Vox Popoli

From Profootballtalk:

Sean Jensen of the Pioneer Press reports that after watching his team blow out the Giants Sunday, Vikings owner Zygi Wilf said that coach Brad Childress will “absolutely” be back for the 2008 season.

“There was never a question,” Wilf said, making his first public comments about Childress in more than a month. “You need time for a team to coalesce and to get together. This is the ultimate team sport, and everyone has to play their part, and it will take some time. And we’re doing it, and everyone is stepping up.”

Lovely. Why do I suddenly get the feeling that Frazier is going to go somewhere at the end of next year and become a very successful head coach?

And on a far grimmer note, it seems that Redskins safety Sean Taylor died of his wounds today:

Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor has died, says family friend Richard Sharpstein…. Known as one of the NFL’s hardest hitters, Taylor played in his first Pro Bowl last season. He is tied for the NFC lead this season with five interceptions, despite missing the past two games with a sprained knee. He did not travel with the Redskins to Sunday’s 19-13 loss at Tampa Bay because of the injury.

The Redskins badly missed him against the Cowboys two weeks ago when TO lit them up for four touchdowns. It’s such a shame he wasn’t with them preparing for next week’s game rather than home with an injury at precisely the wrong time.

Yesterday’s column has GS hot about the collar:

Your column “Unwinnable War” makes it quite amusing to watch you turn and turn 180 degrees now that your gloom and doom predictions for Iraq are not working out. It is NOT the “neo-conservatives” who are in a “muddle at the moment.” It is the “cut and run” Democrats and neo-isolationists such as yourself that find themselves in that position. American success is bad news for you guys.

The rumors of war with Iran you spread are not going too well either, so now you are beginning to debunk those rumors too instead of admitting that you should not have spread them in the first place. Finally, you do not admit that once democracy was imposed on Germany and Japan it WAS successful. Instead you point to minor historical events that took place before Berlin and Tokyo were taken by force and democracy was imposed on them. Your sense of history comes from the footnotes.

Next week, tell us what a mess Bush made of the North Korean situation and how the Middle East talks are irrelevant too. Better yet, tell us how you ARE relevant.

This is amusing. First, I never predicted the failure of “the surge”, in fact, I even wrote before General Petraeus’s report that it would be portrayed and regarded as a success. What I expected, then as now, that the tactical success would prove to be irrelevant. And, indeed, there has been absolutely no improvement on the political scene while the larger strategic picture has absolutely gotten worse.

As for the “successful” imposition of democracy on Germany and Japan, I note that Germany is currently being ruled by an unelected and dictatorial Commission with zero respect for human rights and that both Germany and Japan are still being occupied more than sixty years later.

After I wrote back to GS, he responded again as follows:

Right. . .nothing was accomplished in Iraq. Therefore, Saddam Hussein must still be in power, his sons are waiting to succeed him, Iraq never had free elections, it is still threatening its neighbors, the Kurds are still getting gassed and Iraq oil is still off the market. In your view, these changes are only “tactical successes.”

Worse yet, your positions are not even consistent. If the Iraq government is a “puppet regime” as you say, then why aren’t they passing the laws we want passed? Their inability to get things done is not helping the “neo-conservative” cause.

And if the invasion was is nothing more than “imperialism” as you state, then shouldn’t some Americans benefit from the increased supply as a result of that? Even if you argue that the American consumer will not benefit from more oil because of the evil corporate conspirators who control big oil, the American stockholders who hold shares in oil companies should benefit.

As you see it, everything is a doom and gloom twilight zone where only bad things happen. Fortunately, the percentage of American people who agree with you is about the same as the number who support the absurd and dangerous neo-isolationist foreign policy views of your heroes, Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan.

Let’s count the errors here. 1) We’ve exchanged the secular Saddam for a Shiite mullah regime sympathetic to Iran. 2) Iraq didn’t have free elections and we wrote both the rules for it as well as their “constitution”. 3) The Kurds aren’t getting gassed, which is good, but they are attacking our ally Turkey, which has just overwhelmingly voted an Islamic party into power. But yeah, they are pumping oil… wait, I thought this invasion was about democracy and WMD?

4) The Iraqi government is a puppet regime, it’s just not an obedient one. They want to kick us out, but can’t, so they’re simply cooling their heels and refusing to do what we want them to do. That’s why Charles Krauthammer was pleading for everyone to ignore the failed government benchmarks and pay attention to the temporary military lull instead. 5) Some Americans are benefitting, that’s why the oil companies have been registering record profits over the last few years. 6) The Republicans have already lost the House, the Senate and staunch Spanish and Australian allies over the occupation, apparently they’ll have to lose the White House before GS will consider the possibility that perhaps occupying Mesopotamia is not as popular a policy as he clearly believes it to be.

Only a mindless propaganda parrot could possibly examine the evidence and conclude that the views of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan are dangerous to America. Quite to the contrary, it is idiot America’s failure to heed their clear and substantive warnings that is fast leading it to destruction and irrelevance.

TRP has, quite naturally, asked me to provide some verses supporting my aprevistan contention that capability is not action, that God is not omniscient and that He does not have a Divine Plan which He personally micromanages down to the very smallest level of quantum detail. It is easy to comply with his request because there are so many overt and obvious examples from which to draw; unlike the omniderigistes, I have no need of keeping a list of pre-prepared verses on hand in order to avoid trapping myself in a logical corner. Instead, I merely selected one example from each of the first five books of the Bible. I note that there are literally hundreds of verses that are equally relevant and similarly supportive of the Open View position.

For the various atheists and agnostics here, I realize all of this theology will amount to nothing more than an exercise in counting average fairies per toadstool or whatever, but I encourage you to either skip the discussion entirely, or better yet, to look at it as an opportunity to better understand how to engage in theistic disputation and join it on an entirely conjectural basis. If you think it’s all nonsense, that’s fine, but this particular post isn’t about you.

Genesis 3:8
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?”

10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

There are three possibilities here. Either (1)God was lying to the man about not knowing where he was, (2) He was asking rhetorical questions to which He already knew the answer, or (3) He did not know where the man was and did not know – as opposed to correctly deduced – that the man had eaten from the tree that He had commended him not to eat from. I ask TRP, which he believes to be the correct answer?

Exodus 3:7-10
7 The LORD said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. 8 So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. 9 And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. 10 So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”

In verse 9, God’s statement that “now the cry of the Israelites has reached me” clearly implies that it had not reached Him prior to that moment. I ask TRP, did God previously know about their suffering prior to hearing that cry? And at which point did He become concerned about their suffering, prior to hearing that cry or as a result of it?

Leviticus 18 24-28
24 “‘Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled. 25 Even the land was defiled; so I punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. 26 But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the aliens living among you must not do any of these detestable things, 27 for all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the land became defiled. 28 And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you.

I ask TRP, is this prophetic warning an if/then statement or not? Was it possible for the Israelites to not defile the land and therefore not be driven out? If not, then why did God pretend to offer the Israelites a choice when He was actually planning to cause them to defile the land and cause it to vomit them out?

Numbers 3:12-13
12 “I have taken the Levites from among the Israelites in place of the first male offspring of every Israelite woman. The Levites are mine, 13 for all the firstborn are mine. When I struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, I set apart for myself every firstborn in Israel, whether man or animal. They are to be mine. I am the LORD.”

The significance here requires a reference to Exodus 12:23. When the LORD goes through the land to strike down the Egyptians, he will see the blood on the top and sides of the doorframe and will pass over that doorway, and he will not permit the destroyer to enter your houses and strike you down.

Now, who struck down the firstborn, the LORD or the destroyer? Are the LORD and the destroyer one and the same? This is an extremely important question, as it cuts to the very heart of the sovereignty issue and has important ramifications for the capacity/action aspect of the debate as well.

Deuteronomy 1:26-43

Rebellion Against the LORD
26 But you were unwilling to go up; you rebelled against the command of the LORD your God. 27 You grumbled in your tents and said, “The LORD hates us; so he brought us out of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us. 28 Where can we go? Our brothers have made us lose heart. They say, ‘The people are stronger and taller than we are; the cities are large, with walls up to the sky. We even saw the Anakites there.’ “

29 Then I said to you, “Do not be terrified; do not be afraid of them. 30 The LORD your God, who is going before you, will fight for you, as he did for you in Egypt, before your very eyes, 31 and in the desert. There you saw how the LORD your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place.”

32 In spite of this, you did not trust in the LORD your God, 33 who went ahead of you on your journey, in fire by night and in a cloud by day, to search out places for you to camp and to show you the way you should go.

34 When the LORD heard what you said, he was angry and solemnly swore: 35 “Not a man of this evil generation shall see the good land I swore to give your forefathers, 36 except Caleb son of Jephunneh. He will see it, and I will give him and his descendants the land he set his feet on, because he followed the LORD wholeheartedly.”

37 Because of you the LORD became angry with me also and said, “You shall not enter it, either. 38 But your assistant, Joshua son of Nun, will enter it. Encourage him, because he will lead Israel to inherit it. 39 And the little ones that you said would be taken captive, your children who do not yet know good from bad—they will enter the land. I will give it to them and they will take possession of it. 40 But as for you, turn around and set out toward the desert along the route to the Red Sea. [a] “

41 Then you replied, “We have sinned against the LORD. We will go up and fight, as the LORD our God commanded us.” So every one of you put on his weapons, thinking it easy to go up into the hill country.

42 But the LORD said to me, “Tell them, ‘Do not go up and fight, because I will not be with you. You will be defeated by your enemies.’ “

43 So I told you, but you would not listen. You rebelled against the LORD’s command and in your arrogance you marched up into the hill country. 44 The Amorites who lived in those hills came out against you; they chased you like a swarm of bees and beat you down from Seir all the way to Hormah. 45 You came back and wept before the LORD, but he paid no attention to your weeping and turned a deaf ear to you.

Did the people of Israel rebel against the Lord’s command or not? Was it God’s will that they rebel against Him or was it their will? Was it God’s original plan for Moses and the people of Israel to enter Canaan or did He always intend for them to die in the desert? Was God genuinely angry, or was He merely pretending to be angry for the purpose of making the puppet show seem more convincing to the puppets whose strings He was pulling?

UPDATE – TRP requests a clarification:

Do you actually believe that God CAN do this? Do you believe he DOES do this?

Assuming he’s referring to 1 Samuel 2: 6-8, my answer to the first question is yes. My answer to the second question is yes, occasionally.

100 Cranberry Bogs
78 W.C. Silver Spooners

92 Mounds View Meerkats
29 Black Mouth Curs

75 Village Valkyries
57 Greenfield Grizzlies

69 Winston Reverends
54 Masonville Marauders

66 Burns ICU
62 East Mesa WhiteTrash

I’m not out of it yet. The team that no one wants to face has put together three straight wins; despite being in eighth place the Meerkats have the second-most points in the league, 116 more than the fourth-place Valkyries. It’s unlikely I can make it to the playoffs even if I win out, but we’ll do our best to finish at .500 anyhow.

In other news, Burns finally managed to grab its second win over the ex-champions, who are fading fast and have fallen out of playoff position for the first time all season. Cranberry is looking like the team with the hot hand, although Masonville should cruise to the number-one seed with the help of a timely trip to the ICU. Masonville, Cranberry and Winston all look like they’ll make the playoffs, the Valkyries and Grizzlies will be pulling hard for the Meerkats to knock off both the Spooners and White Trash down the stretch.

The Responsible Puppet responds exactly as expected:

There is some irony here in that Vox is slow to give his own bible verses. The passages referred to above do not in any way prove that his interpretation is true, he can only use them to show that his interpretation is possible.

I ask Vox – how many Bible passages do you want? You can find them more than a few in my “Both Ways” category and I will be giving more presently. But I send the challenge back.

Please show me the ‘outright demonstrations’ where God is not actively managing what goes on in our world…. I am interested to see which approach you will take.

But to show that I know the requirement to use Bible verses goes both ways, here is a passage that we studied in our Adult Sunday School Class yesterday: 1 Samuel 2: 6-8

6 “The LORD brings death and makes alive;
he brings down to the grave [c] and raises up.
7 The LORD sends poverty and wealth;
he humbles and he exalts.
8 He raises the poor from the dust
and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
he seats them with princes
and has them inherit a throne of honor.
“For the foundations of the earth are the LORD’s;
upon them he has set the world.

This says that God has controls how much wealth individual people have.

Does it really? Because in order for this passage to say what TRP is concluding from it, we would have to observe that every single individual poor person is raised from the dust and that all of the world’s needy are seated with princes. And yet, we can observe that this is manifestly not the case, especially since Jesus Christ informed us that the poor would always be with us, not sitting with princes in what one can only imagine to be a series of extremely overcrowded court rooms.

The point is that that the quoted verses only state what God CAN do with regards to these subjects, not what He IS ALWAYS DOING. In other words, they are a statement about CAPACITY and not about ACTION. In fact, this is also a very good example of the very omniderigiste/atheist error that I mentioned in my first post on the matter:

1. Take a Bible verse
2. Assign a possible meaning to it.
3. Insist this is the ONLY possible meaning, even when the meaning doesn’t make sense. (In this case, the problem is apparent a priori, but usually it is only evident when considered in context with other, contradictory verses.)
4. Ignore all other plausible interpretations, especially more logical and Biblically supported ones.

And allow me to correct my initial statement. TRP’s response wasn’t exactly what I expected. I would have thought that he knew me well enough by now to know that it is always a mistake to confuse any slowness in showing my cards with a poor or nonexistent hand.

National Review offers a few suggestions for the intellectual on your list:

Every Thanksgiving, National Review Online asks some regular contributors and friends for their suggestions for gift-giving for the upcoming Christmas season. This year, as often is the case, the list is book heavy — but is not without its surprises. We aim to help and hope it does….

For argumentation on the science vs. religion front, here are two books, one from each side. For believers, WorldNetDaily columnist Vox Day offers The Irrational Atheist, in which he takes on the “unholy trinity” of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Good polemical stuff, with tables of atheist mass-murderers, much sneering at “scientism,” and some arresting eye-stoppers like: “Jerusalem aside, the Crusades were surprisingly irreligious.” On the other side, Cornelius J. Troost’s Apes or Angels: Darwin, Dover, Human Nature, and Race is a good survey of current understandings about human nature — including the religious component — from a coolly naturalistic, “evol-con” point of view. I wish Prof. Troost were not quite so free with exclamation points, but his book fulfills the essential condition any book on the contemporary human sciences should, if it wants to be taken seriously, viz.: it will offend Leftist blank-slaters and Rightist anti-Darwinists equally.

That was certainly a delightful surprise. I don’t know if it will be possible to actually get your hands on the book before Christmas, however, since it’s impossible to say when the books will ship from the publisher to the various bookstores. Books are usually available to the public well before their official publication date, but I think it’s unlikely that one could get a copy before Christmas.

Anyhow, it’s encouraging to learn that it’s not only fellow theists who think well of the book. The only thing I should like to note is that the “arresting eyestoppers” to which John Derbyshire refers aren’t there for contrarian shock value, as could be inferred from the phrase, but are fully supported in the text. For example, that statement about the Crusades to which Derb refers isn’t a naked assertion, but rather an evidence-based conclusion that happens to concur with the conclusions of three historians who are generally considered to know a good deal about that particular epoch, Charles Oman, Steven Runciman and John Julius Norwich.

Anyhow, if you’re an atheist or science blogger who is interested in reviewing the book, just send me an email expressing your willingness to write a review and I’ll arrange to have an electronic review copy sent to you when the book comes out.

Bill Conlin of the Philadelphia News, like most journalists, is a maleducated moron who thinks he’s much more intelligent than he actually is. But he has managed to take the suicidal dead-tree journalist’s impulse for self-immolating sallies into the blogosphere to impressive new heights:

The only positive thing I can think of about Hitler’s time on earth–I’m sure he would have eliminated all bloggers. In Colonial times, bloggers were called “Pamphleteers.” They hung on street corners handing them out to passersby. Now, they hang out on electronic street corners, hoping somebody mouses on to their pretentious sites. Different medium, same MO. Shakespeare accidentally summed up the genre best with these words from a MacBeth soliloquy: “. . .a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. . .”

This is hilarious, especially considering that those “Colonial Pampleteers” were actually the immediate precursors of modern newspapers and, eventually, so-called, self-styled “professional journalists”, not bloggers. How many more journalists need to get their heads handed to them by better-educated, smarter and more knowledgeable bloggers before they begin to realize that neither the power nor the technology curve is on their side?

I particularly enjoyed Conlin’s subsequent insistence that his dead friend having been a Jew somehow insulates him from his rhetorical dreams of blogocaust. How very convenient for him that the witness for this close, antisemitism-nullifying relationship isn’t available to testify for the defense… and besides, do you know who else liked dead Jews? Hitler. It seems to escape this eminent journalist that it’s not the mere invocation of the dread H-word which is the problem here, but the fact that he’s fantasizing about the murder of literally hundreds of thousands of people. Still, the ironic truth is that he’s almost surely right about Hitler’s opinion of the blogosphere. It’s not as if the elites in either the Republican or Democratic parties, or, for that matter, the nation’s editorial boards, are particularly keen on it either.

Jonah Goldberg writes an unexpected and effective defense of Ron Paul while succinctly explaining the essential problem with Mike Huckabee:

Let’s even say that Paul has the passionate support of the Legion of Doom, that his campaign lunchroom looks like the “Star Wars” cantina, and that many of his top advisors actually have hooves.

Well, I would still find him less scary than Mike Huckabee.

One is a culturally conservative libertarian. The other is a right-wing progressive. Whatever the faults of the man and his friends may or may not be, Paul’s dogma generally renders them irrelevant. He is a true ideologue in that his personal preferences are secondary to his philosophical principles. When asked what his position is, he generally responds that his position can be deduced from the text of the Constitution. Of course, that’s not as dispositive as he thinks it is. But you get the point.

As for Huckabee — as with most politicians, alas — his personal preferences matter enormously because ultimately they’re the only thing that can be relied on to constrain him. In this respect, Huckabee’s philosophy is conventionally liberal, or progressive. What he wants to do with government certainly differs in important respects from what Hillary Clinton would do, but the limits he would place on governmental do-goodery are primarily tactical or practical, not philosophical or constitutional.

This is the most important aspect of libertarian philosophy. Even if you seriously disagree with another libertarian, you can support him without reserve, since he is committed to not using the power of the state to compel you. Huckabee offers nothing more than a repeat of the George W. Bush fiasco. Jonah’s electoral analysis is inaccurate; it’s thrown off by his underlying belief that support for the occupations is somehow a vote-winner, but his reasoning here is sound.

UPDATE – Bob Novak also concludes that Huckabee is no conservative, but rather an advocate of strong, intrusive government cut from the Bush the Younger mode:

Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative, but serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist advocate of big government and a strong hand in the Oval Office directing the lives of Americans…. Quin Hillyer, a former Arkansas journalist writing in the conservative American Spectator, called Huckabee “a guy with a thin skin, a nasty vindictive streak.” Huckabee’s retort was to attack Hillyer’s journalistic procedures, fitting a mean-spirited image when he responds to conservative criticism.

All I need to know is that the guy supports smoking bans. If you seriously advocate that sort of idiocy, you’ve obviously got an anything-goes attitude towards government rule. I wonder how long it will take Joe Carter to see through the Huckster and drop him?

As I wrote in September, it’s not actually news that Hillary isn’t normally oriented. But given how tightly this has been kept under wraps and how obediently protective the media – both “conservative” and mainstream – has been of this oft-testified fact, it’s interesting to see how rumors of her and her omnipresent aide have begun to surface in the international press. It seems increasingly probable that the Hillary and Huma scandal is the one upon which the Los Angeles Times has been sitting, about which so many rumors have been flying.

It would be a very, very interesting development if it turns out that the Internet has developed to the point that not even the united efforts of the conventional media suffice to kill a politically explosive story. Because for all the inevitable protestations about how sex is no one’s business and shouldn’t be a factor, Hillary would neither be the first nor the last political candidate to be sunk by her poor judgment in these matters.

A few weeks ago, Ron Rosenbaum reflected on the media’s culpability in protecting the unnamed candidate in the same way they protected FDR and Kennedy:

Now, as I say it’s a rumor; I haven’t seen the supporting evidence. But the person who told me said it offhandedly as if everyone in his world knew about it. And if you look close enough you can find hints of something impending, something potentially derailing to this candidate in the reporting of the campaign. Which could mean that something unspoken, unwritten about is influencing what is written, what we read.

Why are well wired media elite keeping silent about it? Because they think we can’t handle the truth? Because they think it’s substantively irrelevant? What standards of judgment are they using? Are they afraid that to print it will bring on opprobrium. Are they afraid not printing it will bring on opprobrium? Or both?

But alas if it leaks out from less “responsible” sources. then all their contextual protectiveness of us will have been wasted.

From the way Rosenbaum described it, the rumor could apply to either Obama or Clinton, although there has certainly been lots of talk of late about Hillary losing both Iowa and New Hampshire. We already know it’s about a Democrat, otherwise the media wouldn’t have been keeping their lips sealed in the first place. But I still think he was probably referring to the lid finally coming off of Hillary Clinton’s Wellesleyan ways.

What do you think of the revised look? I’ve been wanting to add a second column for some time now, and finally managed to get around to it during the Bears-Broncos game. I’ll be adding one or two new sections, but in the meantime I just wanted to make sure that all of the previous functionality was preserved.

If people with narrower screens are having a problem, let me know and I can reduce the middle area somewhat.