Vox Popoli

Over a movie he refuses to see:

A mature scientific theory is as much a glory of our civilization as is a cathedral or a university; and it is uniquely of ours. Other civilizations had temples, universities, systems of government, literature, philosophy; but only we of the West came up with scientific method, and the whole world owes the innumerable fruits of that method to us.

I am a huge fan of Western civilization. Thus, when people — well-educated people, who ought to set an example for the general — sneer at and spit on these majestic creations of the human intellect, I get mad. They are taking sides with barbarism. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Ben Stein ought to be ashamed of himself. And no, I won’t sit through his wretched movie.

I kind of like the idea of a scientific theory being viewed as a tribute to Western civilization. However, there’s one rather serious problem… it is becoming increasingly clear that Darwinism isn’t science according to any reasonable definition of the term, much less has it produced a mature scientific theory that produces any fruits of the sort that Derb rightly regards so highly. What are the fruits of Darwinian “science” that are not primarily derived from Mendelian genetics? Hey, we got a fly with a leg sticking out of its head! And a “striking prediction” that wouldn’t pass muster with the Catholic Church if it were claimed to be a miracle. What is it about atheism that seems to drive otherwise perfectly rational people over the edge?

As you know, I quite like Derb. He’s a smart and insightful guy and one of my favorite National Reviewers. But that uncharacteristic closing line is… well, let’s just say it teeters perilously close to being embarrassing.

If you can’t trust the Bluehelmets, who can you trust?

At UN headquarters there is both irritation and unease over the BBC story. Irritation because officials regard the allegations of gold smuggling in the Congo by Pakistani peacekeepers as rehashed. Unease because, as the head of UN peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guehenno, put it in a letter to the BBC: “Every incident of misconduct by the Blue Helmets diminishes public confidence in our work and weakens the institution of peacekeeping.”

Fortunately, the UN has investigated itself very thoroughly and is quite confident that its Pakistani peacekeepers have done no wrong. And by wrong, they mean torturing small children over open fires.

Comment was requested of Captain Hassan Ghorani of the Baloch regiment, but his words were largely unintelligible due to the new 24-karat grill he’d had installed on his teeth yesterday.

ANH throws what may be a curve ball into the ongoing Texas-FLDS debacle:

Outstanding article. But I will laugh my rump off when they start whipping out their New Hampshire marriage licenses…

457:4 Marriageable. – No male below the age of 14 years and no female below the age of 13 years shall be capable of contracting a valid marriage, and all marriages contracted by such persons shall be null and void.

Would explain all those FLDS Texas cars at the FLDS community in New Hampshire over the last several years.

How ironic would it be if it turned out that the Southern religious nutcases are taking advantage of godless Yankee laws to avoid any legal peril related to underage marriages?

Then it’s almost guaranteed that any action you devise to solve a problem will make it worse:

Many economists will tell you that the ideal intervention to help the poor is to simply give them money (a negative income tax) – that shores up their income – rather than directly controlling prices. In general, this is correct advice; but not in this case. Suppose we collect $1000 from the rich and hand this out to the poor. Since the rich spend a tiny fraction of their money on food and the poor a large fraction, this transfer will cause food prices to rise.

In general, this would not matter since the price was being driven up by the greater purchasing power of the poor. But in the present precarious situation, the risk is that if the negative income tax does not reach all the poor, then the ones who are left out will see their position deteriorating as prices rise further.

While the professor is correct in this particular instance, it’s worth noting that the only economists who think simply handing over money to the poor is an “ideal intervention” are the ridiculous neo-Keynesians who have landed the global economy in a serious quagmire with their incessant inflationary monetary and fiscal policies. This is no surprise, of course, considering that their philosophy is based on “in the long run we are all dead” thinking. So now the long run has arrived, Keynes is dead, and the inheritors of his economic policies are left to try to get out of the quicksand somehow.

Giving money for nothing, or even lending it for interest, leads to only one thing: price inflation. This is not hard to understand, for example, do college educations cost less now that they are heavily subsidized? The disastrous results of so many of these interventions is completely predictable, and yet most people continue to demand them because they simply can’t think past tomorrow. If you want to be wealthy, you must learn to think at least three years down the road.

Todd Zywicki does a nice job working out why two incomes mean less money than one income did 30 years ago:

Ms. Warren and Ms. Tyagi compare two middle-class families: an average family in the 1970s versus the 2000s (all dollar values are inflation-adjusted). The typical 1970s family is headed by a working father and a stay-at-home mother with two children. The father’s income is $38,700, out of which came $5,310 in mortgage payments, $5,140 a year on car expenses, $1,030 on health insurance, and income taxes “which claim 24% of [the father’s] income,” leaving $17,834, or about $1,500 per month in “discretionary income” for all other expenses, such as food, clothing, utilities and savings.

The typical 2000s family has two working parents and a higher income of $67,800, an increase of 75% over the 1970s family. But their expenses have also risen: The mortgage payment increases to $9,000, the additional car raises the family obligation to $8,000, and more expensive health insurance premiums cost $1,650. A new expense of full-time daycare so the mother can work is estimated at $9,670. Mother’s income bumps the family into a higher tax bracket, so that “the government takes 33% of the family’s money.” In the end, despite the dramatic increase in family income, the family is left with $17,045 in “discretionary income,” less than the earlier generation…. In fact, for the typical 1970s family, paying 24% of its income in taxes works out to be $9,288. And for the 2000s family, paying 33% of its income is $22,374.

Although income only rose 75%, and expenditures for the mortgage, car and health insurance rose by even less than that, the tax bill increased by $13,086 — a whopping 140% increase. The percentage of family income dedicated to health insurance, mortgage and automobiles actually declined between the two periods.

During this period, the figures used by Ms. Warren and Ms. Tyagi indicate that annual mortgage obligations increased by $3,690, automobile obligations by $2,860 and health insurance payments by $620 (a total increase of $7,170). Those increases are not trivial — but they are swamped by the increase in tax obligations. To put this in perspective, the increase in tax obligations is over three times as large as the increase in the mortgage payments and almost double the increase in the mortgage and automobile payments combined. Even the new expenditure on child care is about a quarter less than the increase in taxes.

I’m a bit skeptical of these computations, since at first glance this would seem to indicate that the wife’s car only cost sixty percent of the husband’s original car. Although, I suppose that the new leasing structures may account for that. One thing that is left out of Zywicki’s calculation, however, is the effect on the husband’s wage of all the other wives and single women who went to work in between 1970 and 2000; twice as many women work now as did in the 1950s. I don’t think it’s as important a factor as the taxes or even the second car, but it’s certainly played a major role in the decrease in average weekly wages since their 1973 peak.

Of course, it should surprise no one, least of all a libertarian with an econ degree, that the primary culprit is government and its overtaxation.

There’s a change coming in the next day or so that should please a few of you. The idea is to replace Haloscan with a sophisticated commenting system that will have a few features that I suggested. However, this may mean that your comments during the transition period will be lost, so try not to say anything too terribly profound. The previous 304,000 comments will be preserved; not only that, they’ll be searchable and trackable and all kinds of keen stuff. It should also facilitate the Thucydides discussions.

By the way, this was posted with Blogger’s new scheduled publishing feature, which Blogger has finally gotten around to adding. If you’re on Blogger, note that for the time being, you need to be logged in to draft.blogger.com to use it.

Novel: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

Novella: “Fountain of Age” by Nancy Kress

Novelette: “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang

Short Story: “Always” by Karen Joy Fowler

Script: Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro

Norton Award: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling.

Grand Master: Michael Moorcock

I note with wry amusement that SFWA seems to have survived despite one of its most notorious members sitting on the Nebula novel jury this year. Not that we had much to do, it being a bit of a lean year in science fiction and fantasy. Not a bad set of winners, although it’s ironic that SFWA should give Rowling an award for her worst book to date. But then, it’s probably the only YA title that most of the voters recognized.

The Magic Negro appears to have reversed polarity:

Obama Calls Bloggers Liars for Accurately Reporting His Words

You know a candidate is in trouble when his best hope is to ball-gag his wife, his spiritual advisor and his own bad self.

Thankfully, this sort of barbarous behavior could never happen here:

Twenty-four babies and 40 children under the age of six were among the 250 people rounded up in a raid on Friday, according to Nelson Chamisa, spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Yesterday they were crammed into cells in Southerton police station in central Harare.

“This is ruthlessness of the worst kind. How can you incarcerate children whose mothers have fled their homes hoping to give their children refuge?” asked an emotional Chamisa yesterday. “In Mugabe’s Zimbabwe even children are not spared the terror that befalls their parents.”

Monstrous! We should be so thankful that nothing like this could ever happen in Bush’s America!

Since it’s my philosophy that all honest criticism merits addressing, I’m finally turning to Mr. Tom Marking’s critique of TIA now:

1) Overview

On page 8 we find the following quotation: “These days atheism is, like the atheist’s ultimate destination, hot indeed.” And there are several quotes more obnoxious than this but I suspect they were offered tongue-in-cheek. This is exactly the type of stuff that diminishes his arguments and lends credence to the characterizations of Mr. Day which are prevalent on several science blogs. I know he is trying to be witty and irreverant but it becomes a pain after a while to wade through all this nonsense and get to the heart of his main critique of the New Atheist authors. In passing I will say that there is nothing more certain to piss off atheists than to threaten them with the ol’ hellfire and brimstone routine. We can always get that kind of stuff by tuning into the Sunday televangelist shows. We don’t need it from a book which supposedly wants to be taken seriously.

1. An ad hominum attack says nothing, positive or negative, about an unrelated argument made in its vicinity. If I correct your math, then call you an idiot, the latter action doesn’t change the fact that I showed your math was wrong.
2. The characterizations of me on various science blogs have little to do with my presentation and everything to do with the effectiveness of my arguments. PZ, for example, calls nearly every religious individual to whom he refers stupid. He very seldom, however, ever attempts to criticize my actual arguments; this is because he’s not capable of doing so. And he’s arguably the most capable of the aforementioned science bloggers, who are a very lightweight lot when it comes to brainpower.
3. The book is called The Irrational Atheist, an accusation which upsets the average atheist a lot more than any televangelist’s threats of nonexistent hellfire. Let’s just say that not pissing off atheists wasn’t exactly a priority. Dawkins and company set the rules, I’m just playing by them.

2.) NEW ATHEISTS SAY STUPID THINGS

Now I admit that Harris got a little carried away with his “even a single little girl once in a million years” bit, but can anyone seriously doubt that the remark about 260 million Americans presenting evidence is anything more than a rhetorical flourish? Does the author seriously think that Harris has in mind the opening of evidence processing centers in all 50 states? I doubt that very much. All he’s really saying is that theists assert that God exists so let them show evidence for that position.

Turning now to page 283 let us now peruse the author’s own pet theory comparing God to a computer game designer (a theory I might add which has the sanction of the majority of Christian theologians around the world – NOT!):

“Faced with a maliciously corrupted game, the posthuman designer can either turn it off or attempt to fix it. He could simply manually scrub each aspect of the game, but this brute force solution would risk creating new problems and would certainly warn the mischievous interloper. A more elegant solution would be to trap the malicious posthuman and his friends in the game without warning, then insert a viral APC designed to infect other APCs with the ability to resist the malice of the posthuman intruder. His purpose in doing so would be to salvage those APCs whose emergent behavior suits his original plan to develop AIs capable of demonstrating the behaviors required for the real game.”

Yeah, Vox, we’re really with you so far (translation: we have no friggin’ idea what the heck that last paragraph was all about). So yes, Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens say stupid things in their books from time to time and perhaps quite frequently, but so does Mr. Day and in great plentitude.

1. The main point, which seems to have escaped Mr. Marking, is that Harris’s multiple definitions of atheism directly conflict with one another. The secondary point, which also escapes him, is that theists aren’t obliged to present evidence to anyone to justify their beliefs. Harris made a rhetorical point, I mocked it in the process of making a better one.
2. I pointed out that the Game Designer God concept was not mainstream theology in the book. Neither I nor anyone else thinks it is anything but a potentially interesting analogy that might help some people get past their theodicy hang-up.
3. The fact that Mr. Marking can’t understand a perfectly clear analogy to an MMO is hardly testimony to my predilection for saying stupid things. Nor is one poor example sufficient evidence of a “great plentitude”.

3.) A QUESTION OF COMPETENCE

So Harris is right in this case – the civilized world does agree that slavery is an abomination. The fact that there still exist criminal organizations which flout international law is not proof that an anti-slavery consensus does not exist…. Vox cannot have it both ways. He cannot claim credit for Christianity abolishing slavery and at the same time claim there is no anti-slavery consensus. It must be one or the other….

116 centuries? That would mean the first religion, Hinduism, began in 9,600 B.C. or only a few centuries after the last Ice Age ended. I know Hinduism is ancient but is it that ancient? A quick pit stop at Wikipedia confirms my suspicions:

“Modern Hinduism grew out of the Vedas, the oldest of which is the Rigveda, dated to 1700 – 1100 BCE”

So Vox only missed the correct start of Hinduism by about 8 millenia. Of course what he has done is to sum up durations of religions which are concurrent and thus he overcounts the total span of all religions by about 80 centuries. His percentage error is over 200 percent. Harris’ error was about 10 percent. But anyone can make a mistake, right?

1. Criminal organizations are part of the civilized world. They always have been. Government!=sum total of civilization. Legality!=morality.
2. Abolishment refers to law. Consensus does not. The two statements are not in the least bit contradictory.
3. “These five religions have approximately 4.85 billion adherents, representing an estimated 71.3 percent of the world’s
population in 2007, and they have been around for a COLLECTIVE 11,600 years.” Collective is defined as “Assembled into or viewed as a whole.” Now, “cumulative” would probably have been a better choice, but even so, the problem isn’t with my math, which is correct, it’s with the fact that Mr. Marking can’t bloody read.

Now, getting more into the meat of the issue we turn to chapter 3 entitled “The Case Against Science”. Mr. Day points out that it is science itself which threatens the continued survival of mankind and not religion.

p45: “So, in only 3 percent of the time that religion has been on the scene, science has managed to produce multiple threats to continued human existence.”

By the way, that 3 percent should be replaced with 9 percent based upon Vox’s previous miscalculation. I actually agree with the author on this point. It is primarily the availability of modern technology produced by science which is the gravest threat to our survival as a species….

Taking the atomic bomb as an example, according to Mr. Day the sole responsibility for the development of nuclear weapons rests with the scientists themselves. What about the politicians who funded the Manhattan Project, the military people who organized it, and the numerous bureacrats who managed the project? Can they all now escape culpability? Is it only the scientists who are to blame?…

Hate to rain on your parade, Vox, but the 4,000 banned books (most of them scientific or philosophical works) continued to be banned until 1966, not 1753….

So lots of ve
iled threats that the Christians and other religious believers will do in the scientists. Given that the scientists in this scenario created the nuclear weapons, know how to use them, and have access to them whereas the religious masses do not, just how does Mr. Day expect this war to end? I would suspect the final score would be something like scientists: 4.85 billion, religious folks: 0.

1. Again, there is no miscalculation. The cumulative sum is both the correct figure and the relevant one for comparison’s sake.
2. Yes, it is only the scientists who are to blame for the EXISTENCE of the weapons developed by science, although the RESPONSIBILITY can certainly be shared more broadly, just as I pointed out in the book. Once more, Mr. Marking’s sloppiness leads him into error. Does he seriously believe that the aforementioned weapons would still exist if there had been only politicians and bureaucrats to develop them?
3. If the Church’s opposition to the novels of Daniel Defoe and Honore de Balzac, (which have been readily available to the public ever since they were first published), is not a crime against science, then what is?
4. This is both silly and stupid. What would be the point of veiled threats to further a war I argue does not even exist? It’s a simple matter of numbers. Science can’t win a war against religion; the best it could hope to do is wipe out the entire human race. The fact that atheists continue to promote this insane idea of inherent conflict tends to go some way towards explaining their bloody historical track record.

I’ll address the fifth and final point separately, since Mr. Marking has gone to some trouble to attempt to support it in detail. Rest assured, it’s no more tenable than the previous four.