At the Black Gate

After reading through the various responses to my post two weeks ago, some of which were insightful and intelligent, others perhaps a little less so, I found myself concluding that I had probably gone a little too far in the process of defending historical authenticity against Daniel Abraham’s charge that it is not an effective defense against charges of insufficient strong women, excessive white people, or a surfeit of sexual violence. Upon further reflection, I don’t think it is correct to conclude that a work of fantasy will necessarily be improved by additional historical authenticity. Would The Chronicles of Narnia be improved by religious schism or removing the historically ludicrous notion of four siblings ruling simultaneously? No, I can’t honestly say it would. Would Abraham’s own The Long Price Quartet be improved by making the imperial Asian culture utilize a historically authentic kanji/hànzì system of writing that would be all but unintelligible to the various warlike Caucasian surrounding it? No, I don’t think so.

On the other hand, I still think Abraham goes too far in dismissing the importance of historical authenticity with regards to works that are billed on the basis of, as he says, their ability to “show medieval life the way that (we’re pretending for the sake of argument) it really was.” It is highly probable that George R.R. Martin wouldn’t have gone so far off the rails with his most recent two books in A Song of Ice and Fire had he stuck a little more closely to the historical Wars of the Roses and the violent struggle between York (Stark) and Lancaster (Lannister). Historical authenticity does not require that every fantasy novel concern itself with the life and times of Peasant John and his epic battle to save his diarrhea-stricken pig, after all, only that the author make a reasonable attempt to either a) get things reasonably correct, or b) provide the reader with some modicum of a rationale for departing from the realm of historical fact and plausibility.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

Veterans of an endless war

First, a Happy Mother’s Day to the many mothers out there. However, I think it is long past time to change the emphasis of the holiday, from one that is a saccharine and sentimental celebration of biology to one that honors a vital societal contribution. It is rightly said that the future belongs to those who show up for it. Mothers are the builders of the future, and civilized mothers are nothing less than the core defenders of civilization. Without mothers, all the science and technology and art of Man is pointless and without value.

Mothers risk their lives and sacrifice their petty desires to ensure that Man will survive one more generation. Their unique and precious gift to the species should never be overlooked, much less belittled, as a woman who marries, bears children, and raises them with her husband is doing the single most important thing she can possibly do as a human being. Everything else is of lesser import. So, in addition to the breakfasts in bed, the cards, the flowers, and so forth, don’t forget to remember that she is more than the mother of your children, she is a decorated veteran in civilization’s never-ending war against barbarism and the void.

Famous last words

Shockingly, professional journalists doubt that computer programs can replace their journalistic output:

Kevin Smith, head of the Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Committee, says he laughed when he heard about the program. “I can remember sitting there doing high school football games on a Friday night and using three-paragraph formulas,” Smith said. “So it made me laugh, thinking they have made a computer that can do that work.” Smith says that, ultimately, it’s going to be hard for people to share the uniquely human custom of story telling with a machine.

“I can’t imagine that a machine is going to tell a story and present it in a way that other human beings are going to accept it,” he said. “At least not at this time. I don’t see that happening. And the fact that we’re even attempting to do it — we shouldn’t be doing it.”

It’s going to be interesting to see how quickly the white collar workers change their tune once they understand that white collar automation has been eliminating their jobs nearly as fast as blue collar automation eliminated blue collar jobs two generations ago. We’ve seen the same arguments every time, from stock brokers to bank tellers and everything else, but the arguments keep getting blown away in the face of improving technology and poor human performance. Does anyone really think that a computer can’t fill in the blanks as effectively as the average left-liberal journalist?

Forget news, I mean, how hard would it be to write a program that produced columns indistinguishable from Maureen Dowd’s commentary? After all, it’s a simple matter of scouring the Associated Press for a) a reported problem and b) a Republican’s name, then producing a few snarky spins on the latter while blaming (a) on (b).

RAF heroics

I don’t care if it’s true or not, it’s just funny:

[Y]ou can hardly eff and blind when addressing a leading independent school such as Brighton College. Not unless you happen to be a war hero like Douglas Bader, who reputedly treated the girls of Roedean or Cheltenham Ladies’ College (the uncertainty hints at urban myth, but we’ll let that pass) to a story of airborne derring-do in which one Fokker appeared on his tail, another Fokker attacked him from above… and so on, until the headmistress tried to staunch the pubescent giggling with: “Gels, I should perhaps explain that the, ahem, Fokker was a Second World War German fighter plane.” “Madam, that may very well be,” so legend has Bader responding. “These buggers were in Messerschmitts.”

Outdoor NFL in Minnesota

As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the best aspects of the Minnesota – Vikings stadium deal:

On Thursday, the legislative and executive branches of the Minnesota government finalized a deal to build a new stadium for the Vikings. Also on Thursday, the Vikings and the University of Minnesota finalized a deal to play games at TCF Bank Stadium during a portion of the time that the new venue is being built.

After up to four years of a return to outside football, it’s going to be hard to go back to seeing them play inside another dome. Hopefully whoever is actually building the stadium will rethink the need to put a roof on it. And although it is absolutely absurd for the state and city tax dollars to go towards building the stadium, at least they’re only paying half the cost this way. As I mentioned before, the alternative would have been for them to pay the whole thing and without any guarantee that it would suffice to lure a team to Minnesota. The fact that it is the city and the state, and not the team, that wanted the stadium roof tends to indicate that there is value to the stadium beyond its use as an NFL field. That value may not be equivalent to the $475 million that is their share of the expense, but it clearly isn’t nothing either.

For the benefit of those of you who still erroneously think I’m being hypocritical on this issue, perhaps I should point out that one of the reasons the St. Paul Pioneer Press rejected me as a replacement for their conservative columnist when he left the op/ed page was that one of my three sample columns I provided them was one demonstrating that there are no significant economic benefits to communities paying for sports stadiums. It’s important to distinguish between principles and tactics. For example, I don’t advocate career in prostitution, but if a woman chooses such a career, it’s certainly possible to discuss how she can best maximize her income without maintaining one’s original opinion concerning her job choice.

Wängsty doubles down again

His posterior still clearly giving him an amount of pain, R. Scott Bakker keeps desperately trying to come up with a means of attacking me while avoiding the direct engagement that will expose him as the intellectual fraud he so clearly is:

Vox, it appears, has decided to wage a war of attrition, to keep throwing his cherries until people turn their bowls upside down. I’ve decided to oblige him. But since it stings my vanity knowing the self-aggrandizing way he’ll inevitably spin this, I figured I had better lay out some reasons, as well as discharge an old promise I made regarding the uses of abuses of arguing ad hominem.

Vox literally believes, if you recall, that he really is the winner of the Magical Belief Lottery. You might be inclined, on a occasion, to think that he is simply having one on, but I assure you, when he says things like, “Of course, I am a superintelligence, so the fact that [delevagus] been studying it for years whereas I read Sextus once on an airplane meant that it really wasn’t a fair contest,” he genuinely means it.

At this point, I’m inclined to simply take him as ‘Exhibit A’ of human irrationality. Some, in the jungle that has overrun the comment thread on the previous post, have suggested that I’m ‘running scared’ and the fact is, I am. But from what he represents, not what he ‘argues.’ Vox is what you might call an ‘epistemic bombast’–self-described. He literally believes he has the most powerful three pound brain in the universe. That, in my books, counts as delusional.

One thing I was always big on in my teaching days was what I called the ‘minimum condition of rationality.’ Once you realize that reason is primarily argumentative, as opposed to epistemic, you realize that reason is just as liable to deceive as to reveal. So the question you always need to ask yourself in any debate is whether you are the victim of your own ingenuity. You are more apt to use you intelligence to justify your stupidity post hoc—to rationalize—than otherwise. And that’s a fact Jack.

Thus the crucial importance of epistemic humility. Rational debate is impossible with epistemic bombasts simply because, as more and more research shows, reason is primarily a public relations device, a way to snag other three pound brains, and only secondarily epistemic, a way to snag the world. It is quite literally impossible to convince an epistemic bombast of anything on theoretical subject matters lacking any clear, consensually defined truth conditions.

This is why some cognitive psychologists are now arguing that rationality is quite independent of intelligence.

So what then is the measure of epistemic humility? How can you tell whether you should trust yourself, let alone your interlocutor?

Well some interlocutors, like Vox, make things easy for you. Vox is a self-declared epistemic bombast. As such, given that you accept that science is the best tool we have ever devised for sorting—even if only contingently—fact from fiction, you can write him off as a serious interlocutor.

In other words, you can safely dismiss him on ad hominem grounds.

He’s certainly desperate to do so. This is little more than another attempt to justify his own cowardice in failing to either answer my questions or accept my invitation to a written debate concerning his claims regarding the importance of Uncertainty and the intrinsic dangers of Certainty. His argument that he can safely dismiss me on ad hominem grounds, much less do so convincingly, doesn’t hold up, however, not only because it is a logical fallacy, but also because it is based on a complete falsehood. Wängsty is such a shameless liar, can anyone wonder why I repeatedly call him out for being such an intellectually dishonest charlatan? I don’t believe, literally or otherwise, that I possess “the most powerful three pound brain in the universe”. I’ve never claimed anything like that. I’m not the smartest one in my extended family and I wasn’t even the second-smartest in a house I shared with three other guys after college; both Horn and Big Chilly test out higher than I do. But I am a superintelligence nevertheless, and I do believe, with considerable evidence to justify that belief, that I’m observably more intelligent than Wängsty and his fellow wannabe PhD, Delavagus. This quite clearly, bothers them, as it appears to offend their sense of multiversal order that someone who does not share either their left-liberal ideological orientation or academic credentials could actually be more intelligent than they are.

Of course I genuinely believe it wasn’t a fair contest between Delavagus and me. Is there anyone who read the Dissecting the Skeptics series who did not? If so, do speak up and share your reasoning with us.

It is amusing, to be sure, that Scott asserts I am delusional while being simultaneously dumb enough to lie about things that anyone can easily check and confirm to be false. And it is even more amusing that he insists on a “minimum condition of rationality” while apparently failing to be aware that in the aforementioned unfair contest, Delavagus’s argument attacked human reason and asserted its self-refuting nature.

Scott is running scared and inclined to simply take me “as ‘Exhibit A’ of human irrationality” because I have consistently exposed his cowardice, his dishonesty, and his inability to argue his way out of a paper bag. He’s desperate to avoid direct engagement because he knows that what I will do to his arguments will make what I did to those presented by Delavagus look merciful in comparison. People have been telling Wängsty nearly from the start, eight months ago, that he had gotten me all wrong, but he keeps doubling down again and again on his original position… because you are a complete fraud when it comes to your Uncertainty Doctrine.

But as all the long-time readers here know, I won’t hesitate to continue beating the dead horse that is The Prince of Wängst until there is no longer so much as a maggot wriggling in the corpse. By the time the white flag flies, absolutely no one will take any of his claims seriously, mostly because he’ll have stripped every last vestige of intellectual integrity from himself.

A billion here, a billion there

JPM misplaces a bit of money:

JPMorgan Chase disclosed in a regulatory filing on Thursday that a trading group had suffered “significant” paper losses in a portfolio of credit investments. The troubles at the unit, the so-called chief investment office that makes trades to balance the bank’s assets and liabilities, could weigh on the bank’s broader earnings. The corporate group, which includes the C.I.O. group, is expected to lose $800 million in the second quarter, although the final results will depend on the market and other activity, the company said in the filing. Previously, JPMorgan had estimated that the group would report net income of roughly $200 million.

How long will it be before the first giant US bank is nationalized? Before the end of the year? Before the election?

Does Obama seek Round 2?

The fascist-sounding Department of Homeland Security is preparing to suppress dissident elements:

According to my source, there is talk among the highest levels of the uppermost echelon of the Department of Homeland Security, which he describes as effectively under the control of Barack Hussein Obama. During this call, he said that the DHS is actively preparing for massive social unrest inside the United States. He then corrected himself, stating that “a civil war” is the more appropriate term. Certain elements of the government are not only expecting and preparing for it, they are actually facilitating it,” stated my source.

“The DHS takes their marching orders from the Obama administration, from Obama himself, but mostly from his un-appointed czars. And Jarrett, especially Valerie Jarrett. Don’t think for a minute that the administration is doing anything to stabilize events in the U.S. They are revolutionaries, and revolutionaries thrive on chaos,” he added. My source stated that he has not seen things this bad since he began working within DHS. “It’s like they [DHS agency heads] don’t care about what the American people see or feel about what the DHS agencies are doing. They figure that if the average American will put up with being “sexually groped and nuked” just to fly, they’ll accept almost anything. “That’s why their actions are becoming more overt. “It’s in your face and the brass actually chuckle about it” said my source….

According to this insider, the Trayvon Martin case is just the tip of the iceberg. “You certainly don’t have to be a genius to understand how Obama and his team played the public on this issue, and it’s far from over. But that’s not the sole element of what we’ll see this summer. Remember the shots fired at the White House not too long ago?” asked my source. There was an element of outrage that was squandered, according to ‘team Obama.’ In fact, Obama and some of his closest advisors, especially [Valerie] Jarrett were incredibly angered that the outrage was seemingly tempered. It should have been an opportunity to use our force against the Tea Parties, the gun clingers, the Constitutionalists, and everyone who has complained about Obama. DHS should have stepped in right then, and used that event to start the clampdown,” this source stated about White House comments.

This source stated that from that point on, the DHS must become more responsive and aggressive. Watch for a false flag event against Obama or his family, something that will outrage ‘black America.’ It will be carefully choreographed, but executed in a manner that will evoke the ugliest of reactions and create racial chaos in this country that will make the Watts riots, 1968 and the Rodney King riots pale in comparison. That’s the third leg in this.”

This is why I warned about the significance of the establishment of the TSA. It was quite clearly a test, and a test that the American people completely failed. Had all Americans simply refused to fly, the Federal bureaucrats would have gone too far and pulled back. Since they whined but ultimately accepted the new travel regime, they simply set themselves up for the next test. As for what it will be, I would guess that we’ll find out sometime between September and January since it isn’t looking as if Obama will be re-elected even if he ends up running for a second term.

But don’t think a Romney administration won’t continue where the Obama administration left off. After all, it was the Bush administration that set up both Homeland Security and the TSA.

Victimizing the vibrant

Jonathan Frost chronicles the tragic tale of three vibrant young fun-lovers victimized by an objectively raciss police force:

Events occurred in the neighbourhood of White Oaks, Michigan last week, when a jolly squad of mischief-making troubadours came upon a Whole Foods at 9:18pm on Tuesday of last week and allegedly caused eighteen shoppers to no longer be alive. According to testimony by the one surviving shopper, who managed to conceal herself behind an upright display of locally-sourced quinoa bread, the trio of mischief-makers brandished firearms as they made their way into the store, secured the exits, and ordered the shoppers to fall to their knees in a line, calling them childish names throughout.

The silly teens then slowly went from one shopper to the next, demanding apologies for the brutal, unprovoked, cold-blooded murder of Trayvon Martin, pictured below, by George Zimmerman, a privileged white male who is white. The apologies were apparently not sincere enough for the impish rascals, as they ended the spectacle by executing each of the alleged victims with a double-tap to the base of the skull. The puckish rapscallions then fled the store, but they were apprehended later that night after having immediately uploaded pictures and videos to their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WorldStarHipHop accounts.

It is, of course, overtly and exceedingly raciss for the northern chapter of the KKK also known as “the Michigan police” to arrest these three fine and otherwise upstanding young knuckleheads for the mere exuberance of their vibrancy, and it is an outrage that these itty, bitty babies of color, of whom it has been justly said, “ain’t never gwan be hurt nobody nohow” should find themselves facing the dreadful prospect of as much as four years in jail for the incidental and wholly unintentional life-ending of eighteen raciss descendants of slave-owners who were not only privileged and white, but knowingly shopped at Whole Foods, which everyone knows is the very epitome of stuff white people like.

Free Trayvon, De’Andre, and Sparckle!