Category: Uncategorized

Remember this when you hear humanists babbling about the Enlightnment and its rights. The difference between Enlightenment rights and Creator-given rights? They’re not what you’d call unalienable:

While the EU hectors Ankara about its legislation, it is slowly building a corpus of Euro-law which proscribes criticism of the European Union. The clearest precedent has been the case of Bernard Connolly, a British Commission official who, out of office hours, wrote a book called The Rotten Heart of Europe, which criticised the single currency.

He was dismissed from his post for criticising the European project, and went on to challenge his former employers on grounds of free speech. When the Euro-judge — a Spaniard, as it happened — handed down his verdict, it contained a bone-chilling phrase. Freedom of speech, said the judge, was not an absolute right: “Criticism of the European Union, like blasphemy, lies outside its terms”.

Europeans love to posture over their saintly social structures, especially when it comes to gun control. So, naturally, the world media is attempting to spin this fatal school shooting as somehow being the fault of guns, which are fairly common “by European standards”. Which is only true if you pretend that Switzerland isn’t European:

An 18-year-old gunman killed eight people at a high school in southern Finland on Wednesday, then shot himself but survived, police said. Police said the gunman was taken to hospital with serious wounds and they had the situation “under control” after they surrounded Jokela High School in Tuusula, some 30 miles north of the capital, Helsinki.

I suggest that banning schools would be a much more effective way to prevent school shootings. Unsurprisingly, the kid was a self-described “social Darwinist” and a natural selection enthusiast; what do you think would be the odds against him being an atheist as well?

The unnamed gunman apparently posted a video called “Jokela high school massacre” on the YouTube website, the latest of dozens he listed over the last fortnight. Set to a hard-driving song called “Stray Bullet”, it shows a boy standing with a gun pointed towards the camera.

Going only by the username Sturmgeist89, he calls himself a “social darwinist”. “I am prepared to fight and die for my cause,” read a posting by a user of the same name.

“I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.”

What was that about no one killing “in the name of Darwin”?

UPDATE – And we have confirmation:

Name: Pekka-Eric Auvinen
Age: 18
Male from Finland.

I am a cynical existentialist, antihuman humanist, antisocial socialdarwinist, realistic idealist and godlike atheist.

Well, I’m certainly shocked! I was sure he’d turn out to be an Episcopalian. PZ and company, as you had to expect, are in full-blown No True Atheist mode.

This guy should know:

As a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego, California I know the waterboard personally and intimately. SERE staff were required undergo the waterboard at its fullest. I was no exception. I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. It has been reported that both the Army and Navy SERE school’s interrogation manuals were used to form the interrogation techniques used by the US army and the CIA for its terror suspects. What was not mentioned in most articles was that SERE was designed to show how an evil totalitarian, enemy would use torture at the slightest whim….

Having been subjected to them all, I know these techniques, if in fact they are actually being used, are not dangerous when applied in training for short periods. However, when performed with even moderate intensity over an extended time on an unsuspecting prisoner – it is torture, without doubt. Couple that with waterboarding and the entire medley not only “shock the conscience” as the statute forbids -it would terrify you. Most people can not stand to watch a high intensity kinetic interrogation. One has to overcome basic human decency to endure watching or causing the effects. The brutality would force you into a personal moral dilemma between humanity and hatred. It would leave you to question the meaning of what it is to be an American.

I further note the irony of waterboarding being defended by atheists like Sam Harris, who in his stupendous historical ignorance has declared that the Spanish Inquisition was one of the two darkest episodes in the history of faith.

There were three forms of torture permitted to the inquisitors, the garrucha, the toca and the potro. Waterboarding is simply a modified form of the toca, which is described as follows: “The toca, also called tortura del agua, consisted of introducing a cloth into the mouth of the victim, and forcing them to ingest water spilled from a jar so that they had impression of drowning.”

A female psychologist spells it out:

Over the past two decades I have worked as a psychologist, life coach and sex expert, and I have found that Emily’s attitude is all too common. And such views don’t bode well for the success of relationships. With increasing frequency, women in their twenties, thirties and forties take a pragmatic, postfeminist view that sex is something over which they have no need to negotiate. In the bedroom, there is no compromise. If a man has a higher sex drive than a woman, then he can sort himself out. If he wants to try something new and she can’t be bothered, tough luck to him….

That goes to the heart of this issue. As women, we have come to expect that we can control our sex lives completely – but we get angry when a man wants to do so.

In a relationship of two, one individual is always in charge. In most modern relationships, the female partner is the one who has claimed the right to dictate the sexual relationship which means that lesbian bed death now increasingly applies to many normal couples as well.

Unfortunately, more talk talk, as the writer suggests, is not likely to provide the answer. The two options ultimately boil down to patriarchy or porn; all of the available evidence indicates that at this time most women prefer feminism and the latter, whether they realize that is the choice they are making or not. While the demographics indicate that this is already a problem, it will become a crisis once robo-dolls are as ubiquitous as personal massage devices.

The irony is that feminism will be the main reason the polygamous model of marriage makes a return to the West in the next century. Nature ensures that two or more women engaged in intra-marital competition will always be much more interested in sex than a woman with a sexual monopoly defended by the family courts. And so the Law of Unintended Consequences strikes once more….

Very few women will agree with this, of course, although a few never-married women in their late thirties are beginning to wonder if this equalitarian social order is really all that preferable to the masculine one that it replaced. But, as usual, the essential problems of the trend will not be clear to everyone until they are suffering from the entirely predictable effects.

One female reader’s comment demonstrates the very problem raised by the article very well: I am offended by this article. You are advocating submission, however may you have termed it– something which I find abhorrent, considering women have so recently, and still not completely, won even the intellectual semblance of equality and now you talk of giving it all up based on ideas of happiness and the family unit that need to be examined in today’s context.

That semblance of equality won’t be given up based on happiness and the family unit, but it will be given up in the name of societal survival, most likely before 2050.

In a nutshell:

ESPN will air a profile of Browns TE Kellen Winslow tonight that will include reading the love letters he wrote to his wife when they were 13 years old.

Sweet St. Darwin of the Galapagos, who do they think they’re kidding? Seriously, except for The Sports Guy and TMQ, I no longer pay any attention to ESPN anymore, although the White Buffalo and I used to watch both the early and the late Sportcenters that featured Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. I wish the guys who create successful companies could find a way to cash in without selling them to moronic corporations who ruin everything that made them successful in the first place.

Whether it’s EA destroying Origin Systems or Disney turning ESPN into all-chick-stuff all-the-time, I just hate it.

Ex-Marine Joe Carter cites a familiar name in staking out a staunch conservative position against torture:

Yes, waterboarding is torture. And torture should never be legal.

Even more disturbing than the idea that a future attorney general doesn’t know what’s involved in waterboarding is that we live in an age when a familiarity with torture techniques is to be expected of our leaders. How did we get to the point where such a question needs to be asked of an attorney general? Who allowed our country to succumb to such fear and moral cowardice that we parse the the meaning and definition of “torture?”

I blame myself, and implicate my fellow Christians. We have remained silent and treated an issue once considered unthinkable–the acceptability of torture–like a concept worthy of honest debate. But there is no room for debate: torture is immoral and should be clearly and forcefully denounced. We continue to shame ourselves and our Creator by refusing to speak out against such outrages to human dignity.

Strong words, with which I agree entirely. And Joe has support from some of the nation’s finest military minds too:

As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture — only for the toughest cases, only when nothing else works — the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb. Our soldiers in Iraq confront real “ticking time bomb” situations every day, in the form of improvised explosive devices, and any degree of “flexibility” about torture at the top drops down the chain of command like a stone — the rare exception fast becoming the rule….

Complex situational ethics cannot be applied during the stress of combat. The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality.

Pat Buchanan notices that there’s less chest-pounding about forcibly installing democracy in the Middle East since Pakistan abandoned democracy:

“Inaction at this moment is suicide for Pakistan, and I cannot allow the country to commit suicide.”

Thus did President Gen. Pervez Musharraf declare a state of emergency and invoke martial law.

The Supreme Court has been dismissed, the chief justice put under house arrest. A thousand lawyers and political opponents have been incarcerated. Human rights organizations have been shut down. Independent news media have been silenced.

It’s not merely democracy that is a sham, democracy’s self-styled defenders are and always will be frauds. They don’t actually believe in allowing the will of the people to rule any more than Louis the Sun King did.

Ron Paul raises a bit of cash:

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, aided by an extraordinary outpouring of Internet support Monday, hauled in more than $3.5 million in 20 hours. [$4.2M in 24 – VD] Paul, the Texas congressman with a Libertarian tilt and an out-of-Iraq pitch, entered heady fundraising territory with a surge of Web-based giving tied to the commemoration of Guy Fawkes Day.

Paul’s total deposed Mitt Romney as the single-day fundraising record holder in the Republican presidential field. When it comes to sums amassed in one day, Paul now ranks only behind Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton, who raised nearly $6.2 million on June 30, and Barack Obama.

That whole “unelectable” theme is looking less and less credible as time passes. And once the so-called bigger names start dropping out after Iowa and New Hampshire, anything can happen.

It was such a big deal, NRO’s Corner even noticed:

Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) ended Guy Fawkes Day having done something no Republican has ever done before. He raised almost $4 million over the Internet without spending so much as a thin dime (beyond transaction fees, of course). This sort of thing just isn’t done — usually you spend between fifty and eighty cents for every dollar you raise. We can’t know for sure until the quarter’s end, but Paul is probably leading Rudy Giuliani and perhaps even Mitt Romney in cash on hand at this moment. It was the largest Internet fundraising day in U.S. history. Paul attracted 40,000 donors who gave about $98 on average.

Sam Harris is upset because Theodore Dalrymple can read:

Beyond simply hating my book, Dalrymple seems to imagine that he has exposed me for what I am: not merely a fraud, and a lazy thinker, but a genocidal maniac. On Dalrymple’s reading, everyone who liked The End of Faith—my editor at Norton, the critics who favorably reviewed it, the deluded souls at the PEN America Foundation who awarded it their prize for nonfiction in 2005—must have simply skipped the chapter where I recommend that we murder millions of innocent people for thought crimes. Granted, the few sentences that Dalrymple lifted from my book with forensic care, like bloody fingerprints, seem alarming when viewed out of context. Indeed, I appreciated this liability when I wrote them. I am very happy to report, however, that no devout Christian, Muslim, or Jew—many of whom detested The End of Faith—has had the gall to excerpt these sentences and intentionally mislead readers the way Dalrymple has. His summary of my views is among the least honest I have come across, and his criticism of the “new atheist” bestsellers the least enlightening. This is more of an accomplishment, in fact, than it may appear. The race to the bottom has been fast and furious.

Except, of course, that Dalrymple’s accusations are not misleading at all. In The End of Faith Harris is clearly justifying preemptive mass murder in self-defense against dangerous thoughts; he specifically refers to “ideas” and not actions. It is impossible to view this as anything but an attempt to justify killing large quantities of people for crimes they have not committed. Imagine that, an atheist attempting to justify mass murder… we certainly haven’t heard that one before!

Harris’s proposed ethic is, as Dalrymple noted in his apology for being “intemperate”, (not, you’ll notice, inaccurate in any way), quite likely to lead to mission creep. Morever, Harris even points out precisely where that mission creep is likely to occur, as he echoes the call of past atheist icons like Bertrand Russell in advocating the establishment of dictatorial world government and the extirpation of national identity.

Notice that at no point in his “defense” does he actually offer a defense of his assertion or even deny it, he only argues everyone else who liked his book hadn’t complained about it. This, of course, says far more about what kind of morons liked his book than it does about what he did or did not write.

Harris is both a fraud and a lazy thinker, as I document in TIA to the point of dead-horse beating. There are literally dozens of examples. There’s also some evidence that he is intentionally dishonest, although I incline to the belief that it is merely intellectual incompetence. Sam Harris may or may not be a genocidal maniac, but it is absolutely clear that his book offers far more cover and support for genocidal maniacs than religious moderates offer religious extremists.

If Harris wishes to clarify his views with more precision, then he should do so. As long as he insists that it is ethical to slaughter people for dangerous, intolerable and unspecified ideas, he will continue to be viewed with contempt and disgust by all rational human beings.

As a reader, writer and general skeptic about the future of a post-literate world, I find it hard to be joyful about the continued decline of conventional newspapers. On the other hand, as a right-wing technophile whose nationally syndicated column was rejected by pretty much every major newspaper editor with the exception of the Dallas Morning News, it neither surprises nor upsets me to see how badly the left-wing ideologues are crashing and burning in the marketplace now that technology has shattered their ideological monopoly:

According to an analysis of ABC figures, for 538 daily U.S. newspapers, circulation declined 2.5% to 40,689,617. For 609 papers that filed on Sunday, overall circulation dropped 3.5% to 46,771,486….

In the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, circulation declined in Minneapolis and was virtually flat in St. Paul. At the Star Tribune, daily dropped 6.5% to 335,443, and Sunday was down 4.3% to 570,443. Daily and Sunday circulation at the St. Paul Pioneer Press was up a fraction — 0.1% for both averages. Daily circ is 184,474 and Sunday is 245,930.

Talk about a dying business…. It’s interesting to note that WorldNetDaily’s daily readership already exceeds the Pioneer Press’s circulation and is rapidly approaching that of the Star Tribune.