Category: Uncategorized

I’m so surprised that the assailant didn’t turn out to be someone named Swen Olsen:

A 26-year-old man was charged Thursday for allegedly raping and beating a woman in an apartment hallway — an incident apparently witnessed by several people who did nothing, police say, to help the alleged victim. Charged with two counts of rape, Rage Ibrahim turned himself in to Ramsey County authorities Thursday afternoon….

Police say the alleged attack was captured by the building’s security camera. “It shows the suspect striking the victim,” says St. Paul Police spokesperson Tom Walsh. And police say the tape also shows something else – as many as ten people who saw the alleged attack, but did nothing. “They simply walked down the hall and turned backducked back into their doorway,” says Walsh. Police say the alleged assault lasted 30 minutes and no attempt was made to help the woman and there was no immediate call to 911.

We are informed that culture and race don’t make any difference and that people everywhere are all the same. And yet, less than one hundred years ago, Minnesotans were more inclined to lynch men wrongly accused of rape than to ignore the commission of one.

But then why should anyone do anything now, when there is a reasonable chance that intervening will not only risk one’s health, but one’s wealth should one make the mistake of causing bodily harm to a criminal?

Sam Harris making his customary hash of a case against religion:

At a time when Muslim doctors and engineers stand accused of attempting atrocities in the expectation of supernatural reward, when the Catholic Church still preaches the sinfulness of condom use in villages devastated by AIDS, when the president of the United States repeatedly vetoes the most promising medical research for religious reasons, much depends on the scientific community presenting a united front against the forces of unreason.

What depends, Sam? For the love of the Galapagos Islands, for once in your pathetic career, put some actual substance behind your incompetent logic and half-assed rhetoric! WHAT DEPENDS? I mean, Nature itself has reported that one of the places where science is currently growing fastest in terms of funding and employment is IRAN. Religion does not seriously inhibit science in any way, let alone imperil it. The argument is demonstrably false on its face.

It’s been published – in Nature, no less – that your stem cell argument is outdated. It’s now bad science. How is the fact that Muslim doctors and engineers happen to be politically active terrorists any jeopardy to science in any way, shape or form? And which is more likely to spread AIDS, your advocacy of free sex with condoms or the Catholic Church’s position of chastity until marriage? Is it merely a coincidence that AIDS didn’t emerge until after the invention of the condom and the sexual revolution?

Sam Harris is not a scientist and he isn’t a fan of the scientific method, he’s a fraudulent philosophy major who is attempting to hijack science in service to his anti-theistic jihad. It is my fondest wish for TIA that it will finish off this intellectually dishonest charlatan once and for all.

If science unites against religion, then science will be destroyed and deservedly so. It is science, not religion, which poses a distinct and multi-faceted threat to mankind’s continued survival, moreover, it is a historical fact that while science can be shut down for centuries, not even the most violent totalitarian government is capable of eliminating religion over a period of decades.

PS – On the evolution debate front, my interlocutor Scott has expressed the wish that I hold off until he completes his next response. Since I’ve been under the weather lately I’m quite happy to comply, although I do look forward to hearing his further thoughts on the matter. His partial response can be read here.

PPS – It’s amusing to note that religious youth are more moral by Sam Harris’s own metric of morality: “Eighty percent of those who call religion or spirituality the most important thing in their lives say they’re happy, while 60 percent of those who say faith isn’t important to them consider themselves happy.”

Evangelical atheists sure have a tough sell. On the one hand, you’ll be less happy, live a shorter life, and need therapy before you kill yourself. On the other, you’ll be less popular at a party than a homosexual Haitian pedophile with tuberculosis and three STDs. So wear that scarlet letter with pride!

PZ asks an incredibly stupid question:

Out of curiosity, I’d just like to know … how many recent instances are there of atheists using death threats, threats against family members, and various other kinds of intimidation to discourage Christians from openly professing their beliefs?

Let’s see, there’s the tens of thousands of Christians being held in Korean death camps like Camp 22, there’s the pastors being jailed and beaten in Cuba, the Christians being killed, jailed and imprisoned in the laogai of China, Laos and Vietnam. Forget “openly professing their beliefs”, four of these atheist-run states are actively engaged in murderous oppression of Christians for the mere “possession” of their beliefs.

Here is a list of a few of the Christians currently being “discouraged” by atheists. This is the list of countries where Christians are currently confirmed to be persecuted:

Afghanistan, Cyprus, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Egypt, Mauritania, Sudan, Azerbaijan, Equatorial Guinea, Morocco, Syria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Myanmar (Burma), Tajikistan, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Tibet (China), Brunei, Indonesia, Nigeria, Tunisia, Chechnya, Iran, North Korea, Turkey, Chiapas, Iraq, Oman, Turkmenistan, China, Kuwait, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Colombia, Laos, Qatar, Uzbekistan, Comoro Islands, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Cuba, Malaysia, Somalia, Yemen.

Obviously, there are more examples of Muslim states persecuting Christians today, on the other hand, a higher percentage atheist-run government are currently doing so. Now, where are atheists being murdered and jailed for their atheism?

UPDATE – After viewing the video, I would say there’s little chance of these “threats” being genuine anyhow. All that was missing was the Clintonian lip bite.

After a long discussion on the rational bases for authority and morality, Pintopolis finally comes very close to grokking the fullness:

You are not describing morals here. You are describing obedience. It’s not the same.

Close, so very close. From the Christian perspective, obedience and morality are EXACTLY the same. It is not the Golden Rule or the Beatitudes or even the Ten Commandments, but obedience to the Will of God that is the heart and root and soul of Christian morality. I go into more detail on this in TIA, but a partial explication of the significance of this definition can be found in the first and second posts dealing with the non-dilemma of Euthyphro.

The individual basis of most hypothetical atheist moral systems is the fundamental challenge of atheodicy, which is why Daniel Dennett spends so much time attempting to formulate an approach to begin solving the atheist problem of evil in both Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and Breaking the Spell. He is, by his own admission, unable to conceive of any such universal system himself; the best he can do is theorize the possibility of “moral democracy”. Given the profoundly immoral results of past political democracies, however, this is a hopeless nonstarter of a concept and Dennett even seems to realize that in light of his lackluster description of the idea.

The atheologist Onfray is rightly contemptuous of the milktoast atheism of Dennett, Dawkins and Harris. He is the true son of Nietzsche, and as such, the only semi-rational atheist in the lot. He sneers at the “christian atheism” of Pintopolis, wherein the atheist attempts to cling to what are manifestly Christian morals for no rational reason. It is astounding how poorly educated so many atheists are in history; in much the same way that only historical illiterates such as Dawkins and Harris could argue that religion causes war and is an integral aspect of war-making, it requires a considerable amount of historical ignorance to argue that past human societies shared the Christian moral view of deceit, theft and murder, let alone the concept of individual rights or any form of equality.

If your morality is not defined by obedience to God, then your morality will ultimately be defined by men with the ambition and the ability to impose their will upon you. This is why all totalitarians hate the religious in general and Christians in particular; because they are the one group who can never be fully integrated into the totalitarian’s new morality.

Of course, instead of admitting the whole thing was a ridiculously hopeless concept from the start, they’ll simply refocus on new objectives:

Nightmarish political realities in Baghdad are prompting American officials to curb their vision for democracy in Iraq. Instead, the officials now say they are willing to settle for a government that functions and can bring security.

Brilliant. Just brilliant. But how will this make us safer, since we were informed that democracy in Iraq was required for American safety?

Equalitarians, humanists and those who “see no color” believe that it is government and geography that make a nation, rather than, well, nations. The great experiment formerly known as Great Britain may be the first to let us know if this is true or not, as more than a tenth of the nation has abandoned Albion for foreign lands less foreign than Londonistan:

More people left the UK last year than in any year since current records began in 1991, statistics show. Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) indicate that some 385,000 people left the UK for the long term in the year to mid-2006. Long-term migration into the UK, meanwhile, was 574,000….

Those figures – published in April – suggest that, over that two year period, 71,000 British citizens started new lives in Australia compared with 58,000 in Spain and 42,000 in France.

Over the course of 40 years, some 67,500 more Britons have left the UK every year than have returned – a population loss that has been balanced out by increasing immigration.

It is interesting to note that so many Englishmen prefer to live in Spain and France rather than in an overtaxed country full of Muslims and run by Scotsmen. The worst thing is that this evacuation will only increase as their replacements gain political power and speed up the pace of the transformation of Britain into something much more similar to the places from which they came.

Enoch Powell was right.

Amynda does possess a unique ability to completely miss the obvious. I mean, I have to assume that she’s not serious and this post is some sort of joke, since the racially sensitive are going to go absolutely primate-feces should they ever happen to see the cover of her new book.

If she’s serious, then it is nothing less than the exclamation point on the argument that feminism is simply the politics of the white, college-educated left-wing woman.

UPDATE – It seems she’s really just that clueless:

“Good to know what the joy-killing narrative is going to be. My money was on “pornographic”. Shows my guessing skills.”

A commenter adds:

“No wonder black feminists keep telling us we don’t get it…I was really looking forward to the book but I’m having second thoughts now.”

PZ appears to be in a spot of legal bother, but I find it almost impossible to imagine that he is in any actual peril as this appears to be little more than a nuisance lawsuit. But Dr. Myers is likely going to get an interesting lesson in libel, which he actually might have managed to commit even though it’s almost impossible to do so today:

PZ Myers, Ph.D., Division of Science & Math, University of Minnesota, Morris, says: I’m in an interesting situation. I wrote a very negative review of two versions of a book [Lifecode: The Theory of Biological Self Organization] by Stuart Pivar here and here. He claims to have a revolutionary idea for how evolution works, but his ideas have no connection to reality, and these lovely elaborate drawings he made look nothing at all like actual embryos. The bottom line is that I said his work was more about the evolution of balloon animals than biology.

His response is to sue Seed Media and Paul Z. Myers for “Assault, Libel, and Slander.”

As readers have seen nearly every time PZ links to a post here, PZ is inclined to stretch the truth. He’s doing so again here. The root of his legal peril lies in the fact that he didn’t say Lifecode was “more about the evolution of balloon animals”, but rather “The doodles in this book bear absolutely no relationship to anything that goes on in real organisms, but after staring at them for a while, I realized what this book is actually about. This book is a description of the development and evolution of balloon animals.”

Libel requires not only that the statement is an incorrect and malicious statement of fact and not opinion, but also that the individual making the libelous statement knew it to be incorrect. Due to the phrasing of PZ’s statement and because PZ is a professor of biology and his blog purports to be a serious science blog, the plaintiff has merely to demonstrate that PZ knows the difference between real animals and balloon animal and knows that the book he reviewed was not about balloon animals, in order to prove libel.

PZ’s malice is easy enough to establish; there are dozens if not hundreds of examples on his site, and explaining motivation is unlikely to prove a challenge given his much publicized hatred for creationists and others who challenge TENS dogma.

However, even if PZ did libel Stuart Pivar, and based on the two posts I suspect a good lawyer like TPAM could probably prove it, the only relevant issue will be Pivar’s inability to prove financial damages. Unless Pivar had a book contract get cancelled due to PZ’s review or can demonstrate some other concrete monetary losses, the judge will probably throw this out of court. The fact that Pivar also charged Myers with assault tends to indicate this is simply a crackpot taking a meaningless legal potshot at someone who has angered him.

However, if this lawsuit proves to be more than a temporary nuisance, I should like to let Dr. Myers know that I would be more than happy to submit an affadavit in his defense. Although Pharyngula purports to be a scientific blog, due to the context of PZ’s habitual rhetorical excess, it is abundantly clear that his statements about Pivar’s book should not have been taken literally or assumed to have been any more based in fact than his customary bloviations and misrepresentations.

UPDATE – Having read the complaint, courtesy of Salt, I don’t think PZ has anything to worry about except the inevitable legal costs. Mr. Pivar is completely basing his suit on Dr. Myers’s use of the term “crackpot”, which has been found slanderous in very different circumstances that really don’t appear to apply here. As I said, a competent lawyer could probably make a solid case for libel, (except for that little problem about there being no damages whatsoever), but based on the complaint it’s pretty clear that there isn’t any such animal involved here.

It’s so hard to tell. I found this woman’s response to my hypothesis that atheism may be related to Asperger Syndrome to be the most amusing. Isn’t AS, um, genetic?

Maybe that’s because people with Asperger’s automatically see right past the emotional/authority appeals to religion and notice that is full of shit otherwise with nothing else to back it up. But seriously, as both a recent atheist and a mother of an AS child, I say a big fuck you to Vox Day. I’m so upset I can’t be any more articulate than that at the moment.

Ah, such an unfortunate loss to literary history. The funniest thing is that she’s upset by the hypothesis, but posits a supporting explanation for it anyhow. And yet, why should what is nothing but a scientific hypothesis upset anyone? Should Christians go on the warpath because Daniel C. Dennett suggests, on the basis of less evidence than I presented in support of my hypothesis, that their religious faith could be nothing more than an evolutionary spandrel? Really, we’re all just scientists here, seeking to determine a scientific consensus supported by the evidence.

E si, ho gia letto il Robespierre dell’ateismo. In fatto, c’e un capitolo dedicato solo a lui.

This will be a long one, so buckle up. First, I wish to note three things: (1) Despite his admirable composure and agreeable willingness to answer many questions, Scott has not successfully answered a few of my questions nor has he yet attempted to make a coherent case for evolution. No doubt he has a bit more data with which to do so now…. (2) Scott’s genetic definition of evolution differs from the conventional definition based on fossil-based speciation which one commonly encounters in discussions with pro-evolution laymen. (3) I am not attempting to make a proactive case for an alternate theory of speciation or genetic evolution, I am simply defending my position as an evolutionary skeptic.

Second, I wish to note a few points that Scott has graciously conceded. (1) There is no clear evidence of speciation in the fossil record. (2) One cannot claim that the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (TENS) is the truth and speak as a scientist. (3) Those who attempt to enlist TENS as proof for things which cannot be tested have left the domain of science.

Now, Scott has been asking for my opinion of a pair of predictions made in 1859 and 1989 that he believes to have been made and validated, not only demonstrating speciation but blowing out of the water the creationist claim that no transitional forms between land animals and whales have been found.

My response is that this is impressive and a beautiful example of the backtesting that I find interesting, but inherently unscientific. I’ll demonstrate why by mentioning the validation of an even more astounding “prediction” which was made 2,600 years ago. The Book of Jeremiah claims in chapter 39 verse 3 that an officer named Nebo-Sarsekim was with the Babylonian King Nebuchanezzar II at the siege of Jerusalem. Four days ago, the British Museum announced that a clay tablet in its possession had been determined to be a bill of receipt acknowledging Nebo-Sarsekim’s payment of 1.6 pounds of gold to a Babylonian temple in 595 BC, apparently confirming the Biblical timeline, the existence of the Babylonian king and the individual named Nebo-Sarsekim himself.

One cannot reasonably argue that one prediction of subsequently confirmed past events is proper science while the other is not. If we must accept TENS on the basis of an aquatic bear skeleton, then we must also accept the Bible, (or at least the Book of Jeremiah, including the bits about the Lord speaking to him) – frankly, the Biblical “prediction” is much more impressive, being more than 20 times older – and I doubt many scientists are inclined to accept that conclusion.

While some have failed to understand the significance of my comparison of macroeconomic modeling to macroevolutionary modeling, Scott gets it. He describes the issue well when he writes: “as a scientist, I’m not in the ‘truth business.’ I’m in the ‘model building and model testing business.'” What he has not yet fully comprehended, most likely because his field is subject to significantly less rigorous testing, is the scientific unreliability of successfully backtested theories.

I previously related my own failures in that regard. But I’m far from the only one, Goldman Sachs right now is having far more serious problems with their presumably more advanced models than I ever did. Although the exact details are unclear, shares began to move in ways that were precisely the opposite of those predicted by computer models. These moves triggered selling by funds as they attempted to cover their losses and meet margin calls from banks. This, in turn, made share price movements even worse. As Goldman’s CFO noted in a rare conference call: “We are seeing things that were 25-standard deviation events, several days in a row.” That’s something that only happens once every 100,000 years.

Lehman Brothers is having the same sort of problems: “Models are behaving in the opposite way we would predict and have seen and tested for over very long time periods.”

Now, I admit that it is theoretically possible that the tremendous problems faced by macroeconomists and financial analysts, whose models are very, very different, will not be experienced by scientists basing their predictive models on TENS. However, given the superior precision of the backtesting of the economic and financial models and the unsuccessful nature of so many TENS backdated “predictions”, the logical conclusion based on the current data is that the TENS model is far less likely to prove functional when tested for its future performance in a scientific manner than the inadequate models from other scientific disciplines.

Large numbers multiplied by epochs of time look like a godsend to those who support TENS now because they have filled in so little of the historical record, but the reality is that the complexity they represent are very likely to present numerous and serious problems as more data is gathered and attempts to put it to the only test that really counts are made. The author of a book called The Black Swan writes: “people — especially so-called experts — tend to overestimate what they know and underestimate the uncertainty that is derived from those things they don’t know.” This applies to Darwinism as well as Keynesianism and Bernahnkeism.

I have no alternative to offer TENS subscribers at this point in time, nor do I think I am likely to in the future, but Scott’s juxtaposition of my position with Kepler’s regarding the Ptolemic model – no doubt made with tongue firmly in cheek – is correct in the sense that there is no reason for scientists to abandon TENS at this point in time. It is, as he and others have said, the best model they’ve got right now, and it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to continue to use it to look for ancient bear-whales and fruit flies that can’t breed with other fruit flies. I don’t object to that, but I’m not particularly interested in it either. Let me know when you’re ready to test it instead of using it as a historical dowsing device.

(Speaking of fruit flies, the Dobzhansky paper from 1966 on the Drosophila Paulistorum Complex was quite interesting. Why are there no newer papers on this? What happened to the new “incipient species” of Llanos-A that spontaneously emerged? It can’t breed with its predecessors, and yet it is genetically and morphologically the same as its predecessors at this point in time. Has this changed in any of the generations that have presumably continued to evolve over the last 41 years?)

Thus far, this debate has led me to believe that I can state with complete confidence that it is utterly absurd to attack religious faith on the basis of TENS, that it is ridiculous to ask political candidates whether they “believe” in TENS and that it is scientifically irresponsible to argue that one must be either stupid or ignorant to possess doubts about TENS as a theory capable of standing up to the conventional definition of the scientific method of hypothesis, testing and replicable observation.

Scott writes: Vox, you can play the part of evolutionary skeptic all you want to, but you can’t expect the scientific community to join you in rejecting TENS on the grounds that you’ve given (its high margin of error) unless you can do what Kepler did and propose a testable explanation whose margin of error is significantly lower.

Agreed. I don’t expect the scientific community to reject TENS, I don’t even expect them to seriously question it at this point in time since they’re not testing its predictive validity. However, I do expect those non-scientists whose understanding of evolution is significantly less sophisticated than Scott’s to be more than a little abashed when they realize that they are simpl
y not standing on the firmly scientific grounds that they clearly believed they were.

My skepticism may be nothing more than an intuition, (although I’d prefer to describe it as pattern recognition), but it is an educated and informed intuition, and more so now, thanks to Scott. Remember, it was Richard Leakey, a professor of Human Evolution, who quoted David Pilbeam in 1981: “If you brought in a smart scientist from another discipline and showed him the meagre evidence we’ve got he’d surely say, ‘forget it: there isn’t enough to go on’.”

My latest question to Scott is this: if many other complex models which backtested better than TENS have proven to be roundly unsuccessful when their future predictions have been subjected to rigorous scientific experimentation, what is the basis of your apparent belief that TENS-based models will prove more successful?