Category: Uncategorized

Jamie just passed out from envy after watching this video which a UK reader emailed to me today. As I have repeatedly stated, the backlash is only beginning. I had no idea it would be so much fun, though.

He’s smarter than you, he’s got a science degree!

I suspect this wasn’t quite what the Four Horsemen of the Bukkakelypse had in mind in that rather smug roundtable discussion wherein it was concluded that there was no need for respect to enter into the religion/atheism debate. Of course, thanks to the social autism that pervades scientistry, it’s not exactly hard to send a convincing message that science is deeply uncool and undeservedly arrogant.

UPDATE – While Derb demonstrates that he has both a) a clue, and, b) a sense of humor, one of his NRO readers manifestly does not:

So the argument here is that people who spend their lives working in scientific research are arrogant buffoons if they claim to know more about scientific topics than non-scientists? And this is funny?

I wonder if this guy realizes that Dawkins hasn’t done any science for a long time, he’s literally a professional propagandist now. Dennett is a philosopher and Hitchens is a journalist, so they’ve never done any, although PZ Myers does apparently torture fish from time to time when he’s not busy haranguing the religious faithful. It is science! On the other hand, give the guy some credit as unlike Richard Dawkins and his little cult, he did at least manage to grasp that it is expressing a perspective that is critical of both science and atheism.

“If anyone can understand a single word of this, don’t bother to translate, just tell me whose side it’s on.”
– Richard Dawkins aka The Uncockblockable

“i just want to assure everyone that everyone is looking very deeply into this, and it isnt necessary. i understand this kind of thing very well, and i can say with no doubt that the intent is to flatter a pro-science stance.”
– random Richarddawkins.net commenter

Divisions still matter:

No changes appear to be coming in the way NFL teams are seeded in the playoffs. Adam Schefter of NFL Network reports that owners today tabled the proposal for re-seeding the playoffs, deciding not to bother taking a formal vote on the issue because the clear consensus of the NFL executives in the room was that it had no chance to pass.

The NFL’s Competition Committee had proposed a change in the way the six playoff teams from each conference are seeded. Instead of guaranteeing all four division winners of at least one playoff home game, the proposal would have allowed a wild card team to host a first-round game if it finished the regular season with a better record than a division winner.

Now that they’ve shot down that bad idea, perhaps they can get around to addressing the absurd rookie pay scale that defeats the entire purpose of the worst-to-first draft order. Fix what is broken, don’t mess around with breaking what is manifestly working very well.

Jonah Goldberg rightly hammers the symbol of the smug science fetishist:

I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there’s the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers. The hypocrisy is even more glaring. Darwin fish are often stuck next to bumper stickers promoting tolerance or admonishing that “hate is not a family value.” But the whole point of the Darwin fish is intolerance; similar mockery of a cherished symbol would rightly be condemned as bigoted if aimed at blacks or women or, yes, Muslims.

As Christopher Caldwell once observed in the Weekly Standard, Darwin fish flout the agreed-on etiquette of identity politics. “Namely: It’s acceptable to assert identity and abhorrent to attack it. A plaque with ‘Shalom’ written inside a Star of David would hardly attract notice; a plaque with ‘Usury’ written inside the same symbol would be an outrage.”

But it’s the false bravado of the Darwin fish that grates the most. Like so much other Christian-baiting in American popular culture, sporting your Darwin fish is a way to speak truth to power on the cheap, to show courage without consequence.

I personally find the Darwin fish to be more of an amusingly stupid gesture than anything, mostly as a result of having been a resident of post-Christian Europe for a very long time. Unlike the American secularist who fails to understand the vitality fueled by the religious society that surrounds him, I’m fully cognizant of the fact that the secular culture represented by the Darwin Fish is an evolutionary dead end. And on some level, the Darwin crowd must know this, otherwise they wouldn’t be so fearful and constantly worrying about the way a sticker on a school textbook or exposure to an alternative point of view is capable of entirely undermining their entire belief system.

ND-TENS is now little more than a scientific model that is barely related to its Darwinian original; not only does it owe more to Mendel than Darwin, it’s even less precise than its dysfunctional counterpart in the Neo-Keynesian economic model. I’m confident that both Neo-Keynesianism and Neo-Darwinism will eventually be thrown out entirely in favor of superior models that reflect the observable empirical evidence much more accurately. I’m not sure what those models will be, but I think the conceptual blend of Austrian economics, socionomics and econometrics points the way towards one potential replacement, while game theory, AI design and evolutionary stable strategies may provide us with a way towards developing the other.

Although he clearly doesn’t understand what plants do in greenhouses:

On not taking drastic action to correct global warming: “Not doing it will be catastrophic. We’ll be eight degrees hottest in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.”

I’d bet Ted Turner that in ten years, the Earth will probably be colder than it is now, it certainly won’t be the 2.65 degrees warmer it would have to be to be 8 degrees warmer in 30 years. “Global Warming” is unscience, it’s nothing more than bad software design and badly flawed computer modeling. But you’d think he would understand that plants tend to grow very well in greenhouses. Hence the name.

Turner hungers after one-world government, so this “WAAAHHHHHH WE WILL ALL BE CANNIBALS” nonsense is just emo-screeching in order to try scare the stupid into supporting it. It’s one of the most encouraging things I’ve seen from the global warming alarmists in some time, as they are clearly panicking over the way in which their alarmism has totally failed to gain any traction except among the silly science fetish crowd.

Okay, that actually sounds rather creepy, doesn’t it. I don’t care, it describes what I have for this sexy little device, for which I have long been waiting and what I want built into my next Treo after the next one, complete with an improved Intellivision emulator.

Pint-size digital projectors are in the works. These devices, when plugged into cellphones and portable media players, will let consumers beam video content from their hand-held devices to the closest smooth surface — entertaining themselves, annoying their neighbors and possibly contributing to a new warning sign: No Projectors in This Area. The microprojectors, still in prototype, use light-emitting diodes, lasers or a combination of the two to cast a display of up to 50 or 60 inches, or perhaps even wider, in darkened spaces and 7 to 20 inches or so when there is ambient light.

I love projection technology and I hate flatscreens. Don’t ask me why, just know that it is so. And on a totally tangential note, isn’t it about time for a really good new spacefighting sim?

Two of my teammates played a pretty good prank on the rest of the team today. Last Friday, we were dominating the first half against the second-place team, but somehow found ourselves trailing 2-0 at halftime. We had a lot of injuries in the second half, which caused us to fall apart completely and we ended up losing 6-0.

Yesterday morning, one of the players sent out an email saying that he was personally acquainted with one of the players on the other team, which was how he knew the guy wasn’t registered with the league. Therefore we had not lost the game, but won it by forfeit according to the league rules. This led to numerous emails, including one from the president of the team, which assured us that he would take care of it but because he was in meetings it would have to wait until he was free. Then, this afternoon, he sent out an email explaining that while he had registered the complaint this morning, it was too late according to the league bylaws and therefore the results would stand. Unfortunately, had he only done it the day before, we would have claimed forfeit and the three points that went with it. He even quoted the relevant section of the rules to show that there was nothing we could do about it now.

Naturally, this inspired a storm of angry recriminations which got ever more heated, until finally the first player and the president sent out an email this afternoon with the subject line which translates literally as “April Fish”, but we would understand more accurately as “April Fool!”.

MNOnline finds it irritating, but interesting:

First, I’m a liberal agnostic, and am not a fan of V. Day’s politics (libertarian). And there are times in this book where he gets a bit tedious. He’s no creationist, thank goodness, and he’s no biblical literalist, but he comes close on occasion, which I find irritating. However, I thought that his research was done well, his arguments for the most part well-made, and his assertions supported. While there were times when I scribbled something in the margins like “Huh?”, or “Unfair”, or “Poorly argued”, generally I think he made his case – that many of the arguments made by Richard Dawkins, et al, against religion, are not as supportable as some like to believe.

As someone noted in the comments, it’s interesting how virtually no atheists who have read TIA even attempt to defend any of the arguments of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, while those who haven’t read it continue to insist that there is no way I could possibly have managed to refute any argument made by those staggeringly powerful atheist minds.

Anyone who still finds the central argument of The God Delusion to be compelling or unrebuttable, please raise your hand. And then, don’t hesitate to amuse us all by explaining why. (Hint – if you’re a Dawkins fan who hasn’t actually bothered to read your hero’s work for yourself, please at least glance at page 157 before even thinking about expressing your opinion on the matter.)

I should probably mention that I am a creationist, in the sense that I believe God created life, the universe and everything. But MNOnline is correct and I am not a Creationist in the sense of having any dogmatic attachment to how God created things, much less how long ago it was. Also, I do believe in taking the Bible literally to the greatest extent possible, I simply don’t believe it is humanly possible to fully grasp the literal truth of any translated statement. Since it is nearly impossible to perfectly translate even simple concepts from one man to another, how much more must it be true of translating Divine concepts into Man’s terms.

The point of letting the woman win appears to have escaped Beth:

If it’s to be a woman, I say let it be Ann Coulter!!!!

While I would certainly be more enthusiastic about a Coulter presidency than most – although I have real qualms about her grasp of the militarily possible – that’s not exactly the idea I was putting forth in the column yesterday. The idea is to get this descent to the nadir over with as soon as possible, since rebuilding can’t begin until the self-destruction is complete.

I was astounded, however, to see that WND actually elected to print a positive letter to the editor about one of my columns:

Vox is right about women

I am glad to see that Vox Day has the courage to write what most others are afraid to say on equality. The main problem with equality is that American women have their priorities all wrong. Whenever we talk of equality, we talk about women having equal power, equal wealth and equal education. Those are not good measures of a person’s value in society.

Say there are two men, one of whom wields more power, has more wealth and is far more educated. Is he somehow better than the man who has less? We would say no because those things are not as important as stability, integrity and honesty.

So why is it that when women has less power, wealth and education than men, they suddenly becomes less valuable in society? It is because Americans became convinced that power, wealth and education were more important than faith and family.

Mr. Paris makes a good point, although I think a more salient one is that barring the immeasurable concept of equality before the eyes of God, it is an empirical fact that equality DOES NOT EXIST. There simply is no such thing, and attempting to base material human society upon an empirical fiction while simultaneously denying the existence of the immaterial is beyond irrational, it is downright crazy.

The ironic thing is that some people think it is crazy to order human society on the basis of a specific interaction of the supernatural with the natural, although this makes perfect sense if you believe in the supernatural. What does not make sense is to order human society on the basis of the immaterial with the material, when you believe the immaterial does not exist. I should very much like to hear an equalitarian rational materialist attempt to explain how his equalitarian ideology is not contradicted by his rational materialism. The garden variety atheist, one presumes, would simply retreat into irratheism.

Whether he runs against the Lizard Queen or the Magic Negro, McCain is a probable loser because his nominal supporters don’t support his policies:

A new survey I commissioned demonstrates how McCain’s malarkey about supporting enforcement has succeeded in duping a significant number of voters. The poll (complete results are here) found that only 34 percent of people who voted for McCain in the primaries and caucuses knew that he favored a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants (the word “amnesty” never appeared in the survey questions). Meanwhile, 35 percent of his voters thought he favored attrition of the illegal population through enforcement, 21 percent didn’t know his position, and (this is my favorite) 10 percent thought McCain’s position on illegal immigration was “a program of mass roundups and deportations.”

Most Republicans don’t know how bad McCain is, and they were voting for him in the primaries because they had come to understand how bad Giuliani and Romney were. Once his positions on free speech, guns and open borders become clear in the Republican vs Democrat part of the campaign, his support will quickly dissipate in favor of better third-party candidates and simply staying home. More than a few Republicans have learned their lesson from the Bush years; if you’re going to get Democratic governance anyhow, it’s much better to have its inevitable failures actually blamed on Democrats.

The usual arguments in support of the lesser evil will be made, of course, but there are fewer voters willing to accept that argument for the fifth straight election. At some point, consistently supporting the lesser evil will force one to confront the reality that one has been reduced to a servant of evil.

Kelly’s critique of TIA Chapter II is up on her blog:

Perhaps the most amusing aspect thus far is his total lack of comprehension regarding Euthyphro’s Dilemma, which dealt with the source of morality—not the existence of god(s). Beyond that, he practically asserts that some kind of resolution was reached in the dialogue and that, if applied to science, it could be extrapolated that science doesn’t exist. (This is the point at which I’m looking at my monitor with a look of amazement and confusion—what kind of thought process led him there?) No wonder he thinks that the execution of Socrates was a good thing, although he places it erroneously within the reign of the Council of Thirty, while Apologia clearly explains that it was a jury of 500 citizens who convicted him of impiety. That same document states an incident that Socrates had with the Council, and also that they had been ousted. It’s a common mistake given the proximity, so I guess we can cut him some slack there, likely never having read Socrates’ defense for himself. (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/)

Alright, I was wrong earlier. The funniest part of this chapter is when Day makes this statement: “…[T]he very existence of the Intelligent Design movement is a testimony to a respect for scientific methodology…” (p. 33) Excuse me? Their attempt to redefine science to include supernatural explanations is “respect,” but Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion was a useless distortion of science? Interesting.

His rhetorical question about the hazard posed to science by religion and the resulting “hostility” betrays his lack of awareness of just how detrimental religion has been to science.

I’ll have my detailed response later, but feel free to take out your own red pens in the meantime. For now, suffice it to say that she’s correct about who pronounced sentence upon Socrates – I noted the error in the errata a while ago – but her take on my supposed lack of comprehension regarding a famous “dilemma” again demonstrates the inherent danger of doing a chapter-by-chapter review without reading the entire book first. (See TIA Appendix B.)