You don’t know Euthyphro

I’ll be addressing Luke’s fourth letter in a day or three, but in the meantime, I couldn’t possibly let this very funny comment by drj pass unremarked. As I pointed out in TIA, half-educated atheists often like to resort to the Euthyphro Dilemma, but because they haven’t actually read Plato, they have absolutely no idea that the argument doesn’t merely fail due to moral arbitrariness or because of its intrinsic inapplicability to a non-polytheistic concept of the divine, it first fails on the basis of a dishonest, logically invalid, and admitted modification of an integral definition by Socrates.

What’s funny is… the Euthyphro dilemma is supposed to work on people like Vox. Its supposed to confront them with a reductio ad absurdum – that it should to be absurd to think morality is arbitrary, evils are actually goods when commanded by the right being, and that all statements about the goodness of God become meaningless. What can you do though, when one simply fails to recognize the “absurdum”, in reductio ad absurdum?

Drj clearly doesn’t realize there is no absurdum to be recognized because the attempt to reduce the argument to the required tautology falls apart before it is completed. Any time you encounter someone appealing to Euthyphro in a discussion of religion or morality, you can be very confident that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. See TIA pp 291-300.

RGD: reviews

Right Condition reviews The Return of the Great Depression:

Once in a while, a book comes along that shakes so many of your core beliefs that you are left questioning either the integrity of what you have read or your own knowledge. In this particular case, I had the privilege of a sneak peek at The Return of the Great Depression by Vox Day and with most certainty can state, it is the latter. RGD as it shall be referred to from now on, as can be inferred from its title makes a very compelling case as to the state of our economy and where this nation is potentially headed. However do not be misled by its name, for this is much more than a prophecy, it is principally and foremost an economic text diligently spending the majority of its efforts in explaining why we are standing on the edge of a precipice.

Chad the Elder of the Fraters Libertas reviews RGD:

Let me start by passing on a shocking piece of information: Vox Day is not an economist. That may lead some to discount his views on matters economic, but in this case it proves to be beneficial. He approaches the subject as an outsider and is not wedded to any particular school of economic theory from his background. This allows him to be rather dispassionate in his analysis and also forces him to be more vigorous in his research since he doesn’t come into it with a great deal of experience.

It also makes The Return of the Great Depression a more understandable and entertaining read than your average economic tome. That’s not to say its been dumbed down or overly simplified. Vox takes on some rather weighty and complicated economic topics…. if you want to read an informative, thoughtful, and even sometimes entertaining book on the current economic situation, you can’t go wrong with The Return of the Great Depression.

Letter to Vox Day IV

Luke has posted his fourth letter:

Vox,

Holy crap that’s a lot of insults. I tried to count them but couldn’t. I can see that your readership is impressed and excited by your continuous stream of insults, but I come from a different tradition (analytic philosophy) that values clarity, argument, and evidence – not insults.

I agree we should leave the topic of evolution behind. But I’m sure our readers will remember that one of us gave argument and evidence for his views on evolution, and the other did not.

Thank you for finally explaining your view that Satan rules the Earth. But again, to just assume I should understand your views on Satan by way of vague references to children’s literature and a sci-fi novel is, I think, too optimistic. Christian teaching about Satan has a long, complex, and variegated history. I can’t just guess what your theological views are: I need you to tell me what they are.

This was written in response to my third letter to Common Sense Atheism.

The media is awful

Even the sports media has become increasingly dumbed-down to the point of completed retardation these days, and I’m not referring to its tendency to interject politics into sports, I’m talking about the ability of the announcers to simply do their freaking jobs.

Last week, the announcers at the Steeler-Lions game were rambling on interminably about Brett Favre playing in the dark. Brett Favre, you may note, does not play for either the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Detroit Lions. Yesterday, as the Vikings defense was suddenly getting shredded in the fourth quarter and every Vikings fan was wondering what in the sainted name of Bud Grant special teams player Karl Paymah was doing on the field, the announcers couldn’t bother to mention that both Antoine Winfield and Benny Sapp, the Vikings #1 and #3 cornerbacks, were injured in the first half. Winfield was out for the rest of the game and Sapp was less than 100 percent as he was playing with what looked like a concussion.

On the other hand, give credit to Peter King as he is spot on with this comment:

We were stunned at NBC Sunday to see the Vikings — with 2:30 left in the game, trailing Baltimore 31-30, with a third-and-nine at the Ravens’ 17 — to not go aggressively for the first down. “We were a little surprised too,” Peterson said. Peterson ran for a three-yard gain, with the Vikings happy to settle for the field goal. It was a poor call because the Ravens had scored 21 points in the fourth quarter, the Vikes looked gassed on defense, and even if Ryan Longwell made the field goal, Baltimore would have two minutes to win it. Longwell made it, Baltimore drove into field goal range, and Steve Hauschka lined up for a 44-yarder with two seconds left. Wide left. I don’t care if the kick was wide left; if you’ve got a quarterback as hot as Favre (playing nearly mistake-free in his first six games), you give him a chance to get the touchdown before settling for three.

Especially when you’ve got two downs if you play for the first down instead of the field goal. Childress really reminds me of Denny Green, a decent coach who doesn’t understand when to go for it and when not to. The Vikings once scored to put themselves within a point of the heavily-favored Cowboys at the end of the game, Green ordered the PAT team on, and the Cowboys marched straight down the field to win it in overtime. I’m not sure which play had me shouting at the screen more, that handoff on third-and-nine or the idiotic big blitz that Frasier called when the Ravens were just outside of field goal range.

On an unrelated note, yesterday was clearly a sign from the football gods that the Patriots must return to the Pat Patriot look. 59-0! And 85 percent completion percentage… in the snow!

Just one question

Karl Denninger notes that no one in the media seems interested in asking it:

Note that nobody in the mainstream media bothers to bring up “Prompt Corrective Action” and demand from Bair and rest the answer to one simple question: “How does a bank get into a situation where it has a 20, 30, 40, 50% loss on it’s asset base when Prompt Corrective Action and Tier Capital requirements are supposed to cause banks to be seized before ANY loss occurs?”

The present U.S. financial system isn’t merely based on sand, it’s based on the pretense of sand. Meanwhile, Mike Shedlock catalogs a surprisingly long list of stories about the incestuous Goldman-government circle before wondering why so few Americans are upset about the way a few financial interests are exercising their power to monopolize the economy for their own benefit and to the detriment of the nation, the economy, and the public. The post is well worth reading; I’m sure you’ll all be relieved to know that the responsibility for avoiding the regulatory failures of the recent past has been placed in the capable hands of the new COO of the SEC, a 29 year-old Goldman guy.

Unfortunately, since both the Republican and Democratic elite are beholden to the banks rather than to their party’s bases, there is very little chance of this coming to an end in a rational manner. A small percentage of the American people are infuriated already, but most are still fat and happily feasting on junk food regardless of their employment status. If they ever become lean and hungry, they’re not likely to sit idly by watching bankers pay themselves billions for stealing taxpayer money while they fall from the comfortable middle class into poverty.

It’s good to be a bankster now. But keep in mind, there was also a time when it was good to be a French aristocrat.

WND column

End the Fed
by Ron Paul
Rating: 10 of 10

“The Federal Reserve System must be challenged. Ultimately, it needs to be eliminated. The government cannot and should not be trusted with a monopoly on money. No single institution in society should have power this immense. In fact, I believe that freedom itself is at stake in this struggle.”
– Ron Paul, “End the Fed,” p. 11

In 17 years of writing game and book reviews, I can count on two hands the number of times I have ever given out the highest rating. True excellence is to be distinguished from the merely very good, and it is far rarer than the heavy use of superlatives in our everyday language would tend to indicate. End the Fed is more than a timely political polemic, it is also the story of the long and patient campaign by a small group of freedom-loving patriots to restore economic liberty to the American people.

NFL Week 6

This would be your weekly NFL open thread aka Nate’s suicide watch. Jamie’s on duty this weekend, so let’s hope he’s sober for once.

You know you’re old school when you have old Adrian Peterson throwback jerseys around the house… because they date back to Ahmad Rashad. Skol Vikes!

Practice makes perfect

Before they go on to lose wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama figures his administration could use some practice losing one on the home front:

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, said in an interview with The New York Times. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Ah, but pretending has traditionally been a valuable part of the presidential playbook. Smiling and wearing beige even under the most withering news media assault is not only good manners, but also has generally been good politics. While there is undoubtedly a visceral thrill in finally setting out after your antagonists, the history of administrations that have successfully taken on the media and won is shorter than this sentence.

I’m not a fan of Fox News, but the thing that is so ridiculous about this is that Fox is more balanced – and has been objectively confirmed to be more balanced – than the other cable news networks and the mainstream media in general. Even liberals who doubted this couldn’t credibly do so any longer once CNN took it upon itself to fact-check an SNL skit for the crime of being insufficiently reverential.

Anyhow, the article reports that Fox’s ratings are up 20 percent. Obama’s, on the other hand, are down 38 percent since Inaugural Day. It increasingly appears that strategically besting Hilary Clinton and her team in claiming the Democratic nomination was less Julius Caesar defeating Boadicea and more the equivalent of beating Miss South Carolina at chess.

Photoshop/GIMP request

If you’re a power user of either of these programs, I would very much like to know what you believe to be the 30 most important application commands, in order of how often you use them. Is it Dodge, Burn, Paste Special, Line, or something to do with Layers? If you are able to tell me the hotkey that triggers the function as well, that would be ideal. Thanks very much.