at them in droves. Now, one should never forget that women possess brains and free will and are perfectly capable of surmounting their biological impulses, but that doesn’t change the basic and observable fact that the impulses are there to be resisted.

Men, on the other hand, highly prize sexual loyalty and place a very negative value on women with extensive sexual histories. This should be obvious when one considers the contemptuous male attitude towards prostitutes and porn stars. The modern men of the West may not realize that they still place such store in sexual loyalty, but the instinctive fury that can be aroused when a man’s wife is touching another man or otherwise sends unconscious signals of her prospective sexual availability in public tends to indicate that they do, even if they’re not killing each other in duels over petty insults to a woman’s honor any more.

So, I think it’s a misnomer to describe the situation as a double standard when it’s really two different sets of subjective values that underlie two entirely different standards. If women regarded rock stars in the same way that men regard street hookers, then the double standard would be hypocritical. But given the breadth of the divergence in the opposite sexual value perspectives, it really shouldn’t be regarded that way.

Now, given the Biblical acceptance of multiple wives, I don’t think it can reasonably said that male virginity comes with precisely the same premium that female virginity does, although it certainly comes with some premium given the instruction that deacons of the church are to have only one wife. This lower premium does not excuse premarital fornication in any way, of course; I merely note it as a tangent. I see the secular “double standard” as entirely irrelevant to the Christian perspective because, as is so often the case, the Christian view is fundamentally different than the secular one as it is necessarily driven by non-biomechanic concerns that simply don’t apply to the non-Christian. But as one can usefully discuss gravity and its implications without necessarily taking the Christian perspective on it into account, one can likewise discuss Game.

WND column

Winning the War Against Men, part II

In every large-scale military conflict, there is the macro war and the micro war. While the macro war fought strategically by the generals has a great influence on the micro war fought tactically by the individual soldiers, the two wars are nevertheless distinct from one another and must be contemplated separately. In this second column in the series related to the war against men, I am focused solely on the micro war that is fought in the houses, classrooms, churches and night clubs of America.

In the prelude to a battle, the local commander always considers four things. His resources, the enemy’s resources, the lay of the land and the objective. Now, every male individual’s objective will naturally be different: One man may hope to meet a large number of attractive women, another man might wish to marry a specific woman and a third might wish to escape a hellish marriage without spending the rest of his life in court-dictated financial servitude. But regardless of the objective, the same general rules about the lay of the land and the relative value table will apply.

Semis and Finals

I wasn’t surprised to see Holland defeat Uruguay; as I have repeatedly stated from the start, I expect the Dutch to claim the Cup due to their talent, teamwork, and discipline. However, Uruguay put up a great fight and also battled very hard against Germany in the third-place game. Much to my surprise, the Uruguayans became my favorite team to watch over the course of the tournament.

I was surprised that the Spanish managed to beat Germany, but in retrospect it should have been obvious because Spain has the advantage of starting essentially the same midfield that plays together for Barcelona whereas Germany’s midfield is much stronger on the attack than they are in retaining possession of the ball. This high level of familiarity is a huge advantage at the international level, where there is often the personnel problem of two premier players who happen to play basically the same role on their club teams, as is the case with Gerrard and Lampard of England. I assume this is why Ces Fabregas of Arsenal sits on the bench; it’s not that he’s not good enough to start at this level, but starting him would sacrifice one of Spain’s biggest advantages.

That being said, the Netherlands are better at the back and more disciplined than the Germans, whose 5 goals, (really 6, given Lampard’s non-goal), superficially look the same as the five given up by Holland, but two of those goals, by Uruguay and Brazil, came after the Dutch had already won the game and visibly relaxed. They also have a ball-controlling midfield that matches up better with Spain’s. I do very much dislike their tendency to coast at the end of the game when they have the lead, which appeared again in the semifinal and is probably the best reason to pick against them tonight. I prefer teams with a killer instinct, but the rivalry between Schneider and Van Persie combined with the bad form of Fernando Torres and the deadly dangerous left foot of Robben is enough to convince me that this Netherlands team will finally do what the Total Football and Bergkamp-led teams of the past could not and win the World Cup.

I have to confess that I am impressed with the Germans, though. Some of the finest and most intelligent individual actions I’ve seen in the tournament have been on the part of German players, Bastian Schweinsteiger’s idiotic insistence on playing around with the ball in dangerous positions notwithstanding. I love how their defenders are taught to turn around and run with the ball-handling attacker, thus preventing them from being outrun. And Mueller’s anticipation of the rebound from Schweinsteiger’s shot on goal was beautiful; every striker should closely watch how he begins his run towards the goal area as soon as the shot is taken. Being in the right place at the right time like that is not a matter of luck, it’s a straightforward matter of persistence and probability.

UPDATE: Spain 1, Holland 0. Okay, so I guess I got that one wrong. I thought the Dutch were fell apart tonight, the goalkeeper excluded. They really were a bunch of whiners to boot. Schneider seemed to be tired, while Robben was simply terrible in front of goal and blew at least four solid chances… I couldn’t believe it when he didn’t square the ball to a wide-open Van Persie, who could have practically walked the ball in. Unlike previous games, they weren’t putting shots on goal but were trying to dribble the ball in as far too many teams did this tournament. And the Spanish goal wasn’t even close to being offside, so I have no idea what the Dutch were crying about there.