Liberal integrity

Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk desperately tries to cover his backside after the St. Louis Post-Dispatch admitted that it has no evidence that Rush Limbaugh ever made the “divisive” comments that caused him to be dropped from the ownership group bidding for the Rams.

“When posting on the matter on Monday, we made it clear that Limbaugh contends he never said the words.”

That’s Florio’s story now. But that’s also a very misleading characterization of his earlier post on the matter, to say nothing of the intervening posts made in the five days between Monday and Saturday:

During his Monday show, Limbaugh broadly claimed that 15 hours per week of radio programming covering 21 years had been reviewed. (It’s a job that would take more than 16,000 hours, so he apparently has a bunch of employees.) Said Limbaugh, “There is not even an inkling that any words in this quote are accurate.”

But here’s the key — he never directly denied saying the precise words that Burwell assigned to him. Sure, Limbaugh made vague claims of libel and slander, but there should be no ambiguity here. If Burwell attributed a concocted, made up quote to Limbaugh, Limbaugh’s lawyers should be demanding a retraction and a large bag of cash.

Though I’ve got no idea whether Limbaugh said it, Burwell says that Limbaugh said it. And if Limbaugh didn’t say it, he’s got an open-and-shut defamation claim against Burwell, the Post-Dispatch, and anyone else who has attributed that quote to Limbaugh….

Look, either he said it or he didn’t. And in referring to an item from the Post-Dispatch that troubled him because it suggested that he supports slavery, all Limbaugh had to do was read the quote that Bryan Burwell attributed to Limbaugh and say, “Folks, here are the words they say that I said. And I swear to you that I never uttered these words.”

The fact that Limbaugh didn’t do that makes us think that maybe he said it. And we’ll continue to think that maybe Limbaugh said it until Limbaugh either specifically and categorically denies making the remark or successfully sues Burwell and the Post-Dispatch for falsely claiming that Limbaugh made a statement that any fair-minded person would regard as incredibly and patently racist.

I like Pro Football Talk. It’s a good NFL-related site. But, like many of its readers, its ludicrously biased coverage of the affaire Limbaugh has forced me to concur with many other PFT readers who have concluded that its proprietor appears to have the integrity of a player’s agent and the spine of a sea slug. Everyone who knew anything about Limbaugh and the way the left obsessively tracks his show knew there was no chance that he had said anything even remotely similar to what was falsely attributed to him. Read the comments, as it’s obvious that a lot of PFT readers are not inclined to let Florio skate by on this one.

The man owes Limbaugh an unmitigated apology as does the NFL commissioner, Smith from the NFLPA, and a whole host of other media lefties who mindlessly leaped to the attack and in doing so shredded their false claims to objectivity. I rather hope Rush does as Florio originally suggested and follows through in suing those who slandered him.

Rush is right

It’s not actually about the NFL:

As I explained on my radio show, this spectacle is bigger than I am on several levels. There is a contempt in the news business, including the sportswriter community, for conservatives that reflects the blind hatred espoused by Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson. “Racism” is too often their sledgehammer. And it is being used to try to keep citizens who don’t share the left’s agenda from participating in the full array of opportunities this nation otherwise affords each of us. It was on display many years ago in an effort to smear Clarence Thomas with racist stereotypes and keep him off the Supreme Court. More recently, it was employed against patriotic citizens who attended town-hall meetings and tea-party protests.

These intimidation tactics are working and spreading, and they are a cancer on our society.

In the last two years I’ve been subjected to one successful and one unsuccessful attempt to bar me from an opportunity based solely upon my ideological beliefs, which is ironic considering that I am more often in the gatekeeper’s position than I am in the position of one attempting to pass through the gate. As an occasional acquisitions consultant for two publishers, I’ve shot down 10x more book proposals in the last three years than I ever proposed in the entire course of my writing career, let alone had rejected.

My question to those who think it is correct to bar the likes of Rush Limbaugh or me from various opportunities on the basis of our ideological beliefs is this: is it correct for us to bar those who possess ideological beliefs with which we disagree from opportunities that we control? Because if those are the new rules, I don’t have any problem playing that game.

Occam’s Razor is correct here

The reason Obama hasn’t looked that smart since taking office is because he isn’t:

Are you tired of hearing how “smart” Barack Obama is? I reached my limit over the summer, when The New York Times Magazine quoted Valerie Jarrett, the president’s liaison to Chicago City Hall, declaring, “I mean, he’s really by far smarter than anybody I know.”

Well, as any Chicago schoolboy knows, there are many different kinds of smart. And right now our commander-in-chief is not looking particularly brilliant— at least on the level of substantive politics.

As I said before the election, Obama is far from the genius he is often portrayed as being. There is an absolute ceiling on his IQ of 130, based on his attendance at a high school where students took the PSAT and his failure to achieve any National Merit recognition. I estimate his IQ to be around 116, which is one standard deviation above average, but two standard deviations short of the level loosely described as a genius-level intelligence. (I don’t agree with that definition, by the way; I think genius is far more rare than +3 SD IQs and I think IQ is only one component of genius.)

Intelligence is overrated anyhow. It’s an important factor in accomplishment, but it is by no means the most important one. Focus, determination, connections, and ambition are all more important components of achievement and it’s interesting to contemplate where Obama is probably most gifted considering his relative lack of intelligence.

Mailvox: on method

JB thinks he’s figured out my approach to developing defensible positions:

Here’s an outline based on my observations of your learning to thesis process. Is there anything I’m missing?

1. Select narrow topic.
2. Ask experts to ID sources.
3. Scan and jot occasional note.
4. 2nd reading, pursue suspicions deep into the material.
5. Make minimal positive public statements and destroy opponents using their own illogic.
6. Gradually increase positive suggestions and assertions to keep pace with finished thesis.
7. When challenged on an iceberg tip, unload thesis for maximum credibility transfer.

I can’t say that I’ve ever thought through how I approach this sort of thing, really, but I suppose that’s actually a fairly accurate description of how I go about the process of learning something new that is likely to be contentious in some way. The most important thing is to resist the urge to engage in any debate or do anything but ask questions when you have not yet mastered a sufficient amount of the best material that is reasonably accessible to you, especially the best material from the contrary side. For example, in writing RGD, I went back and read three of Keynes’s works, as well as Samuelson’s original 1948 textbook and five of Paul Krugman’s books, in addition to about fifty or sixty of his columns, in order to ensure that I had the Keynesian position correct. (I still somehow managed to miss the one in which he first calculated the need for a stimulus that was smaller than the one he later criticized the Obama administration for not making larger.) I then read several Austrian criticisms of Keynes, beginning with Hayek and Hazlitt. Why? Because I know that every Keynesian economist who reads the book is going to do his damndest to attack my understanding of Keynesianism, Neo-Keynesianism, and Post-Keynesianism in order to use even the slightest error as an excuse to dismiss my conclusions. It’s entirely possible – in fact, it’s probable – that they’ll find something, but I’m not going to make it easy for them. The monetarists, of course, will be too busy having hissy fits over my characterization of Milton Friedman as a Keynesian heretic who nonetheless remains a Keynesian to notice that they have completely abandoned the core of his monetarist theory.

The fact that I know Krugman’s work, or Dawkins’s work, or Marx’s work much better than the vast majority of their fans always gives me a massive advantage in discussions, especially when those on the other side haven’t bothered to read a speck of anything that criticizes their point of view. My feeling is that you can best understand something by reading both the source material and the critical material, which for some reason most people seem loathe to do. Conversely, the worst thing you can do is what many atheists do so often and so foolishly, which is pretend to knowledge that you do not have and which the other side almost certainly possesses.

This segues nicely to Sloo’s complaint about my etiquette:

I really tried to get into this debate. But as I read Vox’s replies, his condescending sneer works its way into my head and replaces my mental reading voice. It really is off-putting, surely you guys have to admit. He is clearly an intelligent man, but 60% of everything is the delivery. Work a little on your tact and social manners Vox, you have already proven your intellect. Oh, and why the smokescreen still? ‘Refer to my book’, ‘as Thomas Aquinas says’, ‘again you [Luke] have made an incorrect assumption/have demonstrated your ignorance/are ill-prepared etc. etc. Clearly we’re all just complete idiots in your presence Vox, so why don’t you just spell out your points for us.

Tone is not truth, and neither tact nor manners are the issue here. I didn’t select the tone of the discussion, which was set by Luke’s second letter. I’ve made it very clear that I will always respond to others in the manner they address me. If you don’t want me to mercilessly expose your errors, your ignorance, and your lack of intelligence, then I strongly recommend that you avoid attacking me, launching passive-aggressive assaults, or informing me that I am wrong/stupid/uninformed without being able to conclusively demonstrate it. If you can show me I’m wrong, I’ll admit it. I have done it before, I will do it again, and I have no problem doing it. But, if you incorrectly assert that I am wrong, I also don’t have any problem with demonstrating, in excruciating and humiliating detail if that’s what you require, that your assertions are false.

As for smokescreens, the fact that you think I have engaged in any says far more about your own approach to debate than it does about anything I’ve written here. I think it’s absurd to expect me to cut-and-paste numerous pages of text that I’d previously written into what is already a three thousand-word letter. If you can’t bother to read something that is supposedly of interest to you, well, you’ll have to find someone else to hold your hand because I’m not going to waste my time.

King Prawn, meanwhile, takes exception to my assuming a literate readership:

Your explanation of the Silent Planet reference was both enlightening and helpful to furthering the discussion. I don’t understand why you couldn’t have just laid it out before. It’s a bit unreasonable to expect everyone to have read all the same books you have and therefore to have the background information to come to your “obvious” conclusion. You also seem to think your dimissals are warranted, but I think maybe you misunderstand the purpose of dialogue. You communicate your thoughts, then recieve feedback. Regardless of the intelligence level of the recipient, one should strive to make themselves understood. You are running the risk of appearing not to have entered this discussion in good faith.

Let me get this straight. I get invited to a discussion about my religious beliefs which the other party immediately attempts to turn into a conventional bait-and-switch on evolution. He then makes numerous false claims about both his knowledge and my own, and engages in passive-aggressive attacks while demonstrating a near-complete lack of understanding of something he claims to understand very well… and you think I’m running the risk of not having entered the discussion in good faith?

As for not walking Luke through the Lewis metaphor, I can only say that if he was genuinely a sincere former Christian possessed of great familiarity with the wide variety of Christian theologies that he claimed to be, there is simply no chance that he would not immediately recognize the “Silent Planet” metaphor or fail to grasp its connection to the temptation of Jesus Christ in the desert. Even an intelligent non-Christian with no theological knowledge at all could probably have figured it out with or without the aid of a visit to Wikipedia. I cited the title of the first book in the most famous Christian science fiction trilogy, not an obscure bit of text buried somewhere in Aquinas or Augustine that no one can reasonably be expected to know. Since I recently wrote reviews on books by Shermer and Bernanke, it should be readily apparent that I don’t expect most people to have read what I have read. But if you haven’t even read C.S. Lewis, then I have absolutely no time or regard for you.

As for dismissal, what else can one possibly do with feedback that is illogical, incorrect, and based on a false understanding of what was written? I once interviewed Umberto Eco and was a little surprised at how vehemently he engaged with my questions and disputed the interpretations of his texts that lay underneath them. It wasn’t until later, when I saw him deal very kindly with a petrified interviewer who was in well over her head, that I realized he had responded to me as an intellectual equal and was taking my questions seriously. I don’t mind walking people through things when they genuinely want to learn – that’s what Voxiversity is for – but if you want to be handled with kid gloves, then you’d best not come here demanding treatment as an equal, much less a superior.

Mortgage and foreclosure fraud

Socionomics teaches that the end of a fifth wave, especially in a major bubble, is rife with fraud, forgery, and other financial shenanigans. One of the major ones that is still percolating is the massive amount of mortgage fraud that was committed by banks and other financial institutions in mass-producing home loans for securitization purposes. It increasingly appears that a statistically significant portion of the foreclosures in process are being pursued on a fraudulent basis by entities which do not actually hold the rights to the mortgage.

Helpful Guide For All States on how to research your recorded documents at county recorder and determine if there are forgeries or fraud when facing foreclosure…. More and more evidence in coming forth which indicates some of the notorious predatory lenders took shortcuts and did illegal document recordings and some with forgeries.

I’d heard rumors of some shady practices at the mortgage banks as long as seven years ago, but now it appears that documented evidence of them is coming to light. If you took out a loan any time in the last five to seven years, it’s probably worth checking out the public records to find out if your lender was one of the fraudulent ones or not. Of course, this may also explain why some banks have been so uncharacteristically slow about following through on pursuing homeowners in default; they may know they don’t actually have the right to foreclose on them.

As usual, it’s Karl Denninger who posted this first, as he is increasingly focused on the incredible amount of illegal activity taking place in the financial and federal sectors over the last year. On a tangential note, the U.S. deleveraging process appears to be continuing, as total loans and leases at commercial banks declined $146 billion in September. TOTLL is now down 6.8 percent YTD and 8.2 percent since the October 2008 peak of $7.32 trillion. This is not indicative of economic expansion, especially considering that this decline has taken place despite the Federal incentives encouraging people to take on new automotive and housing debt.

Bunny burners

This might be a good thing to remember the next time an American liberal explains that America should follow Sweden’s lead:

The bodies of thousands of rabbits culled every year from the parks in Stockholm’s Kungsholmen neighbourhood are being used to fuel a heating plant in central Sweden. The decision to use Stockholm’s rabbit cadavers as bioenergy to warm Swedes living in Värmland doesn’t sit well with Stockholm-based animal rights activists.

Socialized health care… I suppose you want to murder cute little bunny rabbits too. Why do you hate bunnies, why?

Letter to Common Sense Atheism III

Dear Luke,

I find it amusing, if not unexpected, that you continue to attempt rambling on about evolution. It is, as you have admitted, a tangent, but more precisely, it is an irrelevant tangent which has absolutely nothing to do with the discourse to which you invited me. To charge me with making false assertions and empty hand-waving because I made the mistake of directly answering one of your irrelevant questions is a very strange thing to do, especially when one considers that in that very same letter you neglected to answer the only questions I have asked of you. I am also somewhat mystified by your decision to selectively quote the rules of my blog to me as if they were applicable here. But, as you have appealed to those rules, I shall quote the two that are most relevant as they will suffice to bring your repeated attempt to derail this discussion to an end.

3. Cross-comments and off-topic comments will usually be deleted. If your comment gets deleted, deal with it. Don’t try to argue with me about it, I’m truly not interested.

10. Any insertion of evolution or Creationism into a post that is not directly and specifically related to either subject will be deleted. Repeated efforts to do so will result in banning.

The mere existence of Rule #10 shows how your attempt to turn a discussion about Christianity into one about evolution and/or Creationism is tiresomely predictable in addition to being exactly the pointless sort of thing that this discourse was proposed to avoid. I also note that your claim to have directly rebutted my three assertions with relevant evidence, argument, and examples is clearly false because the evidence, argument, and examples you provided only served to prove that you had no idea what I was talking about. I will not bother to support this, even though I could easily do so, for what should be the obvious reason that it is not relevant to this discussion! As many others have done in the past, you are assuming that a refusal to explain something is tantamount to an inability to explain it. This is not only an illogical assumption but an incorrect one, as I shall soon demonstrate by explaining what I neglected to explain in my previous letter.

I don’t believe it is accurate to say that my tactics rely upon either obscurantism or unmerited dismissal. Indeed, by asserting that I am being obscure about the Christian doctrine of the Fall, you paint yourself with the very label I had not hitherto seen any justification to apply, as failing to spell out an obvious conclusion cannot reasonably be confused with being obscure. I had assumed you were merely ignorant about Christian theology, but if you are not being disingenuous in asserting your failure to understand something as simple as C.S. Lewis’s metaphorical explication of it in the form of science fiction for children, then it will be very difficult for me or anyone else who did understand the metaphor to draw anything other than the obvious conclusion. Having studied Sam Harris’s debates, I can certainly feel some sympathy regarding your frustration at my claim that you have misunderstood what I have written at almost every turn, but in this particular case, it doesn’t change the fact that you have clearly failed to understand what I wrote. More importantly, it doesn’t change the fact that most of the people reading our letters had no trouble understanding what you did not.

Granted, it is not my custom to explain what I consider to be the obvious. Most of my regular readers are intelligent enough to draw logical conclusions and refusing to spell out the obvious serves as a surprisingly effective means of weeding out the less intelligent critics whose specious and petty critiques are of no interest or benefit to me. But, in the interest of not being obscure, I will explain my reasoning in greater detail inasmuch as it is directly relevant to the topic of why I am a Christian. In the example of obscurantism that you mentioned, you wrote that I failed to explain why Out of the Silent Planet is titled as it is, and what the implications of Satan’s temptation of Jesus Christ in the desert are. Very well, let us address those two points.

In the Lewis book, Thulcandra, or “the Silent Planet”, refers to the Earth, which, being “bent”, no longer participates in the music of the celestial spheres with the eldila or even communicates with anyone outside the orbit of the Moon. Hence the appellation “silent”. Thulcandra is not ruled by the Old One (the Creator God) or Maleldil the Young (Jesus Christ), but by its bent Oyarsa (angelic planetary principality), who represents Lucifer/Satan. This idea of a world which is ruled by an evil being in rebellion against the Creator God is based on the fundamental Christian theological doctrine of the Fall, which has been told many times in Western literature and is most clearly demonstrated in the Bible by the temptation of Jesus Christ in the desert. When Satan offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world in return for his worship, Jesus did not argue that the world was not Satan’s to give as he presumably would have if it were a false offer, (which, as the Son of God he would very well have known), instead he merely refused it. This strongly suggests that the world is not completely under the direction and control of the Creator God as most atheists assume Christians believe, but is instead ruled by an evil, intelligent, and malicious being who seeks to be worshipped in the place of God. This concept is further confirmed in numerous places in the Bible, such as when Jesus tells his disciples that “the prince of this world cometh” in Matthew 14:30 and when Paul refers to “the god of this age” in 2nd Corinthians 4:4. While there is debate among Christians about the extent of this being’s rule, which according to the Bible extends to the aion but not the kosmos, as well as the timing and nature of the end of that rule, there is no serious theological dispute as to the existence of either the evil being or his worldly reign.

The nature of the being who rules over the world is a tremendously important point to understand for both the Christian and the atheist. While the atheist can, as many Christians do, wonder about why a deity of sufficient power to end the reign of an evil ruler would not act immediately to do so, it is as illogical for a Christian to blame God for the actions of Satan as it is for a Vikings fan to blame Brad Childress because Percy Harvin ran an incorrect route. There is no question that Childress could have prevented his wide receiver from running the wrong route by keeping him on the bench, but there is also no question that Harvin was told what the correct route was and chose to run the wrong one anyhow, thereby making Harvin, not Childress, the responsible party. The analogy is not quite precise, of course. A more accurate one would be akin to Childress deciding to start Harvin, followed by Bernard Berrian telling Harvin to sit down and let him run the route prior to sneaking in the game and running it incorrectly. We can blame both Berrian and Harvin for the subsequent incompletion, but we cannot reasonably blame Childress except for his poor judgment in permitting both players the freedom to think for themselves and make their own decisions. The inherent conflict between a benevolent Creator and a fallen world leads inevitably to the very mainstream Christian doctrine of free will, which is why some atheists such as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett are so determined to prove that free will does not exist, or is at best an illusion.

And this leads us to consider some of your more interesting assertions. Contrary to your fallacious claim to be “too familiar with Christian theology – or rather, Christian theologies”, you demonstrated your ignorance of not only conventional Christian theology, but philosophy in general, when you claimed that you could not possibly have predicted that I would hold the view that God’s goodness is arbitrary. In fact, it is apparent that your level of knowledge does not even rise to the level of Wikipedia:

“Christian philosophers, starting with Thomas Aquinas have often answered that the dilemma is false: yes, God commands something because it is good, but the reason it is good is that “good is an essential part of God’s nature”. So goodness is grounded in God’s character and merely expressed in moral commands. Therefore whatever a good God commands will always be good. Fr. Owen Carroll notes that the medieval philosophical tradition Realism, to which Aquinas belonged, assumes that the model that God used when creating the universe was within Himself so that the goodness of this world reflects and participates in some limited way and extent in the infinite goodness of God’s own divine nature. The position of the opposing school of Nominalism maintains that the model that God used when creating the universe is outside of God and thus the goodness of this world is alien to the goodness of God Himself. The moral consequence of the latter position is that whatever God wills is good, even if it is inherently contradictory and morally arbitrary according to the light of human reason.”

Now, my view of God’s arbitrary goodness is not actually Nominalist, the philosophical school which you will note is considered to date back to Plato, because I believe either Fr. Owen or his summarizer is incorrect to the extent that a distinction is drawn between Realism and Nominalism in the specific application of Divine arbitrariness. But this is beside the point, as the Wikipedia summary is sufficient to demonstrate that you were clearly unaware of how the arbitrary nature of Divine goodness has been a mainstream Christian perspective for at least 700 years, and more likely 1,800 based on the writings of the Latin Fathers. As it happens, the moral consequence of the Realist position is also that whatever God wills is good even if human reason declares otherwise, due to the imperfection of human reason. The only difference is that the Realist view assumes human reason must be incorrect or insufficiently informed to understand the Divine perspective whereas the Nominalist view does not; for example, Aquinas’s relevant arguments, which can be found in Iª q. VI a. III and IV, do not preclude the view of the arbitrary nature of Divine goodness when seen from from lesser perspectives to which I subscribe. For, as Aquinas himself concludes:

“Hence from the first being, essentially such, and good, everything can be called good and a being, inasmuch as it participates in it by way of a certain assimilation which is far removed and defective; as appears from the above. Everything is therefore called good from the divine goodness, as from the first exemplary effective and final principle of all goodness. Nevertheless, everything is called good by reason of the similitude of the divine goodness belonging to it, which is formally its own goodness, whereby it is denominated good. And so of all things there is one goodness, and yet many goodnesses.”

Ergo, those who confuse one of the many goodnesses with the one goodness may well elevate that lesser goodness to the supreme position and use it as a basis to conclude that the one goodness is evil and arbitrary, a process that one of my fellow Bucknellians describes as moral evolution and what the Bible describes as calling good evil and evil good. The Christian debate on the subject long precedes Aquinas, but while Tertullian decries the goodness of Marcion’s God as imperfect, irrational, feeble, weak, and exhausted, at no point does his view of Divine perfection preclude the arbitrary nature of that perfection when viewed from an imperfect human perspective on it. In fact, his attack on Marcion’s conception of God as a being of simple goodness points directly to the aforementioned Nominalist conclusion despite Tertullian being one of Realism’s most direct antecedents. But even though more than two millennia of Christian and non-Christian philosophical debate on the nature of God and Divine Goodness somehow managed to escape your attention, it is obvious that my views on the subject were readily available to you because I expressed them on pages 292-3 of The Irrational Atheist. I stated there that the arbitrary nature of God’s goodness, which has long been a known solution to the first horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma, “can only be considered a genuine problem for those who insist that a fixed principle cannot be arbitrary.”

And while it would certainly be amusing to see you argue for the immutable nature of the physical constants across the multiverses, I will content myself with simply concluding that you’re correct and the problem is not that you have incorrectly grasped the central aspects of Christian theology. The problem, rather, is that you simply don’t know a damn thing about them. You may not think I can charge you with ignorance of Christian theology, but given your confirmed failure to understand my predominantly orthodox beliefs as well as mainstream Narnia-level theology, it is perfectly clear that I or anyone else can not only charge you with it, but convict you. To paraphrase what I wrote in my first letter, if you don’t understand that the world is fallen, evil, and bent, if you don’t understand that Satan is the prince of this world and the god of this age, you cannot possibly understand the most basic concept of Christianity, much less anything else about it. Your letters have served to confirm this. And the Christian doctrine of a fallen world ruled by evil is hardly a concept with which only Christians are familiar, as Philip K. Dick derived the title for the second book in his excellent VALIS trilogy, The Divine Invasion, from it. Lest I stand accused of obscurantism, the invasion to which the term originally referred is this one:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
– John 3:16

Now, I trust that I have sufficiently demonstrated why your claim of great familiarity with a variety of mainstream Christian theologies merits not only dismissal, but derision. If you would like to dispute that conclusion, by all means let me know,, as we have barely begun to scratch the surface of basic Christian theological concepts that are clearly unfamiliar to you. With regards for your request as to a link to where I support my claims, my recommendation is that you begin by reading the The Chronicles of Narnia. Just to get you started, please note that the lion represents Jesus. Then you should be ready for the space trilogy, after which point I would recommend moving on to Chesterton’s Orthodoxy.

In the third part of your letter, you begin by errantly claiming that I denied God’s omnipotence by asserting that Satan rules the world. But I did nothing of the kind. Would you similarly claim that I deny God’s omnipotence because I also assert that King Henry VIII ruled England? You are making precisely the same mistake for which I criticize Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris in TIA, by confusing capability with action. This error likely stems from the Sunday School theology of your upbringing, as it is a common misconception among less reflective Christians whose theological foundation is based more on the songs they learned as children than it is on any interpretation of the New Testament, but please note that a rejection of omniderigence is not a rejection of omnipotence because the two concepts are not identical. To be all-powerful is not synonymous with being all-acting, much less all-controlling, and the foundation for my critique of omniderigence and its concept of a Master Puppeteer God is the rather obvious observation that the God who knows that the sparrow falls is not necessarily the God who killed the sparrow. This is far from an exotic position and the debate between the hyper-Calvinists and pretty much the rest of Christianity is not a new one. If you’re looking to find the point where Christian orthodoxy and I part company, then note that it is actually divine omniscience that I question, because I don’t see any Biblical claim or theological requirement for it. See The Contradiction of Divine Characteristics, TIA pp 270-274. Even so, the debate over the extent of God’s knowledge still falls well within the umbrella of mainstream Christianity as the various books about Open Theism, both pro and con, will readily show.

While I am certainly interested in discussing which religious or philosophical account of evil best fits the observable evidence as well as further exploring the details of your beliefs, especially those that concern what appears to be little more than a hedonistic spin on utilitarianism, we cannot reasonably move forward until you answer the questions I asked you in my previous letter. While your dissertation on desirism did imply an answer of sorts, it is necessary to clarify your precise beliefs regarding the existence of evil and its nature in order to avoid making any false assumptions about them. I will close by repeating them here now, with the addition of one more question raised by your third letter. I would appreciate it if you would answer them directly before explaining your answers in as much detail as you might like to provide.

1.Do you believe in the existence of evil?
2.If you believe that evil exists, is its nature objective or subjective?
3.If you believe the nature of evil to be objective, what is that objective basis?
4.What is the mathematical equation you used to calculate the three probabilities for metaphysical naturalism, orthodox Christian theism, and desirism?

With regards,
Vox

This was written in response to 3rd Letter to Vox Day.

Now this is disturbing

I didn’t think it was healthy when American women confessed to dreaming about Obama. So, I’m not quite sure what to think about this unexpected confession by Chad the Elder. Saint Paul, of course, is quick to diagnose the underlying issue:

It was quite a mix of symbolism and revealed subconscious needs and anxieties. What could it all mean? Based on some undergraduate psychology courses, years of watching the old Bob Newhart show, and decades of observing Chad interact with society, my initial diagnosis was obvious: latent homosexuality.

See, this sort of thing is why I don’t go on book tour….

Mailvox: a new find

GT would like to know what I think about the fossil record in light of this newly announced discovery:

Researchers in China and the UK say they have discovered the fossils of a new type of flying reptile that lived more than 160 million years ago. The find is named Darwinopterus, after famous naturalist Charles Darwin. Experts say it provides the first clear evidence of a controversial type of evolution called modular evolution.

My first thought is that all new fossils should be named after St. Darwin of the Galapagos. I want to see them all named Darwin Darwin Darwinus and anything less would be an insult to a particular agglomeration of atoms that coalesced for a few decades before dispersing more than a century ago. I have to admit, I find the cult of the dead scientist to be tremendously amusing, especially given the way in which this particular dead scientist’s theory has done little more than ride the coattails of Mendel’s for sixty years. But it keeps a number of socially awkward men happily occupied without bothering anyone, and as we know from Keynes, digging holes in the ground stimulates the economy, so it’s all good.

But in answer to the question, there are two ways of looking at this, that of the true believer and that of the skeptic. The true believer, naturally, will point to the discovery and say: “look, one more gap filled!” That’s a perfectly reasonable perspective, and indeed, it fits with the True Belief that given enough time, chance, and government funding, every gap in the fossil record could theoretically be filled. Just do enough digging and eventually there won’t be any room for doubt. At which point, presumably all the evolutionary biologists can go home and spend their days singing songs to St. Darwin since there won’t actually be any need for their so-called science once the bone collection is complete.

The skeptic, on the other hand, notes this interesting sentence in the middle of the piece: “Researchers say that this could be evidence of what they call modular evolution – where natural selection forces a whole series of traits to change rapidly rather than just one.” Given the difficulty evolutionists have had over the last 150 years in demonstrating the ability of natural selection to permanently change even a single trait, this is a significant alteration to the historical theory. I’ve commented before on how a scientific theory in the process of failing requires adding increasingly contorted epicycles and “modular evolution”, like “punctuated equilibrium” sounds very much like one of those things.

Of course, in light of the recent news that paleontologists may not be able to tell baby dinosaurs from distinct species, perhaps the fact that the new discovery has a head and neck just like that of “advanced” pterosaurs, while the rest of the skeleton is identical to that of “primitive” forms indicates that we should assume these are simply three examples of the same species at different ages.

NFL ownership follies

Forget NBC, Mike Florio appears to be ready for his cameo on MSNBC. Here he attempts to float the idea that Limbaugh scrubbed his transcripts:

And regardless of the debate over whether Limbaugh did or didn’t say things that have been attributed to him but that, as Limbaugh claims, don’t show up in the Limbaugh-generated tapes and transcripts of his show (in this regard, most lawyers know of at least one judges who is very adept at ensuring the official record of in-court statements never includes potentially embarrasing or controversial commens from the man or woman in black), it’s not what he has said in the past that should scare the owners — it’s what he might say in the future.

Right, one of the most popular broadcasters in the world somehow managed to eliminate every recording in which he uttered inflammatory words. This is ludicrous.

The entire episode has been interesting in that it highlights the difference between the toadying sort of individuals whose success stems from successfully crawling their way up the employee ladder versus entrepeneurs who actually create their own success. It’s no surprise that the doorknob chosen by the NFL players would flap his lips on a subject that is none of his business, but Roger Goodell, who is showing more and more signs of being a terrible NFL commissioner, should have known better than to even think about commenting on the prospective ownership of any NFL franchise.

When one considers that the Dolphins are giving away small ownership slices to former methheads in the name of diversity, it’s absurd to that one of America’s most successful businessmen should be preemptively shot down on the off chance that he is foolish enough to invest in what is nothing but a vanity investment in the first place. If the economy goes the way I expect it to, in the not-too-distant future the same people who are presently pontificating on why Limbaugh shouldn’t be permitted to buy an NFL team will be desperately seeking bids from Russian gangsters and Colombian drug lords like the NBA is already doing.

It was amusing to see Peter King lumbering about in attempting to dance around the NFL’s affiliation with Keith Olbermann, who is far more extreme and far less popular than Rush Limbaugh. With classic left-liberal illogic, he declares that it’s just fine for a league-employed commentator to be a political flamethrower who offends millions, but that the league would be damaged if he were to be an owner. This makes no sense, since the league-employed commentator is much more in the face of the public he is offending, but then, that’s par for King’s analytical abilities.

My attitude is that turnabout is fair play. If the Left can do play business thought police, so can the Right, and I’d love to see those owners, whose politics are far more similar to Limbaugh’s than Olbermann’s, take Goodell and every other league employee who was dumb enough to advocate thought-policing to task.