Vox Popoli

Kathryn Lopez demonstrates why women shouldn’t be editors of political journals:

McCain, Giuliani, and Romney come off as serious. You almost forget McCain’s political obits were being written a few weeks ago. And you wonder why conservatives seem so depressed these days. Maybe I’m just optimistic in the morning, but with the right team and veep, would any of these guys be terrible?

Yes, because the metric by which a political candidate is properly judged is not the superficial impression he manages to create. McCain, Giuliani and Romney are all the very worst sort of candidates, being unelectable, certain to cause major portions of their party’s base to stay home on election day and govern as the same sort of pragmatic, unprincipled politician that has allowed America to drift further and further into a morass of giant government.

So, they can’t win, and even if they could, you’d wish they hadn’t. Other than that, they’re great.

UPDATE: Oh, sweet Darwin!

“Tom Tancredo may not even be wrong, but his presence kinda killed the mood.”

It’s politics, not sweet love, Kathryn Jean. Now, put the vibrator away, that’s just wrong.

On the madness of the War Party Wing of the Republican Faction. Actually, Dr. PZ Myers and I are also probably in accord on the desirability of bridges not collapsing on 35W.

However, I must correct his impression that belt buckles inscribed with “Gott mit uns” were Nazi insignia. This is a common example of historical ignorance on the part of atheists foolishly attempting to argue that Hitler was a Christian.(1) “Gott mit uns” was the slogan of the Wehrmacht, the non-Nazi German Army, which inherited it from the Kaiser’s Imperial standard of 1870. The fact that one can easily find examples from WWI should suffice to demonstrate the cluelessness of atheists in this regard.

The actual Nazi slogan was “Meine Ehre heißt Treue”, with which the 950,000-strong Nazi army known as the Waffen-SS replaced “Gott mit uns” and means “My honor is named loyalty”. And it was a genuine army comprised of 38 combat divisions (by way of comparison, the current U.S. Army has 10); the translation of “Waffen SS” is “Armed SS”, which distinguished them from the 500,000 strong Allgemeine SS, or “Generic SS” which was the Nazi bureaucracy.

(1) I deal conclusively with this in TIA, with a document of impeccable evidence that has surfaced only recently. Moreover, not even Dawkins was willing to argue that Hitler was a Christian, only Harris, Hitchens and Onfray were dumb enough to do that; regular readers will be unsurprised to learn that Harris and Onfray both rely in part upon the evidence of the “Gott mit uns” buckles.

They’re not even bothering to fake it anymore:

While voting on a motion to recommit for the agricultural appropriations legislation, the presiding chair (who is a Democrat member) gaveled the vote closed. The tally was clear and the vote was over. The Republicans had won. Then, realizing what had happened – the Dems allowed just their people to keep voting to change the result. Let’s be clear, this wasn’t holding the vote open – they change the results of a vote that was legally declared over.

As you know, American democracy is not democracy, it is a tightly controlled system designed to give the appearance of democracy without actually allowing the people to control anything. In this light, I find it amusing that we’re supposed to be outraged by the Democratic disinterest in even playing along with the charade.

Old Sigmund postulated that religion was a mental disorder, and it’s interesting that some science fetishists still cling to this idea even though it is manifestly a truth of revelation rather than science. Literally ALL of the scientific evidence suggests otherwise, as religious individuals live longer, are healthier, have more children, and are less likely to be depressed, require psychiatric treatment or commit suicide.

So, it’s interesting to compare the self-reported results of the Asperger Quotient test between the atheists, agnostics and theists by combining the results from the 59 Pharyngulans and the 173 Vox Populites reporting. (Thanks, Erik, for the compilation.)

27.2 Atheist
20.0 Agnostic
19.0 Theist

This sampling is too subjective and self-selected to be meaningful, and it skews towards the sort of people who read intellectually oriented blogs,(1) but it does suggest the interesting hypothesis that atheism, particularly in its more aggressively militant forms, could be the result of an anti-social mental disorder. It also explains why agnostics and theists tend to coexist rather better than either do with atheists. I have an idea for testing this hypothesis more scientifically, however it would involve a bit of legwork that isn’t feasible for me to perform alone.

If you might be interested in testing this hypothesis, which I think would require about three hours and a moderate amount of human interaction, email me and I’ll explain what I have in mind. Those attending decent-sized colleges or living in urban areas would probably be the most suited for the task.

(1) In the sense of more intellectual than the societal average of whatever is popular on television at the moment. I’m pretty sure everyone here and at Pharyngula at least knows who Kant and Kafka are, this is not true of the average Tonight Show viewer.

Who are your biggest rivals, the Chicago Bears or the Minnesota Vikings? I ask because while I know the Bears rivalry has a much longer lineage and is usually brought up by the media, nearly every Packer fan I’ve ever met is obsessed with beating the Vikings and not much more concerned about the Bears than the Lions. The Lions have been around a lot longer than the Vikings, after all, and no one in the NFC Central cares about them.

Is this just a western Wisconsin phenomenon due to proximity?

I believe I may have mentioned a few of the obvious results of the doubling of the female percentage of the workforce in the past. I wonder how many people who rejected my citation of the BLS data will believe it now that the New York Times has seen fit to mention it:

Though Dr. Beveridge’s analysis showed women making strides, it also showed that men were in some ways moving backward. Among all men — including those with college degrees — real wages, adjusted for inflation, have declined since 1970. And among full-time workers with advanced degrees, wages for men increased only marginally even as they soared for women. Nationally, men’s wages in general declined while women’s remained the same.

Several experts also said that rising income for women might affect marriage rates if women expect their mates to have at least equivalent salaries and education.

“When New York college women say there are few eligible men around, they’re right if they mean they’ll only settle for someone with an education akin to their own,” Professor Hacker said.

Fortunately, the nation is not New York. I do find it interesting, though, that of all the women I knew who went to live in New York after college or graduate school, only one of them is married even though none of them are still in New York.

As for wages, the peak was 1972. That was because the number of 55+ men leaving the workforce was finally surpassed by the number of women entering it. We have fundamentally altered the composition of our workforce in order to permit women to delay having children for a decade or more and for older men to play golf. Whether you think this has been a bad deal for women depends on your perspective. It’s been a good thing for women who want to remain single, make Powerpoint slideshows and live with their cats. It’s been a bad thing for women who want to get married, have children and stay home raise them, because their husbands make less money and find it more difficult to support a family on a single salary.

I leave it to you to decide which perspective is more in line with a stable social structure.

In shocking news, a British medical expert asserts that the uberfat just like to eat:

Obese people are often simply greedy and should not always be treated with pills, the head of the British Medical Association has said. Dr Hamish Meldrum believes an obsession with medical labels may be stopping overweight people addressing their own problems.

Despite my hypothesis that atheism is a mental disorder, I don’t believe that the medicalization of every problem is a positive development. There aren’t many causal relationships much more straightforward than the one between stuffing food in your mouth and gaining weight, so calling obesity a disease isn’t likely to lay the groundwork for accomplishing anything.

I think cannibalism is the most logical solution. It simultaneously solves the obesity and overpopulation problems, and since post-Christian humanity can resolve all ethical dilemmas through moral democracy, the only obstacle is making sure that fat people don’t vote on the matter. But the solution is simple enough, there’s no need to mess around with hacking into Diebold voting machines or anything devious like that, we can simply set up Krispy Kreme stands across the street from the voting booths and six months later, be firing up some delectable long pig on the barby secure in the knowledge that everyone had a fair chance to weigh in.

I couldn’t help it. I happened to land upon a torrent consisting of the entire 1993 Psykosonik CD and couldn’t resist downloading it. So, is it piracy if you can’t find the CD you own, but you are the copyright holder?

I’m considering the possibility of filing a cease-and-desist order against myself. Although I suppose giving myself a very stern talking to about the evils of IP violation might suffice.

It’s not just a figment of my imagination, it seems atheists truly are socially autistic by their own report. Asperger’s Syndrome is a disorder described as “autistic psychopathy” by its discoverer, Dr. Hans Asperger. Those with the disorder tend to be intelligent, socially awkward and difficult to converse with. They are also likely to be male.

Based on Wired Magazine’s observation that atheists tend to be quarrelsome, socially challenged men, to say nothing of the unpleasant personalities of leading public atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Michel Onfray, one could reasonably hypothesize that there is likely to be a strong correlation between Asperger’s and atheism. It’s by no means a scientific test, but it is interesting to note the coincidence that 59 of the virulent atheists over at Dr. PZ Myers place report an average score on the Asperger’s Quotient test of 27.8. And this does not include the two individuals who actually have Asperger’s but did not report any test results.

The test notes that “Scores over 32 are generally taken to indicate Asperger’s Syndrome or high-functioning autism”. The average male score is 18, the average female score is 15. By way of comparison, I scored 14.

I was amused by one of the questions, which states: “Other people frequently tell me that what I’ve said is impolite, even though I think it is polite.” This one topic accounts for about 15 percent of the collective New Atheist texts, and involves various forms of complaining about how they can’t understand how anyone could possibly take any offense at being called stupid, ignorant, deluded and poisonous, and attempting to justify their reasons for their unprovoked insulting of 4.5 billion people in this manner.

Here’s an object lesson that perhaps might be capable of penetrating the skulls of even the most autistically psychopathic. (1) Do you dislike being described as a socially autistic asshole? (2) Would you like it any more if that description was scientifically proven to describe you accurately? (3) Would you consider it polite and/or socially acceptable for me to insist on always describing you to others as an autistic psychopath were this proven to be an accurate description of you?

Obviously, more comprehensive and scientific tests would be advised before any definite conclusion can be reached, but these initial observations do appear to indicate a possibility that atheism could be nothing more than a minor mental disorder.

UPDATE: I encourage you to take the test – as honestly as possible – and then post your results here in the comments along with your identification as theist, atheist or agnostic.

The collapse of the bridge over the Mississippi is pretty bizarre, I’ve probably driven over it more than 500 times myself. It’s one of the bridges linking downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul, so everyone in the Twin Cities travels across it from time to time, if not every day.

Fortunately, it wasn’t wintertime or it could have been a lot worse. Hope everyone’s all right.