Vox Popoli

The latest publishing scandal is hardly a surprise. I’d bet that the majority of the non-fiction personal triumph tearjerkers out there are substantially fictional:

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods. The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed….

The revelations of Ms. Seltzer’s mendacity came in the wake of the news last week that a Holocaust memoir, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” by Misha Defonseca, was a fake, and perhaps more notoriously, two years ago James Frey, the author of a best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” admitted that he had made up or exaggerated details in his account of his drug addiction and recovery.

One would think that the first sign that a chubby, literate white girl claiming that she had run drugs for the Bloods was telling tale tales would be it’s a chubby white girl claiming to have run drugs for the Bloods! In addition to the completely obvious, such as the names “Terrell” (Owens) and “Taye” (Diggs) for her non-existent black foster brothers and the aforementioned fact of the author’s chubby white girlness, it’s worth noting that there is no gang per se called “Bloods”, it’s a broad criminal affiliation to which many location-based gangs belong, not that the chick lit editor who was listening to Ms Seltzer’s melodramatic stories with her heart in her mouth would have known that.

This sort of thing was old when it was Vanilla Ice and Rigoberta Menchu doing it more than a decade ago; I’d guess that most of the successful black gangster rappers are the college-educated sons of doctors and lawyers. This happens because most people like fantasy, but many of them don’t like to admit it.

The foreign press is much more open about the horrid state of the U.S. economy:

The verdict is in. The Fed’s emergency rate cuts in January have failed to halt the downward spiral towards a full-blown debt deflation. Much more drastic action will be needed. Yields on two-year US Treasuries plummeted to 1.63pc on Friday in a flight to safety, foretelling financial winter. The debt markets are freezing ever deeper, a full eight months into the crunch. Contagion is spreading into the safest pockets of the US credit universe.

The desperate emergency rate-cutting was a foolish idea anyhow. More of the venom that’s poisoning you isn’t going to help, Americans would have been a lot better off if they’d taken their medicine back in 2001. Instead, more money was pumped in and no amount of hiding the statistics can conceal the fact that running the printing presses until they melt isn’t going to fix anything.

The Fed is like a guy with a hammer trying to steer a car. The car is headed for a cliff, so he frantically pounds on the steering wheel until it breaks. Now, there’s nothing it can do. A friend of mine was cursing the fact that he’s tied into dollars because of his stock options. “They’re so screwed”, he said, in unconscious imitation of what two other executives had concluded just last week.

Don’t plan on moving anytime soon, and if you’re thinking of selling your house, better do it now. Prices are going to continue to go lower, and they’ll do so for longer than anyone thinks. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’re into cash, or better yet, if you’ve been into gold for the last five years. But it is problematic given the size of the debt edifice that has been constructed upon the housing market.

UPDATE – Unsurprisingly, the reaction of state and local governments to this decline in availability and concomitant increase in the price of credit is to try to change the rules in their favor:

A complex system of credit ratings and insurance policies that Wall Street uses to set prices for municipal bonds makes borrowing needlessly expensive for many localities, some officials say. States and cities have begun to fight back, saying they can no longer afford the status quo given the slackening economy and recent market turmoil.

Gunny JMC testifies:

I found the school system substantially flawed and only those students with the burning desire to educate themselves, getting an actual education, in my day, graduating high school in 1975. At the time, the teachers were mostly good teachers, and well educated, but fighting a bureaucratic system. It occupied too much of their time, but had not destroyed them yet.

I watched my son and daughter get a horrible education, ameliorated only by my demands of their reading skills, and the constant discussions on everything, each day and evening at home. Neither of my two children graduated high school, but they fit right in with the statistical failure of their school. I’m not sure how one would graduate from the school they went to, it was over-run with gangs and drugs, and only a few male teachers were able to control the mob scenes. I went there on a regular basis, sometimes in uniform, sometimes not, but I always saw kids in the halls, and on many occasion, reached out and grabbed a firm hold and stopped a kid from doing something.

You are absolutely right in calling for the end of these schools.

It’s easy for the college-educated class to forget that while they can afford to have terrible schools tearing away at the values that sustain the social fabric, the less-educated have no such margin of error. It doesn’t actually matter much what is learned or not learned by the suburban girl whose parents pay for a quiet abortion, by the suburban boy whose parents hire lawyers to plea-bargain a felony distribution charge down to a possession misdemeanor and 100 hours of community service, or by the adult-children of either sex who take eight years to complete their sociology degrees on Mommy and Daddy’s dime. They can afford to mess around for 12 years, then settle down into a functional role as an office drone or hausfrau without their lack of an actual education having any significant effect on their lives. They possess the economic ticket, which is all that a college degree represents nowadays.

As I have written previously, the schools are now so bad that they actually maleducate, the net effect is negative and a child would learn more and receive a better education by doing nothing but playing XBox and PS/3 for 12 years. At least he’d learn reading, math and geography, you’d be amazed at the level of geographical knowledge possessed by the average 12-year old wargamer.

Publisher’s Weekly comes up with a description of TIA that actually manages to be less accurate than that of the most hostile atheist non-reading reviewer:

The atheists write with what Matt Baugher, v-p and publisher for spiritual growth and Christian thought at Thomas Nelson, calls “venom,” stridently stating that religious belief is delusional and dangerous and the world would be better off without it. Becky Garrison (InProfile, this issue), senior contributing editor for the smart Christian humor magazine the Wittenburg Door, offers a snarky, satiric response in The New Atheist Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail (Thomas Nelson, Jan.). Baugher said orders from mainstream retailers for Garrison’s book have been double what they expected.

Blogger and political columnist Vox Day comes at the issues from a nontheological perspective in The Irrational Atheist (BenBella, Feb.), relying on factual evidence to counter atheist claims that religion causes war, that religious people are more apt to commit crime and that the Bible and other sacred texts are unreliable and fictitious…. All of these books aim to move the discussion in a less vitriolic direction, and none more so than Zondervan’s A Friendly Dialogue Between an Atheist and a Christian (Feb.).

Less vitriolic. That’s just… astounding, considering that I did nearly everything but question Richard Dawkin’s parentage and tear out Sam Harris’s liver with my bare hands. PW is known throughout the publishing industry for its oft-peculiar take on books, but this may take the cake. Of course, it’s possible that they had the insight to see through the aggressive gamer’s pose and realized that at heart I’m all about the kumbaya and mutual hair-braiding.

On a tangential note, I was helping some guild mates on a quest at the Hellfire Citadel last night when a L70 Blood Elf priest and an L61 Tauren warrior happened to show up at the instance gate where we were waiting for the last member of our party to arrive. I immediately hit the priest with a Viper Sting and set my wolf on the warrior, leading to a violent free-for-all that left five dead, two of ours and three of theirs. The two that got killed were understandably annoyed, which amused the last member of our party when he showed up, saw all the skeletons and asked what happened.

After being informed, he took one look at my Field-Marshal’s Pursuit and said “Never invite a battleground guy anywhere you’re likely to run into Horde.”

Charlotte Allen notices the obvious in the Washington Post:

“Women ‘Falling for Obama,’ ” the story’s headline read. Elsewhere around the country, women were falling for the presidential candidate literally. Connecticut radio talk show host Jim Vicevich has counted five separate instances in which women fainted at Obama rallies since last September. And I thought such fainting was supposed to be a relic of the sexist past, when patriarchs forced their wives and daughters to lace themselves into corsets that cut off their oxygen.

I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, “we women,” of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women “are only children of a larger growth,” wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?

Short answer: yes. But the women’s foolishness she mentions is far from harmless, unfortunately, it will likely require the collapse of Western civilization – or at least its partial conquest by non-feminized cultures – before it will be universally acknowledged that permitting female influence in government does not yield significantly better long-term results than permitting children a similar influence. If this statement upsets you, then I’d be very interested in hearing what, precisely, you believe the difference would likely be. As it stands, most government policy revolves around giving anyone who screams loud enough whatever they want.

It’s been said that if women had run the world from the start, we’d still be living in caves. That’s an exaggeration, of course; matriarchal societies actually tend to produce grass-hut dwellers. To me, the interesting question is if a post-patriarchal culture will survive long enough to return to hut-dwelling or if it will simply die out altogether.

Science aficionado Scott Hatfield raises a hypothesis and asks a question:

Vox likes to talk of scientistry, scientody, and other self-appointed neologisms, and the unmistakable impression I receive is that he resents the relative standing of science in the intellectual world and would like to see it taken down a peg. In this respect Vox Day, the ‘Christian Libertarian and Forensic Atheologist’, has more in common with the science envy displayed by post-modern readers in the sociology of science.

Resents? Science envy? By no means! After all, by one of the temporary definitions of science put forth by the science fetishists, I am myself a member of the secular priesthood, if a low-ranking one. And I hasten to point out that the aforementioned neologisms are merely my labels for the definitions of science provided for us by an atheist scientist, they’re not my definitions. I would like to see a reform of scientistry in defense of scientage and scientody; it’s precisely because I value the latter two that I tend to oppose the former.

In return, I should very much like to know Scott’s definition of science, if PZ’s is unsatisfactory.

I was getting ready to put this dog to bed when I came across a cute little note from fellow Molly winner Blake Stacey about the effects of a series of posts over at Pharyngula. Essentially, the owner of that blog (PZ Myers) was instrumental in marshaling his readership to investigate possible plagiarism and other sins in a peer-reviewed publication, as described here.

What makes this especially fascinating is that it shows that peer review is (of course!) not perfect, as it is done by human beings; at the same time, it shows that the larger role of the scientific community to ‘review’ the reviewers is well-served by the existence of a network of science bloggers! So, Vox, if you’re reading this, please acknowledge that science blogging, even if not science itself, contributes to an important part of the scientific method, which is peer review.

I will certainly do no such thing! I will, however, acknowledge that science blogging, while not science itself, contributes to an important part of the scientific PROFESSION, which is peer review. Ironically, Scott provides us with an illustration of why the distinctions between scientistry, scientody and scientage are so important. Peer review is nothing more than a form of professional group editing, as one commenter previously pointed out, peer review is no more science than a group of editors writing the daily unsigned editorial for the opinion page is news.

“Meta-science” is good, but in this case, “not-science” is better.

I think my publisher was a bit taken aback when I let him know that not only was the journal of the Savitri Era Learning Forum interested in publishing an excerpt from TIA, but that I was entirely inclined to permit them to do so. He was sympathethic, however, when I pointed out that it would be hypocritical of me to openly declare that I am pro-crazy, then turn up my nose at the first Zen-science journal to come along. Besides, from my perspective, random gurus with German names living in India have at least as much intellectual credibility as any of the Unholy Trinity.

To the publisher’s eternal credit, he threw up his hands and said, “hey, why not,” and promptly granted permission. I love BenBella, I really do.

And let’s face it, how could you possibly be expected to resist a name like Koantum Matters?

Another college atheist writes in defense of Sam Harris:

I read your book today. I too, was a Chrsitian, and a fairly conservative one. But I had some questions about it, and Sam Harris book turned me away from it. I found most of your attacks on Harris to be erronous. Except for when you talked about Harris glossing over the evils of Stalin and Mao (you’re dead right there) it sounded like you were distorting what Harris said, or at least what he meant. Also, I never read that Harris thoguht religion was worse than rape–did you make that up?

It’s very strange that this kid could see through the spurious nature of Harris’s No True Atheist defense of communism, yet not recognize the ridiculous nature of the Red State argument and other Harrisian fabrications. As for the hope that I’m dumb enough to simply fabricate quotes relating to a controversial subject, well, here’s the notorious statement right here:

Saltman: “Your analogy between organized religion and rape is pretty inflammatory. Is that intentional?”

Harris: I can be even more inflammatory than that. If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. I think more people are dying as a result of our religious myths than as a result of any other ideology.

It’s sad that a child raised Christian would turn away from the faith of his fathers. But one despairs for the human race to know that anyone could do so on the basis of arguments made by Sam Harris. Mercury in the vaccines is the only plausible explanation.

UPDATE – Speaking of vaccine damage, another TIA reviewer is obviously quite reliable on the details in his review of the response to Clinton, Sam, and the crew:

Robert Beale, right wing blogger, video gamer and part-time Christian fantasy novelist is the literary equivalent of Ann Coulter, and his frequent invocation of the Holocaust, race, gender, class and other cultural hot buttons on his Vox Populi blog is an exercise in intellectual bomb throwing.

I particularly enjoyed the claim that I confuse correlation with causation, when I specifically point out that it is the very high level of correlation that suggests causation. The New Atheists, on the other hand, are permitted by their acolytes to assume causation without even demonstrating correlation in the first place.

Richard Dawkins has demonstrated why evolutionary biologists should stick to biology. Now a soon-to-be physics PhD demonstrates why physics majors should stick to physics in his cursory attempt to review a single chapter of TIA:

1. Entirely, well, idiotic argument that religion has not produced means to destroy the world while science has. Of course religion has not produced a means to feed people, while food has, which means religion is useless. Wow… bad start, Voxy.

Uselessness has nothing to do with it. Imminent danger to the human race is the subject at hand, due to Sam Harris’s assertion that Science + Faith = Human Extinction. Since it has been proven that the danger cannot derive from Faith, even eliminating Faith from the equation means that the threat to humanity will still remain so long as Science exists. Logic therefore dictates that either Harris is incorrect – in which case he has no argument against Faith – or he should be advocating the End of Science. Bad logic, Andy. I note that claiming that food has produced a means to feed people is a tautology… stick to the math, college boy, it’s clear that both logic and analogy are beyond you.

2. More arguments that knowledge is evil. Yawwwwn…

Is he stating a belief that absolutely no knowledge is evil? Or even dangerous? Because I certainly don’t argue that knowledge is inherently evil, (although I think I could make a fairly convincing case for the knowledge of the taste of a virgin’s still-beating heart), I do argue that some knowledge can be dangerous. I find it hard to believe that he seriously disagree with this, I suspect he’s merely intellectually careless.

3. More refutations of Harris’ argument that religion can cause evil. Argument entirely identical that it’s not the man who commits murder who’s at fault, it’s the knife, whose existence is responsible. So far so bad…

Again, Andy can’t do analogy correctly. His man-knife example rests on the fact that “man” is a sentient object and can be responsible for murder, but “knife” is not and therefore cannot be. However, both “Religion” and “Science” are equally abstract concepts and equally capable of being held responsible (or if you prefer, not responsible) for endangering humanity. If one must bring murder into it, both Motive and Means are considered relevant factors in proving a crime, in fact, Means is the more significant factor. So far, still got nothing, Andy.

4. A sort of an argument that not all current science is “good” science, as if that means something, or as if he’s discovering something no one knew.

It certainly does mean something. It means either “bad science” should be held against science, or “bad religion” should not be held against religion. Pick one, I don’t care. And, of course, it also eviscerates the romantic idea that mutable science can be the basis of an objective and rational moral standard.

5. Argument that there are some things we’re better off never knowing. Ridiculous for a variety of reasons, ranging from the fact that there will never be agreement as to who gets to decide which knowledge must never be pursued, to the fact that making a subject taboo is possibly the best way to ensure someone explores it.

Yes, this is why scientists publish information on making nuclear weapons and biological agents in public journals available for free download on the Internet. I submit that the idea that humanity is better off knowing every possible piece of information is not only stupidly short-sighted, it’s downright insane.

6. Oh lordy… “for the first two-thirds of the scientific era, life expectancy was comparable to that of ancient Rome.” I think he thinks this is somehow meaningful, because apparently if the progress of medicine, as measured directly by life expectancy, does not exactly match progress in every other discipline of science, this invalidates all of science.

Andy apparently scored rather better on his Math than his Reading Comprehension. The fact that science has not altered human life expectancy anywhere nearly as much as is commonly assumed doesn’t invalidate anything about science, it invalidates a claim to a specific benefit of science made by many science fetishists.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should never be impressed by the mere possession of an expensive piece of paper sold to an individual by a paper-selling institution, or expect those possessing such pieces of paper to be capable of even the most rudimentary reading comprehension or logical analysis.