Vox Popoli

Apparently not:

The Science Museum in London has cancelled Professor Watson’s sell-out speaking engagement tonight, on the ground that his views have gone “beyond the point of acceptable debate”. A spokesman also claimed that “the Science Museum does not shy away from debating controversial topics”….

As well as intellectual cowardice, the Science Museum is guilty of hypocrisy. On October 30, it will hold an event called Is Science Colour-Blind? “Might race have a useful role to play in contemporary science? Talk about the legacies of scientific racism today . . .” runs the blurb.

This whole controversy demonstrates the hypocrisy and fundamentally false pretensions of the scientific community and its worshipful followers. (You know, those who claim that the scientific racism of eugenics never existed because it was “bad science”, apparently as opposed to today’s “good science”.) It isn’t anywhere nearly as impartial and empirical as scientists would have us believe, all too often, it is the very con game that science fetishists claim religion to be.

UPDATE: Can you even imagine the outrage in the scientific community if a Nobel Prize winner was suspended for questioning the existence of God or arguing that Man was descended from animals? But I have no doubt that we’ll see their dedication to unscientific equalitarian ideological dogma trumps their nominal dedication to the spirit of free scientific inquiry.

James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA’s molecular structure, was suspended at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York after his comments questioning the intelligence of Africans were reported in a U.K. newspaper.

This proves the claims about the fundamental impartiality of science to be a complete joke. Science is arguably MORE dogmatic than religion; one can never be sure whether one is violating the tenets of the scientific faith or not since those tenets are subjective, prone to mutation and are never articulated in an explicit, codified form.

UPDATE II: To my surprise, and to PZ Myer’s credit, he has openly criticized CSHL’s action despite his quixotic position on the complete non-existence of scientific evidence on intelligence. Of course, given the low level of discourse at Pharyngula, I suppose that’s not terribly difficult to understand.

Daniel Hannan methodically takes them apart, one by one:

Gordon Brown was every bit as wooden, perfunctory and unconvincing as expected. He trotted out all the standard claims about the Euro-constitution, but his heart wasn’t in it. He knows, and we know, and he knows that we know, that it’s piffle.

This is simply yet another Continental invasion of the British Isles, abetted by British traitors. That it takes the form of bureaucrats instead of soldiers only makes it less violent, at least until one of the so-called member states tries to leave.

I’ve seen far too many bugs to think that combining software with high explosive cannons is anything but a fundamentally risky idea:

Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14
Once in a while, though, these machines start firing mysteriously on their own. The South African National Defence Force “is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise on Friday.

Apocalyptic techno-heretics anticipate the Singularity, but this incident demonstrates that it’s not necessarily going to be the wondrous event that the apotheosans imagine.

It seems when push comes to shove, PZ Myers prefers politically correct myth to science:

James Watson’s sold-out lecture in London has been cancelled. I guess making bogus accusations about the congenital stupidity of a whole continent has consequence.

I strongly suspect that the misguided atheist belief in what they suppose to be the religious individual’s “fear” of science is actually projection of their own fear of their one god – science – dismantling their own core beliefs for which they know they have no scientific justification.

For example, there is absolutely no scientific justification for the political doctrine of equality. Absolutely all of the scientific evidence points to human inequality, therefore the logical scientist – of which there are many – knows that the method by which he attempts to guide his life undermines many of his most cherished beliefs. Thus, they are functionally schizophrenic, unless they develop a narcissistic (in the Herman Hesse sense) ideology of extreme rational materialism which precludes all such non-scientific factors.

PZ’s statement is particularly amusing given his statement a few months ago that asserted nothing should be sacrosanct from scientific investigation.

Derbyshire notes with dismay that the Midwest is turning Mexican:

I heard a couple of times the remark that in this little corner of rural Iowa, the student body in the schools is half Hispanic. The remark was passed in a polite, diffident and non-condemnatory way—of course! this is Iowa—and when I tried to probe, people just retreated into niceness (“These Mexican restaurants are really great!”)

Still, I found it hard to believe, surrounded as I was by Lundqvists and Muellers. In an idle moment, however, I looked up the stats on GreatSchools.net. Sure enough, the “Student Stats” on GreatSchools for Storm Lake show percentages Hispanic as:

* High school: 32
* Middle School: 43
* Elementary schools: 53, 66, 63, 53.

There’s nothing wrong with that, so long as you don’t mind living in a barrio. Immigrants create enough problems as it is, but a migration fundamentally changes the nature of the destination. And 60 percent of the next generation is a massive migration by any historical measure.

Even the British are beginning to notice him:

Ron Paul won’t win the GOP nomination. But it’s a rather delicious fantasy, isn’t it, worth indulging in for a few moments. Just think: a 2008 election contested by a pro-war Democrat and an anti-war Republican. Whom would the poor BBC back?

The answer, of course, is Hillary. Identity politics always trumps policies on the Left.

Which upsets those poor, ever-oppressed women who can’t do whatever they want, whenever they want, and still walk off with the house, the kids and financial support:

I don’t think any of us are going to lose much sleep over Heather Mills and her millions. But we should be concerned, and here’s why: the more divorces there are involving huge sums, the more afraid men become to marry. And while that may not affect the man much, it’s very bad news indeed for the woman. I know of someone, I’ll call her Anna, who for the past ten years has lived with her partner, who I’ll call Harry. They have two young children.

For years, Anna said to Harry she thought that they should get married, for the sake of the children if nothing else. Harry refused. Anna had a job when they first got together but gave up work when she had her first child. This suited her; she wanted to be at home. It suited Harry; he liked her to do the cleaning, the washing, the ironing and the shopping – indeed, he thought it was her place. He gave her £80 a week housekeeping money. She was never allowed more. If she wanted to buy something for the children, or a birthday present for a friend, or new clothes for herself, she had to scrimp and scrape each week in order to save sufficient money to do so. You might ask why Anna accepted this situation. The answer is because she is a gentle, fragile soul with no stomach for a fight. She pretended to herself for a long time that everything was all right, and then she went to see her GP, who gave her antidepressants.

Whether because the antidepressants have given her new energy, or whether because every dog has its day, Anna has now decided she has had enough. She wants to leave Harry. When she told him, his response was that it was his house, his money and his children. She could leave by all means. But she would be homeless. She would be penniless. And if he had his way, she would be childless, too: he would fight her for custody, using her depression as his weapon. It was her choice, he said.

It sounds like Harry knows what he’s doing. This writer’s advice is typically stupid – don’t have children if he won’t marry you, never stop working – as always, feminists mistake the symptoms of the problem for the disease itself and suggest behavior that will only exacerbate the situation. I mean, all Anna has to do is simply remain with the family she chose to create; if she wants to leave for whatever reason, then she should leave with nothing. Isn’t she a strong, independent woman now, thanks to the drugs?

The thought for today: how much worse would Harry’s situation would have been if he had married Anna?

There are women worth marrying; I know because I was fortunate enough to find one. But they are rather more scarce than one might wish to believe and in the feminist, post-Christian legal environment of today, it behooves a man to be very, very careful before handing over the keys to his potential financial destruction to a woman.

A friend of mine is an extremely wealthy guy in his late thirties, has three children by three different women and laughs out loud at the very idea of getting married. He is, I suspect, a likely model for the successful “post-patriarchal” man.

You know, when you reach the point that you’re comparing Dominos to Hitler because the delivery boy was five minutes late with your pizza, you just might be going overboard:

“Hitler would have loved you. Welcome to the club of white supremacists who think that the Jewish Lobby is running America, and the rest of the world. JEWS DO NOT TRY TO PREVENT CHRISTIANS FROM EXERCIZING THEIR BELIEFS. EXCEPT, when those expressions openly call for the end of Judaism, or criticize Jews for what they believe. What makes Christians think that it is OK to tell everyone that Jews are going to Hell because they do not accept Jesus, that they are not “perfected Jews,” that they are being punished for not accepting Jesus, that they are “errantly waiting for the wrong Messiah,” or that their “Old Testament Laws” have been replaced by Jesus?

A Jew crying Hitler, now that’s new. And it’s an amazingly stupid statement anyhow, considering that National Socialists have nothing in common with libertarians. I mean, exactly what would a National Libertarianist Holocaust look like anyhow?

AH: I haff a vunderful idea! Vee must kill all zee Juden!

VD: With what?

AH: Vat do you mean, vith vat? Vee haff zee Soldaten, zee Polizei, zee Gestapo, and zee immense National Libertarianist bureaucracy, nicht wahr? And are vee not Cherman? It vill be like a great machine clockverk of death!

VD: What bureaucracy? All we’ve got is Ilke and she’s out getting coffee.

AH: Vat? Unglaublich! Vat happened to zat massiff army of bureaucrats vee inherited from zose veaklings of Veimar?

VD: They’re all working in the private sector now. The Wehrmacht and Post were privatized, the police were downsized and decentralized, the universities were given back to the churches and since the income tax, social security and public schools were abolished, we only need Ilke to cover the phones now.

AH: And zee Geheimene Staats Polizei?

VD: Secret state police don’t roll with human liberty, dude. I fired them all and we sold their guns and stuff in a public auction. Some guy named Helmut bought all the leather trenchcoats.

AH: But what about my SS, my personal army sworn to loyalty even unto zee death.

VD: Sorry, they all quit when they found out they weren’t getting paid by the state anymore. EA hired the Ahnenerbe, though, because it turns out that they’re such complete freaks that they make for pretty good game designers. Gerhardt came up with the most amazing spin on Call of Cthulhu for this MMO they’re developing-

AH: I don’t care about zee verdammt MMO games! Are you vollständig verrückt? If vee haff no Heer, no Polizei, no Gestapo and no Staatsbürokratie, how do you expect me to kill zee Juden zen?

VD: (rummages through desk) Hang on, I think Ilke has a letter opener around somewhere….

Of course, it’s totally obvious to any casual observer that Jews must be in charge of American foreign policy, given the way it is now run as a Hitler of the Month club. Milosevic, Bin Laden, Hussein and now Ahmadinejad.

The point is that those who believe in strong central governments and legal monopolies on violence are far more intrinsicly dangerous to Jews, (and every other human being), than the most viciously anti-semitic libertarian could ever be.

Christians, atheist scientists, gay libertarians… no one is impressed with atheism’s enfant intoxiqué:

This ex-Trotskyist, whose support for militant secularism led him to idolize the founder and first commander of the Red Army, has gone so over the top with his crusade against all religion that he has come to advocate wiping out entire populations. “Demolish it!” he said, when asked about Iran – with apparently no more moral compunctions about the slaughter of the innocent than one might normally exhibit toward a swarm of midges….

Although I am not religious, I’m acutely aware of the dangers posed by radical secularists in the course of modern history, and the death of communism has left people like Hitchens still itching for Armageddon, the final showdown between the forces of Modernity (represented by his fat, smug self), and the forces of medieval Reaction (represented by Iran, or the Muslim enemy of the moment).

Some things never change. “Demolish it!” shrieks Hitchens, as Voltaire shouted “Écrasez l’infâme!” And then their supporters pretend to be surprised when all this Enlightened passion eventually turns into guillotines and gulags.

I don’t agree, however, with Raimondo’s wish, similar to Deutsch’s regarding Coulter, that media outlets refuse to give Hitchens a platform. By all means, let them spread his ideas far and wide, as he may be the most self-refuting, self-destructive intellectual I have ever seen.

It’s not religion that poses a threat to science, but rather equalitarian ideology. And yet, because many scientists are equalitarians, they remain silent about it:

One of the world’s most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that “equal powers of reason” were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America’s leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when “testing” suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade….

Anti-racism campaigners called for Dr Watson’s remarks to be looked at in the context of racial hatred laws. A spokesman for the 1990 Trust, a black human rights group, said: “It is astonishing that a man of such distinction should make comments that seem to perpetuate racism in this way. It amounts to fuelling bigotry and we would like it to be looked at for grounds of legal complaint.”

It is interesting how ostensibly scientific issues are increasingly being settled in the courts, as recent examples include evolution, global warming and now human intelligence. Naturally, atheist scientists haven’t made a peep about this, preferring instead to get their panties in a bunch about a non-existent threat from religion.

Speaking of which, I’ve yet to hear anyone make a coherent case for how religion currently threatens any of the three aspects of science.