Category: Uncategorized

Novel: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

Novella: “Fountain of Age” by Nancy Kress

Novelette: “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang

Short Story: “Always” by Karen Joy Fowler

Script: Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro

Norton Award: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling.

Grand Master: Michael Moorcock

I note with wry amusement that SFWA seems to have survived despite one of its most notorious members sitting on the Nebula novel jury this year. Not that we had much to do, it being a bit of a lean year in science fiction and fantasy. Not a bad set of winners, although it’s ironic that SFWA should give Rowling an award for her worst book to date. But then, it’s probably the only YA title that most of the voters recognized.

The Magic Negro appears to have reversed polarity:

Obama Calls Bloggers Liars for Accurately Reporting His Words

You know a candidate is in trouble when his best hope is to ball-gag his wife, his spiritual advisor and his own bad self.

Thankfully, this sort of barbarous behavior could never happen here:

Twenty-four babies and 40 children under the age of six were among the 250 people rounded up in a raid on Friday, according to Nelson Chamisa, spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Yesterday they were crammed into cells in Southerton police station in central Harare.

“This is ruthlessness of the worst kind. How can you incarcerate children whose mothers have fled their homes hoping to give their children refuge?” asked an emotional Chamisa yesterday. “In Mugabe’s Zimbabwe even children are not spared the terror that befalls their parents.”

Monstrous! We should be so thankful that nothing like this could ever happen in Bush’s America!

Since it’s my philosophy that all honest criticism merits addressing, I’m finally turning to Mr. Tom Marking’s critique of TIA now:

1) Overview

On page 8 we find the following quotation: “These days atheism is, like the atheist’s ultimate destination, hot indeed.” And there are several quotes more obnoxious than this but I suspect they were offered tongue-in-cheek. This is exactly the type of stuff that diminishes his arguments and lends credence to the characterizations of Mr. Day which are prevalent on several science blogs. I know he is trying to be witty and irreverant but it becomes a pain after a while to wade through all this nonsense and get to the heart of his main critique of the New Atheist authors. In passing I will say that there is nothing more certain to piss off atheists than to threaten them with the ol’ hellfire and brimstone routine. We can always get that kind of stuff by tuning into the Sunday televangelist shows. We don’t need it from a book which supposedly wants to be taken seriously.

1. An ad hominum attack says nothing, positive or negative, about an unrelated argument made in its vicinity. If I correct your math, then call you an idiot, the latter action doesn’t change the fact that I showed your math was wrong.
2. The characterizations of me on various science blogs have little to do with my presentation and everything to do with the effectiveness of my arguments. PZ, for example, calls nearly every religious individual to whom he refers stupid. He very seldom, however, ever attempts to criticize my actual arguments; this is because he’s not capable of doing so. And he’s arguably the most capable of the aforementioned science bloggers, who are a very lightweight lot when it comes to brainpower.
3. The book is called The Irrational Atheist, an accusation which upsets the average atheist a lot more than any televangelist’s threats of nonexistent hellfire. Let’s just say that not pissing off atheists wasn’t exactly a priority. Dawkins and company set the rules, I’m just playing by them.

2.) NEW ATHEISTS SAY STUPID THINGS

Now I admit that Harris got a little carried away with his “even a single little girl once in a million years” bit, but can anyone seriously doubt that the remark about 260 million Americans presenting evidence is anything more than a rhetorical flourish? Does the author seriously think that Harris has in mind the opening of evidence processing centers in all 50 states? I doubt that very much. All he’s really saying is that theists assert that God exists so let them show evidence for that position.

Turning now to page 283 let us now peruse the author’s own pet theory comparing God to a computer game designer (a theory I might add which has the sanction of the majority of Christian theologians around the world – NOT!):

“Faced with a maliciously corrupted game, the posthuman designer can either turn it off or attempt to fix it. He could simply manually scrub each aspect of the game, but this brute force solution would risk creating new problems and would certainly warn the mischievous interloper. A more elegant solution would be to trap the malicious posthuman and his friends in the game without warning, then insert a viral APC designed to infect other APCs with the ability to resist the malice of the posthuman intruder. His purpose in doing so would be to salvage those APCs whose emergent behavior suits his original plan to develop AIs capable of demonstrating the behaviors required for the real game.”

Yeah, Vox, we’re really with you so far (translation: we have no friggin’ idea what the heck that last paragraph was all about). So yes, Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens say stupid things in their books from time to time and perhaps quite frequently, but so does Mr. Day and in great plentitude.

1. The main point, which seems to have escaped Mr. Marking, is that Harris’s multiple definitions of atheism directly conflict with one another. The secondary point, which also escapes him, is that theists aren’t obliged to present evidence to anyone to justify their beliefs. Harris made a rhetorical point, I mocked it in the process of making a better one.
2. I pointed out that the Game Designer God concept was not mainstream theology in the book. Neither I nor anyone else thinks it is anything but a potentially interesting analogy that might help some people get past their theodicy hang-up.
3. The fact that Mr. Marking can’t understand a perfectly clear analogy to an MMO is hardly testimony to my predilection for saying stupid things. Nor is one poor example sufficient evidence of a “great plentitude”.

3.) A QUESTION OF COMPETENCE

So Harris is right in this case – the civilized world does agree that slavery is an abomination. The fact that there still exist criminal organizations which flout international law is not proof that an anti-slavery consensus does not exist…. Vox cannot have it both ways. He cannot claim credit for Christianity abolishing slavery and at the same time claim there is no anti-slavery consensus. It must be one or the other….

116 centuries? That would mean the first religion, Hinduism, began in 9,600 B.C. or only a few centuries after the last Ice Age ended. I know Hinduism is ancient but is it that ancient? A quick pit stop at Wikipedia confirms my suspicions:

“Modern Hinduism grew out of the Vedas, the oldest of which is the Rigveda, dated to 1700 – 1100 BCE”

So Vox only missed the correct start of Hinduism by about 8 millenia. Of course what he has done is to sum up durations of religions which are concurrent and thus he overcounts the total span of all religions by about 80 centuries. His percentage error is over 200 percent. Harris’ error was about 10 percent. But anyone can make a mistake, right?

1. Criminal organizations are part of the civilized world. They always have been. Government!=sum total of civilization. Legality!=morality.
2. Abolishment refers to law. Consensus does not. The two statements are not in the least bit contradictory.
3. “These five religions have approximately 4.85 billion adherents, representing an estimated 71.3 percent of the world’s
population in 2007, and they have been around for a COLLECTIVE 11,600 years.” Collective is defined as “Assembled into or viewed as a whole.” Now, “cumulative” would probably have been a better choice, but even so, the problem isn’t with my math, which is correct, it’s with the fact that Mr. Marking can’t bloody read.

Now, getting more into the meat of the issue we turn to chapter 3 entitled “The Case Against Science”. Mr. Day points out that it is science itself which threatens the continued survival of mankind and not religion.

p45: “So, in only 3 percent of the time that religion has been on the scene, science has managed to produce multiple threats to continued human existence.”

By the way, that 3 percent should be replaced with 9 percent based upon Vox’s previous miscalculation. I actually agree with the author on this point. It is primarily the availability of modern technology produced by science which is the gravest threat to our survival as a species….

Taking the atomic bomb as an example, according to Mr. Day the sole responsibility for the development of nuclear weapons rests with the scientists themselves. What about the politicians who funded the Manhattan Project, the military people who organized it, and the numerous bureacrats who managed the project? Can they all now escape culpability? Is it only the scientists who are to blame?…

Hate to rain on your parade, Vox, but the 4,000 banned books (most of them scientific or philosophical works) continued to be banned until 1966, not 1753….

So lots of ve
iled threats that the Christians and other religious believers will do in the scientists. Given that the scientists in this scenario created the nuclear weapons, know how to use them, and have access to them whereas the religious masses do not, just how does Mr. Day expect this war to end? I would suspect the final score would be something like scientists: 4.85 billion, religious folks: 0.

1. Again, there is no miscalculation. The cumulative sum is both the correct figure and the relevant one for comparison’s sake.
2. Yes, it is only the scientists who are to blame for the EXISTENCE of the weapons developed by science, although the RESPONSIBILITY can certainly be shared more broadly, just as I pointed out in the book. Once more, Mr. Marking’s sloppiness leads him into error. Does he seriously believe that the aforementioned weapons would still exist if there had been only politicians and bureaucrats to develop them?
3. If the Church’s opposition to the novels of Daniel Defoe and Honore de Balzac, (which have been readily available to the public ever since they were first published), is not a crime against science, then what is?
4. This is both silly and stupid. What would be the point of veiled threats to further a war I argue does not even exist? It’s a simple matter of numbers. Science can’t win a war against religion; the best it could hope to do is wipe out the entire human race. The fact that atheists continue to promote this insane idea of inherent conflict tends to go some way towards explaining their bloody historical track record.

I’ll address the fifth and final point separately, since Mr. Marking has gone to some trouble to attempt to support it in detail. Rest assured, it’s no more tenable than the previous four.

If you want to talk draft, you can do so here. I’m a bit torn about the Jared Allen deal. It looks as if the Vikings have overpaid for a defensive lineman, but the loss – hopefully temporary – of Udeze to leukemia treatment did create a real problem for a team that can’t afford to not have a pass rush.

I guess I would like the move if I thought Tavaris Jackson was a potential championship quarterback. But I don’t. You can win with a great defense and a good running game, but you still need a competent quarterback who doesn’t turn the ball over or take too many sacks. I guess I just don’t understand the move, not when some decent quarterbacks were going to be available where the Vikings were picking in the first round.

The Sports Guy marvels at a certain seven-footer’s intensity:

you can’t exaggerate the impact of veterans here, something that surfaced in Game 2 as a central theme — the Celtics were furious about a hard foul that briefly sent Pierce to the locker room in the first half, so they spent the second half banging bodies, doling out retaliatory clotheslines, talking trash and intimidating the young Hawks in every way possible. TCIKG (The Completely Insane Kevin Garnett) was leading the way, as always, and other than Al Horford (a tough cookie who’s going to be great), none of the young Hawks seemed interested in escalating things, getting each other’s backs, sticking up for themselves, responding or even making eye contact with TCIKG.

I don’t know if the Celts can get past the Spurs or the Lakers this year, but it would sure be fun to see them do it. Especially if they do so with KG finally coming up big in crunch time.

There are few things more confidence-inspiring than knowing your teammates have your back. I’ve played for more successful teams, championship-winning teams, up to the NCAA D1 conference level, but the best team I ever played on was my high school soccer team. The team’s competitive ethic and pride was intense; I think we’re still the only soccer team in Minnesota to win a state tournament game and have the post-game brawl make the TV news as well as the front page of the next day’s newspapers.

On an unrelated note, as a Vikings fan, I don’t quite get the elevation of Barry Sanders to the MJ “never bet against him” pantheon. I’d have to look it up, but I don’t recall him ever having a big game against the Vikes. He may have been the only back we ever shut down; the sweetest thing about Adrian Peterson claiming the single-game rushing record is that it helps lighten the burden of those horrific memories of Walter Payton running around, over, and through white Vikings jerseys for 275 yards that are burned into every Vikings fan’s brain.

You’ve been given adequate time to procure a text of History of the Peloponnesian War so it’s time to start reading if you haven’t begun to do so already. Read from section 1.1 through section 1.115 by next Saturday, which is when the 12-question quiz will be posted and the discussion gets rolling.

Please let me know here in the comments if you’re actually participating in this one so that I can get a rough idea of how many people are reading even if they’re not taking part in the subsequent discussions.

The eyes, they roll:

I didn’t pick the offensive imagery in my book, but I should have caught it sooner than now. I didn’t and there’s no excuse. It was my first book, I was excited and happy, but I needed to have a more critical eye. I would do anything to remove racist images from the first printing of the book if I could, and I am relieved and happy to say that they will be removed from future printings…. Once again, I apologize for the images, my overlooking them, and any hurt this may have caused.

While the never-ending war between blacks and feminists between who are the mostest victimized ever is mildly amusing as they work to turn Western civilization into an equalitarian morass of grass huts and subsistence diets, I can’t help but marvel at Amynda’s amazing inability to grasp that images of gorillas carrying off blonde women and blonde women beating up black men were never likely to go over well with her hypersensitive target readership. But the “hurt this may have caused?”

Live by the hysterical overreaction, die by the hysterical overreaction.

It’s always the same. The police kill an unarmed man and walk away without even getting their wrists slapped:

In what marks the end of one of the most high-profile police-involved shooting trials in New York City, a judge has acquitted three NYPD detectives of all charges in the shooting death of 23-year-old Sean Bell on Friday. Bell was gunned down in a hail of 50 bullets outside a Queens strip club on what would have been his wedding day in November 2006.

The details are irrelevant. All you need to know that a killer will walk is that he had a badge. But it’s short-sighted and stupid to allow the police to operate above the law, because if people cannot get justice from the courts, they will eventually realize that they have no choice but to take it for themselves. One thing that has changed dramatically since I was a child is that a significant of middle class suburban white people now hate the police with a passion you’d think was reserved for poor inner city blacks.

I’ve always been pretty pro-Israel, but this news is more than a little troubling. How can Charles Krauthammer argue that the USA should not only supply funds and military aid, but put its own troops on the line for a foreign non-ally that is actively spying on America?

Convicted of espionage in 1986, Pollard did such damage to U.S. national security that top intelligence officials threatened to resign if Bill Clinton acceded to Israeli demands to pardon him. He is serving a life sentence for stealing secrets deemed so valuable that the Soviet Union reportedly agreed to trade them for the release of tens of thousands of Russian Jews for resettlement in Israel….

The suspicion that Pollard was far from alone has been confirmed, in spades, by the Kadish indictment, but that is just the beginning. The Israeli spy network that not only persists but flourishes to this day may be about to unravel. According to Giraldi, the Feds are “investigating a number of U.S. citizens, including an individual who held very senior security positions in the Clinton and Bush White Houses.”

I realize it is not exactly unheard of for some media figures to point and shriek “anti-semitism” every time Israel is criticized, fairly or unfairly. But in these circumstances, one has to wonder about the loyalties of those who would do so when Israel is behaving more like an enemy than a friend. It is absolutely Israel’s responsibility to defend itself in any way it sees fit, but treating a longtime friendly nation like an enemy is not a wise course of action and is a good way to find oneself friendless in the long term.