Category: Uncategorized

Pederasts and their atheist enablers

I found it difficult to believe that Uganda was on the verge of passing a law that would require the death penalty for merely being homosexual as various atheist sites have been reporting, especially since by all reports it is an extremely popular law. Unsurprisingly, about thirty seconds of research revealed that the critics of the law have played a little fast and loose in their portrayal of it. While homosexuality is illegal in Uganda and has been for more than 100 years, the death penalty attached to the new law is primarily intended to stop the homosexual rape of children and the disabled and passing on the HIV virus.

Given that Uganda is one of the third-world countries presently targeted by sex tourists and the country also passed laws against cannibalism and sex tourism recently, it should be perfectly clear that the law involves more than societal hatred for homosexuals. Now, I don’t support capital punishment in criminal law because I believe giving the state the power of life or death over its citizens is an inherently dangerous idea. Nor do I understand how locking up homosexuals in same-sex prisons is supposed to be an effective deterrent. I would not support a law like the anti-homosexuality bill being enacted in the United States since legality is not morality and homosexuals should be free to choose Hell in their own way, just like everyone else is.

However, the more pressing question is not why some Western Christians would fail to denounce this law, but rather, why those who so vehemently oppose it are defending the right of gay pedophiles to rape children. Now, it’s perfectly reasonable to take a position opposing the long-term jailing of individuals for the crime – and in Uganda, it has long been a crime – of engaging in homosexual acts, although it’s not actually all that reasonable unless you are normally in the position of expressing your opinion regarding Ugandan law. But life sentences for practicing homosexuals is clearly not the only thing most of these sites are complaining about because they are specifically referencing the death penalty.

This reaction against what is clearly a very popular law in Uganda highlights the anti-democratic aspect of Western progressivism. If the great majority of people in Uganda don’t want to put up with homosexuality, why should they? It’s clearly the sacred Will of the People, after all. And more importantly, how is this of concern to anyone who doesn’t live in Uganda, barring those who will have to give up their pedophile safaris in the future? Given their opposition to such laws, you would think that banning the mass importation of Ugandans and other like-minded third-worlders who will support similar laws here in the United States would be a more urgent issue, but ironically, importing third-worlders is a policy favored by most progressives.

There is, of course, a perfectly rational solution to the situation. Since Uganda doesn’t want its gays, and American progressives insist that gays and immigrants are good for a community, why don’t progressive communities across America simply encourage gay immigration from Uganda? Everyone wins! And it’s eminently practical too, since Uganda’s estimated 500,000 gays would make up less than one-third of the 1.8 million foreigners who annually immigrate to America.

Economics and evolution

Scott Hatfield of Monkey Trials brings an interesting series of posts by David Sloan Wilson to our attention:

One important theme that emerged was the yawning gap between economic theory and evolutionary theory. Economists are very smart people, but when smart people take off in the wrong direction, they go a very long way. As Eric Beinhocker (one of the participants) recounts in his book The Origin of Wealth, neoclassical economics was originally inspired by physics and led to an enormous body of formal theory based on assumptions that are required for mathematical tractability but that make no sense from an evolutionary perspective…. If economics and evolution are different paradigms with a yawning gap between them, then it will be very difficult to get from one to another in an incremental fashion. Every time we try to make one assumption in economic theory more realistic from an evolutionary perspective, it will conflict with the other assumptions and will be resisted by those accustomed to the economic paradigm. Scientific progress will require comparing the two paradigms as package deals and accepting or rejecting them on that basis.

I have to say that it is refreshing to see an evolutionist admitting that perhaps economists may actually be intelligent, (their recent performance notwithstanding), and simply have a different way of looking at things. This is much preferable to the defensive shrieking and finger pointing we have come to expect from biologists forced to confront basic economic concepts. Unfortunately, the response to perfectly reasonable questions like “what is the average rate of evolution?” tends to be some variant of “You know nothing about evolution or science and the reason I can’t answer any of your questions is because you’re stupid!”

Well, that’s helpful. I’m much more convinced that you know what you’re talking about now….

Now, the Walrasian-Keynesian neoclassical formalist paradigm to which Wilson refers was a detour from the earlier and in many ways superior economics of Turgot and the School of Salamanca and it certainly has many weaknesses. Since I favor the Austrian School, I am by no means wedded to the mathematical assumptions and artificial equilibria which Wilson implicitly questions. However, despite the gaps, I also see many similarities between what has now evolved into a Samuelsonite Neo-Keynesian macroeconomic orthodoxy and the Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy of the evolutionists. Both scientific consensuses are highly intolerant of criticism, produce predictive models that are reliably wrong, and take an approach that should be labeled “Kuhn’s Ostrich” toward anything that might threaten their current dogma.

Unfortunately for the sake of evolutionists who are actually interested in improving their theories rather than defending their dogma, the time scale on which they operate prevents their theoretical flaws from being exposed as rapidly as is the case with illegitimate economic orthdoxies. Pure Keynesian general theory was vanquished during the recession of the 1970s, the two Japanese Lost Decades eviscerated the monetarist heretics of the Chicago School, and the current contraction should cause the collapse of the SNK synthesis over the next decade. The false dichotomy of monetarism vs Neo-Keynesianism has already been exposed; whether the successor is some Minskyite Post-Keynesian doctrine, the Austrian school, or, as I expect, a blending of the two with a strong dash of behavioral economics, economics will be greatly transformed.

While I have hopes for genetics eventually putting the final stake through the tattered remnants of TENS that still survive the modern synthesis, it’s quite clear that in the absence of an unexpected Kuhnian crisis, biology will continue to be handicapped by its reliance on what is at its core nothing more than a quasi-medieval philosophical foundation rather than a properly scientific one. But Wilson’s perspective is an unusual one and I expect to follow his Paradigm series with interest.

I am, however, more than a little dubious of Wilson’s attempt to construct an analogy fitting paradigms into evolutionary stable strategy. “Intriguingly, paradigms can be regarded as the intellectual equivalent of local stable equilibria in complexity theory and adaptive peaks in evolutionary theory.” This sounds suspiciously like Dawkins’s “meme” nonsense to me, especially in light of Wilson’s obvious awareness of the risks inherently involved in adapting concepts from one discipline into another.

Adios 401k

The Market Ticker smells smoke coming out of the treasury market:

Now this is a guaranteed rape job. In a short conversation this noontime that CNBC apparently has omitted from their archives (Why’s that folks?) Rick Santelli was talking about a potential to effectively force money into the Treasury market. Where would they get this?

From your 401k and IRA accounts!

I find it very difficult to believe that the fiscal and monetary authorities would be that stupid. On the other hand, perhaps they’re just that desperate. California is on the verge of melting down again, house prices are looking ready to start collapsing soon, and the only reason that U3 unemployment isn’t worse is because the size of the labor force continues to shrink despite continued immigration.

Mailvox: an atheist economist considers TIA

SS writes back:

Thank you for taking the time to answer my last email in considerable length on your blog. I wrote with questions about your latest book and professed an interest in reading The Irrational Atheist at some later date. I managed to finish it on a long flight back to the US a few days ago, and after a few days to think about it, I think you wrote a very good book that ought to be required reading for any atheist wanting to take on religion and especially Christianity.

While I can’t speak for the reactions of most atheists, I hope you won’t mind if I make a few observations and ask a few questions of my own.

(1) I think your tripartite criticism of the Dawkins-Harris-Hitchens group was both reasonable and accurate. I haven’t read either of Harris’s books (and have no intentions of doing so), and have been greatly underwhelmed by some of Hitchens’s public debates with people who actually know what they are talking about. I was not particularly convinced by Dawkins’s book either, but I didn’t quite realise how little he actually knows about religion until I read your dissection of his book.

(2) I particularly liked your division of atheism and atheists into the High Church and Low Church varieties. I started out as what you call a High Church atheist, but as my political beliefs changed to a more libertarian bent I found myself repulsed by just how militant many atheists- particularly the European variety- have become. In a recent interview with PJTV, author David Berlinski called atheism an “adolescent” view, and I think he’s got a point. If atheists really want to build a coherent argument, we have to stop sounding like a bunch of stroppy teenagers. I think your book makes this point very effectively.

(3) I am curious, though: why is it that in your chapter regarding the perceived Christian misdeeds of the past, you have excluded the Spanish conquest of the Americas, or the forceful introduction of Christianity into Scandinavia? If I understand your writing correctly, you argue that one should not judge a religion by its followers, and vice versa. But I think your argument would have been greatly strengthened by looking at one or both episodes, and at the reactions of the Catholic Church in particular to the grievous misdeeds carried out in its name in Central and South America during the 16th Century. I think that if you had addressed this, your argument would have been nearly airtight.

(4) Your point regarding the “red hand of atheism” is spot-on. It is an absolute travesty that my fellow atheists rarely, if ever, recognise that atheist Communism and Socialism is responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent people. Since becoming a libertarian a few years ago I’ve been disgusted by the apologies made by atheists for the horrific abuses of Communism, particularly in China and Russia, and it is completely unacceptable that atheists cannot recognise their culpability in promoting an essentially evil view of government. Until we repudiate the hedonistic and left-wing philosophies that pass for considered thought among the New Atheists, we do not deserve to be taken seriously in questions of morality and government.

(5) Your point about the way in which atheists construct our systems of morality is well made, and I take your argument about “moral parasitism” without offence. I am yet to be fully convinced, however- though I agree with both you and John Locke that atheists have a very hard time trying to prove that we are “moral”. (Given the awful record of atheists with political power, I think we’ve got a long way to go.) I think that the remarkable similarities that are found in the moral systems of various religions and civilisations demonstrates that it is possible for morality to “evolve”. This is not to say that all moral systems are equally acceptable. Suffice to say that I think I have a lot more reading to do in this area before I can fully agree or disagree with your argument.

In his email, SS also informed me that my surmise was correct and he is an LSE guy. Which is unsurprising, given that he is obviously more intelligent than the run-of-the-mill Dawkinsian atheist – it’s interesting to see the very different way TIA is viewed when seen from the perspective of someone who has come to it by way of RGD. I suspect economists will tend to be a little more open-minded than either physicists or biologists on average due to the speed with which the orthodox scientific consensus is regularly shown to be inadequate. This makes it much more difficult to shut off one’s brain and accept a doxastic division of labor based on credentialed authority. SS wrote later in his email: “Four years later, I’m convinced that the economic theory I learned is nearly useless. Maths, though, was great fun- and rather more useful.” He actually has 11 points, so I’ll address the first five today and save the rest for next week.

(1) I think one really has to read at least one of Harris’s books in order to appreciate how reliably awful his reasoning is. Hitchens, on the other hand, can be skipped because he doesn’t even attempt to make a case. His book is little more than a series of unconnected anecdotes, declarations, and complaints.

(2) One of my goals in writing TIA was to embarrass the atheist community into throwing out the likes of Dawkins and Harris in favor of developing a more intelligent, more rational atheism with a broader historical perspective. This is important; I read an article in a UK paper recently that was calling for an alliance between European Christians and secularists to deal with the rising tide of Islam, and that’s simply never going to happen so long as the atheist community is dominated by the rabid Christian haters. One of the more remarkable things I’ve noticed about atheists over the last few years is how utterly ignorant of history they tend to be.

(3) Since TIA was a response to the various atheist books, not an general Christian apology, I saw no reason to introduce defenses that were outside that context. The omission of such historical events initially surprised me when I read the books, given their goal of attacking Christianity, until I realized that the New Atheists know virtually nothing about the historical conversion of Northern Europe, the colonization of Central America, or the Belgian atrocities in the Congo. As anyone who has read Summa Elvetica knows, some of the theological issues surrounding these events are of interest to me, but they weren’t relevant to TIA.

(4) Yes, I tend to agree. The transparent attempts of militant atheists to disassociate the historical actions of militant atheists from their known atheism is intellectually shameful. However, I don’t think the needed repudiation is particularly likely, despite the Randians and Michael Shermer’s pro-Austrian perspective, due to the logical consequences and philosophical implications of godlessness.

(5) The “remarkable similarities that are found in the moral systems of various religions and civilisations may demonstrate that it is possible for morality to ‘evolve'”. Or they may indicate that God has written His Law in the human heart and the various divergences from it are to be expected as the result of societies falling away from it to varying degrees. Or, as I contend, the similarities are not be anywhere nearly as similar as those who don’t study history believe them to be.

Not so fast

Markku is under the impression that he managed to catch me making a mistake about God’s knowledge of the design imperfections of His Creation. I think I can demonstrate that this is not correct:

“I think Jesus was the fix for a design gone haywire.”

Can’t be.

1Pe 1:19-20 But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot: Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you.

Now, Markku is correct to the extent that the verses make it clear that Jesus cannot have been a fix conceived subsequent to the problem. However, I think Markku is making a mistake in equating Jesus Christ’s existence and potential mission with the actual sacrifice of his life here. Since we already knew that the Word was with God from the start, his existence before the foundation of the world isn’t in question from a Biblical perspective. However, we can also see that the foreordaining does not refer to his “precious blood”, although I agree that the reference is still in the context of him redeeming Man. This distinction between the potential redemption and fact of the redeeming sacrifice is perhaps more apparent in other translations.

NIV: For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.

Now, Markku’s interpretation is potentially correct, as it indicates that God was aware from before the beginning of the possible need to send Jesus Christ to redeem Man. The Redeemer was chosen from the start, but not revealed until later. But this does not make his interpretation necessarily correct because it is perfectly plausible that God would have understood that Man was capable of falling and had a backup plan prepared in case of such an event.

As a programmer – a very good programmer, as a matter of fact – Markku is well-equipped to understand the concept of an if/then structure created during the design phase. So, while these verses from 1st Peter certainly permit his interpretation of a scripted scenario of Fall and Redemption, they fall short of conclusively proving it. This means that my interpretation of an unscripted scenario remains Biblically tenable and it is possible that Jesus was the predetermined fix for a design with multiple potential outcomes.

Robbery by police

Considering that highway robbery is in the job description, I don’t know why we’re supposed to be surprised when the occasional policeman simply extends the logic one step further:

Minneapolis police officer Timothy Edward Carson’s shift on Wednesday started at 9 a.m. But he wasn’t there. By the time he told a supervisor he was running late at 9:30, the FBI says, Carson had robbed an Apple Valley bank and was well on his way to getting caught. Carson, 28, was arrested early Thursday and appeared in federal court Thursday afternoon, charged with bank robbery. More criminal charges are expected to follow; police sources familiar with the investigation say he could be connected to at least a dozen robberies in the metro area over the past two weeks.

In the eyes of the police, his real crime wasn’t robbing banks. It was robbing banks for his personal benefit. Police robbery is supposed to be for the benefit of the department and the state, not the individual policeman. If Carson had simply walked into the bank with his uniform on and arrested the money under the pretense of it being laundered drug money, he’d have won a medal and a bonus.

Veni, perdi, clami

Mikio is merely the latest in a tediously long series of would-be critics to show up, repeatedly make blatant errors of fact and logic in an attempt to criticize one of my posts, then whine and cry because I’m not inclined to indulge inept argumentation. Since these critics, (who used to be feminists but of late have tended to be atheists), are more than a little handicapped when it comes to logic, it seems to escape their attention that the reason the Rules of the Blog exist is because their behavior is not only common, but reliably follows a predictable pattern.

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

Now, the fact that Mikio fell into the “intellectually underpowered” category was obvious from the start, but was underlined by his hapless attempt to quibble with my demonstration of his errors, which actually exceeded the requisite three. The amusing thing was that he subsequently attempted to argue that my explication of his incompetence, which was amply demonstrated in the preceding comments, was an ad hominem dismissal. As anyone who actually knows what the term means, it quite clearly was not.

Strike 1 – erroneous assumption confusing observation for fairy tale
Strike 2 – failed analogy
Strike 3 – false accusation of logical incapacity and unsupported assumptions

As is the social autistic’s wont, Mikio has proceeded to whine, complain, and even lie about why his later comments were deleted, despite the fact that they were treated precisely as the rules dictated they would be. He has now asserted that because comments which violate the rules are deleted, there is a possibility that I am avoiding strong arguments that expose the flaws in my thinking. He is not the first to suggest this; it is a common theme among those who find their comments getting deleted. He has also claimed that the regular readers here are obsequious and clueless followers and that challenges to thinking are not welcome here.

Of course, it is easy to expose the numerous falsehoods in Mikio’s dishonest claims. While it is theoretically possible that some strong arguments are being deleted, because I almost never delete the first few comments made by any commenter, we have sufficient evidence to judge the general quality of the arguments that have been presented as well as information about the intellectual capacity of the person presenting them. For example, there is absolutely no reason to suspect that the same individual who made the panoply of errors that Mikio did in the post entitled The Porker Principle is capable of producing stronger and more effective arguments.

Second, dozens, if not hundreds of readers have the opportunity to read posts that are deleted. While some masochists may enjoy such posts, no one has ever seen fit to argue that any of them have been deleted because they are too effective or because I am incapable of answering them. Third, Mikio assumes that I do not have access to deleted comments for future use in the event that someone is foolish enough to claim that I was incapable of answering a specific argument they made in a comment that was deleted. Fourth, the large number of critical comments contained in the comments over the last five years show that challenges to my thinking are far more welcome here than they are anywhere else on the Internet. There is considerable evidence, both here and on other sites, that I am not one who fears debate and runs away from it. Finally, the six thousand or so daily readers who are familiar with this blog all know very well what small minority of comments get deleted and why, since the behavior is so predictable.

Once someone demonstrates that he is either unable or unwilling to engage in rational, intelligent debate, there is no reason to waste any time on them or their comments since it is like dunking a basketball on a fifth-grader. I have no reason to ban them, but neither do I have any interest in anything they have to say. I understand that it’s difficult to accept that you’re not quite as intelligent as you were led to believe back when you were the smartest koi in the little garden pond, but it’s a lesson that you’re eventually going to learn one way or another. And the sooner you learn it, the less of an ass you’re going to make of yourself in the future.

Post-Christian culture shock

As I have repeatedly warned, post-Christianity isn’t necessarily that shiny, sexy, secular science fiction society that so many atheists fantasize about. Secularism is merely a transition phase from civilization to barbarism:

Witch doctors in Uganda have admitted their part in human sacrifice amid concerns that the practice is spreading in the African country…. The African country’s government claimed human sacrifice was on the increase. According to officials trying to tackle it, the crime is directly linked to rising levels of development and prosperity – and an increasing belief that witchcraft can help people get rich quickly.

It is all to telling that so many clueless atheists are more worried about prospective Ugandan laws banning homosexuality than they are about the rise of human sacrifice! And it’s interesting to see yet another example smashing the progressive notion that rising levels of development and prosperity will suffice to create a more civilized society.

Mailvox: evading Euthyphro

NR queries the Catholic response:

I regularly visit your blog and remember that you’ve discussed the Euthyphro question. I was looking at a Catholic website (www.catholic.com) that answers theological questions, and the old question came up on their website like this:

“Is the difference between good and bad whatever God says it is? Or is God good because he conforms to a standard of goodjavascript:void(0)ness?”

And the question was answered this way:

“Neither. Goodness is not imposed upon God from some external standard nor is it invented by him. Rather, it is rooted in his own eternal and unchanging nature. For example, when God commands us to love him with our whole heart and to our neighbor as ourselves, that is rooted in the fact that God himself is love (cf. 1 Jn 4:8). He could not suddenly choose to forbid loving God and neighbor, or command hating God and neighbor, for he cannot be other than what he is.”

Is this a valid answer in your opinion?

It’s potentially valid answer, but I consider it to be inaccurate as well as evasive because it confuses God’s essence with God’s will in an attempt to avoid the so-called dilemma. I believe God can choose to distinguish between His will and His essence and I suspect that He has done precisely that in the case of certain individuals who had specific roles to play at a crucial nexus. In fact, there is an inherent contradiction in the two ideas of a) a Catholic God who cannot forbid loving God, and, b) an Omniderigiste God who controls the actions of all individuals, including those who do not love Him. Of course, Catholics do not necessarily subscribe to omniderigence, so this contradiction is not necessarily intrinsic to the Catholic answer.

So, I come down strongly on the side of good and bad being whatever God says it is. We know, from the Bible, that God does change His will. But changing one’s will is not the equivalent of changing one’s essence. And I never lose any sleep over the possibility that He will change His mind about His definitions of good and bad tomorrow, since that requires a failure to distinguish between the concepts of possibility and probability.

Iceland defies the vampire squids

A few politicians are finally beginning to listen to the people rather than the banksters:

Iceland will hold a referendum on a depositor accord with the U.K. and Netherlands after President Olafur R. Grimsson blocked the bill in a move that threatens to undermine the island’s efforts to repair international relations.

“The constitution is very clear about the need for a referendum in this situation,” Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir told reporters in Reykjavik today.

Grimsson vetoed the so-called Icesave accord after more than 60,000 of Iceland’s 320,000 inhabitants signed a petition urging him to reject the legislation. The bill, which polls show about 70 percent of the population opposes, had obliged Iceland to use $5.5 billion in borrowed funds from the U.K. and Netherlands to cover depositor claims from the two countries after the failure of Landsbanki Islands hf in October 2008. The absence of clear cross-border regulatory rules on depositor insurance has allowed settlement of the claims to drag on and left Icelandic taxpayers disgruntled over having to pay for the failure of a private bank.

Why should all the people of Iceland be responsible for paying 40 percent of their annual GDP on behalf of the 22 people who owned the failed Icelandic bank? Why should they be held responsible for paying off the Dutch and UK governments just because the Dutch and UK politicians decided to prevent Dutch and UK investors from suffering the negative consequences of their bad investment decisions? The truth is that there is no reason whatsoever, and the Icelandic people should call the banking community’s bluff; the banks need borrowers more than the borrowers need banks. And even in the unlikely event that the financial isolation threat is carried out, in the long run the Icelandic people will be much better off without having the vampire squids constantly draining their economy of its profits. They will be even better off if they use this incident to stay out of the EU.

“Britain warned Iceland that it would be frozen out of the European Union after its President abruptly vetoed the repayment of a £3.6 billion loan.”

I seem to recall that 70% of the American public opposed TARP. And I imagine an even higher percentage will oppose SuperTARP once they realize that the White House just opened up the floodgates for a continuous banking bailout via Fannie and Freddie. So, it’s interesting to see this demonstration in real-time of which countries are genuinely democratic and which are not.