Vox Popoli

But you can’t make him die:

Iraq war veterans now stationed at a base here in upstate New York say that morale among US soldiers in the country is so poor, many are simply parking their Humvees and pretending to be on patrol, a practice dubbed “search and avoid” missions….

“We had units that never called in SIGACTS,” Millard, who monitored highly volatile areas like Baquba, Tikrit and Samarra, told IPS. “When I was there two years ago, there were at least five companies that never had SIGACTS. I think ‘search and avoids’ have been going on there for a long time.”

Millard told IPS “search and avoid” missions continue today across Iraq. “One of my buddies is in Baghdad right now and we email all the time,” he explained, “He just told me that nearly each day they pull into a parking lot, drink soda and shoot at the cans. They pay Iraqi kids to bring them things and spread the word that they are not doing anything and to please just leave them alone.”

That’s certainly one explanation for U.S. combat deaths dropping of late. Of course, the fact that this was written by a gentleman by the name of Dahr Jamail does render it somewhat suspect.

On the other hand, it’s perfectly rational behavior. The administration and military high command isn’t even pretending to have a strategy that might possibly lead to victory, so ensuring his own survival is going to be the highest priority for every soldier with even half a brain. This is one of the many reasons why garrison and policing duties have historically been avoided by combat troop commanders, as they are inherently detrimental to troop discipline, effectiveness and morale.

Maimon Schwarzschild notices that charity tends to be contingent upon a certain religion:

The New York Times ran a front-page story recently about an elderly man who starved to death in Japan, having been denied help by the welfare bureaucracy. The man kept a diary as he died: heartbreaking to read. The Japanese welfare bureaucracy seems to have been notably heartless, and not only in this case. There are other, similar cases of starvation in the past year or two in Japan, according to the Times.

There is this brief throwaway in the lengthy Times story:

With no religious tradition of charity, Japan has few soup kitchens or other places for the indigent. Those that exist — run frequently by Christian missionaries from South Korea or Japan’s tiny Christian population — cater mostly to the homeless.

If the Christian world is on its way to being post-Christian, will the tradition of Christian charity persist? Or is the ethic of charity liable to go down with the faith that inspired it?

Atheists argue from theory that the ethic of charity doesn’t logically HAVE to disappear from a culture as its number of Christians drops. And this is true, in theory. Both historical and current evidence, however, demonstrates the opposite; I would go even farther than Schwarzschild and predict that those countries which continue proceed in a post-Christian path will soon begin to see the same sorts of arguments for slavery and/or caste that they are currently seeing in favor of eugenics, infanticide and euthanasia.

What the atheists have failed to understand is that secularism is not an end destination, it is merely a point on the path towards paganism. Atheism’s primary emotional appeal, the release from religion’s sexual shackles, is overwhelmed by paganism’s offer of the erotic made divine. This is particularly true for women, for whom the nominally rational appeal of atheism is practically nil.

There will be no fully secularized societies of the sort which appear so often in science fiction. In fact, the infant science of socionomics points to humanity already having passed secularism’s high-water mark.

There is also some evidence that religion becomes more important to people as bear markets progress and less important as bull markets progress. At the stock market low of wave (II) in 1857, 22 years after the peak of wave (I) in 1835, newspapers reported that people in New York City were lined up for blocks to join churches for the first time. In contrast, it was in the late 1960s, near a multi-decade stock market top, that a national magazine asked on its cover, “Is God Dead”. In extended periods of social depression and war, religion is generally a central aspect of people’s lives. In long periods of social ebullience, religion plays a secondary role. Thus, social mood trends appear to affect not only the style of religious practices but the very importance of religion itself. We can see both aspects of this influence in the rise of fundamentalism in the form of terrorist activities by radical Muslims and efforts by Baptists to get stories in Genesis taught as science.
– Pioneering Studies in Socionomics, Robert Prechter, 2002

In light of these observations, it is intriguing to note that the recent housing and stock market peaks coincided rather closely with the sudden appearance of books such as The God Delusion, The End of Faith and God is Not Great on the best-selling lists. They are likely indicators of cultural change, but almost surely not in the way their authors had hoped.

According to the socionomics forecast, one should anticipate disease, war and increased racial conflict as well as a series of religious revivals. And, of course, longer women’s skirts….

PZ Myers declares his political colors:

My least favorite political/economic group is the Libertarians

He prefers National Socialists, Fascists, Communists, Christian Socialists, Democratic-Farmer-Laborites and Ba’athists to those evil Libertarians. How dare anyone advocate human liberty and the rights of the individual over the collective’s imperative to build a godless New Man and Society!

And atheists wonder why Americans would rather vote for a one-legged black homosexual Mormon crack whore with a criminal record than an atheist.

PZ’s instinctual distaste for both libertarianism and God is very revealing, this distaste comes from an intrinsic desire to wield authoritarian power over others. It is why Hitchens was a Marxist as well as an atheist prior to his Damascene moment and rebirth as a neocon; it represents the complete opposite of my own Christian libertarian philosophy.

I note that a number of Pharyngula’s commenters don’t seem to understand that corporations, being creations of the state, are inherently anti-libertarian. There is nothing fundamentally capitalist about a corporation, which is why they were and are powerful in every communist society.

I like Mieville’s fiction, but since he’s a godless Marxist himself, it should hardly be surprising that a) he doesn’t like libertarianism, or, b) Myers admires his political views. The only difference between a Marxist and a Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party supporter is that the Marxist is an overt communist while the DFLer won’t admit it, not even to himself.

Just in case you weren’t sure that the “right-wing” blogosphere has gotten completely out of touch with the conservative movement, John Hawkins’s latest poll of blogs shows how they regard the Republican candidates in order of preference, taking both negatives and positives into account:

1) Fred Thompson (72.0)
2) Duncan Hunter (37.5)
3) Rudy Giuliani (33.0)
4) Mitt Romney (25.0)
5) Mike Huckabee (24.5)
6) John McCain (-13.0)
7) Tom Tancredo (-15.5)
8) John Cox (-38.0)
9) Alan Keyes (-41.5)
10) Ron Paul (-65.5)

For me, the telling thing is how much they appear to dislike and fear Ron Paul. This is totally bizarre, considering his policy positions and supposedly “minor” status. Either these bloggers regard him as a very serious threat or they are more totally committed to the ongoing War on Everyone Including Our NATO Allies than I had previously imagined.

I’m seldom a fan of women attempting to do a man’s job, because the evidence proves they usually don’t. Lara Logan, however, is clearly up to the task:

Yet the allegedly “antiwar” media is a myth that exists largely in the minds of the neocons, who see any deviation from their preconceived notions as the equivalent of treason. Logan, as Kurtz relates, was constantly hectored by superiors to do “softer” features: at one point, she was asked to do “a story on female soldiers who were distracting themselves by keeping cyber-pets online.” Logan emailed back: “I would rather stick needles in my eyes than spend one second of my time on that story.”

Good for her! It’s a pity more female editors, reporters and commentators don’t follow her lead. And the fact that Logan considers Michelle Malkin to be a “f*cking idiot” can only be regarded as an additional point in her favor.

Andrew Brown accuses the Archbishop of Oxford of knowingly repeating an ugly lie:

I told Dawkins at the beginning of our interview that I had just come from reading the piece, he said, straight into my tape recorder, that Midgley had confessed to Ullica Segerstråle, a distinguished sociologist of science, that she had not in fact read the book before reviewing it.

Given that her review contains 11 extended quotes from the book, this could not possibly be true; given that he spent some time writing a closely argued reply, and thus poring over every quote she used, he must have known it could not possibly be true. None the less he said it with such conviction that I took the trouble to track down Dr Segerstråle and – after she had failed to respond to emails – to ring her up in Illinois. She said that of course it was nonsense….

I felt this was rather a difficult story to deal with; however, while I was wondering what to do, I had an unexpected email from Dawkins himself, in Chicago, where he had just had supper with Ullica Segerstråle. They had discussed the matter and come to the happy conclusion that it was all a misunderstanding. He also, I believe, wrote to Mary Midgley apologising for telling me this rather unpleasant lie about her….

Then, blow me if three weeks ago he did not repeat the claim, in writing, on his own website: “Mrs Midgley confessed to Ullica that she had not in fact read The Selfish Gene when she wrote that article. She has since backtracked from that confession, and I was inclined to believe her.”

What makes it almost literally incredible that he should write this is that he links in that post to her original review, so that anyone who bothers to click through can check the evidence for his claim.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least considering the number of easily provable falsehoods in his books, including but not limited to The God Delusion. In those cases, I believe he’s simply ignorant, but this isn’t exactly the first time Dawkins has been accused of attempting to retroactively modify past events in his favor.

Another thing to like about Ron Paul is the fact that he is capable of articulating his own thoughts and making his own case, without requiring a puppet master to put words in his mouth:

A few months back, I wrote back-to-back weekly messages regarding globalism and isolationism. In writing those columns, I focused on the fact that our nation’s interventionist foreign policy was precisely what was isolating us from other countries.

Turkey’s recall of their U.S. ambassador in the wake of last week’s resolution, passed in the House Foreign Affairs Committee in condemnation of Turkey, is a perfect example of what I wrote in those columns, as well as what I have been saying for years….

Even though I am no fan of the war in Iraq, keeping positive relations with Turkey is important to protecting our troops who have been sent to fight this war. We are likely to need cordial relations with Turkey so that we can get our troops out of Iraq as quickly and safely as possible, when the time comes.

It’s a pity Giuliani and Thompson aren’t writing similar columns, one has little trouble imagining what Rudy would write about; it would almost surely go something like this:

There is something deranged about those with a excessive concern with little weasels. It is a sickness, and they should go consult a psychologist or a psychiatrist with this excessive concern, how they are devoting their lives to weasels. They need somebody to help them. There are people in this city and in this world that need a lot of help. Something has gone wrong with them. I’m convinced there is something seriously wrong with them. Because a normal person doesn’t do this. They don’t get involved in this kind of sick, compulsive behavior.

Giuliani would be a horrendous president, but he would be amazingly entertaining as the anti-Oprah. Someone get him a syndicated advice column.

The Evangelical Outpost drops the Tennessee Toad:

When it comes to investing I have a difficult time letting go. I hold onto stocks long after I should have dumped them from my pitifully performing portfolio. But when it comes to politics I am more ruthless and willing to take a loss. That is why I’m cutting my support for Fred Thompson….

I won’t waste time elaborating all the reasons for my decision, but they are many. Still, I hung on until this past weekend. After seeing his sloppy, lackluster, uninspiring speech at the Washington Briefing I realized I couldn’t do it anymore. It’s embarrassing to have to admit I was wrong.

Unfortunately, he’s elected to embrace the Huckster rather than Ron Paul. But Joe may come around yet; obviously he’s capable of changing his mind once he figures out that Huckabee is a scandal-prone, big-government, pro-immigration faux conservative with a crazy wife. He’s essentially a Republican Bill Clinton.

As I wrote when Thompson was first being talked up prior to what was apparently supposed to be his entry into the race, his only appeal was that he was a Republican who wasn’t named Giuliani, McCain or Romney. I expect many to soon follow the lead of the founder of Blogs for Fred in abandoning the senator.

UPDATE:

St. Anselm College’s Institute of Politics will release a new poll today, completed by SRBI Research in New York City, showing that Clinton and Romney hold solid leads in New Hampshire…

Romney leads Giuliani 32.4 to 21.8 percent, with John McCain at 15.2 percent and Ron Paul in fourth place at 7.4 percent. Fred Thompson is in sixth place with 5 percent.

It will be interesting to see how the “conservative” media reacts if Paul beats both Huckabee and Thompson in New Hampshire. And if my suspicions are correct, he’ll overperform the polls and pass McCain as well. Meanwhile, the “frontrunner” Giuliani is so hopelessly unelectable that he can’t even win a primary in a northeastern state.

UPDATE II: I love the smell of panic in the morning.

Ron Paul beating Fred Thompson in New Hampshire?

RF asks about the obvious:

How come 500,000 Californians can be safely evacuated in three days but it is impossible to deport any illegal aliens?

Why do you hate Californians, RF, why? Are you saying you want to burn illegal aliens to death? To burn them just like they burned human beings in the ovens at Bergen-Belsen? Nazi! Wait a minute, why do I suddenly feel the urge to grow a mustache?

Sorry, it seems I was channeling Michael Medved for a moment there.

By my calculations, it should take approximately 72 days to repatriate all 12 million illegal immigrants, or six months if there’s actually 30 million, as reported recently.

IQ Quiz: is it more difficult to identify a) non-English speaking illegal aliens in the United States or b) Islamic guerillas in an occupied Islamic country?

Our evolution debate has finally petered out on somewhat of an amusing note, with Scott repeating my initial assertion that I am not proposing an alternative to TENS, but am merely an evolutionary skeptic. (I’m also a string theory skeptic, but I don’t propose an alternative to that theory either.) It’s been interesting, as I’ve definitely learned a lot about the current state of genetic science, but I simply haven’t seen any reason to modify my skepticism about evolution in any way.

Scott is correct, my position is largely intuitive, but it is an educated intuition. The nature of the gaps in the theory are such that I suspect a complete overhaul of the theory is more likely than the gradual filling-in of the missing data that evolution supporters expect. These gaps are certainly more obvious than were those in the Ptolemic system at the time that Copernicus developed his alternative to it, the fact that no one else had come up with anything during the centuries preceding Copernicus didn’t make Ptolemy correct. And I hope that Scott will agree that I have made a solid case against the abuse of TENS, which damages both the public regard for science as well as TENS itself by dragging it into intellectual fields where it simply has no legitimate application.

Scott is a good teacher, but I don’t think he fully grasped the extent to which the issues I raised are serious and fundamental problems with the current TENS model. He never addressed a number of them directly, but rhetorically punted instead. This was completely understandable, as some of the questions were difficult and to his credit he didn’t claim to have answered them, but one cannot reasonably expect a skeptic to be convinced by an admitted non-answer. Questions regarding margin of error, temporal dichotomies, the percentage of correct predictions and the average rate of evolution may be problematic but they are not spurious and even a cursory investigation into the literature shows that most of these questions are taken very seriously by scientists in the field.

Ironically, it was the scientist who was more impressed by unscientific anecdotes such as the naked mole rat “prediction”, which could have been far more easily faked than, for example, the Fatima miracle witnessed by 70,000 people. I find this selective suspension of disbelief to be all too typical; it is a human tendency to demand more rigorous data from our opponents than from our allies.

I enjoyed the debate, although I think it would be more effective if there were a moderator involved next time to help keep track of things and keep them on target. In any case, Scott is a good man and I’d happily debate him again on this or any other subject.