Category: Uncategorized

The next female ghetto

Broadway is all but dead. Television ratings continue to decline. Fantasy literature is increasingly indistinguishable from camp parody. University degrees cost more and are worth less than ever before. But since I generally despise Hollywood and the trivial medium of film, I can only regard the news that women now make up the majority of moviegoers and ticket buyers as great news.

Yes, folks — women go to the movies more than men do…. Another line that I want to bury for good is that young men go to the movies more than anyone else. That’s just bullshit. Younger men don’t go to the movies more than younger women. Younger people in general go to the movies more, but based on the MPAA numbers of frequent moviegoers (ones who go more than once a month) in the coveted demographic of 18-24, women make up 3.4 million filmgoers while men make up 3.1 million. Suck on that Hollywood!

This development, even more than big high-definition flatscreens and digital piracy, will marginalize the film industry. From church pews to college lectures, once women become the majority and quite reasonably have their preferences catered to, men are driven away. And it’s a cautionary tale to game publishers who have been hearing the siren song of “the female gamer” for fifteen years now.

It’s really not that difficult. Women are more open to male entertainment than men are open to female entertainment. A woman might not go see Star Wars 20 times, but she won’t mind seeing it once or twice. A man, or at least a straight man, would rather slash his hand with 20 papercuts before rolling it in salt than go to see the Sex In The City movie even once. So, as incredible as it sounds, we can expect the movies to be further dumbed down from what is an already abysmal level.

Needless to say, this transition point suggests that fantasy sports, MMOs and games with episodic content are only going to get bigger. And it also may explain why the bottom dropped completely out of games with movie tie-ins last year.

Mailvox: Divine communication

DF requests clarification:

I have a question for you. In your Literal or non-literal post, you stated, “I do not believe that the human mind is capable of properly comprehending either the Word of God or the Will of God.” God’s thoughts are above our thoughts, that is clear. However, do you really believe that a God who a) created humans, b) became a human, and c) openly desires communion with humans lacks the capacity or willingness to communicate with humans on a level that we can “properly comprehend”? If so, which is it: incapacity or unwillingness?

First, I must note that DF’s three points are not quite correct. The Father created Man, but He never became a man. That is, of course, a minor correction and not pertinent to the question at hand. I believe that the answer has to be unwillingness, since the design of Man is such that Man lacks the capacity to fully comprehend God’s Will or His reason. And Man clearly lacked this capacity from the start, as evidenced by Adam’s failure to grasp the difference between Good and Evil.

So, while it is God’s intention that we understand and obey Him to the best of our limited capacity to do so, it is clearly not His intention that we fully comprehend either His purposes or His reason. The thoughtful reader will note that this also explains the common atheist complaint that God does not make it easy for them to see or believe in Him. There is no Scriptural indication that making things easy for us to comprehend has ever been any part of His intentions, and indeed, there is a great deal of evidence indicating the precise opposite.

I’m not an effigy

One guess as to the race of the teacher who hung an effigy of Obama to protest Obama’s support for teacher accountability:

A teacher at a failing school where he and all his colleagues are being fired hung an effigy of President Barack Obama in his classroom, apparently in reaction to Obama’s support of extreme measures to ensure accountability in schools. The teachers union on Thursday condemned the effigy, discovered Monday in the teacher’s third-floor classroom at Central Falls High School, saying it was wrong and cannot be condoned under any circumstances….

She said that the teacher had been issued a “strong letter of reprimand” and that she considered it an internal matter.

This strikes me as one of those cases, rather like those rape and assault newspaper reports where the description of the attacker is unaccountably absent, where you can reliably deduce the color of the responsible individual by the fact of its absence from the report. In this case, that deduction tends to be supported by the fact that every show on ABCNNBCBS is not presently populated by angry race-hustlers decrying how this is a prime example of the racism that still pervades America in the year 2010.

Of course, I could easily be wrong. For all I know or care, Rhode Island could be entirely populated by the Chinese.

Mailvox: inference and fact

Blackblade explains his take on Richard Dawkins’s invalid substitution of inference for fact in his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth:

My reading may be oversimplifying but, summarising, his fundamental assertion is this: There is sufficient evidence, direct and inferred, to prove that evolution has occurred (although not the mechanism by which it did so), to the normal standards of such proof and it should therefore be viewed as fact.

He then attempts to justify his nomenclature of evolution as a “fact” by somewhat confusing hypotheses, theorems and facts and the definition thereof. He even goes so far as to create a new one called theorums so as to be more precise in his meaning. However, since you made a few words up yourself in TIA for a similar purpose I think you can’t complain on that one too much 🙂 But, yes, I do agree that your original point was valid.

However, and this is why I made my original point, the whole thing is a distraction from the fundamental issue … is there sufficient evidence to conclude that evolution has occurred and with what degree of confidence … the nomenclature of what confidence level deserves the imprimatur “Fact” is, to me at least, largely inconsequential and Dawkins would have done well to have avoided the pseudo-philosophical and just focused on the evidence.

I certainly can’t disagree with the latter part of that statement. Dawkins would always do well to avoid anything that is even remotely philosophical, pseudo or otherwise, since philosophy is demonstrably outside both his competence and his interest. However, what Blackblade is missing here is that The Greatest Show on Earth is not a rational case for the theory of evolution by natural selection or possibly something else. It is instead a polemical work of propaganda; as in The God Delusion, Dawkins is not presenting his case and methodically supporting that case with evidence, he is instead merely attempting to browbeat and bedazzle the careless or moderately intelligent reader into accepting something that is provably and demonstrably untrue. The reason that Dawkins could not simply focus on the evidence because the evidence, scientific and otherwise, is insufficient to make a convincing case, let alone a conclusive one.

Consider the insidious and characteristic bait-and-switch in which Dawkins engages in the first chapter alone:

“Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt. Beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact.”

“Evolution is a fact, and this book will demonstrate it.”

“I shall demonstrate that evolution is an inescapable fact.”

“I shall show the irrefragable power of the inference that evolution is a fact.”

Notice the rapid devolution in Dawkins’s case from “evolution is an inescapable fact” to “I infer that evolution is a fact”. These are two very different statements because an inference is not a fact, by definition. It cannot reasonably be considered a fact no matter how much Dawkins elects to argue that it can be. And Dawkins knows this perfectly well, for he even writes: “The dictionary definition of a fact mentions ‘actual obervation or authentic testimony, as opposed to what is merely inferred‘ (emphasis added). The implied pejorative of that ‘merely’ is a bit of a cheek. Careful inference can be more reliable than ‘actual observation’, however strongly our intuition protests at it.”

But what Dawkins has done here is to cherry-pick aspects of the definition of “fact” and silently substitute “apparent fact” for “fact” in order to dishonestly justify his substitution of inference for fact. It is true that careful inference can be more reliable than actual observation, but it is also true that astrology, blind luck, and women’s intuition can be more reliable than actual observation. None of these comparisons of reliability have anything to do with the definition of a fact. In addition to leaving out the greater portion of the definition, Dawkins skates over the obvious distinction between fact and apparent fact, which is to say that if an observation or testimony is incorrect, then the claim based on that observation or testimony is clearly not a fact. Now let’s consider the definition.

FACT
–noun

1. something that actually exists; reality; truth
2. something known to exist or to have happened
3. a truth known by actual experience or observation; something known to be true
4. something said to be true or supposed to have happened

Dawkins blatantly leaves out the first two definitions and the second part of the third one in a devious attempt to leverage the small opening provided by the first part of the third one into misleading the reader into accepting the idea that an inference is equivalent to a fact. But it is not. It cannot be, according to its own definition.

INFERENCE
–noun

1. the act or process of inferring.
2. something that is inferred
3. Logic.
a. the process of deriving the strict logical consequences of assumed premises.
b. the process of arriving at some conclusion that, though it is not logically derivable from the assumed premises, possesses some degree of probability relative to the premises.
c. a proposition reached by a process of inference.

Of course, the reason that Dawkins wants to claim that his proposition, his conclusion with some degree of probability that is not logically derivable from the premises, is something that known to exist or have happened, is that if he sticks to what he can actually prove to be true, he has absolutely no basis for claiming that people who reject that proposition are “History-deniers”. Because, by the very definition of inference, there is some degree of probability that the skeptics are correct to doubt the validity of his conclusion.

I note with no little amusement that no man who was so foolish to write, as Dawkins did on page 249 of The God Delusion: “I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca— or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan.”, should ever dare to use the term “History-denier” in public. Remember, we are dealing with such a historical ignoramus here that he not only doesn’t know it was atheists who destroyed 41,000 of Russia’s 48,000 churches, 240 of 700 Buddhist temples in Vietnam, and 7,000 Buddhist temples in Tibet in the previous century, but genuinely believes religion is a primary cause of war.

Blackblade points out that Dawkins coins a somewhat useful term, “theorum”, in order to distinguish non-mathematically provable scientific concepts in which he has a high level of confidence from mathematical theorems. The ironic thing, however, is that Dawkins destroys his own case in his very definition of “theorum”.

“[It] has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; [it is] a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles or causes of something known or observed.”

What follows are 434 pages of explaining why the reader should accept Dawkins’s proposition as a fact despite the absence of observation and experiment in support of it. I think my favorite argument was Dawkins’s technologically naive citation of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in mammals as good evidence against a designer. Speaking as an veteran technology designer, I would invite anyone who finds that argument convincing to open up the shell of an electronic device; in many cases you will find no shortages of wires indicating similar reroutings of the printed circuit boards.

And ironically, even if evolution by possible natural selection is both propounded and accepted as accounting for the known facts by every sane, informed, intelligent individual, that pesky and means that in addition to not being a fact, Dawkins’s inference does not even qualify as a theorum by his own chosen definition.

The historical fact of the matter is that evolution by natural selection is a failed science. It has a long and inglorious record of failed predictions that puts even Keynesian economics to shame. Evolutionists know this, which is why they prefer polemic to predictions and why the foremost evolutionary propagandist has adopted rhetorical tactics that are utilized by the devotees of another pseudoscience, anthropogenic climate change/global warming.

The Greatest Show on Earth is an apt name for Dawkins’s book. For, as the man who made that phrase famous is popularly and erroneously supposed to have said, there’s a sucker born every minute.

Mailvox: History and Christianity

JF wonders how to handle the historical angle:

I am a new reader to your blog (better late than never!) and I must say I am very impressed. I have your book “The Irrational Atheist” on my wishlist and am looking forward to reading it when the time comes. Quick summary of my worldview: Baptized as a Catholic, bordered on Deism/Agnosticism in my teens/young adulthood and then re-embraced Christianity after reading “Mere Christianity” by C.S Lewis, combined with a personal spiritual experience. I have now decided to return to the ranks of the RCC as I now approach my 30’s. After finding out the horrific crimes of State Atheism in the 20th century, and realizing the absolute bankruptcy of metaphysical naturalism in regards to objective morality and purpose, I lose no opportunity to challenge the few atheists I know and take them to task on their often narrow views. I have been successful when it comes to monotheism vs atheism. No problems there. The one chink in my armour, so to speak, is when discussing Christianity, and that is why I have come to you. While I am a mere amateur at this, you have ten times the intellect that I do and have sent the mightiest New Atheist arguments packing with the tail between their legs. So here is my problem and question for you and the purpose of this email:

How do/can I argue that Jesus Christ is the Son of God/Divine when the historicity, authorship and authenticity of the Gospels are often challenged or even dismissed by some scholars? Another example of this challenge is that many atheists (or non denominational monotheists, like my fiancee) champion the supposed fact that none of the Gospels are actual eyewitness accounts, but second or third-hand re-tellings of past events, often with gross embellishment and fabrication? Many scholars share this opinion and I find it difficult to refute. If one takes the Gospels (especially that of John) as an actual eye witness testimony of Jesus, then of course (thanks to the Lewis Trilema) one is almost forced to admit him to be the Son of God. But if someone does not consider the Gospels historically accurate, I have no way of arguing that Jesus was who he said he was.

First of all, you must recognize that they have just handed you a gigantic sledgehammer with which to smash their feigned rationale for their lack of faith. It is only the historically illiterate and the willfully dishonest who consider the Gospels to be historically inaccurate. There are three things to keep in mind. 1) If it were not for the supernatural claims, not a single historian would cast any aspersions on either the Old or New Testament. 2) As an archeological guide, the Bible has repeatedly proven to be far more accurate than the current state of archeological science. There are a host of examples where scientists thought to have disproved the Biblical history, such as the nonexistent “Assyrian” and “Hittite” empires, only to learn to their chagrin that they were incorrect and the Bible was supported by the archeological evidence. The relatively recent discovery of a Bronze Age kingdom in Israel which corresponds with the Davidic kingdom is another, more recent example of this phenomenon. 3) Rejecting the Bible as a historically reliable document on any of the grounds usually cited requires rejecting most of history’s most famous figures, including Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great.

For example, the primary source on Alexander the Great, Arrian, was writing as a second-hand source more than 400 years after Alexander. All four Gospels, on the other hand, were clearly written within 70 years of Jesus Christ’s resurrection. “The Gospels are dated traditionally as follows: Mark is believed to be the first gospel written around A.D. 60. Matthew and Luke follow and are written between A.D. 60-70; John is the final gospel, written between A.D. 90-100.” And Paul’s letters were written between 48 AD and 60 AD.

The best way of defeating these silly arguments is through brutal mockery. For example, you can ask them if they are asserting that it was the Persian Empire that occupied Judea and not the Roman Empire as the Bible has it. Or you can ask them if it was Julius Caesar who ordered the famous census that led to Mary and Joseph being at Bethlehem, not Octavian. You will be surprised at how most atheists with whom you speak will stick their heads directly into the easiest of historical traps. Once they have done so, you can point out that they have absolutely no grounds for holding an opinion on the historical reliability of the Bible.

The zero-reserve banking system

Unbelievable. They certainly didn’t teach this in our economics textbooks. From Ben Bernanke’s testimony to the House Committee on Financial Services:

Given the very high level of reserve balances currently in the banking system, the Federal Reserve has ample time to consider the best long-run framework for policy implementation. The Federal Reserve believes it is possible that, ultimately, its operating framework will allow the elimination of minimum reserve requirements, which impose costs and distortions on the banking system.

Those who have RGD will note that this elimination of reserve requirements would theoretically permit the former fractional-reserve banks to make an infinite amount of loans regardless of what deposits they hold. This would also theoretically provide a rational basis for the hyperinflation scenario, but as I have pointed out many times before, even an infinite money multiple will require an infinity of borrowers.

If this does not make it clear to you that the financial authorities are getting desperate, I don’t know what will. The ironic thing is that most people still believe that the fractional-reserve system is based on a 10% minimum reserve requirement.

And they wonder why we laugh

No woman who is incapable of figuring out that Time always outruns Beauty in the end can reasonably be considered intelligent. Consider Elizabeth Wurtzel’s lament that while beauty fades, loneliness lasts:

When I was still in my twenties, for several years I had this wonderful boyfriend; I’ll call him Gregg—he’s the one we’re all waiting for: tall, blue-eyed, with this thick black hair, all smart and sensitive, an inveterate graduate student who used to rub my feet at the end of the day with a lovely pink peppermint lotion from the Body Shop. It was young and romantic. You’d have thought we were happy. I think really we were happy. He was good for me: People met him and liked me better because I was going out with him; his sweetness redounded to me like a sunny day on a dark sidewalk. I could have and probably should have spent the rest of my life with him…. I became seasick with contentment. It was nauseating daily, and I couldn’t still myself against a funny feeling that there had to be more to life than waking up every day beside the same person. To say I was bored would be to misunderstand boredom: I did not need to take up table tennis or ballroom dancing—I needed a sense that this wasn’t the end of the story. The idea of forever with any single person, even someone great whom I loved so much like Gregg, really did seem like what death actually is: a permanent stop….

Age is a terrible avenger. The lessons of life give you so much to work with, but by the time you’ve got all this great wisdom, you don’t get to be young anymore. And in this world, that’s just about the worst thing that can happen—especially to a woman. Whoever said youth is wasted on the young actually got it wrong; it’s more that maturity is wasted on the old.

The single most amusing thing about the women of modernity is that in their pursuit of finding happiness through imitating masculinity, they have forgotten that most basic of market principle: buy low, sell high. Time is not cruel, but it is both indifferent and inexorable. In almost every circumstance, the women that I have seen turn down good men of suitable quality who wanted to marry them in their early and middle twenties wound up settling for lower quality men in their late twenties and thirties. And they are the fortunate and happy ones; those who are still unmarried and childless in their early forties are nearly all full of regrets for the various opportunities they either rejected or simply allowed to pass them by.

The root problem seems to be that women are horrifically bad at anticipating what they are going to want in the future. The usual female pattern proceeds thusly: In her teens, a woman wants to focus on her education and having fun through a series of practice relationships. Her main concern is actually how much admiration she generates from men and her concomitant status among women. In her early to middle twenties, she wants to focus on her job and having fun through sampling a variety of penises; her main concern is actually not getting tied down to any commitments, professional or personal. In both stages A and B, she will swear up and down that she doesn’t ever want to have children for some nonsensical reason or another, although she is open to getting married someday off in the distant and nebulous future.

Stage C begins when her friends start getting engaged, usually in her late-twenties. Then she decides that she might be “okay” with one or two children and begins a desultory search for a marriageable man. However, this search is usually interrupted by a series of disastrous affairs with various Alphas, bad boys, and marriage-allergic men. She often talks about how confused she is and has no coherent focus; her main concern is to maintain her social equivalency with her female friends. At this point, the smarter women settle down and get married to the best available man since their marriage value is still high enough that they can attract a man of reasonable quality. The more foolish women convince themselves that they are even more attractive than they were in their early twenties due to their educations and careers and decide they have another decade before they “have to settle”.

Stage D is the early to middle thirties. A detectable edge of desperation begins to set in; you will seldom talk to a woman in her thirties who does not bring up science out of the blue and and ramble on about how it will allow her to have children in her forties. She is often in total denial about the decline in her market value and often wastes years dating higher quality men who are not actually on the marriage market. Her focus is now getting married as soon as possible so she can still have children, however, her inability to properly value herself causes her to pass over the sort of men who are actually willing to settle for her.

Elizabeth Wurtzel is in stage E. She is past her prime, she knows she is past it, and she is now regretting the potential husband she foolishly threw away in stage C. Her focus is now on finding a husband, although she knows it is probably too late for children. She appears destined to be a Stage F failure, also known as a Companion to Many Cats. This is not a worthless societal role, or necessarily an undignified one, but it is not one that most young women in their teens dream about.

The basic problem of female self-valuation is compounded by the challenge posed by the male Madonna-Whore division. What is attractive to a man on a short term basis is not necessarily attractive to a man on a long term basis. I would estimate that a woman can expect to regularly attract men who are two points higher in Whore mode than she can in Madonna mode. If you’re a 20 year-old seven who regularly has flings with men you rate as eights and nines, you should actively look for marriage material among the men you would rate as fives to sevens. This will significantly increase your chances of long term success; remember that in 15 years you are going to be a five, not a seven, while that five that you find barely attractive now has the potential to move up to a six or even a seven on the scale due to the way women value financial success and social substance over physical looks.

There are always outliers, of course. And the progression I describe obviously doesn’t apply to all women. There are even a few lucky women who are more attractive in Stage C than in Stage A or B. But in general, a woman will be well served by applying the buy low, sell high principle and marrying a man who is between five and ten years older before she reaches the age of 25. And above all, remember that what you think you will want in ten years is almost surely not what you will actually want in ten years and that drama is much more entertaining on television than it is in real life.

And this comment really says it all: “I was shocked at my visceral response to reading this column. I cried uncontrollably. I’m tearing up as I type this comment. There are so many reasons why Elizabeth’s story had such an effect on me…. I spent my entire life working towards my career and then lost it in the blink of an eye. Meanwhile, men were basically play things coming in and out of my life. (Think Samantha; Sex and the City.) I was never the relationship type. My longest relationship lasted a year during my junior year of college. That was 20 years ago. Now, I’ll be 40 in July.”

Yes, I’m not ashamed to admit it. I laughed, I did.

Ed Brayton digs a deeper hole

Fresh from debating himself over whether Ellis Washington challenged him to a debate or not, Ed Brayton manages to completely miss the point of a column which was an introduction to a slideshow entitled Against the New Atheism that showed eight of the primary arguments made by the various New Atheists to be false:

I had to laugh while reading Vox Day’s most recent bit of absurdity at the Worldnutdaily. It is, like nearly everything he writes, little more than a string of ad hominems and arrogant pronouncements rather than any actual arguments. He really does seem to think that a haughty sneer and an insult regarding some entirely irrelevant trait of one of his enemies magically defeats their arguments…. Notice what’s missing from all of that? Anything even remotely resembling a substantive argument. Is that really the best he can do?

No, you dimwitted journalist, what defeats the New Atheist arguments is knowledge of history and the citation of copious statistical evidence combined with correctly applied logic. That column was simply the introduction to blowing the following arguments out of the water:

1. Religion Causes War (Harris, Dennett, Hitchens)
2. Religion Causes Violence (Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins)
3. Atheists Commit Less Crime (Harris, Dawkins)
4. The Red State Argument (Harris)
5. The Extinction Equation (Harris)
6. Religion Inhibits Science (Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins)
7. The Improbability of Divine Complexity (Dawkins)
8. Atheists are Very Intelligent (Harris, Dawkins, Lynn)

After conveniently ignoring seven of eight of these refutations, which are not only substantive arguments but also happen to be conclusive, Brayton unwisely proceeds to comment on my refutation of Dawkins’s Improbability of Divine Complexity.

“Ai yi yi, I missed that one. The proper response would be “OR…..the mere size of a genome is not the proper measure of complexity.”

Unsurprisingly, Brayton isn’t bright enough to avoid lumbering directly into the trap. Is he saying here that variance in genome size is not variance in information? Or is he saying that “complexity does not concern information”? And what, pray tell, is the proper measure of the complexity which Dawkins is utilizing in order to attempt proving Divine improbability?

You have to be pretty stupid to claim that I do not make substantive arguments. You also have to avoid actually reading anything I write. The clueless ignorance of anklebiters like Brayton borders on the artistic, indeed, it approaches the Platonic paradigm. Not even the most rabid Neo-Keynesian or fervent Chicago School Friedman fetishist would dream of suggesting that my arguments are insubstantial. Wrong, perhaps, but never insubstantial.