Category: Uncategorized

Andrew Brown accuses the Archbishop of Oxford of knowingly repeating an ugly lie:

I told Dawkins at the beginning of our interview that I had just come from reading the piece, he said, straight into my tape recorder, that Midgley had confessed to Ullica Segerstråle, a distinguished sociologist of science, that she had not in fact read the book before reviewing it.

Given that her review contains 11 extended quotes from the book, this could not possibly be true; given that he spent some time writing a closely argued reply, and thus poring over every quote she used, he must have known it could not possibly be true. None the less he said it with such conviction that I took the trouble to track down Dr Segerstråle and – after she had failed to respond to emails – to ring her up in Illinois. She said that of course it was nonsense….

I felt this was rather a difficult story to deal with; however, while I was wondering what to do, I had an unexpected email from Dawkins himself, in Chicago, where he had just had supper with Ullica Segerstråle. They had discussed the matter and come to the happy conclusion that it was all a misunderstanding. He also, I believe, wrote to Mary Midgley apologising for telling me this rather unpleasant lie about her….

Then, blow me if three weeks ago he did not repeat the claim, in writing, on his own website: “Mrs Midgley confessed to Ullica that she had not in fact read The Selfish Gene when she wrote that article. She has since backtracked from that confession, and I was inclined to believe her.”

What makes it almost literally incredible that he should write this is that he links in that post to her original review, so that anyone who bothers to click through can check the evidence for his claim.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least considering the number of easily provable falsehoods in his books, including but not limited to The God Delusion. In those cases, I believe he’s simply ignorant, but this isn’t exactly the first time Dawkins has been accused of attempting to retroactively modify past events in his favor.

Another thing to like about Ron Paul is the fact that he is capable of articulating his own thoughts and making his own case, without requiring a puppet master to put words in his mouth:

A few months back, I wrote back-to-back weekly messages regarding globalism and isolationism. In writing those columns, I focused on the fact that our nation’s interventionist foreign policy was precisely what was isolating us from other countries.

Turkey’s recall of their U.S. ambassador in the wake of last week’s resolution, passed in the House Foreign Affairs Committee in condemnation of Turkey, is a perfect example of what I wrote in those columns, as well as what I have been saying for years….

Even though I am no fan of the war in Iraq, keeping positive relations with Turkey is important to protecting our troops who have been sent to fight this war. We are likely to need cordial relations with Turkey so that we can get our troops out of Iraq as quickly and safely as possible, when the time comes.

It’s a pity Giuliani and Thompson aren’t writing similar columns, one has little trouble imagining what Rudy would write about; it would almost surely go something like this:

There is something deranged about those with a excessive concern with little weasels. It is a sickness, and they should go consult a psychologist or a psychiatrist with this excessive concern, how they are devoting their lives to weasels. They need somebody to help them. There are people in this city and in this world that need a lot of help. Something has gone wrong with them. I’m convinced there is something seriously wrong with them. Because a normal person doesn’t do this. They don’t get involved in this kind of sick, compulsive behavior.

Giuliani would be a horrendous president, but he would be amazingly entertaining as the anti-Oprah. Someone get him a syndicated advice column.

The Evangelical Outpost drops the Tennessee Toad:

When it comes to investing I have a difficult time letting go. I hold onto stocks long after I should have dumped them from my pitifully performing portfolio. But when it comes to politics I am more ruthless and willing to take a loss. That is why I’m cutting my support for Fred Thompson….

I won’t waste time elaborating all the reasons for my decision, but they are many. Still, I hung on until this past weekend. After seeing his sloppy, lackluster, uninspiring speech at the Washington Briefing I realized I couldn’t do it anymore. It’s embarrassing to have to admit I was wrong.

Unfortunately, he’s elected to embrace the Huckster rather than Ron Paul. But Joe may come around yet; obviously he’s capable of changing his mind once he figures out that Huckabee is a scandal-prone, big-government, pro-immigration faux conservative with a crazy wife. He’s essentially a Republican Bill Clinton.

As I wrote when Thompson was first being talked up prior to what was apparently supposed to be his entry into the race, his only appeal was that he was a Republican who wasn’t named Giuliani, McCain or Romney. I expect many to soon follow the lead of the founder of Blogs for Fred in abandoning the senator.

UPDATE:

St. Anselm College’s Institute of Politics will release a new poll today, completed by SRBI Research in New York City, showing that Clinton and Romney hold solid leads in New Hampshire…

Romney leads Giuliani 32.4 to 21.8 percent, with John McCain at 15.2 percent and Ron Paul in fourth place at 7.4 percent. Fred Thompson is in sixth place with 5 percent.

It will be interesting to see how the “conservative” media reacts if Paul beats both Huckabee and Thompson in New Hampshire. And if my suspicions are correct, he’ll overperform the polls and pass McCain as well. Meanwhile, the “frontrunner” Giuliani is so hopelessly unelectable that he can’t even win a primary in a northeastern state.

UPDATE II: I love the smell of panic in the morning.

Ron Paul beating Fred Thompson in New Hampshire?

RF asks about the obvious:

How come 500,000 Californians can be safely evacuated in three days but it is impossible to deport any illegal aliens?

Why do you hate Californians, RF, why? Are you saying you want to burn illegal aliens to death? To burn them just like they burned human beings in the ovens at Bergen-Belsen? Nazi! Wait a minute, why do I suddenly feel the urge to grow a mustache?

Sorry, it seems I was channeling Michael Medved for a moment there.

By my calculations, it should take approximately 72 days to repatriate all 12 million illegal immigrants, or six months if there’s actually 30 million, as reported recently.

IQ Quiz: is it more difficult to identify a) non-English speaking illegal aliens in the United States or b) Islamic guerillas in an occupied Islamic country?

Our evolution debate has finally petered out on somewhat of an amusing note, with Scott repeating my initial assertion that I am not proposing an alternative to TENS, but am merely an evolutionary skeptic. (I’m also a string theory skeptic, but I don’t propose an alternative to that theory either.) It’s been interesting, as I’ve definitely learned a lot about the current state of genetic science, but I simply haven’t seen any reason to modify my skepticism about evolution in any way.

Scott is correct, my position is largely intuitive, but it is an educated intuition. The nature of the gaps in the theory are such that I suspect a complete overhaul of the theory is more likely than the gradual filling-in of the missing data that evolution supporters expect. These gaps are certainly more obvious than were those in the Ptolemic system at the time that Copernicus developed his alternative to it, the fact that no one else had come up with anything during the centuries preceding Copernicus didn’t make Ptolemy correct. And I hope that Scott will agree that I have made a solid case against the abuse of TENS, which damages both the public regard for science as well as TENS itself by dragging it into intellectual fields where it simply has no legitimate application.

Scott is a good teacher, but I don’t think he fully grasped the extent to which the issues I raised are serious and fundamental problems with the current TENS model. He never addressed a number of them directly, but rhetorically punted instead. This was completely understandable, as some of the questions were difficult and to his credit he didn’t claim to have answered them, but one cannot reasonably expect a skeptic to be convinced by an admitted non-answer. Questions regarding margin of error, temporal dichotomies, the percentage of correct predictions and the average rate of evolution may be problematic but they are not spurious and even a cursory investigation into the literature shows that most of these questions are taken very seriously by scientists in the field.

Ironically, it was the scientist who was more impressed by unscientific anecdotes such as the naked mole rat “prediction”, which could have been far more easily faked than, for example, the Fatima miracle witnessed by 70,000 people. I find this selective suspension of disbelief to be all too typical; it is a human tendency to demand more rigorous data from our opponents than from our allies.

I enjoyed the debate, although I think it would be more effective if there were a moderator involved next time to help keep track of things and keep them on target. In any case, Scott is a good man and I’d happily debate him again on this or any other subject.

At least Captain Ed correctly recognizes the GOP’s self-destructive impulse, as exhibited most recently by RedState’s ban of Ron Paul supporters:

I disagree with Leon’s assumption that these Paul supporters are all or mostly cryptoliberals. Plenty of libertarian-leaning Republicans exist in the party, along with the former Buchananites and isolationists of the GOP. Instead of cutting these people off, it might be better for Redstate to keep engaging them. After all, Paul will not be in the race all that much longer, and we need those voters to stay in the GOP when Paul disappears. There are worse impulses than libertarianism.

The GOP does need those voters, but they’re not going to get them. Not because its leadership has rejected the only candidate who can beat Hillary in 2008, but because it is rejecting the conservative principles upon which the party is supposedly based. Many conservatives and libertarians have learned their lesson from their betrayal by George W. Bush and will never again vote for a big-spending, Constitution-ignoring, globalist, big government candidate, much less one that is openly pro-abortion to boot; the fact that he might have an (R) after his name only makes the candidate that much more offensive to them.

None of this is a surprise, of course. Except for the unexpected Paul irruption, this entire campaign has been a charade on both sides of the aisle. As I predicted literally years ago, the whole point of nominating a Giuliani or a Romney is to permit the GOP to take a dive for Hillary. If you still believe there are two different political parties in the United States of America, you have been paying attention to the style of their pre-election promises rather than the substance of their post-election actions.

I have never been terribly impressed with RedState. They’re about as ideologically conservative as Hillary Clinton:

Effective immediately, new users may *not* shill for Ron Paul in any way shape, form or fashion. Not in comments, not in diaries, nada. If your account is less than 6 months old, you can talk about something else, you can participate in the other threads and be your zany libertarian self all you want, but you cannot pimp Ron Paul….

P.S. Comments to this post are closed. Complaints may be directed to the contact form.

No, life isn’t fair. All that glitters isn’t gold. And, as Daniel Larison notes, not everyone who claims to be conservative supports free discussion, liberty or the Constitution.

The presumption behind the ban that most Paul boosters are liberals is embarrassing to RedState. Sadly, it says a lot more about what passes for conservatism at RedState than it does about the Paul supporters. Rather than reaching some reasonable middle ground, punishing posters who abuse their privileges, their solution is a ban against new members saying anything about Paul. The symbolism of this move is terrible for RedState. It says to all those enthusiastic Paul backers that there is no point trying to talk to most Republicans, and after this I would be hard pressed to contradict such a view.

Lowkey asks about anonymous commenting:

I was wondering if you had a response to Dennis Prager’s most recent column, given that you do host a poltical discussion blog that remains relatively civil without any way of identifying most of the participants.

The key word there being “relatively”, of course. I think Prager is wildly and utterly wrong in every way, as there is no reasonable way to enforce identities – I quite enjoy net registrations since I regard them as mandatory exercises in creative fiction – and I dislike how registration tends to significantly stifle debate. So, I think his idea is impractical, pointless and ultimately self-defeating.

I don’t mind the occasional drive-by commenter, as it’s easy enough to nuke comments from those who get out of hand, while even the craziest people occasionally have something positive to add to the conversation. Many bloggers have asked me why this blog gets more comments than blogs with 10x the readership and the answer is an easy one: I don’t play thought police.

The rules here are simple. Keep the vulgarity within reasonable norms, be civil to Spacebunny, don’t cross-comment and don’t evade direct questions posed to you. You can accuse me of whatever you want, but you’d better be able to back it up with evidence.

Too many bloggers buy into the idea that they are somehow responsible for whatever their commenters happen to write. I don’t, as it makes no sense. The spectrum here is too broad for me to possibly agree with everything that’s written, much less be responsible for it. Yes, sometimes there is ugliness and vapidness and downright idiocy, but there is also the occasional insight, wisdom and brilliance. I don’t think you can have the latter without risking the former.

Prager’s opinion may lie in the fact that he’s fundamentally a radio performer, not a writer. I suspect that he likes to talk at people somewhat more than he likes to engage with them. A writer, on the other hand, always absorbs more input than he produces output. And even morons can serve a purpose. While I find some of my critics personally annoying, I still appreciate them, as even the most irritating moron can help me refine my thinking or at least demonstrate how I may have to clarify things in order for it to make sense to the average, clueless individual.

Christopher Hitchens gets his ass kicked again, this time by Dinesh D’Souza. In his typically absurd style, he manages to demonstrate what is either enormous historical ignorance or enormous dishonesty.

Hitchens: “There is nothing secular about fascism. Hitler praised the church in Mein Kampf.”

1. The latter sentence is irrelevant as Hitler was never a fascist of any sort. Both Mussolini and Hitler were very clear about the many ideological differences between secular Italian national imperialism and pagan Teutonic national socialism.

2. The first sentence is simply incorrect.

Per il problema finanziario:
Noi vogliamo:

b) II sequestro di tutti i beni delle congregazioni religiose e l’abolizione di tutte le mense Vescovili che costituiscono una enorme passività per la Nazione e un privilegio di pochi.

For the financial problem:
We demand:

b) The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics, which constitute an enormous liability on the Nation and on the privileges of the poor.

Hitchens is nothing more than an intellectual joke and an increasingly specious one at that.

I always find colloquial expressions to be interesting because of what they reveal about a culture. Italian expressions can be particularly fascinating as they show a connection to both the primitive agricultural past as well as to intellectual aspects of the Renaissance.

It was very confusing the first time I heard someone say “boca lupo“, “mouth of the wolf”, in the context of a thesis presentation. Whose mouth? What wolf? Weren’t we talking about his thesis? But it simply means “good luck”, as in, “I hope you come out of this problematic situation all right”. I would have been even more confused the other night at practice did I not have a history habit, as one of our strikers was complaining vociferously about how a midfielder had passed the ball to the left just as he broke on goal to the right during scrimmage.

“Eppure si muove“, the midfielder replied sarcastically. “And yet, it moves”. That didn’t make any literal sense but it cracked me up all the same. The midfielder’s reply was a quote of what Galileo is supposed to have said after being forced to publicly recant his belief in the Copernican system.