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But TIA is already 20 percent longer than Sam Harris’s “marvellous little book”. And I haven’t even begun the serious slashing and burning.

It seems to be going really well so far, although I’m slightly concerned that someone is going to look over my shoulder and ask: “why do you keep typing REDRUM over and over?”

And special thanks to Huck, whose quick finger on the JSTOR trigger kept me from making a stupid mistake and let me keep rolling without pause.

Poof

Gone

I’m pulling a lot of the stuff I’ve written over the last few days. I invited a flood of racist and gay-baiting trash traffic here, and I am anxious to see it go away.

Or not. Whatever. Nothing like a little Parthian shot to try to cover your porcine behind as you run away squealing. Of course, there never was any such flood, nor can his assertion be disproved since he conveniently deleted all seven posts attacking me, including such non-gay-baiting classics as vox_day_is_gay_possibly and faggot_science.

A simple admission of misunderstanding would have sufficed as far as I’m concerned, but it has become mysteriously common to conclude that it’s somehow less humiliating to destroy your own credibility instead. But there’s no shame in being wrong from time to time; there is, however, plenty of it in acting like a whiny little bitch.

UPDATE – on an unrelated note, GT’s back, having answered the question to my satisfaction. I don’t really care what any of you believe, I do expect everyone who asks questions of others to be willing to answer questions directed their own way to the best of their ability. Unless it’s EP or Jamie doing the asking, I would recommend ignoring their questions at all costs. And no, you don’t have to pull Bane’s finger if he asks either.

Does anyone have access to JSTOR from their local or school library? If you do, please let me know, there’s a few old scholarly articles I need to review.

Thanks

Twinkletoes obviously doesn’t read this blog:

I’m just guessing here, but I’m starting to suspect that Vox Day is as gay as riding a girl’s bike while holding your mom’s purse and wearing a pink shirt.

Here is a comment Aaron left: “When your hair is your trademark, you join John ‘Breck Girl’ Edwards and it becomes clear that Vox protesteth too much.”

I don’t know why I didn’t see this before. Think about it.

1. He mentions is Mensa membership on his blog. Mensa is full of single men who make a good living. What better place for a young guy who needs a ride through life to cruise?

2. He says he plays Madden, which is a video game. Remember how Michael Jackson used video games to lure his conquests? It’s brilliant. You spend hours on the couch with another guy…maybe beer is present…one thing can lead to another.

3. He says he belongs to SWFA. I’m not sure, but I think that may be “Soft-Wristed Flamers Association.”

1. No, I don’t. Column bio |= blog.
2. Word ’em up. Since 1992. I am frighteningly good at Maddens. Not just good, frighteningly good.
3. That’s SFWA, Twinkletoes. SFWA. Although actually, that’s not terribly far from the truth. Still, Seriously Fat Women Authors would arguably be closer.

Sadly, Twinkletoes doesn’t rate when it comes to the Insult rating. I imagine it’s due to his strong anti-slur beliefs; he just doesn’t have the practice. While he did nail the homosexual and Mensa references and implied a hairstyle reference – we’ll give credit for the picture – he left out a) the assertion that no women will ever have sex with me, b) that I live in my parent’s basement, c) that he will never have sex with me, d) no LOL, ROTFL or ROTFLMAO e) that I am a mysogynist, f) that I am a fascist / Nazi/ totalitarian / authoritarian / etc and g) that Daddy got me my job.

I’ve seen better. Although he does demonstrate his skills as a humorist when he writes: “I don’t care about hurting Vox Day’s feelings. It’s not my problem if he has a glass chin, or his fans have one on his behalf. And what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. It was perfectly appropriate for me to insult him personally, and in case no one noticed, I also ripped his sophomoric writing and half-baked beliefs, which is the farthest thing from a personal attack. The guy has NOTHING, at least compared to the image he tries to project. His thinking is as thin as the margin by which he made it into Mensa.”

Yep, glass chin and sophmoric writing, that’s me. One absent-minded slur and he’s posting away like a madman, he was up to seven posts based on one “Twinkletoes” before I’d even heard about it… now who’s got that glass chin, exactly? I don’t think the gentleman understands that it’s not possible for him to hurt my feelings, as it would be like fretting about being pinned by a gnat. What’s funny about this is that I didn’t even intend to insult Mr. Sensitivity nor know anything about him, I was merely staking my stated position as being pro-slur.

But obviously, I’m pleased that my rhetorical kung fu is so strong, it managed to convince Steve to abandon his public anti-slur stance. Twinkletoes, my dear child, if you’re anti-slur, you shouldn’t use them regardless of the target’s attitude towards them. I realize, of course, that this sort of basic logic might be difficult for a lawyer to grasp, lacking as it is in any emanations or penumbras.

But as long as we’re at it, let’s get this straight. Steve asserts that Electrical Engineers are scientists. Fantastic! I had no idea that I am not only a scientist myself, but I am now the son of a scientist! An elite scientist, no less!

So, I must ask him this: are only electrical engineers scientists, or is this true of all other engineers as well?

UPDATE – Upon further review, it seems I must rethink the way in which I addressed Hog on Ice: I am starting to attract skinheads from the right and moonbats from the left. Comments closed.
Steve H. | Homepage | 03.03.07 – 5:20 pm | #

Did I say “Twinkletoes”? I obviously should have said “chickenshit”.

What about my needs? What about the reassurance I require after being told that a) no woman will ever want to have sex with me, b) I am gay, c) my hairstyle is unattractive, d) my flaming sword isn’t big enough.

And sometimes all in the same email!

*sob* Hold me, Ralph!

The thing that’s so nonsensical about this sort of thing is that the degree to which one’s opinion is correct has nothing to do with any of this sort of thing. Jill is attractive, especially for a law school student, who generally fall into the YE CATS MY EYES category. Lauren is even more attractive; she’s no Spacebunny, but she makes for a nice feminist poster girl. Others, well, the less said the better, but that’s neither here nor there.

But no woman who is willing to attack anyone else’s appearance has any right to complain about attacks on her own. I don’t know if Jill has ever done that, but certainly others in her blog circle have.

In which I join Richard Dawkins in celebrating a particular point in history upon which a specific collection of genes enjoyed the first flowering of the capabilities for which they were selected:

Thy hasting days fly on with full career,
But thy autumn no grey or wrinkle shew’th.
Perhaps thy semblance might deceive the truth,
That thou to corpsehood art arrived so near,
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
Than the bitter north winds from Duluth.

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be in strict measure correction
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads and Natural Selection.
All is matter, and matters not to know
As ever in thy blind Watchmaker’s eye.

I cannot describe how happy I was to read the following words, which I rather expect Prof. Dawkins to be eating in the near future:

Sam Harris doesn’t mess about. He writes directly to his Christian reader as ‘you’, and he pays ‘you’ the compliment of taking your beliefs seriously: ” . . . if one of us is right, the other is wrong . . . in the fullness of time, one side is really going to win this argument, and the other is really going to lose.” But you don’t (as I can personally understate) have to fit the ‘you’ profile in order to enjoy this marvellous little book. Every word zings like an elegantly fletched arrow from a taut bowstring and flies in a gracefully swift arc to the target, where it thuds into the bullseye.

If you are part of the target, I dare you to read this book. It will be a salutary test of your faith. Survive Sam Harris’s barrage, and you can take on the world with equanimity. But forgive my scepticism: Harris never misses, not with a single sentence, which is why his short book is so disproportionately devastating.
– Richard Dawkins, Foreword for the UK edition of ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’

Dawkins is vulnerable enough in his own right, but his public adulation for Harris makes it like fishing in a small pond with oversized depth charges. This isn’t handing someone a stick with which to beat you, it’s handing them a Dragonstrike mace and then taking off your helm.

As for surviving “Sam Harris’s barrage”, it’s about as difficult as surviving a stampede of ducklings. I predict that in three years, people will find it hard to take Dawkins seriously in his scientific capacity, given his predilection for public target practice on his own feet.

The comments at Pharyngula inspire a thought:

If they don’t believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?

Everything. The void. The fact that there is no higher ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’. What is, just is. I’m going to die and that’s it. I shall have been a speck of dust in time and space. Nothingness is rushing up to meet me and I can do nothing about it. And there isn’t anything Out There that gives a fuck about my terror. Atheists spend their entire lives facing those fears without the props religions (claim to) provide.

I don’t think that’s a particularly frightening concept. What would I find frightening is the thought that there is something out there, sadistically stoking my terror and feeding off it.

I once had a conversation with one of my editors at Pocket – a very good one, she originally signed Jim Butcher of The Dresden Files to his first book contract – about a related subject. She had commented that she found “The World in Shadow” to be more frightening than a Stephen King novel.

ED: It’s not the idea of God that bothers me, but the idea of these fallen angels trying to interfere with our lives. And then, the Hell thing kind of freaks me out.

VD: There’s more to the Christian worldview than the Sermon on the Mount.

ED: Yeah, but I thought you guys believed that God was in control of everything.

VD: You’ve read CS Lewis. Why do you think he referred to Earth as the Silent Planet, and humans as “bent”? The point is that God isn’t in control here.

ED: So who is in control, the fallen angels?

VD: More the guy that Jesus Christ called “the prince of this world”.

ED: Oh… oh shit. Thanks, I’m really going to sleep well tonight.

VD: Well, you have to admit, it would explain a lot.

ED: We should put your books in the horror line….

I did find it somewhat appropriate, actually, when one SF site classified them as Dark Fantasy. And while Wrath isn’t as superficially grim as Shadow, it’s actually somewhat darker when seen in the proper context. Shadow, for all its bleakness, is ultimately the light coming out of the darkness, whereas Wrath highlights the recognition that the Dark shall rise again.

Fortunately, so long as there is faith, there will always be those to play the part of the Old Ones too.

Apparently Evil Bender not only missed the point of Monday’s column, he missed the entire omniderigence and free will discussion as well:

Like most wingnuts, Vox Day is afraid of knowledge…. For now, let me say that Vox’s argument, if valid, directly impeaches his God for worse things than science could ever be blamed for….

But if Vox wishes to blame the evils of the world on science, I’ll make two corollaries:

1) The evils of this world are the fault of God, who–in Vox’s theology–created the Universe, and so bears more responsibility for sin and death than science bears for the Bomb.

It’s amazing how atheists always gravitate to the kiddy theology and the baseless assertion. “But… but the song says ‘He’s got the whole world in His hands!'” As sin is the departure from God’s Will, He can only bear responsibility for His refusal to make us robots without free will. Now, we certainly could say that God’s creation of life therefore makes him responsible for the deaths which could not otherwise occur, but in that case, it’s a wash, it’s not a net positive or negative. Since the Bomb only ended lives, it is a net negative, given the obvious implication here that death = negative.

What, I wonder, does Vox think “take responsibility” mean? He seems to think that science is to blame because some of the billions who have benefited from medical science die–generally through the mistakes of individuals, and not through any problem with science itself. By Vox’s logic, scientists need to own up to being responsible for those who have an allergic reaction to a drug, no matter how many that drug might save.

Vox thinks “take responsibility” means to acknowledge that X is a direct cause of Y. If scientists are responsible for the lives saved by medical science, they are also responsible for the lives ended by medical science. If this is justifiable from a utilitarian perspective, that’s fine, but then make that utilitarian case. It is both dishonest and irrational to claim credit for the lives saved on the one hand but then refuse blame for the lives lost on the other.

But if, hypothetically, God exists and is kept from destroying evil due to His desire to respect the autonomy of His creatures (if he eliminated evil, he would effectively be eliminating free will), then it stands to reason that it’s up to humans to utilize the power that comes with knowledge responsibly. Thus far, humanity has a pretty awful track record in this regard.

There’s something to that argument, for those who buy the premise. But it isn’t the argument Vox is making.

Vox has repeatedly made that argument, as the commenter Poppies either knows or strongly suspects. Evil Bender is correct in saying that I didn’t make that tangential argument in that one particular 750-word column, but I have certainly made it on many occasions.

The Blog of Very Moderate Logic struggles with what little it possesses. Most of it is irrelevant “PZ says” blather, in fact, he even quotes PZ’s lack of basic reading comprehension at one point, but there were a few funny bits:

I mean, first off, inquisitions and jihads are, ex vi termini, religious in nature. It’s like saying that people call both the World Series and the World Cup “sporting events”–they are.

They may be religious in nature. But that’s not the point. The point is that if religion is responsible for their evils, then science is equally if not more responsible for other evils.

As for the military attacks[on Hiroshima and Nagasaki]? Yes, science facilitated them, from gas attacks to the atom bomb. But it was not scientists who made the decision to fund the weapons, nor scientists who made the decision to use them.

At least BotML is willing to admit that science facilitated them, that’s more than most cowardly science defenders can manage. But in the Inquisition, the Church didn’t decide to kill anyone, it merely found the individual guilty of heresy. In both the case of the Spanish Inquisition (the “deadly” one) and the dropping of the atomic bombs, it was the government involved that made the decision and executed it.

Therefore, either “religion” is not responsible for the deaths of the Spanish Inquisition or “science” is responsible for the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in addition to many, many other science-facilitated deaths in war.

His particular wording here is interesting, as he carefully avoids stating something simpler. For example, in defending the Church with regards to the Spanish Inquisition, I would have said that it was no the Church that set fire to anyone. Of course, he can’t say that, because a scientist did indeed drop the bomb, given Navy Capt. William “Deak” Parsons, Manhattan Project Scientist, and his place on the crew of the Enola Gay.

As for the iatrogenic deaths, I never wrote that they were “on the rise”, I merely wrote that they existed, so that was simply a weird and meaningless critique of nothing. There are two competing statistics provided by Google, I note that BotML happened to skip over this one in favor of this one, perhaps because it would have confirmed the number cited in my column. In any case, a more astute reader would have noted that the latter is a subset of the former.

The larger point, which clearly sailed right over BotML’s head, is that the case against science is stronger than the case against religion when made on the basis of the New Atheist’s case against religion. BotML doesn’t even realize that his argument is not with me, but rather with the ludicrous and fallacious arguments presented by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.