Category: Uncategorized

Contra the bricklayers

In which I respond to an erroneous assumption made by a commenter on John Scalzi’s blog:

I think Libertarians are the most idealistic people in the world. They really do believe that left to their own devices people will do the right thing. Look at Alan Greenspan and his shock that large corporations didn’t act in their investors’ best interests.

This is a wildly incorrect notion of libertarianism and is almost precisely backwards. It is because libertarians understand that people are capable of committing great acts of evil, especially the sort of people who desire power over others, that they wish to prevent government from interfering in people’s lives to the greatest extent possible. We libertarians most certainly do NOT believe that people will do the right thing if left to their own devices, rather, we believe that since most people will do the wrong thing if given power over others, it is in the interests of everyone to make sure that the force multiplier offered by government to those people is as small as possible.

As for Alan Greenspan, it is important to understand the difference between the supposedly innnocent, self-servingly revisionist Greenspan and the coldly calculating servant of Wall Street. There was absolutely nothing libertarian about Greenspan’s actions; it wasn’t as if he eliminated all of the many government regulations that create and govern corporations as well as forcing them to sell their stock on certain specific private exchanges rather than freely on the Internet.

As for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was positive in that it overturned government enforcement of segregation, which was a clear violation of the Constitutional right of free association. And it was a negative in that it also violated the individual’s Constitutional right to free association.

It is profoundly stupid to claim that a private individual does not have the right to refuse to serve someone on the basis of race, sex, or any other criteria he happens to choose, given the right of free association. (Yes, I am aware that the Supreme Court has declared otherwise, that still doesn’t change the perfectly clear text of the Constitution.) Once you eliminate that right, you have transformed the individual into a legal serf with no control over his own services as there is no bright line on further directives from the government except the momentary whims of the responsible agents.

Libertarians are those few who understand that the problem with the brick is not the brick itself, but that it is another brick in the wall.

I should note that it is also profoundly stupid, in many cases, for business owners to exercise their right to free association on the basis of superficial factors. If I manufacture computers and refuse to sell to Asians, I am voluntarily abandoning a huge international market. If I own a bar in Detroit and refuse to serve blacks, I am not likely to remain in business very long. These things tend to sort themselves out over time courtesy of the inexorable market forces. On the other hand, in some cases, it is necessary for other businesses owners to exercise their free association right on a superficial basis if they are to remain in business. The successful fitness franchise, Curves, is built upon little more than anti-male discrimination whereas the traditional men’s social clubs are all but extinct because their customers were not interested in patronizing the government-dictated mixed-sex format.

Everyone discriminates/exercises their right to free association, the only question is where one happens to draw the line. The primary problem with permitting the government to draw the line for everyone is that the government is a dynamic entity. Those who cheer government involvement in telling business owners they cannot discriminate against homosexuals are unlikely to be happy about a government telling business owners they must discriminate against them. But once you have permitted the camel’s nose into the tent, you have very little control over which part of the tent it will eventually choose to defecate.

Best to keep the damn camel outside where it belongs!

Mailvox: the whitewashing of Lincoln

It’s kind of sad when Electric Six presents a more accurate view of Abraham Lincoln than most mainstream historians. AJ wishes to better understand why:

My father recommended to me a book called “The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War” by Thomas DiLorenzo. I’m not sure if you’ve read it or heard of it – I’m guessing that you have – but this book’s main focus is Lincoln’s rape of the Constitution, and the downfall of state sovereignty. Checking out the sources DiLorenzo used – as amateur as I may be in that area – they all look legit.

I’ve never really been a Lincoln fan in the first place, but this book made me sick to my stomach. Other books I have read and sources I have looked at, among them Murray Rothbard’s “Just War”, corroborate all of the evidence that Lincoln was a liar, power hungry, and a sociopath of the highest order. His Emancipation Proclamation was designed to provoke slave uprisings in states where the North did not have control, knowing full well that only women and children remained in those areas – yet it is hailed and revered as one of the greatest and most moving speeches ever given by a president. He has his face on Mount Rushmore, on our currency, a memorial in DC, and his own day in February – the same man who suspended the writ of habeas corpus, muzzled the press when it spoke out against him, imprisoned thousands of NORTHERNERS for political dissent (re: clamoring for peaceful secession) and is described as a dictator by even his most ardent of historians (though a benevolent one, they insist).

If people knew the truth about Lincoln – specifically the blacks who hold him up as the Great Emancipator, despite his desire to ship them all out to Africa and/or South America to preserve the “purity” of America – life in America would be drastically changed. And if they saw the similarities between the goings on before the War of Northern Aggression and what’s going on now, they might see some disquieting parallels. The only difference is that our current president doesn’t have to muzzle the media – they’re his already. The least of his crimes were against civil liberties, and the worst was starting the bloodiest war on American soil for the sole reason of destroying state sovereignty. Dishonesty in science and archaeology usually just annoys me, but I consider it par for the course. The same goes for most historians, but this is just too great to ignore. This makes me angry, and it should make everyone else angry, too, if they weren’t so historically ignorant.

I’m sure you know all of this already, and have probably written about it before, but my question is this: WHY have historians ignored Lincoln’s obvious agenda and wickedness? Why have they painted him in such a false light? I understand this isn’t anything new for history writing, but all of the evidence is there. I understand dishonesty in certain arenas, but against a corrupt politician? Historians usually revel in that sort of thing. Why does Lincoln get a free pass?

AJ answered her own question when she said “If people knew the truth about Lincoln… life in America would be drastically changed.” Lincoln is a secular saint for the same reason that the Roman Senate deified Octavian Augustus – he was the first emperor of Imperial America. Lincoln was, without a doubt, the worst president the united States of America because he murdered what had been a free and voluntary republican confederation in the name of a Federal Union imposed by violence.

Naturally, the would-be totalitarians of today revere him. But every freedom-loving American, black or white, should mark the end of the Republic by him. Sic semper tyrannis.

Rookie mistake

Rand Paul hasn’t quite figured out the art of dealing with critics looking for gotchas:

Rand Paul is coming under attack for things he said about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed race discrimination in privately owned restaurants and hotels.

First of all, I would absolutely voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which is an egregious violation against property rights as well as the Constitutional Right of Free Association. That being said, it is remarkably stupid for any politician, of any party, to comment upon what he would or would not have done had he been voting on a bill 46 years ago.

The correct response would have been to say: “Rachel, I have no more intention of speculating about how I would have voted on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than I have of speculating how I would have voted on the Declaration of War against Spain of 1898 or the Proclamation of Imperial Divinity of 14 AD. I was not a Senator in either Washington DC or Rome at the time of those previous votes, and while hypothetical speculation is always interesting, it’s simply not relevant to a Kentucky Senate campaign in 2010.”

Of course, if she pressed further, I would answer the question as if she had asked about the Augustan godhood. “Well, Rachel, there’s no question that Octavian accomplished great things and reunified the empire after it was riven by a series of failed triumvirates and the subsequent civil wars, but I’m not sure it actually required the mind of a deity to outthink Marc Antony.” If your interlocutor is being silly, the idea is to respond in a way that highlights the inherent silliness of his approach, not be dragged down into the mire of the ridiculous.

Mailvox: where is the love?

KC is concerned about my willingness to express my opinion about others’ capacity for applied intelligence:

Vox, I enjoy reading your blog a lot of the time: you provide interesting stories and insight into them, and I appreciate your faith. However, might I suggest that you refrain from labeling “most people regardless of what they believe” inane/idiots? It seems very judgmental of you and makes me question your fundamental attitude towards humanity or what God is capable of doing in/through the least of us. It often seems as though you place more worth in the intelligence of your fellow man than their fundamental worth in God.

An impoverished farmer in Korea that has received no education and is, by all secular account, worthless intellectually could have MUCH more to teach me about the Kingdom of God due to his close relationship with God than the most highly acclaimed theological intellectuals.

Acts 13When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. 14But since they could see the man who had been healed standing there with them, there was nothing they could say.

All I am saying is that Jesus “cherished” the unlovely and unintelligent because they were human. You might not have MEANT that uneducated/unintelligent believers are to be “cherished” less in an absolute sense, as I know you are speaking to an intellectual wanting to learn intelligent Christian arguments. However the basis of faith and love of God is not primarily supposed to come from our ability to grasp high falutin arguments but a fundamental heart change and love of God and neighbor. Valuing intellectualism above this makes it an idol as abhorrant as the golden calf. 1st and 2nd commandments, man.

I know, and you know, you’re a lot more intelligent than many people in a lot of ways however that really means nothing in God’s eyes, as he has given us all everything we have. What we will be judged on is our hearts, and our hearts are only changed when we willingly submit ourselves to his desire for us, greatest of which is for us to LOVE. I don’t know you and don’t want to presume to have more insight into your attitude than I do. However, you – I think you know this – very often do not present yourself as loving and hurting for humanity (actually I seem to recall you boasting about your arrogance!), but as an annoyed and in some instances even amused observer at the shortcomings, failings, and sin of your fellow man. For instance, you more quickly laugh at the deeply delusional feminist who is in confusion about how her former choices have led to her current pain than show compassion. Obviously her choices were/are bad and she is not accurately perceiving reality but should we LAUGH AT her? Is that would Jesus would do? Is that the attitude God wants you to cultivate in yourself and share with others? Or should you feel deep compassion for the pain her sins have caused her and the state of the secular world that is so deeply influencing people to make decisions that will lead them to eternal condemnation?

Anyway, I hope that you will receive this with an open heart and not attack me if you do respond to me. I don’t know if anyone else has shared this with you but it from what I have observed, it is area in your life that is not congruent with the way Christ would have you think and behave. We are not to cultivate an attitude of mocking, dismissing, and writing off those immersed in this fallen world, but to continually beseech God for a heart of compassion and desire to see them brought to the Light. Have you meditated at all on 1Corinthians 13?

I think KC is operating under a severe misapprehension with regards to my opinion of intelligence. In my opinion, it is no more judgmental to declare that someone is “an idiot” or “inane” than to declare that he is “short” or “brown-eyed” or “Asian”. It’s just an observable fact, based on the individual’s behavior which indicates either a lack of cognitive capacity or a disinclination to use one’s cognitive capacity in a rational manner. While one can argue over the legitimacy of the application of the observation, once the matter has been demonstrated to a reasonable degree, there is no reason beyond the vagaries of etiquette to shy away from applying the correct label to an individual. And Internet etiquette is a very different thing than RL etiquette.

I would be the very last one to argue that God cherishes the unintelligent. Compared to Him, we are all complete idiots and yet He loves some of us anyhow. [Idiots and the Scripturally ignorant will please submit their erroneous arguments about God loving everyone equally here.] And given that I believe an impoverished, uneducated North Korean farmer is more useful and possesses more intrinsic human value than a Goldman Sachs investment banker with an Ivy League diploma, I don’t find it hard to imagine that God might find genuine value in him as well. But love and an accurate summation of cognitive use and capacity are simply two different things. I think it would correct to chastise me if I was walking around and attempting to hurt people by telling them how idiotic they are without any provocation, but that’s simply not the case here.

The statistical fact of the matter is that most people, the overwhelming majority, are functionally sub-normal. Since 50% of the population possesses IQs below 100 and a majority of the population with IQs above 100 observably spend absolutely no time thinking about anything, one can only conclude that most people are idiots regardless of one’s individual vantage point. And we’re all functional idiots from time to time; I could certainly fill weeks of blog posts about my own lapses into functional idiocy.

But getting back to KC’s primary point, I see no love in indulging the idiocy of others and none in enabling idiotic behavior either. I believe the Biblical model is to speak the truth, to provide a clear warning of consequences, and then to let those who willfully choose or are for one reason or another doomed to idiocy experience the full and unmitigated consequences of their actions.

As for any subsequent pointing and laughing, well, KC has probably got a relevant point there. Mea maxima culpa. I shall in the future endeavor to focus solely upon the surgical dissections and leave any amused appreciation of the artistry to others.

Wake up and smell the depression

Some silly and formerly-rich women clearly do not understand the dynamic nature of investments:

Michelle Young was supposed to face her estranged husband Scot in the High Court this week, but has had to postpone the hearing while she finds further funding. For the last three years, the couple has been embroiled in a bitter fight over his alleged multi-million pound fortune which she says he is hiding and he claims he no longer exists.

Last December, Mr Young was ordered by the court to pay his wife £27,500 a month pending their divorce settlement but he has since been declared bankrupt. At their last court appearance, Mrs Young said she was down to her last £13,000 of savings and owes £660,000 in unpaid legal fees.

The guy has been declared bankrupt. The money is gone. Clearly his creditors understand this, so what sort of cretin finds it hard to grasp the concept? You don’t make £400 million without leverage, so it’s not at all hard to figure out where the money went. Profit by the leverage, die by the margin call.

Mailvox: a humble request

PC has found the Common Sense dialogue to be of no little interest and has a few questions:

Love the blog and hope that you can answer a few questions for me. Your correspondence with Common Sense Atheism made me reconsider many of my thoughts on Christianity and God. Like him, I felt in command of the fundamentals of Christian theology when all I know are Bible stories and sermons from my youth. And it bothers me that I have neglected a large field of intellectual inquiry. However, many of the Christians I meet and evangelical literature I come across are just as inane as the childish arguments for atheism that are too common on the internet. I am glad to have found in you an intelligent advocate who can discuss these topics without nonsense.

How do I begin to erase this deficit? What are some books that I can read this summer to learn the doctrine of Christianity? Where can I find intelligent arguments for the existence of God? Are local priests and ministers generally good discussion partners?

I’m a mathematician, so I like my theory raw. Don’t be afraid to lay the good stuff on me.

On a different note, I am interested in your conversion to Christianity, how a self-proclaimed internet superintelligence discovered and accepted belief. Also, you mention occasionally that one of your reasons for faith is because you saw evil in the world. Could you elaborate on this? What do you mean by evil? What are some examples?

First, always remember that most people are inane. Most people are idiots no matter what they do or do not believe. If you find an honest and intelligent interlocutor in any area, then cherish him regardless of how similar or divergent your views happen to be. Synchronicity of perspective is not an intrinsic hallmark of intelligence.

Second, I must freely admit that I am overdue in writing my response to Luke’s last post. I’m not the least bit apologetic about my tardiness, mind you, as we just went gold on a year-long software project yesterday and I’m still in the process of gradually reanimating from development zombie mode. As will soon become clear, Luke and I are so far apart in philosophical areas that have absolutely nothing to do with religion that our differences of opinion with regards to Christianity almost pale in comparison. But it should take the discourse in an interesting and perhaps unexpected direction.

Third, I think it is absolutely refreshing whenever someone steps back to reconsider what they actually do and do not know, contra their previous assumptions. As much as I might brutally tear into Luke, or anyone else, for mistaking their half-remembered fragments of childhood knowledge for a comprehensive grasp of a subject, it’s actually an entirely normal failure to revisit the past. I remember being astounded when SB dryly asked me why I thought the crust was the healthiest part of the bread… the real reason was that someone had once told me that as a young child and I had never once bothered to actually stop and think about the matter. And the observable fact is that most people never stop and think about anything they have been told by their parents, their teachers, and their professors. So, it should come as no surprise at all that most atheists raised in a Christian tradition should belatedly discover that they really don’t know that much about the simple theological facts of the faith they are rejecting… in the unlikely event they ever stop long enough to seriously consider the matter.

This is why I tend to take an atheist who abandons a religious faith after the age of 30 much more seriously than the normal teenage deconvert. Think about this for a second: How many of your decisions made in your teen years do you still think were particularly wise or intelligent today? And every childhood deconvert I have ever questioned has simply had Daddy issues of one sort or another. You can usually identify the latter sort by their emotional reactions to religion.

As for learning about the Christian faith and theology, the two best books with which to begin are Letters From a Skeptic by Greg Boyd and Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. I would follow that with Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton, and Cynic, Sage, or Son of God, also by Boyd. Then re-read the four Gospels. As for priests and ministers, well, I wouldn’t expect too much out of them other than a reasonably accurate summation of the theology. Remember, they are called to be shepherds of the flock, not providers of intellectual discourse to the highly intelligent. This isn’t to say that no priest or minister is capable of it, but it’s really somewhat of a category error to seek it from them.

Regarding evil, I simply mean behavior that is described as evil or wickedness in the Bible as well as the influences, autonomous or otherwise, that encourage that behavior. I see it in the world and I see it in myself. I have seen it in the transparent lies of an almost-innocent child, in the irrational fury of a hysterical woman, in the maddened glee of a violent man, and throughout the blood-soaked pages of history. I have seen it in the rich and the poor, in the brilliant and the dim, and in the beautiful and the ugly. Once, like many an arrogant non-believer before me, I thought I could construct my own valid moral code and live by it. And, like everyone but the nihilists, I failed. Not spectacularly, but worse, ludicrously and unneccessarily.

As for evil, you know what it is. It is everything from the first lie you tell your parents and that senseless momentary impulse to smash your fist into an unsuspecting person’s face as they walk by to the Ten Persecutions of Imperial Rome and the Killing Fields. I have no doubt that you have heard the little whispers in the back of your mind from time to time just like everyone else. There are two parts to evil, the temptation and the submission. When the submission finally comes, when the resistance finally fails, it feels absolutely liberating at first and it is only after a period of repeated acts of submission that one gradually discovers apparent how enslaving evil truly is. Hence the apparent theological dichotomy of finding freedom through bending the knee before the Lord Jesus Christ.

I think that unless one understands that evil is in some senses desirable to every man and woman, one cannot even begin to make sense of the Christian faith. Unfortunately, many if not most Christians take the admonition to hate evil and twist it into an erroneous dogma that insists evil is not and cannot be enjoyable. And yet, no matter how terrible the act, it always feels either good or necessary at the moment of action. This is just one of the many ways in which I find the Christian perspective to be more observably accurate than the current scientific ones.

I do not speak about my personal experience with anyone. This is for several reasons, but primarily because I understand that personal experiences are not an objective basis for rational argument. In addition, I know that atheists reject personal experience as a basis for belief even in the case of their own experiences, or at least they claim to do so. So, there is clearly no point in it. The atheist who queries, even sincerely and in good faith, about someone else’s experience is attempting to put himself in the position of prosecutor and judge and I have no interest in playing star witness and public defender.

I tend to doubt this response answered all of your questions, but at least it should suffice to give you a starting point on your investigation. And before you begin reading anything, I highly recommend contemplating the significance of John 20:24-31. I think many atheists who are conditioned to believe in the idea of a blind Christian faith and its supposed arrogance, would do well to become familiar with what is indubitably the genuine Christian attitude towards doubts and doubters.

The sport of champions

I’m not a huge Rick Reilly fan. But his piece on going up against the great Timo Kaukonen in the World Sauna Championships is hilarious:

Okay kids, today’s activity is to go down to your local Pizza Hut, have the oven set for 261° and insert your body into it. The tips of your ears start to ignite. The backs of your arms scream. Your throat burns as if somebody had stuck a tiki torch down it. Your lips feel bitten by large, unseen raccoons. And you haven’t hit 30 seconds.

Now do it for 10 minutes or more, and that’s what it’s like to compete in quite possibly the world’s dumbest sport: the Sauna World Championships.

I know. I entered.

I’m looking forward to the inevitable Onion piece. “Does Cambodia threaten our world dominance of sauna?”

Republican spin

Charles Krauthammer suggests that Kentucky Republicans chose for Rand Paul over the establishment candidate, Grayson, because they don’t like Obama:

Well, I think that‘s the most amazing phenomenon of this day. He came literally out of nowhere. And when you compare him — politically he’s not exactly like his father, Ron Paul, but Ron Paul when he ran for the presidency in ‘08 was a bit of a joke. He was way out there.

It tells you how much our country has changed in two years that that kind of libertarianism was considered kind of kooky at the time, and now his son who is less libertarian, he’s more sort of centrist, but still – he’s really challenging the Republican establishment . . .

This has been I think the amazing story of the last year. Look, the tea party, which is behind Paul, barely existed a year ago. . . .

This is I think a tribute to how radical is the Obama agenda — the spontaneous reaction to overreach, a trillion-dollar stimulus, a health-care takeover, and cap-and-trade, all of that at the beginning of a term. This is an amazing, spontaneous phenomenon, and we‘re going to see a lot of its effects tonight.

Right, it can’t possibly be because Bush and his establishment Republican White House rammed the bank bailout down the throats of an unwilling America. What a pathetic attempt at co-option. It’s not hard to see that the Republican leadership absolutely hates what is happening and is getting concerned that their plans to send another Dole/McCain sacrificial goat up against Obama in 2012 may be falling apart. Ron Paul wasn’t a joke in 2008, but Charles Krauthammer is most certainly a joke in 2010.

Mailvox: In which we point and laugh

Keller demonstrates to all and sundry that he doesn’t have to worry about demonstrating his insecurity by joining Mensa:

There is nothing, nothing, more insecure than belonging to Mensa. I don’t think Molotov Mitchell or his wife are very smart…. Yes, there is nothing insecure about wasting money to have a meaningless membership in a “smarty” club. Ha, I mean what a lame, pathetic, girly thing. It’s like paying money to belong to a “Big Penis Club.” God forbid we verify your intelligence or penis size, we just have to see the membership card and you’ve won the argument!

It is eminently clear that Keller isn’t smart enough to figure out how Mensa works. If Mensa were, in fact, a “Big Penis Club”, it would most certainly require the third-party verification of your penis size. Hence the requirement to take an intelligence test in order to qualify for membership in Mensa. In fact, according to a 2003 survey of 5,000 men, Mensa is roughly the IQ equivalent of having an 8.15-inch penis.

Now, as to whether one considers Mr. Mitchell or his wife to be very smart or not, that completely depends upon one’s perspective. The Mensa requirement is not terribly high; there are approximately 120 million individuals on the planet capable of qualifying. However, if someone is a Mensa member, then he possesses incontrovertible evidence that he is more intelligent than 5.88 billion of the people on the planet. And that’s assuming that the individual barely squeaked past the Mensa bar, it’s entirely possible that he is oen of the few Mensans who are as far beyond the Mensa requirements as the requirements themselves are beyond the average 100 IQ individual.

As for insecurities, I can honestly say that I have never met an insecure Mensan. Of course, I’ve never been to a meeting or anything, and as is probably abundantly clear to most of the regulars by now, my membership is little more than one of the many tools in the AWCA arsenal. But since the subject of personal insecurity was raised, I would be remiss if I failed to note that getting one’s panties in a bunch over someone else’s membership card is hardly a reliable indicator of a confident and self-contained personality. A reaction to Mensa membership always tends to remind me of those poor independents who spent four years walking around a Greek-dominated campus complaining about fraternities and wearing a GDI sweatshirt.