The Wikileaks rape-criers

In Male Fide posts the pictures and identities of Julian Assange’s two accusers, Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilén.

A few people have sent me the home addresses and phone numbers of Julian Assange’s lying rape accusers. My traffic has ballooned from Googlers seeking info and pictures of Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilén in the past 48 hours, and my posts are being linked all over the place from sites as diverse as Indymedia and Democratic Underground to Pajamas Media and Stormfront….

These two women are accessories to a great evil, an evil that will continue to perpetuate unless someone stands up and does something. They are arguably evil themselves for trying to destroy a man’s life over their feeeeelings. If there’s a part of me that would feel bad for releasing the info, there’s another part of me that would feel bad for not using my power to fight this evil when I am uniquely positioned to do so.

So, guilt or not, I’m posting the info.

I don’t see why Ferdinand should feel any guilt over making available information that should be available given the criminal accusations. Anyone who accuses someone of rape should be considered a public figure in precisely the same manner that the accused rapist is. Crime is a matter of public record, so if you are not willing to go public when pressing charges you should not be permitted to participate in the judicial system. It is a fundamental aspect of justice that it not be hidden in any way. This is why it is important that women who claim to have been raped are not permitted to hide behind the so-called “rape shield” laws because it is readily apparent they find it far too easy to use it to get away with making false criminal accusations without being held accountable for them in any way.

And since female activists have successfully lobbied to impose some form of restriction of public information regarding activity within the judicial systems of many countries, they leave the public with no choice but to identify secret accusers outside the justice system in order to prevent miscarriages of justice from taking place within it.

Misplaced faith in reason

Scott Atran scientifically demolishes a cherished atheist belief in his new book Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What It Means to Be Human:

Seeing humans as essentially driven by their passions, Hobbes cherished little hope that they would ever be guided by reason. Still, he never doubted that if people were more rational they would be less prone to violence. How could any sane person not seek peace? After all, everyone wants to go on living – or so Hobbes wanted to believe.

Something like Hobbes’s analysis (though without his refreshing pessimism or his wonderfully terse prose style) has resurfaced today in regard to suicide bombing. If you read evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins, you will be told that suicide bombers are driven by their irrational religious beliefs. ‘Suicide bombers do what they do’, writes Dawkins in a passage cited by Scott Atran, ‘because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools; that duty to God exceeds all other priorities, and that martyrdom in his service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise.’ What is striking about claims of this kind is that they are rarely accompanied by evidence. They are asserted as self-evident truths – in other words, articles of faith. In fact, as Atran writes, religion is not particularly prominent in the formation of jihadi groups….

Unlike Dawkins’s assertions, Atran’s account of violent jihadism is based on extensive empirical research. An anthropologist who has spent many years studying and talking to terrorists in Indonesia, Afghanistan, Gaza and Europe, Atran believes that what motivates them to go willingly to their deaths is not so much the cause they espouse – rationally or otherwise – but the relationships they form with each other. Terrorists kill and die ‘for their group, whose cause makes their imagined family of genetic strangers – their brotherhood, fatherland, motherland, homeland, totem or tribe’. In this terrorists are no different from other human beings. They may justify their actions by reference to religion, but many do not. The techniques of suicide bombing were first developed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist group hostile to all religions, while suicide bombers in Lebanon in the 1980s included many secular leftists. The Japanese Aum cult, which recruited biologists and geneticists and experimented with anthrax as a weapon of mass destruction, cobbled together its grotesque system of beliefs from many sources, including science fiction. Terrorists have held to many views of the world, including some – like Marxism-Leninism – that claim to be grounded in ‘scientific atheism’. If religion is a factor in terrorism, it is only one among many.

This is precisely what I pointed out in TIA when criticizing Sam Harris’s error-filled The End of Faith, although I didn’t need to perform any extensive empirical research as a basic knowledge of military history was sufficient. But it is satisfying to see that more and more atheists are beginning to see what I explained two years ago: the New Atheists have not utilized any science in their ideological campaign against religion in general and Christianity in particular, they are nothing more than ideological propagandists attempting to further a specific and virulent form of secularist philosophy. And while they do utilize a good deal of reason – the cases they present are uniformly philosophical cases rather than scientific ones – the more important point is that they seldom utilize it correctly.

Anyone conversant with military history knows that suicide bombing is a fairly conventional weapon of the desperate and the weak. And it’s a remarkably ineffective weapon at that; even if suicide bombing could be reasonably connected to religion, it would make for a strong argument that religion is not only seldom a cause of war, it also happens to be almost completely useless in practicing war.

Rethinking feminism

“I was informed that there would be no work in this career.”

It goes without saying, although it sometimes seems we are expressly forbidden to say it, that having a rich husband would provide that option. When I go to pick up Nancy from school, there are three ­distinct camps of women at the gates: the frazzled working mums like myself, rushing up at the last minute.

Then there are the childminders of those women still at work. Then there are the stay-at-home mothers — and if you imagine the latter group to be tubby drudges in unflattering tracksuits with fuzzy, unkempt hair, think again.

Today’s breed of stay-at-home mother is impeccably turned out — after all, they’re the only ones rich enough to be able to not work. Mostly in their late 20s, they’re clad in designer gear and have the time to have their hair styled weekly at an upmarket salon.

Unsurprisingly, female envy proves convincing where logic and reason fail. Of course, it’s not that any man will do, only a rich man.

Joel Rosenberg arrested

It looks like the Minneapolis police department is determined to test its ability to flout the concealed carry law:

Rosenberg was in police headquarters to pick up some documents, and he came packing not only his handgun but a video camera. The video captured Sgt. Palmer confronting Rosenberg about his gun before taking the weapon away with all the decorum of a father scolding his bratty son.

Rosenberg argued he had permission to carry inside City Hall and later filed a complaint against Palmer. Palmer insisted that Rosenberg was violating a court order that bans guns on the premises. The warrant that was issued yesterday for Rosenberg’s arrest agrees with the latter opinion.

Rosenberg says he notified the sheriff’s department of his intent to carry a weapon into the office that day, while the warrant says the sheriff has no record of that.

Notice that the police position depends upon the sheriff having no record of something it doesn’t even openly deny. Which means that they’re doing what the police always do when they’re in the wrong – they’re lying – so I hope Joel has a record of his conversation with them. I recently dealt with a company that swore they had no record of my contact with them; they were trying to bill me for a contract I’d canceled months. They tried to pull the same “we have no record” line and didn’t drop it until I sent them a copy of the email I’d sent them which also referred to the conversation I’d had with them.

Shameless. And here’s an interesting thought. If the police are the servants of the public, why is it legal for the police to lie to the public and illegal for the public to lie to the police? Good luck to Joel. It should be a matter of real pride for him to be publicly declared “Minneapolis’s most rabid gun advocate”.

And yes, fantasy fans, he is THAT Joel Rosenberg.

Central bank or teenage girl?

In which Jon Stewart attempts to figure out if Ben Bernanke is printing money or not:

Default and devalue

Iceland shows that the arguments put forth by the banksters and the europhiles are simply incorrect:

Iceland’s real gross domestic product grew by 1.2 percent in the July-September period from the previous quarter, the first quarterly increase since the same period in 2008. Iceland entered a slump after its overleveraged financial sector collapsed in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy.

Like Ireland and Greece, Iceland has taken a large dose of austerity measures to rebuild its economy. Unlike Ireland and Greece, however, Iceland allowed private banks to fail, and its currency, the krona, has declined by about 46 percent against the dollar since the start of 2008.

“Excluding the financial system, the real economy is doing well,” Arsaell Valfells, a professor of business and finance at the University of Iceland, said in telephone interview. Retail spending was still shrinking, he said, but the export sector, consisting mainly of fish, aluminum and tourism, was improving.

Just as a man cannot serve two masters, a government cannot serve two economies. The USA and Europe have chosen to preserve the financial economy at the cost of the real economy. Iceland chose the opposite. Needless to say, Iceland made the wiser choice because there are a lot more people in the real economy than the financial one. More importantly, the real economy is not a parasite completely dependent upon the financial economy, which is why putting the interests of the financial economy first is bound to be disastrous when viewed from a longer term perspective.

Mailvox: On the secrets of the state

An interested party asks for elucidation on my attitude towards the legitimacy of state secrets:

I have read your column for years, sometimes in agreement, and sometimes not, and am so not surprised at your position on the most recent Wikileaks affair. Given that position, I am curious as to whether you would agree with the statement that no state may morally conceal any of its actions, intentions, or internal communications. If not, how would you qualify the statement to render it acceptable to you? I am also interested in whether you would draw a distinction between the concealment just mentioned and the provision of intentionally false or misleading responses — lies — in answer to requests for information. Finally, I would ask whether you might see any basis for differentiation between individual or state concealment or lies.

The question requires some clarification before it can be answered. First, what sort of state is it? Second, from whom is the state concealing its actions, intentions, and international communications? In the case of a state that is ruled by a sovereign monarch, in which “l’etat, c’est moi”, then the state can morally conceal its actions, intentions, and communications from anyone it pleases. In the case of a state in which the people are sovereign, (which is to say that the people are the state), the state cannot morally conceal its actions, intentions, and international communications from the people, which is to say itself.

It is completely false and historically illiterate to argue, as some would have it, that it would be self-destructive for a state in which the people are sovereign to retain no secrets. Quite the opposite is true; because most great powers fall to internal corruption prior to their conquest by external parties, it is the ability of powerful elements within the state to conceal information from the rest of the state that leads to the subversion of the state and its eventual transformation and collapse.

The example of war, so often cited in support of state secrets, actually supports the contrary case even more strongly. While it might have been more difficult make the D-Day landings, the more significant point is that they never would have needed to be made had the American people not been led blindly into World War I, which allowed the stage to be set for the rise of Hitler, the National Socialists, and the conquest of France. In the same manner, the informants who are supposedly endangered by the Wikileaks releases would never have faced any danger if the American people had been in full possession of the facts with regards to Afghanistan and Iraq; those invasions would never have taken place.

Obviously, it is worse for the government to lie in request for information; sins of commission are generally considered worse than sins of omission. But in a supposedly free and democratic society, there is no place for either. And finally, the difference between a state lie and an individual lie is that in the case of the former, (assuming a nominally free and democratic state), the state is lying to itself whereas the individual is lying to someone else. Needless to say, whether one is a state or an individual, one who lies to himself is very unlikely to make optimal decisions. And that is precisely the practical problem that underlines not only the immorality, but the self-destructive foolishness of state secrets.

In a state where the people are sovereign, state secrets are maintained for one reason and one reason only: to permit certain elements of the state to operate freely without taking into account the will of the other elements of the state. This is why state secrets are intrinsically authoritarian and invariably lead to the loss of human liberty over time. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that mine is a “naive” position, as the self-styled geopolitical realists like to describe it. It is nothing of the kind, being an extremely cynical one instead.

Neuroscience is racist

It looks like Sam Harris is going to be very, very disappointed where the science of brain imaging experiments looks to be headed:

Following up on the cultural differences between Asians and Americans, one study published in Neuroimage found that when faced with the same image, people’s neural responses are totally different. Scientists found that when American subjects viewed a silhouette in a dominant posture (standing up, arms crossed) their brain’s reward circuitry sparked. Not so for Japanese subjects. For the Japanese, their reward circuitry fired when they saw a submissive silhouette (head down, arms at sides). This physiological response matches a well-known behavioral difference: Americans favor and encourage dominant behavior. Japanese culture reinforces submissive culture.

So, instead of neuroscience providing a scientific means of defining morality outside of religion, it looks as if it will be providing a scientific means of defining racial and/or cultural superiority outside of morality. All of Harris’s reasoning in support of scientific morality, which was constructed in support of his hypothesis of differences in religious and non-religious beliefs and put forth in The Moral Landscape, can now quite reasonably be utilized in support of scientific racial and cultural superiority.

How fortunate for everyone that his reasoning is so completely flawed.

The Fifth Definition

Paul Krugman explains why Keynesian economists have now begun to switch to a fifth definition of inflation, “core inflation”, that is distinct and increasingly distant from the Keynesian school’s theoretical, official, textbook, and practical definitions.

Since I’m taking a break from shoveling, I thought I might take a few minutes to address an issue that seems to confuse many people: the idea of core inflation. Why do we need such a concept, and how should it be measured? So: core inflation is usually measured by taking food and energy out of the price index; but there are alternative measures, like trimmed-mean and median inflation, which are getting increasing attention.

First, let me clear up a couple of misconceptions. Core inflation is not used for things like calculating cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security; those use the regular CPI.  And people who say things like “That’s a stupid concept — people have to spend money on food and gas, so they should be in your inflation measures” are missing the point. Core inflation isn’t supposed to measure the cost of living, it’s supposed to measure something else: inflation inertia….

The standard [core inflation] measure tries to do this by excluding the obviously non-inertial prices: food and energy. But are they the whole story? Of course not — and standard core measures have been behaving a bit erratically lately. Hence the growing preference among many economists for measures like medians and trimmed means, which exclude prices that move by a lot in any given month, presumably therefore isolating the prices that move sluggishly, which is what we want.

And then these great minds of the dismal science wonder why their models don’t work in either a predictive or an explanatory manner. Of course, the reason they need to keep coming up with these additional “definitions” is because not because the “measures have been behaving a bit erratically” but because the conclusions that are based on the definitions don’t line up with what is visibly taking place in the actual economy.

The red line is the standard “core inflation” CPI-FLENS measure that Krugman is citing in his second “Core Logic” post; the blue line is the standard CPI-U.  However CPI-FLENS cannot possibly measure the inflation inertia because the practical application of the various Keynesian definitions of inflation requires something to measure those price changes against.  Simply removing some of the more volatile (and generally higher) prices from the price index only smooths out the price index while tending to reduce it.  Since inflation – and therefore its inertia – depends upon the comparison of those price changes with changes in the production of goods and services, (in practical terms, with GDP minus the price increase of one’s preferred index, be it CPI-U or CPI-FLENS), anything that leaves GDP out of the equation cannot be considered the inflation inertia anymore than the mere change in prices can be considered inflation if it does not take the change in production into account.

Republicans plot betrayal

The incoming House Majority Leader is considering whether he can get away with keeping Ron Paul out of the chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee panel that oversees monetary policy in order to protect the Federal Reserve from any uncomfortable oversight:

Five GOP leadership aides, speaking anonymously because a decision isn’t final, say incoming House Speaker John Boehner has discussed ways to prevent Paul from becoming chairman or to keep him on a tight leash if he does.

If this happens, it will be a strong indication that the Tea Party is either going to split in two or split from the Republican Party.  And this should tell you all you need to know about whether the House Republicans are going to govern any differently than they did the last time they were in power.

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