Vox Popoli

I’ll be surprised when a school killer turns out to be a popular cheerleader or a star athlete who leads a Bible study, not when it’s another atheist and social outcast who was bullied in the process of being “educated”:

The Finnish teenager who killed eight people in a high school shooting was a bullied social outcast but appears to have picked his victims randomly, a senior police official said Thursday.

However, I stand corrected. When I sarcastically mentioned that I had expected to learn that the Finnish killer was an Episcopalian, the Original Cyberpunk noted that “Speaking as an ex-Episcopalian, there’s nothing in his statement that is incompatible with current ECUSA doctrine.”

Rational materialists are finding themselves to be increasingly at war with not only science, but even the theory of evolution:

Rationalization is thought to have an evolutionary utility; once a decision has been made, second-guessing may just interfere with more important business. “We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that’s an outsider’s perspective. This experiment shows that there isn’t always much conscious thought going on,” said one researcher.”

This is what will ultimately destroy the New Atheism; not their copious errors and demonstrated historical ignorance, but the fact that an increasing number of godless scientists are beginning to find that the very foundation of their Enlightenment humanism is non-existent. This experiment is, in itself, far from conclusive, but similar evidence is beginning to pile up.

Robert Heinlein pointed out in 1953 that man is not a rational animal, but a rationalizing one. And a rationalizing animal simply cannot hope to order its society on the basis of a reason that it demonstrably does not possess.

Again, I’m not interested in engaging in a discussion about my father, and this time I’m simply going to delete any personal attacks on him, but there’s no point in pretending that this isn’t a news story of interest to people.

I realize that many will be dubious, but at the end of the day, my father is a good, decent, and believe it or not, generally law-abiding man. Now, you might reasonably conclude that he’s mistaken, a religious nut, or even delusional, but no one who has met him, regardless of their stance on the salient legal issues, doubts his sincerity. Perhaps you believe that human decency is defined by unthinking obedience to whatever an authority figure tells you is the law; if so, you and I will simply have to disagree.

If I don’t sound upset, it’s because I’m not. None of this surprises me any more than did the reaction to 9/11, $800 gold, the disappearance of M3 or the mortgage crisis. The Empire never ended.

Rod Dreher finds himself inspired by Ron Paul.

Remember this when you hear humanists babbling about the Enlightnment and its rights. The difference between Enlightenment rights and Creator-given rights? They’re not what you’d call unalienable:

While the EU hectors Ankara about its legislation, it is slowly building a corpus of Euro-law which proscribes criticism of the European Union. The clearest precedent has been the case of Bernard Connolly, a British Commission official who, out of office hours, wrote a book called The Rotten Heart of Europe, which criticised the single currency.

He was dismissed from his post for criticising the European project, and went on to challenge his former employers on grounds of free speech. When the Euro-judge — a Spaniard, as it happened — handed down his verdict, it contained a bone-chilling phrase. Freedom of speech, said the judge, was not an absolute right: “Criticism of the European Union, like blasphemy, lies outside its terms”.

Europeans love to posture over their saintly social structures, especially when it comes to gun control. So, naturally, the world media is attempting to spin this fatal school shooting as somehow being the fault of guns, which are fairly common “by European standards”. Which is only true if you pretend that Switzerland isn’t European:

An 18-year-old gunman killed eight people at a high school in southern Finland on Wednesday, then shot himself but survived, police said. Police said the gunman was taken to hospital with serious wounds and they had the situation “under control” after they surrounded Jokela High School in Tuusula, some 30 miles north of the capital, Helsinki.

I suggest that banning schools would be a much more effective way to prevent school shootings. Unsurprisingly, the kid was a self-described “social Darwinist” and a natural selection enthusiast; what do you think would be the odds against him being an atheist as well?

The unnamed gunman apparently posted a video called “Jokela high school massacre” on the YouTube website, the latest of dozens he listed over the last fortnight. Set to a hard-driving song called “Stray Bullet”, it shows a boy standing with a gun pointed towards the camera.

Going only by the username Sturmgeist89, he calls himself a “social darwinist”. “I am prepared to fight and die for my cause,” read a posting by a user of the same name.

“I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.”

What was that about no one killing “in the name of Darwin”?

UPDATE – And we have confirmation:

Name: Pekka-Eric Auvinen
Age: 18
Male from Finland.

I am a cynical existentialist, antihuman humanist, antisocial socialdarwinist, realistic idealist and godlike atheist.

Well, I’m certainly shocked! I was sure he’d turn out to be an Episcopalian. PZ and company, as you had to expect, are in full-blown No True Atheist mode.

This guy should know:

As a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego, California I know the waterboard personally and intimately. SERE staff were required undergo the waterboard at its fullest. I was no exception. I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. It has been reported that both the Army and Navy SERE school’s interrogation manuals were used to form the interrogation techniques used by the US army and the CIA for its terror suspects. What was not mentioned in most articles was that SERE was designed to show how an evil totalitarian, enemy would use torture at the slightest whim….

Having been subjected to them all, I know these techniques, if in fact they are actually being used, are not dangerous when applied in training for short periods. However, when performed with even moderate intensity over an extended time on an unsuspecting prisoner – it is torture, without doubt. Couple that with waterboarding and the entire medley not only “shock the conscience” as the statute forbids -it would terrify you. Most people can not stand to watch a high intensity kinetic interrogation. One has to overcome basic human decency to endure watching or causing the effects. The brutality would force you into a personal moral dilemma between humanity and hatred. It would leave you to question the meaning of what it is to be an American.

I further note the irony of waterboarding being defended by atheists like Sam Harris, who in his stupendous historical ignorance has declared that the Spanish Inquisition was one of the two darkest episodes in the history of faith.

There were three forms of torture permitted to the inquisitors, the garrucha, the toca and the potro. Waterboarding is simply a modified form of the toca, which is described as follows: “The toca, also called tortura del agua, consisted of introducing a cloth into the mouth of the victim, and forcing them to ingest water spilled from a jar so that they had impression of drowning.”

A female psychologist spells it out:

Over the past two decades I have worked as a psychologist, life coach and sex expert, and I have found that Emily’s attitude is all too common. And such views don’t bode well for the success of relationships. With increasing frequency, women in their twenties, thirties and forties take a pragmatic, postfeminist view that sex is something over which they have no need to negotiate. In the bedroom, there is no compromise. If a man has a higher sex drive than a woman, then he can sort himself out. If he wants to try something new and she can’t be bothered, tough luck to him….

That goes to the heart of this issue. As women, we have come to expect that we can control our sex lives completely – but we get angry when a man wants to do so.

In a relationship of two, one individual is always in charge. In most modern relationships, the female partner is the one who has claimed the right to dictate the sexual relationship which means that lesbian bed death now increasingly applies to many normal couples as well.

Unfortunately, more talk talk, as the writer suggests, is not likely to provide the answer. The two options ultimately boil down to patriarchy or porn; all of the available evidence indicates that at this time most women prefer feminism and the latter, whether they realize that is the choice they are making or not. While the demographics indicate that this is already a problem, it will become a crisis once robo-dolls are as ubiquitous as personal massage devices.

The irony is that feminism will be the main reason the polygamous model of marriage makes a return to the West in the next century. Nature ensures that two or more women engaged in intra-marital competition will always be much more interested in sex than a woman with a sexual monopoly defended by the family courts. And so the Law of Unintended Consequences strikes once more….

Very few women will agree with this, of course, although a few never-married women in their late thirties are beginning to wonder if this equalitarian social order is really all that preferable to the masculine one that it replaced. But, as usual, the essential problems of the trend will not be clear to everyone until they are suffering from the entirely predictable effects.

One female reader’s comment demonstrates the very problem raised by the article very well: I am offended by this article. You are advocating submission, however may you have termed it– something which I find abhorrent, considering women have so recently, and still not completely, won even the intellectual semblance of equality and now you talk of giving it all up based on ideas of happiness and the family unit that need to be examined in today’s context.

That semblance of equality won’t be given up based on happiness and the family unit, but it will be given up in the name of societal survival, most likely before 2050.

In a nutshell:

ESPN will air a profile of Browns TE Kellen Winslow tonight that will include reading the love letters he wrote to his wife when they were 13 years old.

Sweet St. Darwin of the Galapagos, who do they think they’re kidding? Seriously, except for The Sports Guy and TMQ, I no longer pay any attention to ESPN anymore, although the White Buffalo and I used to watch both the early and the late Sportcenters that featured Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. I wish the guys who create successful companies could find a way to cash in without selling them to moronic corporations who ruin everything that made them successful in the first place.

Whether it’s EA destroying Origin Systems or Disney turning ESPN into all-chick-stuff all-the-time, I just hate it.