Vox Popoli

Newsflash: Foreign investors think it’s a good idea for foreign investors to control US public assets:

When asked to vote, a show of hands indicated virtually every attendee in the 300-person audience was in favor of public-private partnerships to structure the next U.S. generation of highways as foreign-operated private toll roads.

I have no problem with the private ownership of roads, but I have a serious problem with the “public-private partnerships” which are designed to provide the private partner with the maximum of revenue while saddling the public partner with the risk. See the newly democratic Russia for details on how this sort of thing works; very few of those Russian gazillionaires living in London created any of the former state corporations they now own.

In related news, 300 out of 300 children surveyed believe that children should be provided chocolate cake, chocolate chip cookies and three flavors of ice cream at every meal.

It’s getting ugly:

90 East Mesa WhiteTrash
59 Burns Hausfraurers

70 Masonville Marauders
39 Winston Reverends

69 Village Valkyries
62 Greenfield Grizzlies

63 W.C. Silver Spooners
61 Cranberry Bogs

60 Black Mouth Curs
51 Mounds View Meerkats

The sad thing is that I’ve been favored in every projected matchup this year… obviously I should have kept Marion Barber instead of Reggie Bush or Maurice Jones-Drew. What’s really ironic is that wasn’t even the choice that I spent much time thinking about; as it turns out, I made the right call in dropping the Bears defense for all that it matters now.

Even some in the mainstream media are beginning to figure it out:

Politicians often wonder why people don’t vote. This is the wrong question. The real puzzler is why on earth anybody bothers voting at all. If you multiply the chance of influencing the outcome by the difference that a change of government might make to your life, you might calculate that the benefit to you is not enough to risk, say, that on the way to vote a caravan full of violins falls on your head, having been pushed off a third-floor council house balcony by a drunk dentist.

This is why the low probability that the rare liberty-friendly candidate like Ron Paul will win doesn’t trouble me at all. I don’t believe there is a soft landing for the USA, in my opinion the experiment is already dead, it simply hasn’t stopped twitching yet. But supporting Paul does no harm, it’s like giving a stopped heart one last jolt of electricity and every now and then the low probability chance comes through.

But it’s been clear that the fix was in for years, as President Bush’s consultations with his anointed successor, Hillary Clinton, tend to demonstrate. Consider the following report, which shows how Fox News is attempting to keep Paul’s candidacy out of the media, not to benefit Giuliani and the other Republican candidates who cannot win in 2008, but rather Hillary Clinton, who Rupert Murdoch is supporting.

My recommendation is to support Ron Paul until he can go no farther, then withdraw from the process. Inasmuch as your vote matters, it’s worth noting that voting for the lesser evil is still supporting evil evil; in this case, voting for the current Republican party is voting for treason, foreign aggression and the conversion of America into a third world dependent nation.

I don’t understand why we’re supposed to be concerned about the fate of the foreign relatives of the very people who are trying to ban Christmas and have publicly declared war on Christianity:

I find it troubling that, because of Ahmadinejad’s vitriol (and nuclear threats) against Israel, and his denial of the Holocaust, non-Jewish students seem to regard this as a Jewish problem, about which they can comfortably be passive, and evaluate the speaker as if his words, occasionally reasonable, had any relation to his actions. There is nothing sophisticated about the intellectual pose, common among students, that one must listen and evaluate “each side.” (Which, in any case, they don’t mean when it comes to conservatives.) Listening legitimates.

Now there are many reasonable Jews and Israelis whom I like and respect. Nor do I have any affection for the Islamic Republic whatsoever; I have two Christian Iranian friends who were forced to flee for their lives from the Islamic revolutionaries. But the fact is that Iran poses no danger to America and Ahmadinejad and his rambling rhetoric are far less likely to cause problems for Americans than the sort of Ivy League Jew who doesn’t believe that Americans should even LISTEN to free speech.

I’m guessing that like many of her left-leaning co-religionists, she’s probably not all that keen on the Constitutional freedoms of association, the press and the right to bear arms either.

Anyhow, God’s chosen people would do well to rely on God rather than the strength of a Christian nation that many of them appear to despise.

I am a staunch opponent of “representative democracy”. Even direct democracy, with all its theoretical evils, is to be preferred to a system designed to reward those who are most capable of lying about their intentions to the general public:

The betrayal of the Dutch by their political class continues. Dutch News has the details:

A majority of Labour MPs on Tuesday decided not to back calls for a second referendum on the European Union, making it almost certain that the approval of the new EU treaty will be left to parliament rather than the public at large.

This is what the same party had to say in its election platform back in ancient history (well, 2006, but you know how it is):

Europe exists for the sake of the citizens. The result of the referendum on the Constitution was crystal clear. The PvdA will not accept that such result will be circumvented. A new (constitutional) treaty will require a new referendum.

If there is anything guaranteed to secure the rise of extremist parties within the EU it is the open contempt that is shown again and again to the continent’s voters by a political class blinded by greed, arrogance, and the delusion that is “Europe.”

Being a professional politician should be made a crime, punishable by expulsion and permanent exile. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO NEED FOR THEM IN ANY SORT OF DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM. The sole reason for their existence is to violate the very will of the people they are supposedly representing.

Das Europa uber alles
Uber alles im Erdteil
Einigkeit und Gewaltherrschaft
Fur der neue Vaterland.

JS is both conflicted and confused:

I was intrigued by your article as a both a Christian and a devoted Ayn Rand fan (I know obviously I have unresolved issues). But your column, while it makes a decent argument for the concept of non-overlapping magisterium, which I support, never really argues against reason per se. You say that religion is important to human societies and culture (which is no doubt true but not an attack on reason), that Dawkins and Harris (and I guess Hitchens too) make fallacious arguments in support of atheism, that most good charitable work is done by people with religious motives (which is somewhat questionable), and that Enlightenment philosophers were more emotional than rational (Nietchze comes to mind) in their arguments, but the idea that mankind can use logic, evidence, and reason to reach important conclusions about us, the world, etc., is never really challenged. I don’t know if you wrote your headline but perhaps it was mis-applied to your argument.

I did not write my headline; one of the keys to living life as a content and well-adjusted columnist is accepting the fact that the average editor neither reads nor necessarily understands your columns. They’re too busy checking for typos, grammatical errors and potentially offensive metaphors to either worry or care much about what you’re writing. Naturally, this doesn’t prevent them from writing the headline; meaning always takes a backseat to puns and alliteration.

The significant point isn’t that Man can’t use reason as an effective tool, which he can, but rather that reason, in itself, can no more provide the basis for moral and ethical systems than can a computer. It is a tool, nothing more; assertions based on reason are best understood as supporting justifications for underlying arguments rather than as arguments in their own right.

Some devotees of reason consider it to be both ironic and frustrating that I can wield reason and logic more deftly than they can, especially since I do so in the service of what they consider to be irrationality. What they don’t understand is that they are doing precisely the same thing, with the exception of the fact that they quite literally do not understand what they are doing.

When TIA comes out, I suspect many readers will be shocked at how closely some of my conclusions resemble Jonathan Haidt’s assertions; it may prove to be an interesting example of how formal scientody is not the only path to knowledge.

I’m not sure if Hog on Ice hits it precisely on the head, but the general tenor of his lament/rant is largely correct:

I only know one young conservative who got a real chance from the big-time media. These people are all going to quit and do something else; at least the ones who are trying to make careers in the political arena. That’s too bad, because they’re not disposable. They’re hard to replace. But when they quit, they’ll be doing the right thing. I quit, and not only am I glad, I wish I had never started. I curse the day when I first broke my own rule and wrote about politics. It was counterproductive and futile, and the conservative media doesn’t deserve me. It doesn’t deserve any new writer….

Conservative personalities are used to being blackballed and pigeonholed and hired only as tokens, so they think there are a limited number of conservative job openings out there. Just like the limited number of spaces on the comics page. They think that if they help anyone else succeed, it will be at their expense. So instead of fresh new faces, we see the same boring, mediocre, and sometimes even discredited pundits and writers, over and over.

Fortunately, I’m already doing something else, so there’s no need for me to quit. But has been educational for me to learn how the right-wing media, like the Christian media, is generally much more interested in wailing, shirt-tearing and ash-heaping than doing anything constructive. Of course, I do find it frustrating that so many people continue to pay attention to those who publicly and repeatedly prove themselves to be utterly unreliable analysts in every possible way. That’s just ridiculous.

I don’t know how responsive it will be to TIA, but I won’t be surprised if most of those who have publicly gnashed their teeth about Dawkins and company don’t even bother to request a review copy; when it finally comes to their attention it will probably be because some archaic churchman debating one of the New Atheists is using it as his primary ammunition.

One thing the New Atheists do very well – in fact, they do it to the point of it looking disturbingly like a circle jerk to the casual observer – is constantly talking up each other’s material, whether it merits it or not. This has the side effect of opening them up to criticism that they would not otherwise experience, especially when they are repeating Harris’s egregious errors, but I think it has been an important factor in their media success and in making what is a relatively small and insignificant collection of books look like a genuine intellectual movement.

Unlike Hog on Ice, I’ve never been particularly enthusiastic about the idea of a media career and it’s only ever been a tertiary interest at best, so the fact that Fox News, National Review and the Wall Street Journal try to pretend that WorldNetDaily and I don’t exist no longer irritates me. It does seem strange that it’s much more likely that the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Huffington Post will take note of TIA than Townhall, Focus on the Family and the 700 Club, but that’s the way it appears to work these days. The ironic thing is that at this point, only Richard Dawkins has even noticed the fact that the book is coming out.

Because I’m not a conservative, I don’t fit what the conservative media are selling, so they stick to their tried-and-true formulas even though my columns repeatedly prove more popular than the usual grist for the mill. That’s fine, at this point I’d much rather pursue what interests me than media notoriety; the fact that I am currently working on a novel which will be entitled Summa Elvetica, A Casuistry on the Elvish Controversy (and yes, the publisher did change the title, this is the more accessible version, believe it or not), should suffice to demonstrate my complete lack of interest in winning over the lowest common denominator.

To explain to Scott why his response to my last post was inadequate regarding the points it addressed, if you felt that way. I recommend precise articulation, preferably with examples:

In my previous post, I waxed at length about why I felt that Vox’s impression of how the scientific community actually operates missed the boat. A lot of his sympathetic readership felt my post missed the boat, and felt it was largely bloviated excuse-making. To those folk, I would say this: if you think the distinctions I raised in that post are irrelevant, I invite you to explain why you feel that way here.

Have at it, if you are so inclined. I note that Scott has a potential defense which I don’t think he has yet realized, but more on that later. In any event, in light of Scott’s recent confession that he is a Barry Bonds admirer, I encourage you to treat him with all the kindness and gentle understanding due the clinically insane.

Wait, didn’t Christopher Hitchens write about how it’s the Buddhists who are the totalitarians?

Twenty thousand people, including nuns, monks and ordinary Burmese, marched through the streets of Rangoon yesterday demanding freedom for Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate, in a dramatic escalation of the country’s Buddhist-led “Saffron Revolution”.

Ten thousand monks, joined by about the same number of ordinary supporters, marched from the gold-covered Shwedagon Pagoda through the centre of Burma’s largest city in the biggest anti-government demonstration since the bloody suppression of the first democracy movement in 1988….

“We want the people to join us,” the monks chanted. One leader shouted through a megaphone: “We want national reconciliation, we want dialogue with the military, we want freedom for Aung San Sun Kyi and other political prisoners.”

The marchers responded by raising their hands in the air, and shouting: “Our God!”

The Buddhist god is not my God, but I note that as it so often is, religion in Burma is the primary focal point for opposing secular government repression, not supporting or reinforcing it.

It’s always interesting to witness how atheists always complain about past or imaginary oppression, while theists are constantly battling the real thing in real time.