Category: Uncategorized

Some of Nothing offers a demonstration of why women shouldn’t vote:

Couched in the language of rationality, the basest, most absurd arguments appear even more idiotic than when a silly caricature such as Ann Coulter says them…how is this possible? Apparently, this blogger either doesn’t count women as humans or has the most arcane definition of liberty I’ve ever come across. Nonetheless, with a statement so internally illogical, I won’t spend too much time on it other than to illuminate for others what, apparently, has been hidden from me for so long: Dude, these people still exist!

Let’s just list the errors:

1. I’m not a Republican.
2. An opposition to a certain population voting does not indicate fear of that group. Very few people believe that children should vote, this does not indicate that they are afraid of children.
3. See if you can spot any possible definition of liberty – using the very dictionary to which she linked – that requires women’s suffrage:

1. freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control.
2. freedom from external or foreign rule; independence.
3. freedom from control, interference, obligation, restriction, hampering conditions, etc.; power or right of doing, thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice.
4. freedom from captivity, confinement, or physical restraint: The prisoner soon regained his liberty.
5. permission granted to a sailor, esp. in the navy, to go ashore.
6. freedom or right to frequent or use a place: The visitors were given the liberty of the city.
7. unwarranted or impertinent freedom in action or speech, or a form or instance of it: to take liberties.
8. a female figure personifying freedom from despotism.

My upcoming visit to the Northern Alliance promises to be a little feistier than previous ones, as we’re going to discuss the Republican Party and the Ron Paul Revolution tomorrow:

This Saturday, we will once again welcome Vox Day to the First Team of the Northern Alliance Radio Network airwaves. We’ll discuss his forthcoming book “The Irrational Atheist” and will also likely get into his support for Ron Paul.

Now, I am not a backer of Mr. Paul. His proposed foreign policy solutions are not adequate to deal with the challenges we face in the world today and I don’t believe that they will make America stronger and safer in the long run. I also think that he has done his campaign a disservice by embracing too much of the Left’s rhetoric on Iraq. There is a principled conservative/libertarian argument against the war in Iraq, but Paul has too often strayed from making it. And I don’t share his view that giving more power to Congress at the expense of the Executive branch is necessarily a good idea.

However, all that being said, I find myself appalled at the some of the mainstream conservative/Republican reaction to Paul and his supporters. While Paul’s campaign has no doubt attracted a higher than average percentage of certified kooks, the vast majority of Paul’s followers are solid, rock-ribbed conservatives who simply have lost confidence in the GOP.

They want fiscal constraint, smaller government, and secure borders to be more than campaign buzzwords. And you can’t really blame them for that given the way the Republican Party has abdicated its commitment to these areas in recent years. Ron Paul’s candidacy and some of the policies he proposes may not be realistic, but the values underlying them are legitimate. For the most part, legitimately conservative.

And so, when I hear conservative commentators dismissing Paul and his supporters as a bunch of clowns or even worse accusing them of being anti-Semitic bigots, I get a little ticked. Last night, Hugh Hewitt was doing exactly this on his radio show.

Yes, it certainly is likely that we will get into it… I suspect the only question is whether we’ll manage to get out of it long enough to get around to TIA. Now, I know the NARN crew are good friends with Hugh Hewitt and I have no doubt that Hewitt is a decent and likable guy, but I have to admit that despite reading his WND column for years, I still don’t understand what, if anything, the man’s core political principles are. The idea that a pragmatist who has championed both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Arlen Specter in the past has anything particularly serious to say about either conservative or republican principles doesn’t really add up.

And I have little doubt that I can make a rational case for Ron Paul’s foreign policy, whether the gentlemen of the Northern Alliance find it convincing may prove to be another matter entirely.

For those of you who can’t listen, I’ll post a link to the Fraters Libertas page with the mp3 once they have it up.

PZ gets called on the absence of science from his “science blog” and gets just a little bit upset:

I noticed that this blog is in the running for a Best Science Blog award. I’ve looked over the site. Can someone point out where the science is on it. I have looked but I can’t find any.

In PZ’s defense, there are lots of pictures of squid, and since he’s a biologist aka butterfly collector, he genuinely believes that passes for science.

The amusing thing about the relationship between atheism and science is the way many atheists can’t seem to make up their mind about their own beliefs regarding the two concepts. If atheism is merely, as Brent Rasmussen reasonably says, the absence of god-belief, then there is no relationship. The problem is that so many atheists are science fetishists that they can’t bear to let go of the notion that the two are somehow inherently entwined, which is why PZ can write nearly non-stop about atheism and then react so angrily when it’s pointed out that he isn’t actually writing about science.

Hey, Belgium doesn’t. From NRO’s Corner:

Talks designed to resolve Belgium’s political ‘crisis’ (the country has now been without a government for 150 days or so) have once again collapsed. The International Herald Tribune has this to say about Yves Leterne (despite his name he’s the head of the Flemish Christian Democrats), the politician who came closest to winning the country’s elections back in June:

Leterme didn’t help his cause as a Belgian unifier when he could not say what was celebrated on Independence Day and sang the French Marseillaise when asked for the Belgian national anthem.

May the crumbling continue!

The Israeli Football Association on Thursday banned fans of Beitar Jerusalem from two home matches after they booed through a minute’s silence in memory of assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

“This was an outburst of a large number, hundreds, of Beitar fans in the stands on an issue that is considered a national consensus and an affront to our existence as a democracy,” the IFA said in a statement. The IFA also slapped the Israeli champions with a suspended punishment of two additional matches without a crowd.

Before kick-off in Sunday’s match against Maccabi Haifa, more than 2,500 Beitar fans refused to observe the silence, called in honour of Rabin and also to protest against violence in Israeli society and at sports stadiums.

This is utterly ridiculous. Why should people be expected to honor someone they have reason to regard as a traitor to their country? Obviously it’s not a “national consensus” or thousands of people would not have been loudly expressing their opinion on the matter.

One would think that this sort of thought-policing behavior in Jerusalem would concern Jews far more than Ann Coulter response to theological questions.

And if speaking your mind in public is truly “an affront to Israel’s existence as a democracy”, it’s pretty clear that Israeli democracy’s days are numbered.

I’ll be surprised when a school killer turns out to be a popular cheerleader or a star athlete who leads a Bible study, not when it’s another atheist and social outcast who was bullied in the process of being “educated”:

The Finnish teenager who killed eight people in a high school shooting was a bullied social outcast but appears to have picked his victims randomly, a senior police official said Thursday.

However, I stand corrected. When I sarcastically mentioned that I had expected to learn that the Finnish killer was an Episcopalian, the Original Cyberpunk noted that “Speaking as an ex-Episcopalian, there’s nothing in his statement that is incompatible with current ECUSA doctrine.”

Rational materialists are finding themselves to be increasingly at war with not only science, but even the theory of evolution:

Rationalization is thought to have an evolutionary utility; once a decision has been made, second-guessing may just interfere with more important business. “We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that’s an outsider’s perspective. This experiment shows that there isn’t always much conscious thought going on,” said one researcher.”

This is what will ultimately destroy the New Atheism; not their copious errors and demonstrated historical ignorance, but the fact that an increasing number of godless scientists are beginning to find that the very foundation of their Enlightenment humanism is non-existent. This experiment is, in itself, far from conclusive, but similar evidence is beginning to pile up.

Robert Heinlein pointed out in 1953 that man is not a rational animal, but a rationalizing one. And a rationalizing animal simply cannot hope to order its society on the basis of a reason that it demonstrably does not possess.

Again, I’m not interested in engaging in a discussion about my father, and this time I’m simply going to delete any personal attacks on him, but there’s no point in pretending that this isn’t a news story of interest to people.

I realize that many will be dubious, but at the end of the day, my father is a good, decent, and believe it or not, generally law-abiding man. Now, you might reasonably conclude that he’s mistaken, a religious nut, or even delusional, but no one who has met him, regardless of their stance on the salient legal issues, doubts his sincerity. Perhaps you believe that human decency is defined by unthinking obedience to whatever an authority figure tells you is the law; if so, you and I will simply have to disagree.

If I don’t sound upset, it’s because I’m not. None of this surprises me any more than did the reaction to 9/11, $800 gold, the disappearance of M3 or the mortgage crisis. The Empire never ended.

Rod Dreher finds himself inspired by Ron Paul.