WND column

The consequences of Obama’s culinary habits are considered:

I’ve eaten some strange things in my day. Living in Japan, for example, we occasionally broke our fast with orange juice and octopus tentacles, which most assuredly is not the breakfast of champions. There was the squid pizza at the Pizza Hut, the burned caramelized meatloaf that was a Chinese chef’s gracious, but misguided, attempt to make a hamburger for the American, and live shrimp plucked from the pool, cut in half and served freshly twitching. I tried whale, which is dark maroon and too rich to eat more than a few bites, as well as some bitter sea creatures that are only delicacies by virtue of their rarity; I half-expected that they would glow if we turned the lights out.

Obama really has no one to blame for this but his supporters. If they hadn’t tried to make hay out of Romney’s foolish exercise in canine transportation, Romney’s supporters likely wouldn’t have gotten on Obama’s case for his childhood cuisine.

The immigration transformation

So much for the sexy side of the scientific secular utopia.

As many as 100,000 women in Britain have undergone female genital mutilations with medics in the UK offering to carry out the illegal procedure on girls as young as 10, it has been reported. Investigators from The Sunday Times said they secretly filmed a doctor, dentist and alternative medicine practitioner who were allegedly willing to perform circumcisions or arrange for the operation to be carried out…. The Metropolitan Police said since 2008, it had received 166 reports of people who fear they are at risk of FGM but it has failed to bring forward a single perpetrator. It is the same for all 43 forces across England and Wales with no convictions for the offence ever taking place.

The problem isn’t that immigrant women are getting cliterodectomies, involuntary or not. They would have gotten them in the native countries anyhow and they will continue to get them in Britain. The problem is the possibility that the practice will eventually begin to spread to the British population. No doubt that sounds impossible, but then, I’m sure the idea that Britain would ever become a Christian nation and stop painting their bottoms blue probably sounded crazy to the average druid. What is actually crazy is the fact that feminists refuse to work towards stopping immigration even though tens of thousands of women are having part of their genitals amputated, just as environmentalists won’t protest it even though it necessarily leads to more pollution and pressure on the environment.

Instead, they both continue to embrace the multitudinous advances in cultural vibrancy, such as sex selective abortion and genital amputation.

Wängsty discredits himself

In which R. Scott Bakker conclusively demonstrates that he isn’t merely hypocritical, ignorant, morally blind, and philosophically inept, he also happens to be a confirmed liar:

By way of disclosure, I have to say that I’m most interested in the way you’ve changed your answers to these questions since the last time. We actually speculated about how you might change your rhetorical tactics. You seem to have moved from a bald (and quite embarrassing, I think you realized in retrospect) assertion of exceptionalism (IQ, social regard – I think you even managed to work your wife’s fertility in there!) to one that has more cognitive qualifications (which is something I predicted – my conceptual model must have been bang on that day!).

To which I replied: “As I recall, the previous questions were different, Scott. Why on Earth would you expect me to provide the same answers to different questions? I’ll suppose I’ll have to look up your previous questions and compare them. And before I do, let me point out that this will have some seriously negative implications for your credibility and intellectual honesty if those two sets of questions are not identical.”

I’ve been engaging with Bakker long enough now to know that he is a slippery intellectual snake, and while I’m not perfectly consistent over time, I don’t customarily change my answers to the same question without either admitting or realizing I have done so. So, his claim that I had changed my rhetorical tactics immediately triggered my BS radar. I went back and looked at every single question both he and his readers asked me, and thanks to his description, I had no trouble identifying the one to which he was referring, which I answered in the post entitled The Wangst that Comes After.

Wängsty: “What makes him think he’s won the Magical Belief and Identity Lottery?”

Oh, I don’t know. Out of nearly 7 billion people, I’m fortunate to be in the top 1% in the planet with regards to health, wealth, looks, brains, athleticism, and nationality. My wife is slender, beautiful, lovable, loyal, fertile, and funny. I meet good people who seem to enjoy my company everywhere I go. That all seems pretty lucky to me, considering that my entire contribution to the situation was choosing my parents well. I am grateful and I thank God every day for the ticket He has dealt me. If I’m not a birth lottery winner, then who is? The kid in the Congo who just got his hands chopped off and is getting raped for the fourth time today? To paraphrase the immortal parental wisdom of PJ O’Rourke, anyone in my position had damn well better get down on their knees and pray that life does not become fair.

First, let me say that I’m not embarrassed by my answer to that question in the slightest. I wouldn’t change a word of it if I were asked it again. But I wasn’t. And to prove that, let’s take a look at the questions that I subsequently answered. Here is the complete list of questions Bakker asked of me in the latest go-round. Do you see anything about the Magical Belief and Identity Lottery?

1. Granting two things, that the technologies that science made possible have transformed our world in the past three centuries, and that science, as another human institution, nevertheless suffers many flaws, you’re saying your non-scientific account of science demonstrates that science is not to be trusted… what? At all? More than non-scientific accounts? No differently than non-scientific accounts? [Bakker doesn’t understand that technology drives science more than science drives technology. And it was not a “non-scientific account” that demonstrated peer-reviewed, published science papers from top science labs are about 11 percent reproducible. -VD]

2. Lastly, I will ask you – this one time – to refrain from verbally abusing any one on this site but myself. Are we clear on that? [Sure, we’re clear that you asked. – VD]

3. Are you ever puzzled by the way it always seems to be the other guy that’s wrong? For us outsiders, we can only assume, absent any relevant information, that you are at best ‘in the right’ a fraction of the time (just like everyone else), but that you are duped into thinking you are pretty much right all the time (just like everyone else). What makes you special? My personal instinct – one that I think many others share – is to be skeptical of an individual the degree to which they impress themselves. Why should I make any exception in your case?

So Bakker is trying to claim that a question about the uniqueness of my identity and beliefs is exactly the same as a question about the unusual success of my public track record and thereby score some cheap rhetorical points by claiming that two very different answers to two different questions were actually two different answers to the same question. He then goes on to make the risible claim that this somehow supports his conceptual model and that he had predicted my behavior. But his claims aren’t simply false, they are shamelessly dishonest. While I knew from the start that Bakker was somewhat of a charlatan and prone to intellectually carelessness as well, until now, I only suspected that he would be willing to knowingly lie in support of his utopian ideology. And the sheer stupidity of lying about such an easily checked statement tends to support one of my other suspicions, which is that Wängsty is more educated than intelligent.

Nor can Bakker claim that “what makes you special” is synonymous with his Lottery question, because it was asked in the context of why I believe I am right more than others are, as one can easily see in my answers to him.

Wängsty: Are you ever puzzled by the way it always seems to be the other guy that’s wrong?

That’s hilarious. When I make my annual economic predictions at the start of the year, I always score my predictions from the previous year. Sometimes they’re very good, such as the time I was only off on the change in the median existing home price by $300 when the chief economist for NAR was off by more than $40,000. Sometimes they’re not, such as when I didn’t anticipate the BLS playing games with the employment-population ratio in order to keep the unemployment rate down. But it’s not enough to be stupid, you have to be completely ignorant to think that anyone who meddles in economics could possibly think he’s right all the time. I only wish I was. Unlike academia, there are significant financial penalties for being wrong in the markets. But in general, your question is rather like asking if Bill Belichick if he’s ever puzzled that the other team always seems to lose. He’s a good football coach. I’m a good recognizer of patterns. I’ve been writing op/ed columns for 11 years. My track record is all out in the open and it speaks for itself. I don’t always get it right – I still can’t believe Hillary Clinton didn’t win the nomination – but in that same election, I was the only commentator in a field of 100 to correctly predict that Sarah Palin would be McCain’s vice-presidential choice. And this time around, I correctly anticipated Romney would be the Republican nominee; time will tell if my outlandish prediction that Obama will not be the Democratic candidate in November is correct as well. And note that I made that prediction about 18 months ago; my track record is not a result of playing it safe and obvious.

What makes you special? My personal instinct – one that I think many others share – is to be skeptical of an individual the degree to which they impress themselves. Why should I make any exception in your case?

Because I’m really that good. Look, a lot of people ignored me back in 2002 when I urged them to stay out of the housing bubble and buy gold instead. After housing crashed and gold went from $275 to $1750, a lot of those people subsequently decided that they at least ought to pay attention. Strangely enough, no one is laughing at my prediction of massive worldwide economic contraction anymore. What makes me special? I am not sure. There are certainly others smarter than I am, and more successful than I am. But what I’m very good at is forcing myself to only look at what is there, rather than what I want to be there. In retrospect, most of my errors have been caused by failing to sufficiently adhere to that principle, and that’s how I often pinpoint my interlocutors’ weaknesses: look at what they desperately want to believe is true and you’ll probably find a logical or factual error there. But what many of my readers find amusing about your accusations of certainty is that I have quite openly changed my mind about a number of significant ideological issues. Can you honestly say the same?

It may be illuminating to keep this in mind as I proceed to pin down the snake and vivisect his Moral Uncertainty Principle, armed with little more than a superintelligence and a peculiar definition of “certainty”. Those who find this whole thing amusing will no doubt be interested to know that Mr. Moral Uncertainty appears to have a fairly serious obsession that the alien rape monsters of The Prince of Nothing were not enough to sate, as it appears rape is a major theme of his science fiction work as well.

More handicapable, more better

I tend to doubt that this interesting aspect of immigration is often taken into account when the pro-immigration theoreticians claim that immigration is always a net positive for society:

A BBC investigation in Britain several years ago revealed that at least 55% of the Pakistani community in Britain was married to a first cousin. The Times of India affirmed that “this is thought to be linked to the probability that a British Pakistani family is at least 13 times more likely than the general population to have children with recessive genetic disorders.” The BBC’s research also discovered that while British Pakistanis accounted for just 3.4% of all births in Britain, they accounted for 30% of all British children with recessive disorders and a higher rate of infant mortality. It is not a surprise, therefore, that, in response to this evidence, a Labour Party MP has called for a ban on first-cousin marriage.

It is estimated that one third of all handicapped people in Copenhagen have a foreign background. Sixty four percent of school children in Denmark with Arabic parents are illiterate after 10 years in the Danish school system. The same study concludes that in reading ability, mathematics, and science, the pattern is the same: “The bilingual (largely Muslim) immigrants’ skills are exceedingly poor compared to their Danish classmates.” These problems within Islam bring many detriments to Western countries. Expenses related to mentally and physically handicapped Muslim immigrants, for instance, severely drain the budgets and resources of our societies. Look at Denmark, for example: one third of the budget for the country’s schools is spent on children with special needs. Muslim children are grossly overrepresented among these children. More than half of all children in schools for children with mental and physical handicaps in Copenhagen are foreigners — of whom Muslims are by far the largest group. One study concludes that “foreigners inbreeding costs our municipalities millions” because of the many handicapped children and adults.

The problem, of course, is that the transformative effect of immigration goes both ways. The host culture is effected by the immigrant culture, so it is as reasonable to expect that first cousin marriage will be not only legalized, but adopted by segments of the native population as well, as it is to assume it will be banned. So, while this may be good news for those of you who have highly attractive cousins, it’s yet another example of how what passes for progress is actually regressive and detrimental to society. After all, if the host culture cannot be deemed superior to the immigrant culture, it has no grounds for denying immigrants, and everyone else, any cultural tradition they practice. And one need not be a social darwinist to doubt the benefit to any civilized society of importing masses of people guaranteed to be disproportionately mentally and physically handicapped.

Excuse me. Of course, I mean disproportionately mentally and physically handicapable.

Deeper and deeper

The discussion at R. Scott Bakker’s Three Pound Brain has continued and sprouted numerous branches, and yet Wängsty himself has thus far resolutely refused to provide any definition of “certainty” or “uncertainty” despite the fact that his entire philosophical framework appears to rest upon them.  Here is but one of several comments that I have made there in answering the various questions of his commenters even as Bakker continues to avoid answering mine.

Why is he so reluctant to provide definitions for his central terms?  Is he afraid that his entire philosophical edifice will tumble to the ground if he exposes it to criticism?  Or is it only that the certainty of a definition would be less moral than the uncertainty of a non-definition, so he is simply attempting to abide by the ethos of his doubt-filled creed?

First, I’d like to point out that I’ve been answering many questions, whereas Scott still hasn’t deigned to define
certainty or uncertainty for us, which has prevented us from proceeding
with the main subject. So, how about it, Scott? Are you cool with the
dictionary definitions or is Delavagus correct and you have something
else in mind?
Just for the sake of clarity, you advocate attempting to convince
all women to voluntarily not work. You don’t advocate forcing them to
not work, right?
I don’t think it’s necessary to force anyone not to work. Most women
of the important class don’t really want to, not after they have actual
experience of it. But I would go a little farther than simply
attempting to convince women, I advise removing the incentives that
encourage women to enter the labor force and provide them with
incentives to bear and raise children instead.
The basic problem is that since the doubling of women in the labor
force from 1950 to 1975, and concomitant reduction of wage rates,
married women who don’t want to work are forced to if they wish to
maintain the standard of living a one-income family once had.
Is this [changing  positions on the drug war] really an example of you being (proven) wrong, though? It was incompatable with your beliefs.
Yes. A friend pointed out the logical inconsistency to me.
Is there some method by which you could be shown to be wrong on
the womens rights (or even shown to not be so certain of how it aught to
be)? You seem to say your belief changed – but what was the changing
method and can anyone else have a hand in that?
Of course. But it’s unlikely, since I’ve looked at it in more depth
than most. The method involved looking at the societal effects over the
course of the last 90 years, and it rapidly became clear that the
predictions made by opponents of women’s suffrage were largely correct
and those made by its supporters were incorrect. Furthermore, there are
a whole host of problems, mostly rooted in economics, that were never
anticipated by either side.
Seems a legacy argument? Legacy, Eg: Well, if we give all these
slaves freedom, who will work the plantation! Economic ruin! Thus
slavery aught to continue.
No, you’re making the mistake of confusing a forward-looking
perspective with a retrospective one. In the correct analogy to the
case we’re discussing, we’re considering that pro-slavery argument from
amidst the economic ruins. As it happens, that pro-slavery argument was
subsequently proven wrong by events, as were the pro-suffrage
arguments.
if we assume that women are technically human, and we assert that
we value human liberty, shouldn’t we support their desire to work as
much as we would support a man’s desire to smoke some nice (almost)
harmless weed due to both being a special case of general human liberty ?
Not necessarily. This is the common error committed by many of my
fellow libertarians. For example, consider open borders. That
seemingly libertarian position is actually anti-freedom, as there would
be nothing to stop China from sending 30 million Chinese to the UK and
55 million to the USA, gaining voting rights, then voting to sign a
treaty of surrender to the Chinese government. Maximizing human liberty
in the aggregate is not perfectly synonymous with maximizing all
individual human liberty.
However, if he supports bypassing persuasion and going straight
for coercion, things take a decidedly ominous turn. But relying only on
persuasion immediately suggests the practical improbability of the
proposition, and this is why I think it’s proper to feel uneasy about
even theoretically suggesting it. What really is the point to suggesting
a counterfactual that has no chance of being realized?
There is a long gap between persuasion and coercion. As I said, I
favor incentives, not force. But it’s not a counterfactual that has no
chance of being realized. The coercion and oppression of Western women
by force will come if their behavioral trends are not changed, and
changed in the next 30 years. The socio-sexual and demographic trends
are fairly clear. Who would have imagined, in 1973, when wages peaked
and the divorce/abortion equalitarian program was implemented into US
law, that there would be honor killings in the USA and Europe only
thirty years later?
Societies that rest upon structural incoherencies always collapse
sooner or later. Feminist equalitarianism is actually a less coherent
and less realistic ideology than Soviet communism was, and it probably
won’t last the 72 years that the Soviet system did. It’s only been 39
years and the problems are rapidly building up throughout the West.

Mailvox: writing advice

AD has a few questions about the business:

I am a fan of your writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and own three of your books. I have thought about writing both fiction and non-fiction on topics that I think have not been written on or I am just ignorant of such books existing, and I want to write these books. I still think that my writing skills have a long ways to go before I can turn out a book that I would feel happy about (and just to clarify, I am not looking to earn a living via writing, there are just some books I must write). Let me just list my brief questions in a list:

1. Are sample chapters worth sending to publishers?

2. What are some pitfalls people should avoid (both non-fiction and fiction)?

3. If you could mention one or two resources that will help someone write either non-fiction or fiction work, what would the resource(s) be?

4. What do you think of self-publishing or using a publisher for your work?

5. If one uses a publisher, how would one make the book available for free or a very low price?

6. What have you found to be the best three ways to advertise your book?

First, I’m pleased to see that AD has the common sense to pursue writing as a past time and isn’t thinking that it’s a practical way to make a living these days. In answer to his questions:

1. Yes. The usual submission consists of three sample chapters. Even if you send a complete manuscript, there is almost no chance anyone is going to read the whole thing anyhow. Nor is it necessary. When I was doing the slush pile reading for a SF/F publisher six or seven years ago, I usually had a sound basis for rejecting a submission within the first three pages. Those who can’t write, quite clearly can’t write. And most people can’t write.

2. The biggest pitfall I’ve had to deal with is the feeling that one’s work has to be tremendously brilliant or original in order to be good or successful. No one actually gives a damn about such things except other writers and the writer himself. The Tolkiens and Ecos are the rare exceptions. I agonized over attempting to fit the story of Summa Elvetica to the philosophical structure, couldn’t manage to do it, and was subsequently bemused to find that absolutely no one noticed, much less cared, about what was arguably the most structurally original fantasy novel in years… and the only reviewer who even commented on the philosophical argument actually mistook it for a real one from Thomas Aquinas. The main focus should simply be on writing a good story with interesting characters, everything else is window dressing.

3. Obtain a book or two that is directly relevant to your general subject and will give your book solid depth of detail. TIA would have been much less effective without An Encyclopedia of Wars. In the novel I’m currently writing, I’m making heavy use of various letters and speeches by Cicero and other Romans.

4. Electronic self-publishing is now without question the way to go. In fact, I’d originally intended to self-publish Arts of Dark and Light, and it was only because I was contractually obligated to offer it to Marcher Lord due to its connection to Summa Elvetica that I ended up, to my surprise, publishing it through them.

5. Negotiate it in the contract. That’s why my ebooks are much less expensive than most. I made it clear to all three of my publishers that I wanted the price to be 1.99 and not the full price or 9.99 that most publishers at the time were charging. When the EW ebooks are released, hopefully next month, they’ll most likely be priced at 1.99 as well.

6. I am not the correct person to answer this question, as I think I have done a very poor job of advertising them. Pretty much all I do is write a reasonably popular blog and showcase a cover or two on the sidebar. Judging by the results, this isn’t ineffective, but also is not the best way to go about advertising one’s books.

Bringing back Wicker Man

The return to paganism in increasingly post-Christian Britain is being embraced by the state:

Paganism has been included in an official school religious education syllabus for the first time. Cornwall Council has told its schools that pagan beliefs, which include witchcraft, druidism and the worship of ancient gods such as Thor, should be taught alongside Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

The requirements are spelled out in an agreed syllabus drawn up by Cornwall’s RE advisory group. It says that from the age of five, children should begin learning about standing stones, such as Stonehenge. At the age of 11, pupils can begin exploring ‘modern paganism and its importance for many in Cornwall’.

Atheist secularists must be so pleased. The consequence of their two-century campaign against Christian civilization increasingly looks to be a choice between Islam and half-naked, blue-bottomed savagery. Since the core concept of progress was intrinsically a Christian one based on the idea that a rational Creator’s Natural Law could be better understood through reason and observation, it should be no surprise that the abandonment of Christianity has not led to secular progress, but rather pagan regress.

Britain is already seeing the occasional human sacrifice committed by its imported savages. But unless the religious trend is reversed by Christian revival, the next century will see the native savages reviving their murderous old customs as well. Justice will be well served if they begin with the secular scientists.

Conclusion: go long on woad.

The exits close

A lot of people failed to understand the point of my controversial column “Against a Fence”, having been distracted by the deportation discussion. Even fewer understood my reasoning behind it; many critics found it hard to wrap their minds around an anti-immigration, anti-border wall perspective. But it has always been a tautological truth that a wall designed to keep people out is just as useful for keeping people in. The proposed law to strip passports in order to better hold Americans hostage to the IRS would appear to be an indication that the time in which one easily leave the United States is rapidly coming to an end.

The Republican House of Representatives may soon follow the Democratic Senate and give the IRS the power to confiscate your passport on mere suspicion of owing taxes. There’s no place like home, comrade.

‘America, Love It Or Leave It” might be an obsolete slogan if the “bipartisan transportation bill” that just passed the Senate is approved by the House and becomes law. Contained within the suspiciously titled “Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act,” or “MAP 21,” is a provision that gives the Internal Revenue Service the power to keep U.S. citizens from leaving the country if it finds that they owe $50,000 or more in unpaid taxes — no court ruling necessary.

It is hard to imagine any law more reminiscent of the Soviet Union that America toppled, or its Eastern Bloc slave satellites.

In a free and well-governed society, exile is a punishment. In an unfree and misgoverned one, exile is impermissible. There is no stronger indication that America is no longer free than the fact that its leadership is seriously contemplating the idea of attempting to imprison its citizens within its borders.

And of course, one tends to doubt that Warren Buffett will lose his passport despite Berkshire Hathaway owing massive back taxes, or that any of the 98,000 federal employees who owe a combined $1 billion in back taxes will be deprived of their ability to travel outside the country. And while the writer is correct to say that “if House Republicans pass this assault on our Constitution, their credibility will be in tatters”, this presumes that the House Republicans still possess any credibility after permitting the continued growth of big government by raising the debt ceiling last year.

For all that the Congressional actions are egregiously unconstitutional and directly opposed to the foundational principles of America, one shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. This behavior is completely typical of financially desperate states that can no longer afford the costs of empire. The collapse of the Soviet Union was only the most recent example; there are many to be found throughout history. “Valentinian III, who remarked in 444 AD that new taxes on landowners and merchants would be catastrophic, still imposed an additional 4% sales tax… and further decreed that all transactions be conducted in the presence of a tax collector.” But however harsh the crackdown, however totalitarian the government, strict tax enforcement never works because its objectives are inevitably based upon a static revenue model that fails to account for Man’s unwillingness to work and to obey the law when the state claims an excessive share on the fruits of his labor.

Enjoy the decline… preferably from a distance.

Christianity is more scientific than New Atheism

And it’s not hard to conclusively prove it. Shadow to Light shines a big spotlight on the intrinsic absurdity of the New Atheist attacks on religion in general and Francis Collins in particular:

Coyne has accused Collins of being an “embarrassment to the NIH, to scientists, and, indeed, to all rational people” and an “advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.” Myers calls him a “creationist dupe arguing against scientific theories” and “an amiable lightweight” who doesn’t know how to think like a scientist.

You would think that when these three biologists dish out their smug vitriol, it would come from a foundation of having generated more scientific knowledge than the religious guy. But alas, such is not the case.

Recall that Collins has published 384 scientific papers from 1971 to 2007. I’m sure he has published since 2007, as that is where the CV on the web ends. In fact, by searching through PubMed, a database that contains millions of scientific articles, it looks like he has published 483 papers. But we’ll stick with 384 since there could be other “Collins FS” authors out there mixed in with the PubMed search results.

Again using PubMed, I was able to determine that Jerry Coyne has published a very respectable 88 papers from 1971 to 2011. For Myers, I found only ten papers from 1984-1999. For Harris, I did not bother with PubMed. I used his own site where he promotes himself and his publications.

He has published two papers since 2009.

In other words, it’s obviously not Christianity that hinders science. Collins has not only produced considerably more science than his critics, he has published more than twice as many papers as Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers, and Sam Harris combined. He has published infinitely more scientific papers than the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Michael Shermer, all of whom have nevertheless made similarly false claims about the incompatibility of Christianity and science.

As is so often the case, the atheist argument is based entirely on incorrect logic and not on the empirical evidence that they claim – also falsely – to value so highly.