Vox Popoli

If you want to talk draft, you can do so here. I’m a bit torn about the Jared Allen deal. It looks as if the Vikings have overpaid for a defensive lineman, but the loss – hopefully temporary – of Udeze to leukemia treatment did create a real problem for a team that can’t afford to not have a pass rush.

I guess I would like the move if I thought Tavaris Jackson was a potential championship quarterback. But I don’t. You can win with a great defense and a good running game, but you still need a competent quarterback who doesn’t turn the ball over or take too many sacks. I guess I just don’t understand the move, not when some decent quarterbacks were going to be available where the Vikings were picking in the first round.

The Sports Guy marvels at a certain seven-footer’s intensity:

you can’t exaggerate the impact of veterans here, something that surfaced in Game 2 as a central theme — the Celtics were furious about a hard foul that briefly sent Pierce to the locker room in the first half, so they spent the second half banging bodies, doling out retaliatory clotheslines, talking trash and intimidating the young Hawks in every way possible. TCIKG (The Completely Insane Kevin Garnett) was leading the way, as always, and other than Al Horford (a tough cookie who’s going to be great), none of the young Hawks seemed interested in escalating things, getting each other’s backs, sticking up for themselves, responding or even making eye contact with TCIKG.

I don’t know if the Celts can get past the Spurs or the Lakers this year, but it would sure be fun to see them do it. Especially if they do so with KG finally coming up big in crunch time.

There are few things more confidence-inspiring than knowing your teammates have your back. I’ve played for more successful teams, championship-winning teams, up to the NCAA D1 conference level, but the best team I ever played on was my high school soccer team. The team’s competitive ethic and pride was intense; I think we’re still the only soccer team in Minnesota to win a state tournament game and have the post-game brawl make the TV news as well as the front page of the next day’s newspapers.

On an unrelated note, as a Vikings fan, I don’t quite get the elevation of Barry Sanders to the MJ “never bet against him” pantheon. I’d have to look it up, but I don’t recall him ever having a big game against the Vikes. He may have been the only back we ever shut down; the sweetest thing about Adrian Peterson claiming the single-game rushing record is that it helps lighten the burden of those horrific memories of Walter Payton running around, over, and through white Vikings jerseys for 275 yards that are burned into every Vikings fan’s brain.

You’ve been given adequate time to procure a text of History of the Peloponnesian War so it’s time to start reading if you haven’t begun to do so already. Read from section 1.1 through section 1.115 by next Saturday, which is when the 12-question quiz will be posted and the discussion gets rolling.

Please let me know here in the comments if you’re actually participating in this one so that I can get a rough idea of how many people are reading even if they’re not taking part in the subsequent discussions.

The eyes, they roll:

I didn’t pick the offensive imagery in my book, but I should have caught it sooner than now. I didn’t and there’s no excuse. It was my first book, I was excited and happy, but I needed to have a more critical eye. I would do anything to remove racist images from the first printing of the book if I could, and I am relieved and happy to say that they will be removed from future printings…. Once again, I apologize for the images, my overlooking them, and any hurt this may have caused.

While the never-ending war between blacks and feminists between who are the mostest victimized ever is mildly amusing as they work to turn Western civilization into an equalitarian morass of grass huts and subsistence diets, I can’t help but marvel at Amynda’s amazing inability to grasp that images of gorillas carrying off blonde women and blonde women beating up black men were never likely to go over well with her hypersensitive target readership. But the “hurt this may have caused?”

Live by the hysterical overreaction, die by the hysterical overreaction.

It’s always the same. The police kill an unarmed man and walk away without even getting their wrists slapped:

In what marks the end of one of the most high-profile police-involved shooting trials in New York City, a judge has acquitted three NYPD detectives of all charges in the shooting death of 23-year-old Sean Bell on Friday. Bell was gunned down in a hail of 50 bullets outside a Queens strip club on what would have been his wedding day in November 2006.

The details are irrelevant. All you need to know that a killer will walk is that he had a badge. But it’s short-sighted and stupid to allow the police to operate above the law, because if people cannot get justice from the courts, they will eventually realize that they have no choice but to take it for themselves. One thing that has changed dramatically since I was a child is that a significant of middle class suburban white people now hate the police with a passion you’d think was reserved for poor inner city blacks.

I’ve always been pretty pro-Israel, but this news is more than a little troubling. How can Charles Krauthammer argue that the USA should not only supply funds and military aid, but put its own troops on the line for a foreign non-ally that is actively spying on America?

Convicted of espionage in 1986, Pollard did such damage to U.S. national security that top intelligence officials threatened to resign if Bill Clinton acceded to Israeli demands to pardon him. He is serving a life sentence for stealing secrets deemed so valuable that the Soviet Union reportedly agreed to trade them for the release of tens of thousands of Russian Jews for resettlement in Israel….

The suspicion that Pollard was far from alone has been confirmed, in spades, by the Kadish indictment, but that is just the beginning. The Israeli spy network that not only persists but flourishes to this day may be about to unravel. According to Giraldi, the Feds are “investigating a number of U.S. citizens, including an individual who held very senior security positions in the Clinton and Bush White Houses.”

I realize it is not exactly unheard of for some media figures to point and shriek “anti-semitism” every time Israel is criticized, fairly or unfairly. But in these circumstances, one has to wonder about the loyalties of those who would do so when Israel is behaving more like an enemy than a friend. It is absolutely Israel’s responsibility to defend itself in any way it sees fit, but treating a longtime friendly nation like an enemy is not a wise course of action and is a good way to find oneself friendless in the long term.

In which I take Mr. John Scalzi’s advice to writers to post one-star reviews of their books:

“These days the most popular books are books that slam other books or writers that slam other writers or idealists on one side slamming idealists on the other side. Get a clue!”

“I only managed to read the first 3 chapters of this book. Vox Day employs so many logical fallacies and so much dishonest rhetoric that it’s a difficult read.”

“The book starts with many generic arguments that evolve down to the old question of “without god, how can there be morals?”. Anyone who has spent 5 minutes reading the ‘Argument from morality’ page on wikipedia will find these sections silly or at least inefficient. The attacks use short quotes from Dawkins/Harris books, and as a reader I feel like I am not getting the context of the quotes. In the case of the Harris state vs county crime/religion statistic, I wish Vox would quote the reason Harris was using it… for all I know Harris was making a point that the corelation is meaningless.”

“Since I’m not willing to pick this book apart in review, I recommend that anyone interested read the book and exercise their own critical thinking skills. If you’re not well read in other areas of science and religion, don’t bother.”

“If the author wrote the book for the three most often named Athiests, I could probably give him 4 or five stars, the 1 star is for the book as written, assuming that it was intended for mass market readership. I really have no quarrel with Day’s disgust with Athiests if that is how he feels, not do I have any problem with Harris et. al. espousing their lack of beilef in a supreme being. My problem is with the author and what appears to be an extreme ego.”

“I opened this book expecting, or at least hoping, to find a reasoned rebuttal to the arguments of better-known authors, but what I found was a meaningless parade of misrepresentations and outright lies. From someone who has actually named himself the Voice of God, this was a remarkably mundane read.”

“[Vox Day’s] arrogance, rudeness, and unending logical fallacies have brought nothing to the intellectual discussion between theists and atheists.”

I think Scalzi was right. If it is really true that we are defined by our enemies, I suddenly find that I feel kind of… feel kind of invincible. Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?

And speaking of reading three chapters, Kelly of the Rational Response Squad has responded to my response to her critique of chapter two. I’m quite content to leave it with her and wait for her critique of chapter three, although I should probably note that “the vast majority of historians” she mentioned do not disagree with me, but with her. Kelly’s airy dismissal of the Encylopedia Britannica also happens to reject what has been the historical consensus for the last 70 years.

This is what passes for a defense of the theory of evolution by natural selection’s predictive power:

Cosmologists make precise predictions about what will happen to the universe in 20 billion years’ time. Biologists struggle to predict how a few bacteria in a dish might evolve over 20 hours. Some claim that this lack of precise predictive power means evolution is not scientific. However, what matters in science is not how much you can predict on the basis of a theory or how precise those predictions are, but whether the predictions you can make turn out to be right….

Perhaps the most striking prediction in biology was made in 1975 by entomologist Richard Alexander. After studying the evolution of eusocial insects such as termites, he predicted that some burrowing rodents in the tropics might have evolved the same eusocial system – as later proved to be the case with the naked mole-rat…. Most predictions relate to very specific aspects of evolutionary theory. If a eusocial mammal like the naked mole-rat had not been found, for instance, it would have proved only that Alexander’s ideas about the evolution of eusocial behaviour were probably wrong, not that there is anything wrong with the wider theory.

This is just absurdly pathetic. The entire article is nothing but a list of excuses for why the model simply can’t do what New Scientist disingenuously insists that it can. Suggesting that something that already took place might perhaps maybe possibly have happened a certain way is not a prediction. Alexander didn’t predict the existence of the naked mole rat or even the existence of a eusocial vertebrate, he merely “asked himself what characteristics a eusocial vertebrate would have if it had evolved”. Musing out loud is not making a prediction, nor did Alexander ever explain how a eusocial vertebrate that had not evolved would have different characteristics. Evolutionists make the Biblical prophecy-interpretation nuts look clinically accurate in comparison. Economic predictions, fuzzy and wildly inaccurate as they often are, are orders of magnitude more specific than “the most striking prediction” that evolutionary biology has ever made despite dealing with far greater levels of complexity. And as always, we are informed that if the TENS model makes an incorrect prediction, well, that doesn’t mean the model is wrong….

The problem with the TENS model isn’t that it’s wrong, it’s that it is almost completely useless for anything except providing a scientific-sounding basis for historical fiction. It can’t predict anything more specific than whatever anyone with an imagination can pull out of his backside, or with any greater degree of reliability. But, it must be confessed that New Scientist does manage to perfectly summarize the “science” of evolution when it states in a most authoritative manner: “Evolution is as firmly established a scientific fact as the roundness of the Earth.”

Of course, the Earth isn’t round. It’s a geoid that is very nearly an oblate spheroid. How can you not love the scientific precision of the butterfly collectors? You really need to read the entire list of 24 myths, there’s more dancing there than you’ll find at the average disco.

UPDATE – Jerry Pournelle quotes Fred Reed: “If something looks implausible, it probably is. Evolution writ large is the belief that a cloud of hydrogen will spontaneously invent extreme-ultraviolet lithography, perform Swan Lake, and write all the books in the British Museum.“

Not all in six days, of course. A certain amount of time is required. As for how much, you’d have to ask Richard Dawkins. He’s done the math.

Is something that I am eagerly anticipating. It will be particularly enjoyable given the sanctimonious reaction to my March column on the absurdity of clueless scientists worrying about religion as the tidal wave of feminism rushes towards them:

“Women have surpassed men in most areas of education, but men continue to be more numerous in fields like math, physics and engineering. For more than a decade, feminist groups have been lobbying Congress to address the problem of gender “injustice” in the laboratory. Their efforts are finally bearing fruit. Federal agencies are now poised to begin aggressive gender-equity reviews of math, science, and engineering programs. Groups like the National Organization for Women must be celebrating — but American scientists should brace themselves for the destructive tsunami headed their way.”

At a recent House hearing on “Women in Academic Science and Engineering” Congressman Brian Baird, a Democrat from Washington State, asked a room full of activist women how best to bring American scientists into line: “What kind of hammer should we use?”

This is a no-lose situation as far as I’m concerned. You already know what’s going to happen. Initially, the PZs of the world will embrace their new Title IX overlords and pronounce themselves delighted by the amazing quality of their new female co-workers. Then, once they start losing their jobs and seeing plum positions handed to properly credentialed but incompetent women who don’t actually do any real science, the tears and the hissy fits will begin.

Did someone say tenure? Right… as if tenure or anything else that smacks of Patriarchy and male privilege is going to protect a male scientist’s job when there are historical sexist imbalances to be corrected.

It was always a bad idea, but Microsoft’s action show how those foolish enough to buy DRM-protected products were doomed by the technology curve from the start:

“You will need to obtain a license key for each of your songs downloaded from MSN Music on any new computer, and you must do so before August 31, 2008. If you attempt to transfer your songs to additional computers after August 31, 2008, those songs will not successfully play.”

It’s bad enough to know that your technology will soon become outdated, although at least you can continue to use it. But DRM all but guarantees that eventually you’ll lose even your ability to use what you’ve bought.