Vox Popoli

Daniel Hannan points out the irony of the way in which the Fourth Reich’s second annexment of Austria is actually less democratic than the Third Reich’s was:

Two anniversaries are marked this week. Fifty years ago, the European Parliament met for the first time; seventy years ago, Austria was annexed by Hitler. The first anniversary is the subject of official self-congratulation; the second of official obloquy.

It’s funny how things look in retrospect. Both the Treaty of Rome and the Anschluss were acts of political integration. But whereas the Anschluss was endorsed by 99.8 per cent of Austrian voters in a referendum, European treaties are habitually rejected in referendums. The odd thing is that we are expected to deplore the former and applaud the latter in the name of democracy.

I’m very skeptical of democracy. But I’m even more dubious of non-democratic conquests hidden behind a faux-democratic veil. One needn’t be a Christian eschatologist to see that the EU is not going to end much better than Europe’s last totalitarian takeover.

My complete response to Kelly’s initial broadside is posted on the TIA forum. Feel free to comment either here or there. Here’s a snippet:

Day starts his list of the evils of atheism by blaming the philosophers of the Enlightenment era for paving the way for “the murderous excesses of the French Revolution and dozens of other massacres in the name of human progress,” which I find to be amusing given that were it not for such revolutions, we would still be living in feudal societies and caste systems quite antithetical to his own libertarian ideals. I wonder where he got those ideas regarding man’s free will and right to exercise it. Could it be…the Enlightenment? The irony is almost overwhelming. This is a point he brings up often. The philosophers of the time certainly did effect the populace, but not by advocating war or revolution. Senseless killing is certainly not rational, nor is being swept away in nationalistic fervor. If waking people up to the reality of their circumstance by giving them a vision of hope for a better tomorrow is a crime, it is one that should be committed more often. The people of the Enlightenment era were simply alerted to the fact that, to paraphrase Rousseau, despite being born free, they were “everywhere in chains.” The people reacted to this knowledge with revolution, and violence is an unfortunate byproduct of the overthrow of established regimes. If these things had not taken place, there would be no United States of America, no democracy, and certainly no libertarianism. Vox Day himself could be similarly vilified by the benefactors of his philosophy for espousing such views, assuming we lived in a world where the Enlightenment had never occurred.

As with the five atheists analyzed in TIA, history is not Kelly’s strong point. Feudalism and caste systems were not ended by the Enlightenment, indeed, the former is largely a fictional concept of medieval governmental structure popularized by Montesquieu in the 18th century and is as historically dubious as the long-discredited concept of “the Dark Ages”. The caste system never existed in Christendom and it still exists today in a number of Asian countries. Kelly’s statement about free will reveals a shocking ignorance of the concept, as it is not an Enlightenment idea in any way, shape, or form, it is a Christian one. In fact, its very existence is denied today by New Enlightenment thinkers such as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. Were she even slightly familiar with Christian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, or Augustine, or Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire, she’d realize that she is, in a very Harrisian manner, demonstrating the precise opposite of what she wishes to prove. The Enlightenment free will of Hume and Rousseau is holdover from the Christian traditions of their Christian societies, it was far from a new concept. Democracy predated the Enlightenment by literal millenia, and the statement that “senseless killing is certainly not rational” is a meaningless tautology that says nothing about the fact that most of the mass killing committed by atheist revolutionaries is perfectly rational given their stated goals of remaking human society according to the precepts of their new and shinier morality.

My publisher informs me that I’ll be a guest on G. Gordon Liddy’s show on Radio America today around noon EST. I don’t know if we’re talking about TIA, homeschooling or Title IX, but feel free to tune in if you happen to get it in your area.

Here is the MP3 from today’s show.

Vox’s First Law: Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.

I do enjoy PZ’s little jabs, he’s such a coward that he’ll go on and on about my opinions while pointedly trying to ignore that I’ve published a book that cuts the heart out of his atheist icons. Now he’s afraid to even directly link to the very article he’s complaining about, which is why there’s not a single reference to Title IX in either his post or what he amusingly calls Mark Chu-Carroll’s “evisceration” of the column.

How does one “eviscerate” an argument when one fails to even mention, let alone refute, its central point? That word does not mean what he thinks it means.

As for the commenter’s question about why Sam Harris would respond to me? Probably because unlike these fourth-raters, he is capable of recognizing a superior intellect that is demonstrably capable of dismantling his arguments. If he wants to improve those arguments, then it is in his direct interest to pay attention any criticism that is relevant regardless of the source. One doesn’t have to be bestest buddies with one’s critics in order to benefit from their input. I don’t mind that PZ takes shots at me, I merely regret that his criticism is so lightweight.

RK writes to inform us of a tale of two emails:

I got two EMails from Amazon today.

1. My order was cancelled for not acknowledging the delay. (Which I was never asked about).

2. My book was shipped.

Wonder what happens next?

Does RK’s book exist or not? The question is beyond my ability to answer, perhaps a Dark Vaporist could utilize his miraculous powers of observation to let us know.

A few days ago, during the discussion about the existence or non-existence of dark matter and dark energy, I wrote: “Scientists and science fetishists may hate it that a part-time rebel scientist such as myself should so confidently express contempt for the current consensus, but you don’t need impressive scientific credentials or even to make use the scientific method to recognize when a group of people are attempting to BS everyone else, you simply need to keep your eyes open and possess sufficient experience with human nature.”

So it was a happy coincidence that I discovered, in the process of trying and failing to straighten out my office for the Nth time in six months, an unread 24 September 2007 issue of New Scientist. Naturally, I abandoned the effort and kicked back in The Comfy Chair, and was promptly rewarded with the very amusing sight of a headline that read “Dimmer outlook for dark matter” on page 12:

Dimmer outlook for dark matter

Though we can’t see it, dark matter is supposed to make up 22 per cent of the universe. Now it turns out it might not exist at all. Earlier this year, the discovery of a ring-like astronomical feature, invisible except for the way its gravity distorts background galaxies, was hailed as proof for the existence of dark matter and the death knell for a rival theory known as modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND)…. Jee’s team dismissed the MOND explanation because they thought it predicts that there should be no enhanced gravity without visible matter to do the enhancing. “This is a common misconception,” says Milgrom. “In fact, in MOND there does not necessarily have to be visible matter there to boost gravity – it is naturally boosted in the transition region.” No one knows what physics may underpin such a transition.

“I am interested to hear that the transition between the Newtonian and MONDian regime also gives rise to a ring,” says Jee. “In general, I am happy whenever there comes a theory which is simpler but can explain more observations.”

Stronger evidence may be found in three dwarf galaxies which were formed in galactic collisions near the galaxy NGC 5291, discovered this year by a team led by Frederic Bournaud of the French Atomic Energy Commission in Paris. “The collision should have stripped the galaxies of all their dark matter yet they still have enhanced gravity,” says Milgrom. “MOND explains things naturally whereas dark matter proponents have to propose the existence of yet another type of dark matter – cold molecular gas.”

Yes, I did laugh out loud upon reading that, less at the inevitable discomfiture of Bad Astronomy and his space fetish crew than the thought of a momentary flicker of despair flashing through Scott Hatfield’s mind about the ultimate fate of another consensus theory of which I am similarly skeptical. May I propose the term Dark Vapor to accompany its fellows Dark Matter and Dark Energy to complete the unobservable trilogy of Dark Mystery? It seems rather fitting. As I have previously written, the more one has to weld epicycles and epiphenomena to one’s theory in order to make it work, the less likely it is to stand up over time. And it doesn’t take a complete understanding of a theory to recognize when such furious retro-fitting is being done to it.

I don’t actually care whether Dark Vapor exists or not. For all I know, it does. Having no capacity for making a judgment based on the empirical data myself, I merely run what I’m informed through the logic machine, and anyhow, my attitude towards most of these things tends to be rather similar to that of Sherlock Holmes. But due partly to my belief in the need for science reform, and partly to my fundamental character flaws, I do so enjoy seeing their unmitigated faith in scientific snapshots landing the stupidly arrogant scientific faithful on their asses yet again. What passes for science these days is beginning to sound like a Monty Python skit:

“Dark Matter and Dark Energy…Dark Matter and Dark Energy…. Our two explanations are Dark Matter and Dark Energy…and Dark Vapor…. Our three explanations are Dark Matter, and Dark Energy, and Dark Vapor…and an almost fanatical devotion to Karl Popper…. Our four…no… Amongst our explanations are such elements as Dark Matter, Dark Energy…. I’ll come in again.”

Kelly kicks things off with her review of the first chapter of The Irrational Atheist:

I am going to be going through this book one chapter at a time in order to keep the posts relatively short and still allow for a detailed analysis. I mentioned that plan to Vox Day, who kindly provided me with a complimentary copy of this book, and his suggestion was to read the entire book first before beginning. After getting about half-way through it, I didn’t see anything that necessitated that, but just as an FYI, if any of my points of contention are dealt with in later chapters, I’ll note that in later posts.

The first thing I noticed about this book is that Day’s writing style is quite humorous, and if I may, even endearing. This is troublesome as many readers will fall into the trap of getting caught up in the seemingly personable style and disregarding critical inquiry of the content. Day comes off as the friendly but mischievous antagonist in what he terms “an intellectual deathmatch” (p. 3) between himself and the “Unholy Trinity” of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. I must also note a point of agreement before I continue into the actual substance of the book: I appreciate Day’s regard for the autodidactic learner and his insistence that one not be swayed by degrees and credentials as they don’t necessarily make one’s arguments more or less valid. (p. 3) This is a point far too often missed by the pseudo-intellectual crowd who seem to desire a type of hegemonious rule over knowledge itself with authority to speak on a subject deemed only by universities.

Read the entire thing over at her place. I’ll post my response both here and in the TIA forum in the next day or two. This isn’t going to be a proper debate per se, but it should be an interesting back-and-forth since unlike other would-be chapter-by-chapter reviewers, Kelly is clearly doing her best to comprehend what is actually written and go after the weak points she perceives rather than seeing only what she wishes to see and then crying strawman.

And if she happens to take a cheap shot or two along the way, hey, so much the better. It’s not like I’m in any position to complain about that, and let’s face it, I’m far more inclined to applaud an amusing one than get upset anyhow.

Laura Mckenna explains the appeal of the Lizard Queen:

Taking a grudge to an empty voting booth may be passive aggressive, but that’s sometimes how we work.

Notice how part of the bitterness stems from realizing that there’s a gap between academic achievement and actual achievement.

“We’re sailing through school work, out pacing men in the classroom. It’s only when the hard realities of family and work hit that women understand that they get the short end of the stick.”

And then notice that in this woman’s fevered imagination, reality = “soft sexism”.

1. When you wrote the Red State/Blue State argument quoted by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, were you aware that the electoral data for the various counties in which the various cities mentioned are located was available? If you were not, are you willing to concede that the more accurate county data supports a conclusion that is the precise opposite of the one you reached in Letter to a Christian Nation?

I haven’t seen the electoral data you mentioned. Feel free to send a link, if you have one.

Shockingly careless, but much better than the alternative of intentional misrepresentation. It will be interesting to see if he retracts the argument now that he is aware of the relevant facts, although one can’t reasonably expect him to verify the data until after he completes his dissertation. Of course, Dawkins will need to revise future editions of The God Delusion as well….

2. Are you willing to admit that religion is not the explicit cause of more than 90 percent of the war throughout recorded human history? Are you also willing to admit that religious faith is not a significant aspect of military strategy, tactics, recruitment or discipline?

I wouldn’t be able to quantify this, but I freely admit that religion is not the only explicit cause of war and it probably is not the main cause. I would say that tribalism generally is the cause, and religious tribalism is a subset. Still, I think religion creates the most energetic and pathological forms of tribalism, and it is the form I am most worried about in the future. The other forms are showing clear signs of evaporating (racism, nationalism, etc.). Religion is the only one that has very good defenses against modernity.

He’s essentially conceding the point here, although again it’s clear that he hasn’t considered the relevant information. However, even setting aside the obvious fact that he wasn’t attacking tribalism in his two books, but religious faith, as it happens he’s incorrect about tribalism as well. Harris would do rather better to look at economics, geography and individual ambition. Moreover, nationalism is again on the rise in direct reaction to the success of the global political elites in imposing multiculturalism and supranational governmental frameworks around the world. I have some serious doubts about the evaporation of racism, too, considering the voting results in Mississippi yesterday, where Obama won the black vote, 91% to 9%, and Clinton won the white vote, 72% to 27%. I suspect that even if Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction vision of one unified irreligious brown species was ever achieved, Man would promptly create distinctions based on height, weight or foot size.

3. Were you aware that the professional historians’ estimated bodycount of the most deadly Inquisition, the Spanish, was less than 3,000 deaths over 345 years when you described the inquisition as one of the two “darkest episodes in the history of faith”? I’d also be interested in knowing your understanding of the inquisition’s lethality at the time you wrote that.

I wrote about the Inquisition as a whole (not just the Spanish). Here is what I said in The End of Faith (p.87) Witches,in all likelihood, did not even exist, and those murdered in their stead numbered perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 over three hundred years of persecution;19 Along with the associated endnote (p. 255). 19 R. Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft(New York:Viking,1996), has this to say on the
subject:

“On the wilder shores of the feminist and witch-cult movements a potent myth has become established, to the effect that 9 million women were burned as witches in Europe; gendercide rather than genocide. This is an overestimate by a factor of up to 200, for the most reasonable modern estimates suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between 1450 and 1750, with something between 40,000 and 50,000 executions, of which 20 to 25 percent were men.”

Such a revaluation of numbers does little to mitigate the horror and injustice of this period. Even to read of the Salem witch trials, which resulted in the hanging of “only” nineteen people, is to be brought face to face with the seemingly boundless evil that is apt to fill the voids in our understanding of the world.

Several errors here. The most obvious and significant one is that the European and American witch burnings had no relation to any of the four inquisitions. Second, in The End of Faith, Harris refers to “the Inquisition” as a singular institution and a specific “episode”, one of the two darkest in the history of faith, and refers to certain devices used only by the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions as well as devices never used by any of the four. This is another indication of his characteristic carelessness and happens to directly conflict with his subsequent assertion that the evils of Communism can somehow be tied to faith.

By his own estimation, the European witch-burnings amounted to 166/year out of a population of 70 million in 1600, which is roughly similar to the number of annual bike deaths… in California (141/year, population 36.5 million). However absurd one might consider witch-burning to be, I’d be curious to know why it is any less necessary than bicycle riding. Indeed, one could easily make a Darwinian case that witch-burning is preferable to bike-riding, since the former harmlessly eliminates the old and weak while the latter removes the young and healthy from the population. So, perhaps it would help if everyone would think of witch-burning as a precursor to modern euthanasia.

Anyhow, without witch-burnings we wouldn’t have had that classic scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I don’t know about you, but based on a happiness-suffering metric, I’d say the trade-off was well worth it. What is the screaming death of thousands over centuries when compared to the laughter of millions over decades?

4. How does your long-term vision of world government differ from Bertrand Russell’s? Why are you opposed to American national sovereignty?

I’ve forgotten what BR said about world government. And my brief comments on the subject were made with the full knowledge that it is unlikely to be desirable or practical any time soon. In the meantime, I am not opposed to American sovereignty. I’m opposed to nationalism (because it is idiotic), but I am not opposed to safeguarding civilization. For what it’s worth, I think we need to put even more resources into our military than we do.

To refresh everyone’s memory, Bertrand Russell wrote that a science-based dictatorship willing to engage in Communist-style mass horror was necessary in order for the human race to establish a utopian world government of the sort that Sam Harris desires. The fact that Harris accepts American sovereignty now doesn’t explain why he opposes it in the future. As for the idiocy of nationalism, I fear that we will all soon be reminded that nationalism is necessary for safeguarding civilization. Certainly history suggests that given the fate of civilizations which abandon nationalism – both the Roman Empire and the Ming Dynasty spring to mind – the concept is less idiotic than vital.

5. Are there other forms of “unjustified belief” or “an absence of rationality” than religious faith?

Of course.

This admission of the obvious proves my point related to his attempt to construct a No True Atheist argument in order to disassociate atheism from the bloodshed committed by the dozens of atheist Communist leaders. One cannot substitute the set for the subset. See TIA pages 128-131.

6. Did you forget that you had defined Buddhism as not being a religion of faith when you compared the societal health of the U.S.A. t
o that of “the least religious states”?

But I said that most Buddhists don’t realize this and practice Buddhism like a religion.

A very nice example of the common atheist dance. Buddhism is atheism… except when it’s not useful for Buddhism to be atheism, in which case it isn’t. Come on. If one accepts this line of reasoning, one must go on to admit that most atheists practice atheism like a religion. The High Church atheists do, anyhow.

7. If the world is genuinely imperiled by nuclear weaponry in the hands of religious individuals, isn’t it true that science is as much to blame as religion? And if the peril is both imminent and genuine, wouldn’t it be more practical and far less costly in terms of human life to end science rather than religion?

You are committing a genetic fallacy here. The problem with Nazis, for instance, was not the railroads and ovens. The problem was their beliefs (and subsequent actions). Blaming the technology (or its source in science) misses the point. That said, I believe that certain types of scientific information should not be published (and there may be some that should not be sought in the first place) — things like the recipe for synthesizing the smallpox virus, etc.

Oh dear. I am doing no such thing. Sam apparently hasn’t properly understood the genetic fallacy, which is a logical fallacy wherein “a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone’s origin rather than its current meaning or context.” Sam’s mistake is to conclude that the danger in his Extinction Equation stems solely from the scientific origins of today’s lethal weaponry, but that is manifestly not the case at all. The danger from nuclear weaponry and other science-related evils stem from both their scientific origins and science in its current context, therefore I cannot possibly have committed a genetic fallacy when pointing out that it is not the potential motive of Faith that is the danger facing man, but rather the current means of Science.

If Sam waved a wand and magically caused all religion to disappear, the threat to the species would remain in its entirety, indeed, one can make a case that it might actually increase since religion has been a mitigating factor as well as an exacerbating one in human conflict. If, however, every scientist was taken out and shot, the knowledge base was suppressed and the method was suppressed, then weapons development would be severely hampered, the risk of biological and super-colliders going awry would be eliminated, and over time, the weapons themselves would decay and become unrepairable as the knowledge of how to maintain them died out. Indeed, I tend to suspect that this is a notion that the utopians supported by Sam Harris have in mind for the future; it’s what I would do, anyhow, if I wanted to preserve a status quo in which I already ruled the world. Science is an existing threat in itself, it is not merely the origin of the threat.

While I’m at it, on a tangential note, less sophisticated thinkers than Sam have attempted to criticize the case against science by using a “guns don’t kill people” argument. The obvious problem with this is that science is not an inanimate object, an aspect of it specifically incorporates people. While a gun cannot be held responsible for its actions or forseeing how it will be used, a scientist most certainly can and should be held responsible for what he is doing and how his work will be used. In any event, this defense – which I hasten to point out that Sam Harris is not foolish enough to make – has little relevance to the extinction equation, because a gun requires a person in order to kill. As I have proved in my chapters on war, Science does not require Faith in order to do likewise. It should perhaps be kept in mind that my purpose in pointing this out was not to blame Science, but rather to exonerate Faith from a responsibility it was errantly and illogically assigned in Sam Harris’s thesis. IF we accept the extinction equation that Science+Faith=Human Extinction, THEN we must logically conclude that the only rational response is to end science.

David Mamet belatedly wakes up to the fact that giving people a monopoly on force and the power to tax does not make them inherently good:

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

Liberalism, in the American sense, is little more than a failure to pay attention to history, human nature, and what is going on around you. It requires an astounding degree of obtuseness to look upon the past and present actions of government and conclude that government action is likely to improve any situation. Sadly, much of what passes for current “conservative” thought suffers from the same observational failure.