Category: Uncategorized

In which I take Mr. John Scalzi’s advice to writers to post one-star reviews of their books:

“These days the most popular books are books that slam other books or writers that slam other writers or idealists on one side slamming idealists on the other side. Get a clue!”

“I only managed to read the first 3 chapters of this book. Vox Day employs so many logical fallacies and so much dishonest rhetoric that it’s a difficult read.”

“The book starts with many generic arguments that evolve down to the old question of “without god, how can there be morals?”. Anyone who has spent 5 minutes reading the ‘Argument from morality’ page on wikipedia will find these sections silly or at least inefficient. The attacks use short quotes from Dawkins/Harris books, and as a reader I feel like I am not getting the context of the quotes. In the case of the Harris state vs county crime/religion statistic, I wish Vox would quote the reason Harris was using it… for all I know Harris was making a point that the corelation is meaningless.”

“Since I’m not willing to pick this book apart in review, I recommend that anyone interested read the book and exercise their own critical thinking skills. If you’re not well read in other areas of science and religion, don’t bother.”

“If the author wrote the book for the three most often named Athiests, I could probably give him 4 or five stars, the 1 star is for the book as written, assuming that it was intended for mass market readership. I really have no quarrel with Day’s disgust with Athiests if that is how he feels, not do I have any problem with Harris et. al. espousing their lack of beilef in a supreme being. My problem is with the author and what appears to be an extreme ego.”

“I opened this book expecting, or at least hoping, to find a reasoned rebuttal to the arguments of better-known authors, but what I found was a meaningless parade of misrepresentations and outright lies. From someone who has actually named himself the Voice of God, this was a remarkably mundane read.”

“[Vox Day’s] arrogance, rudeness, and unending logical fallacies have brought nothing to the intellectual discussion between theists and atheists.”

I think Scalzi was right. If it is really true that we are defined by our enemies, I suddenly find that I feel kind of… feel kind of invincible. Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?

And speaking of reading three chapters, Kelly of the Rational Response Squad has responded to my response to her critique of chapter two. I’m quite content to leave it with her and wait for her critique of chapter three, although I should probably note that “the vast majority of historians” she mentioned do not disagree with me, but with her. Kelly’s airy dismissal of the Encylopedia Britannica also happens to reject what has been the historical consensus for the last 70 years.

This is what passes for a defense of the theory of evolution by natural selection’s predictive power:

Cosmologists make precise predictions about what will happen to the universe in 20 billion years’ time. Biologists struggle to predict how a few bacteria in a dish might evolve over 20 hours. Some claim that this lack of precise predictive power means evolution is not scientific. However, what matters in science is not how much you can predict on the basis of a theory or how precise those predictions are, but whether the predictions you can make turn out to be right….

Perhaps the most striking prediction in biology was made in 1975 by entomologist Richard Alexander. After studying the evolution of eusocial insects such as termites, he predicted that some burrowing rodents in the tropics might have evolved the same eusocial system – as later proved to be the case with the naked mole-rat…. Most predictions relate to very specific aspects of evolutionary theory. If a eusocial mammal like the naked mole-rat had not been found, for instance, it would have proved only that Alexander’s ideas about the evolution of eusocial behaviour were probably wrong, not that there is anything wrong with the wider theory.

This is just absurdly pathetic. The entire article is nothing but a list of excuses for why the model simply can’t do what New Scientist disingenuously insists that it can. Suggesting that something that already took place might perhaps maybe possibly have happened a certain way is not a prediction. Alexander didn’t predict the existence of the naked mole rat or even the existence of a eusocial vertebrate, he merely “asked himself what characteristics a eusocial vertebrate would have if it had evolved”. Musing out loud is not making a prediction, nor did Alexander ever explain how a eusocial vertebrate that had not evolved would have different characteristics. Evolutionists make the Biblical prophecy-interpretation nuts look clinically accurate in comparison. Economic predictions, fuzzy and wildly inaccurate as they often are, are orders of magnitude more specific than “the most striking prediction” that evolutionary biology has ever made despite dealing with far greater levels of complexity. And as always, we are informed that if the TENS model makes an incorrect prediction, well, that doesn’t mean the model is wrong….

The problem with the TENS model isn’t that it’s wrong, it’s that it is almost completely useless for anything except providing a scientific-sounding basis for historical fiction. It can’t predict anything more specific than whatever anyone with an imagination can pull out of his backside, or with any greater degree of reliability. But, it must be confessed that New Scientist does manage to perfectly summarize the “science” of evolution when it states in a most authoritative manner: “Evolution is as firmly established a scientific fact as the roundness of the Earth.”

Of course, the Earth isn’t round. It’s a geoid that is very nearly an oblate spheroid. How can you not love the scientific precision of the butterfly collectors? You really need to read the entire list of 24 myths, there’s more dancing there than you’ll find at the average disco.

UPDATE – Jerry Pournelle quotes Fred Reed: “If something looks implausible, it probably is. Evolution writ large is the belief that a cloud of hydrogen will spontaneously invent extreme-ultraviolet lithography, perform Swan Lake, and write all the books in the British Museum.“

Not all in six days, of course. A certain amount of time is required. As for how much, you’d have to ask Richard Dawkins. He’s done the math.

Is something that I am eagerly anticipating. It will be particularly enjoyable given the sanctimonious reaction to my March column on the absurdity of clueless scientists worrying about religion as the tidal wave of feminism rushes towards them:

“Women have surpassed men in most areas of education, but men continue to be more numerous in fields like math, physics and engineering. For more than a decade, feminist groups have been lobbying Congress to address the problem of gender “injustice” in the laboratory. Their efforts are finally bearing fruit. Federal agencies are now poised to begin aggressive gender-equity reviews of math, science, and engineering programs. Groups like the National Organization for Women must be celebrating — but American scientists should brace themselves for the destructive tsunami headed their way.”

At a recent House hearing on “Women in Academic Science and Engineering” Congressman Brian Baird, a Democrat from Washington State, asked a room full of activist women how best to bring American scientists into line: “What kind of hammer should we use?”

This is a no-lose situation as far as I’m concerned. You already know what’s going to happen. Initially, the PZs of the world will embrace their new Title IX overlords and pronounce themselves delighted by the amazing quality of their new female co-workers. Then, once they start losing their jobs and seeing plum positions handed to properly credentialed but incompetent women who don’t actually do any real science, the tears and the hissy fits will begin.

Did someone say tenure? Right… as if tenure or anything else that smacks of Patriarchy and male privilege is going to protect a male scientist’s job when there are historical sexist imbalances to be corrected.

It was always a bad idea, but Microsoft’s action show how those foolish enough to buy DRM-protected products were doomed by the technology curve from the start:

“You will need to obtain a license key for each of your songs downloaded from MSN Music on any new computer, and you must do so before August 31, 2008. If you attempt to transfer your songs to additional computers after August 31, 2008, those songs will not successfully play.”

It’s bad enough to know that your technology will soon become outdated, although at least you can continue to use it. But DRM all but guarantees that eventually you’ll lose even your ability to use what you’ve bought.

Go on, accuse him of being an evangelical Christian or whatever, make his day:

I think it a shame that discussion of evolution usually boils down to a pledge of allegiance either to Darwin or to the handling of snakes. This view admirably distracts attention from the observation that much of Darwinism doesn’t square with observation or even make sense. Religion has nothing to do with it, being an innocent bystander. I recently read Understanding Human History, by Michael Hart, which deals with the influence of intelligence on history. Hart is an astrophysicist, and his book is well worth reading—except when he deals with evolution, when he goes ditzy. They all do….

The entire Darwinian structure rests on the willingness to accept wild theories without examination.

Of course, by “theories” he is referring to the English language sense of the word:

“contemplation or speculation“, “guess or conjecture“

It’s pretty obvious that “a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena” can’t possibly apply, given the contradictory incoherencies of many evolutionary “explanations” and “stable strategies” for observed phenomena. As some noted yesterday, it is the infinitely pliable nature of evolutionary theory that indicates its fundamentally non-scientific nature. There are, of course, useful aspects of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, however, those aspects are almost entirely the part known as Mendelian genetics and have always stood quite nicely on their own.

He’d be thinking thusly:

Barack Obama can’t carry Florida. Can’t carry Ohio. Now we see he can’t carry Pennsylvania. Exit polls suggest that regular churchgoers don’t like him. Older white women don’t like him. He even lost white voters aged 18-29!

Doesn’t that make him look like a probable loser in November?

Yes, African Americans and upscale liberals will be annoyed if I prefer Hillary over him. But I don’t think we are in much danger of losing the African American and upscale liberal vote. The downscale white vote however – that’s important, that’s unpredictable, and if we nominate him, it looks like it may be gone.

He should have stopped his analysis there, because his “stronger” case for Obama leaves out the massive personal benefits that accrue to the party players when they raise one of their own to the Cherry Blossom Throne. Those trump any fears of retribution from the toothless black wing of the party.

As a general rule, the candidate who most benefits from visible youth support will lose the nomination. JFK being the obvious exception.

The New York Times mindlessly calls for tax hikes:

To restore the health of the budget, let alone keep ambitious campaign pledges for spending more money, the next president, regardless of which party wins, will have to tax the American people more than any of the candidates has been willing to admit.

Now, I’m not a Keynesian myself. But the New York Times, to the extent that they understand economics at all, have long taken a fundamentally Keynesian view. And from the Keynesian perspective, the one thing that you absolutely do not do in a recession is to tighten fiscal policy by raising taxes or cutting spending, a recession is the one time that you’re actually supposed to INCREASE the federal deficit in order to smooth out the business cycle. The editorial is clearly talking about recessionary times; it even explicitly mentions this being a time of “economic crisis”.

Newspaper editors are so economically illiterate that they can’t even manage to produce coherent idiocies.

Unsurprisingly, there is confirmation that the original “Sarah” call was a fraudulent one:

A mobile phone number used to make calls that triggered a mass raid on a Texas polygamist compound has been traced to a woman in Colorado with a history of making allegedly false claims of abuse.

If the Texas authorities were following due process, every kidnapped child would already be back with his parents. But, as we know, the judge and the CPS have no interest in following the law when there are what they laughably claim to be “the interests of the child” to justify doing whatever they decide to do. What we’re seeing in Texas is not the rule of law, it is the rule of tooth and claw.

Instapundit suggests that “This thing seems to be turning into a major disaster for the authorities”, and as the Volokh Conspiracy points out: “It’s time for a nationally prominent civil liberties attorney to get involved.”

This one is a solo job, and as I intimated before, should serve as sufficient evidence explaining why I don’t aspire to radio stardom. Henceforth, I’m going to go to an every other week schedule, which should give me enough time to offload some of the production work to the Ilk who volunteered and actually schedule interviews before the last minute. But there still might be some useful things to consider here in the fifth podcast.

Recommended Reading:

The Wealth of Nations

Food Alarmism

I’m sure all the TENS enthusiasts won’t be at all reluctant to abandon their little theory now:

Theory predicts that it should be impossible for any species to survive in such circumstances. According to Muller’s Ratchet, a law devised by Hermann Joseph Muller, an American biologist, without the genetic reshuffling of sexual reproduction, an asexual population will accumulate mutations which over many generations should spell its doom.

The Amazon molly defies that analysis. After devising mathematical models which describe the evolutionary process, researchers at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh calculated that the fish, which has a life cycle of a year, should have died out 50,000 years ago.

One thing that is annoying about evolutionists is the way that many of them declare they would be happy to abandon it if it were falsified. But every time a genuine falsification is produced, the theory is promptly respun sans substantive modification in such a manner as to dance around the previous falsification. Does anyone truly believe that a single TENS believer would abandon the faith if Haldane’s proverbial rabbit fossils in the Precambrian were found? There are many different reasons that the Molly fish may not, in fact, falsify the theory. But is there a single evolutionary adherent who will disavow it in the absence of those reasons? I doubt it… because it is first and foremost a matter of faith, not science.

Dr Myers, meanwhile, points out that evolution only requires 30 generations. So, now we’ve got a good falsification model for testing a hypothesis based on the theory. Given the reproductive cycles of rats, we can have conclusive proof or falsification of evolutionary theory within five years by seeing if we can turn rats into cud-chewing herbivores or not.

Evolution created something new, and it did it quickly (about 30 generations), and the appearance was documented. It’s still just a lizard, but we expected nothing else — and it’s now a lizard with novel adaptations for herbivory.

I look forward to the innovative excuses offered for why we can’t actually test the model’s predictions….