PZ Myers throws out Darwin

As I have predicted for years that they would, biologists are beginning to turn away from Darwin’s dangerous idea of evolution by natural selection.  Even self-styled champions of evolution such as PZ Myers have reached the point of giving up on their erstwhile secular saint:

We aren’t using Darwin’s model anymore; he had no accurate notion of how inheritance worked, for instance — genes and alleles, the stuff of most modern theory, are not present anywhere in his works. “Darwinian” is also problematic. It does have a specific, technical meaning, but it’s often applied thoughtlessly to every process in evolution.

Today Darwin, tomorrow “natural selection”, and, sooner or later, the entire concept of one species coming into existence from another less evolved species through mutation and environmental pressures will be cast into the incinerator of scientific history.  It is merely a matter of time.

Lars Walker reviews A THRONE OF BONES

As we were discussing George Martin and the aspects of his work which tend to appeal to the Left yesterday, the appearance of this review is a timely one. Lars Walker is the author of the novels that collectively make up The Erling Skjalgsson Saga, and as can be seen from his picture, is a descendant of Vikings himself. (Ladies, I believe he is single.) This no doubt made it rather painful for him to read through the scenes set in the Iles de Loup.   Nevertheless, he manfully slogged through them in order to write his review of A THRONE OF BONES.

Most anyone who starts reading Throne of Bones will realize that it’s very much the same sort of thing as George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice books, and Vox makes no denial of this. But he’s trying to do the same sort of thing in a very different way, which for me makes all the difference….

I enjoyed it immensely. Vox Day isn’t the prose stylist George R. R. Martin is, but he’s not bad. On the plus side we have a complicated, complex story with interesting and sympathetic, fully rounded characters. There are few out-and-out villains – everybody is doing what they think right. And unlike Martin’s stories, the fact that someone is virtuous and noble does not guarantee them a painful and ignominious death. In terms of pure story, Vox Day’s book is much more rewarding. And Christianity is treated not only with respect, but as a true part of the cosmos. Much recommended. 

Walker is entirely correct to say that ATOB is very much the same sort of thing as AGOT. It was intended that way from the start.  However, I did not write Arts of Dark and Light to imitate A Song of Ice and Fire, but rather, to create a fantasy epic of similar scope that not only improves upon Martin’s series in terms of characterization, intellectual depth, and storytelling, but also demonstrates the way in which the utilization of a more traditional and historically coherent perspective can permit a less-talented writer to create works capable of surpassing the well-written, but empty, soulless literary edifices constructed by the betrayers of the fantasy tradition created by George MacDonald and so firmly established by JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis.

Contra the superficial assumptions of those who look only at the rhyming names and the similar heft of the two books, A THRONE OF BONES is not an imitation of A GAME OF THRONES. To the extent that it is relevant to compare the two books, it would be considerably more accurate to describe it as literary criticism in action.  I find it a little ironic that while people often ask critics if they can do any better, on the rare occasion one actually attempts to do so, one is accused of wishing to imitate the object of criticism.

One Boston bomber caught and killed

Two suspects One suspect caught and killed.  Names are Tamerlan Mike Mulugeta and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Sunil Tripathi. Tamerlan is dead. An MIT police officer was shot and killed on campus.  More details that show the confusion leading up to the endgame from this scanner summary on Reddit.  As well as Part 2.

EDIT 1:39 EST: WCVB reports one suspect is at large!
EDIT 1:41 EST: Reports of first officer down has died of his wounds (death toll: 2)
EDIT 1:42 EST: Reports of explosion at Harvard Quad.
EDIT 1:42 EST: Second suspect not in custody from radio! Be safe all!!
EDIT 1:44 EST: Children’s Hospital clear. No shots fired there.
EDIT 1:46 EST: Explosion heard was from bomb squad.
EDIT 1:47 EST: Backpacks left on Laurel St.
EDIT 1:48 EST: News about Harvard Quad bomb seems to be fake. No bomb confirmed there.
EDIT 1:55 EST: Second suspect middle eastern looking, clean shaven, male with blue jacket with a “christmas style” hat.
EDIT 1:56 EST: My inbox is flooded with “Fuck the Mods”
posts. Please, not now. Come back with hate in a few hours. For now,
only news. Hate them in another thread.
EDIT 1:57 EST: The Christmas hat is a beenie.
EDIT 1:58 EST: MIT update: Suspect from there is no longer on campus. Right now, these are two different incidents and not related.
EDIT 1:58 EST: Suspect who was laying on the ground was released and is walking home. Taken in from confusion.
EDIT 2:00 EST: Reports of a “code black” at Auburn Hospital. Nothing confirmed.

According to Wikipedia, Tripathi is a “Hindu Brahmin surname found mostly in the northern and central parts of India and Nepal.”  Mulugeta is an Ethiopian name.  It looks as if they were both recent immigrants to the USA, within the last year, but if they were Muslims, they would appear to have been converts.  CORRECTION: The Tsarnaev brothers appear to be Muslims of Chechen descent.

UPDATE: NBC says Tripathi is not suspect. Police searching Watertown area for Suspect 2.

UPDATE 2: Watertown Twitter feed.

UPDATE 3: “To recap: One marathon suspect killed. The other at-large and dangerous. If you live in Boston, stay indoors.”

UPDATE 4: The guy in the white hat to the left of the picture appears to be the man for whom the SWAT team is looking. The AP reports his name is Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, thereby dashing once more the hopes of progressives who fearfully fantasize about white Christian terrorists.

UPDATE 5: Glenn Reynolds notes: “Several readers comment that there are probably quite a few people in
the Watertown area who wish they had a gun right about now.”

UPDATE 6: Zerohedge posts an interview with an MMA guy who trained with Tamerlan: “About four or five years ago, I was working full-time as a project
manager and in my off time, I was training at a mixed martial arts gym
in Boston. Tamerlan wasn’t part of our gym, but he was training for the
golden gloves boxing championship. I remember that he would come in to
work with some of our boxers and worked with us. That is where I
remember him from. When I woke up this morning and saw his name and his
picture on the news, I immediately recognized him.  He seemed
like a really nice guy, to himself and a little bit arrogant and cocky,
but he helped people at the gym all the time with their boxing and was
friendly with everyone. It’s a complete shock.”

His girlfriend was attractive and supposedly converted to Islam, presumably on his behalf. It looks like he might have met her at one gym or another.

UPDATE 7: The Telegraph has a detailed summary, including lots of pictures related to the incidents.

The black vs brown wars

It’s not too hard to understand why the Hispanic gangs have methodically gone about ethnically cleansing former black neighborhoods such as Compton for the last 20 years. They have no more desire to live in the vicinity of Africans than white progressives like John Scalzi do, but since most Hispanics can’t afford to buy property in lily-white counties, they have to go to the work of forcibly undoing years of government-sponsored desegregation. And this sort of racial violence no doubt provides them with their ruthless determination to not live among blacks.

Two eighth grade students are now recovering from a terrifying attack in Queens…. The honor student said she was badly beaten while trying to defend her friend Christina Campos, who was getting punched and kicked by more than a dozen high school students.

“About seven to 10 girls just started grabbing me and held my hands and just started kicking me in the face,” Gonzalez told CBS 2′s Hazel Sanchez. “They threw cones at me. They hit us with belt buckles, with Timberlands, umbrellas, guys kicking us — like guys, really?”

The attackers could be seen stomping on Christina Campos’ body and head. Campos said the same group of high school-aged girls jumped her the day before and warned her they’d be back for more. This time boys were throwing punches, too. Campos’ face was bloodied and bruised.

“They came out of nowhere with so many people,” Campos said.

“I was scared. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. Was I going to live after this or was I going to be beat to death?” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez was left with two black eyes and a broken nose. She said no bystanders stepped in to help her or her friends. Most, she said, just watched or recorded the brawl.

Educated African-Americans who have never laid a finger on anyone in anger and would never dream of resorting to violence understandably get distressed and offended when this sort of black group violence is contemptuously described as “chimping-out“.  But the issue is not the label, however offensive some might find it to be.  It makes no difference if such behavior is called “chimping-out”, “wilding”, or “youthful exuberance”, because the problem is that whatever one calls it, it is not behavior indicative of a people capable of maintaining, or even successfully co-existing in, a civilized society.  At the end of the day, most people are inclined to believe that whatever may you call it, if it quacks like a duck, it is, for all intents and purposes, a duck.

The problem facing the African community in the USA is three-fold, even if we agree to delicately avert our eyes from all the frightening and very politically incorrect implications of genetic science and human bio-diversity.  First, as the domestic economy worsens, it will be harder on those of African descent than everyone else since they are less likely to have financial and family reserves than other Americans.  Second, with their sky-high illegitimacy rates, low marriage rates, and 3/4 adult male/female ratio, they have very little family infrastructure to guide the intellectual and emotional development of their children. Third, the growing Hispanic population feels absolutely no shame over historical black slavery and is almost completely immune to the race card and the White Guilt upon which the African community has become so dependent.

Where whites stay their hands and suffer black barbarism out of a misguided sense of shame, browns simply react without hesitation or remorse. I note the percentage of the Queens population that is Hispanic is presently 6.4 points higher, at 27.5 percent, than it was in Compton in 1980.  Given the fact that there is already an amount of black vs brown racial conflict in Queens, we can probably expect the the African percentage of the population there to decline to less than 10 percent in the next ten years.

Both Compton and Queens are trivial in themselves, of course, but they are a microcosm of the larger conflict that is already playing out inside the United States, a sizable conflict concerning which white Americans are largely oblivious.

Mailvox: GRR Martin and the Left

DH, one of the increasingly less token liberals here, asks about my assumption that he would enjoy George Martin’s novels:

Hey you started me thinking about why you presume that as a token liberal I would be predisposed to enjoy or not be disappointed by Martin’s ASOIAF series. What if anything is the link as you see it between leftism and Martin’s works?

  1. Martin’s world is intrinsically amoral. There is little in the way of Christian or high pagan morals in the Julian mode; even Jaime and Cersei’s incest is only noteworthy for its effect on her sons’ claims to the Iron Throne.
  2. Martin’s world is essentially secular.  While he does a credible job of creating an alternate religious system and making use of it for plot purposes in a meaningful quasi-medieval manner, there is only two characters out of the huge cast who appear to be religious in any meaningful sense.  That being said, I very much liked the sea-based religion of the Greyjoys, but even there, Martin was unable to convey the emotional aspect of a strongly held faith. It was like watching a blind man attempt to describe color.
  3. Martin’s world is entirely nihilistic. There is no point to anything except the pursuit of power, and to a lesser extent, sex and money.
  4. Martin is, as he has declared, a feminist, and although his commitment to realism prevents him from giving in too heavily to the Warrior Woman trope that presently infests fantasy, science fiction, and urban fantasy, he created the ludicrous Brienne of Tarth and the equally silly Sand Snakes as a nod to it.  I went to high school with a heavily recruited basketball star who, at 6’6″, was both taller and bigger than Brienne.  She was strong, but, (and this is what the SF/F writers always leave out), she was incredibly slow.  The main reason women cannot fight men is not because they are weaker, although they are, but because they are so much slower.
  5. The sex in ASOIAF is almost invariably perverted. Although married couples have children, and therefore presumably at least occasionally have sex, Martin is more likely to describe a sexual encounter between a dragon and a pig than a conventional one between a married couple. The absurd Reek-assisted wedding night of the Bastard of Bolton demonstrated that Martin is aiming to shock the reader in the manner that so excites leftists.
  6. As it is said, Martin never met a Stark he didn’t want to kill.  Every honorable character seems to be stupid and meet with a bad fate, while the amoral but clever survive. Like most intelligent leftists, Martin values cleverness over every other virtue.

So, amorality, secularism, nihilism, feminism, perversion, and a cleverness fetish.  Throw in sword control, abortion, and progressive taxation, and it would tick all the boxes.  Oh, and let’s not forget the cornucopia of Daddy issues!  I’m not saying they are bad books, the first three are really quite good. But there is little of traditional or civilizational value to them; about halfway through A Dance with Dragons, I found myself beginning to sympathize with the Others.  Say what you will about them being murderous and dead, but at least it is an ethic of sorts.

Defined by one’s enemies

I could not be more pleased to know that I am not on the side of chinless men without chests – and I use the term “men” in a very loose sense – such as John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton.

Fuck the NRA.
—
Wil Wheaton (@wilw) April 17, 2013

Savor the sweetness of their tears.  Savor their angry bitterness about your ability to defend yourself against their proxies with lethal force. And remember that because they will never stop being afraid, the rabbits will never stop trying to defang the wolves.

Another explosion

First the black powder bombs in Boston and now a massive explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas:

Up to 15 people are feared dead including five volunteer firefighters after a giant explosion at a fertiliser plant wreaked devastation in the town of West, Texas, leaving hundreds with horrific injuries. The blast destroyed scores of buildings, including a nursing home and an apartment complex and blanketed the area in a cloud of toxic fumes.

The missing volunteer firefighters and a policeman were attending a blaze at the plant at about 7:50pm local time last night it suddenly exploded into a fireball – it thought to be caused by anhydrous ammonia igniting in the heat of the fire.

Sergeant W. Patrick Swanton from Waco’s police department said at least 160 people have been treated for injuries at local hospitals, but he warned that he expects the total number of deaths and injuries to rise when daylight arrives and emergency teams are able to conduct a proper search. The explosion at West Fertilizer Co. shook the ground with the strength of a small earthquake in the community of 2,800 people located about 20 miles north of Waco.

Well, I’m sure it’s all nothing a few million more immigrants won’t fix….

The sweetness of their tears

Savor the angry tears shed by the forcible disarmament fetishists at the New York Times.  Not even their constant waving of the false and bloody flag of Newton was enough to sway the American people into volunteering another step towards giving government a monopoly on gun violence.

For 45 senators, the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School is a forgotten tragedy. The toll of 270 Americans who are shot every day is not a problem requiring action. The easy access to guns on the Internet, and the inevitability of the next massacre, is not worth preventing.

 Those senators, 41 Republicans and four Democrats, killed a bill on Wednesday to expand background checks for gun buyers. It was the last, best hope for meaningful legislation to reduce gun violence after a deranged man used semiautomatic weapons to kill 20 children and six adults at the school in Newtown, Conn., 18 weeks ago. A ban on assault weapons was voted down by 60 senators; 54 voted against a limit on bullet magazines.

Patricia Maisch, who survived a mass shooting in Tucson in 2011, spoke for many in the country when she shouted from the Senate gallery: “Shame on you.”

Newtown, in the end, changed nothing; the overwhelming national consensus to tighten a ridiculously lax set of gun laws was stopped cold. That’s because the only thing that mattered to these lawmakers was a blind and unthinking fealty to the whims of the gun lobby.

The National Rifle Association once supported the expansion of background checks, but it decided this time that President Obama and gun-control advocates could not be allowed even a scintilla of a victory, no matter how sensible. That group, and others even more militant, wanted to make sure not one bill emerged from the Newtown shooting, and they got their way.

Their impotent rage oozes from every sentence in the article. It was one thing for Americans to ignore Hispanic drug dealers and black youths killing each other in their ethnic enclaves, and to spare no sympathy for white, middle-aged men shooting themselves in despair over their unemployment and divorces, but this involved cute little children, kindergarteners no less, and white ones at that!  About the only way to tug more effectively at America’s heartstrings would have been to advertise slaughtered puppies, kittens, and bunnies.

And America shed a few tears, collectively wiped at their eyes, then stood up and said: “Fuck you, we’re still not letting you take our guns, you totalitarian bastards.”

No wonder they’re upset.  Americans aren’t falling for the emotional pornography anymore. Now they’ll have no choice but to go for the brute force option and they know they aren’t assured of winning that way.  After all, there are a lot more of us than there are of them.

Molon labe.

Jesus loves you. God, probably not so much.

Comedians, gay rights activists, and “accomplished journalists” are probably not the right people to consult when you wish to contemplate Christian theology. Meanwhile, the New York Times slanders millions of Christians by falsely and absurdly misrepresenting both their faith and their attitude towards a particular group of notoriously unrepentant sinners.
The crowd laughs a little nervously when Minchin, an outspoken atheist,
begins to sing, “I love Jesus, I love Jesus.” They bought tickets to a
comedy show, not a religious revival. Minchin prompts the audience to
join him. “Who do you love?” he asks. “Sing it!” Soon the whole crowd is
singing “I love Jesus, I love Jesus,” along with Minchin, in a video
that has been viewed half a million times on YouTube. 
Then Minchin changes the lyrics: “I love Jesus, I hate faggots,” he
sings. “I love Jesus, I hate faggots.” The crowd stops singing along.
Minchin looks up from his guitar, pretending not to understand what the
problem could be. 
“What happened? I just lost you there,” Minchin says. He makes a
halfhearted attempt to get the singalong going again before giving up.
“Ah, well,” he shrugs. “Maybe these are ideas best shared in churches.” 
Those ideas — loving Jesus means hating gay people — are proclaimed in
Christian churches and on Christian television and radio broadcasts. The
combined efforts of the Family Research Council, the National
Organization for Marriage, “The 700 Club,” the United States Conference
of Catholic Bishops, the Westboro Baptist Church, and countless
conservative Christian activists, preachers and politicians have
succeeded in making antigay bigotry seem synonymous with Christianity. 
This can cause a lot of heartache — with sometimes devastating
consequences — for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender children born
into fundamentalist or evangelical Christian families. Such was the case
for Jeff Chu, the author of “Does Jesus Really Love Me? A Gay
Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America.” Chu is an
accomplished journalist who recently married his male partner. But Chu’s
mother, a devout Baptist, didn’t attend her son’s wedding. She still
cries herself to sleep every night, Chu writes, tormented by the
certainty that her gay son is “lost.” 
As a child, Chu adored the song “Jesus Loves Me.” But does Jesus love
him now that he’s an openly gay adult? Chu has his doubts: “There are
still moments when I wonder whether my homosexuality is my ticket to
hell.”

Does Jesus still love Chu? Absolutely.  Does God hate those who refuse to repent of their abomination?  We have a strong Biblical basis for asserting that, given how many times we are told He hates the wicked.  It isn’t Chu’s homosexuality that is his ticket to Hell, it is his refusal to repent of his sin and his refusal to permit Jesus Christ to stand in his stead in the time of judgment.

We are all sinners. The very last thing I want is to have to stand behind my personal permanent record and be judged by it.  I want my official record, as far as God’s judgment is concerned, to be that of history’s only sinless man.  The proper question with which one should be concerned isn’t whether Jesus loves one or not, but whether God does.

This piece is as trivial as it is slanderous.  It is not “antigay bigotry” to claim that unrepentant sinners who not only glory in their sin, but define themselves by it, are headed straight for the eternal incinerator, especially if Hell does not exist.  If I were to say that homosexuals are all destined to be raped by unicorns and leprechauns, no one would consider it bigotry.  This is mere rhetoric, intended to modify Christian behavior to the liking of those who hate Christianity by a transparent attempt at emotional manipulation.

Either unrepentant homosexuals are Hell-bound or they are not.  No amount of touchy-feely Churchian welcomism will change that either way.  And to the extent that the wicked are welcomed into the Church without being warned of the need to repent, the Church is failing in its Christian duty.  Homosexuality, like almost every other sin, can be forgiven. But before forgiveness can be granted, there must be repentance.

Liberals always love to cite the example of the adulterous woman spared stoning by Jesus asking who will cast the first stone.  And they always leave off the vital conclusion, where Jesus tells the woman to “go and sin no more”.

The wickedness of the homosexual community can be seen in its corrosive effect on others.  Consider this passage in light of the requirement Jesus laid upon his followers:

After Benjamin Sullivan-Knoff came out to his parents in his sophomore
year of high school, his mother begged her son not to do so publicly.
She was working as an associate pastor at a conservative church — an
Evangelical Covenant Church — and she feared she would be fired if her
son came out. A few months later she reversed herself, asked for her
son’s forgiveness and gave him her blessing to come out. “I love this
denomination,” Eva Sullivan-Knoff tells Chu, “but I love my son more.”

She loves her son more than her denomination, which is fine. But she has revealed that she is no Christian disciple, she cannot be, as per the words of Jesus Christ himself.


“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and
wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life,
he cannot be my disciple.”
– Luke 14:26

Christianity is not the easy way.  It is the hard way. We forget that at our peril. And to those Churchians and non-Christians who would attempt to argue with the points presented here, I have a single question: precisely what sins beside homosexual fornication did Jesus Christ declare a man did not need to repent in order to be saved?

The Future of the Future

John C. Wright predicts where SF/F is heading on the basis of its primary purposes:

Like all fiction, Science Fiction is an oasis of rest amid the wasteland of mundane life, a time between toil to lift our eyes to distant mountains and wonder what is beyond them, or to lift our eyes further, to the stars, and wonder.

Unlike other fiction, which contains imaginary places and events, science fiction also contains an imaginary cosmos that operates by different rules, perhaps one where men can be invisible, or fly to the moon in antigravity spheres, or suffer an invasion by hunger and superior beings from Mars. The bridge between the real cosmos and the science fictional cosmos is the speculation, either rigorous or lax, of scientific plausibility that connects them. If you have invisible man in a science fiction story, he must perhaps walk unclothed, for example, because that is a realistic extrapolation from the unrealistic premise; or if you have invaders from Mars, they must have physiology evolved by Martian conditions, they perhaps will be swiftly poisoned by the diseases their more advanced civilization long ago abolished from their sterile world, because again this is a realistic extrapolation from an unreal premise.

Fantasy also postulates a different cosmos with different rules, but the bridge that reaches to the perilous realm of Elfland from our world is one of dream-logic. If the wicked witch says love’s first kiss will wake the sleeping beauty, only the prince who did not die on the enchanted thorns hedging the haunting castle may kiss and wake her, and not Doctor McCoy with a hypospray of stimulant. Because that is the way dream logic works, or fairy tales, or myths: the arbitrary rules of Elfland can be trespassed only with draconian retaliation, and the rewards achieved by the bold or the cunning performance of the twelve terrible tasks or the answer of the riddle of the sphinx. These are the dreamlike implications of the unreal premise, based on the rules of a realm no man has seen, but which we somehow always greet with a start of recognition.

Why do we need dreams to come from a cosmos other than this one?

I propose that while somewhere, on some dark and moonless world of inky seas beneath a blood-colored sun, some Coleopterous race of pitiless logic and soulless energy toil and travail nakedly without joy, copulate without love, live without dreams and perish without regret, their corpses left to rot where they fall, or are eaten by their larvae, that these insectiod swarms are the true heirs to this cosmos, and, unlike Man, feel no discomfort at existence here. Birth is no miracle to them and death no tragedy, because they are at home here, and their emotions exactly suit and match the contours of the world.

Not Man. We are exiles.

Wright identifies the intrinsic flaw in mainstream secular science fiction and fantasy. Rejecting, as it does, the fundamentally religious foundation of fantasy, (for Wright is incorrect and George MacDonald, not William Morris, is the father of fantasy), modern fantasy cannot serve its primary purpose because it cannot slake a thirst its writers do not even realize exists.  This is why there so often feels like something missing from even the best modern fantasy, why it is lifeless, soulless, and limited to portraying shades of grey in the place of the full color spectrum.

Mainstream science fiction is affected by these problems too, but to a much lesser extent because it has a different purpose. If fantasy is meant to provide the exile with dreams of home, science fiction is supposed to provide a technological vision of the future. The problem is that science is increasingly beyond the comprehension of the science fiction writer to grasp its implications, has settled many of the questions to which science fiction once proposed answers, (and often in a way that renders more abstract the various possibilities of wonder), and is increasingly written by writers who have no interest in technology and can’t explain how their television’s remote control worked, much less present a technologically credible vision of the future.  Even as less science fiction is being published, there is less and less science to be found in what purports to remain of it.

It is hard to dispute Wright’s conclusion: “So look for a growth of darker fantasies in the future as the scientific
world view slowly gives way to a world view that does not believe in
science, nor in any over-arching narrative, nor in truth, nor in beauty,
nor in virtue.”

But that is neither fantasy nor science fiction.  What we are witnessing is the lingering death of two literary genres. What we are seeing is the subsumption of fantasy and science fiction by romance and horror.