Tag: history

Dawkins and the Dark Ages

In this Twitter spat between Richard Dawkins and the Muslim community, I find it interesting that no one has noted the silliest thing that the world’s most famous atheist said:

Professor Richard Dawkins has become embroiled in a Twitter row after he claimed the last time Muslims contributed something worthwhile was during the Dark Ages.  The 71-year-old author went on to tweet that the world’s Muslims had won fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge.

His comments sparked anger among high-profile Twitter users including writer Caitlin Moran and economics editor at Channel 4 News, Faisal Islam.

Moran tweeted: ‘It’s time someone turned Richard Dawkins off and then on again.

‘Something’s gone weird.’

While Islam said: ‘Actually, over the last two decades, it’s 8-4 against Trinity. I

‘I say this as a muslim alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge.

‘Of course if @RichardDawkins had any clue what he was talking about, he’d know to strip out the Economics Nobels, which aren’t quite real’

Forget the fake Nobels of economics, which Islam is correct to point out are not true Nobel prizes, but rather Sveriges Riksbank Prizes in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.  It’s more pertinent to point out that there never were any Dark Ages, in Europe or anywhere else, and even if one uses the term in the historically incorrect colloquial manner, it has nothing to do with Islamic history.

Richard Dawkins is simply demonstrating, once more, the fact that in addition to being a philosophical and theological ignoramus, he is a historical one as well.

UPDATE: It is pointed out that it was the newspaper, not Dawkins, who used the ahistorical term “Dark Ages”.  Fair enough, that is an error that should not be laid at his door.  But he is responsible for this logical error: if Muslims had contributed nothing worthwhile, then the Nobel count difference cannot matter since either Nobel Prizes are worthwhile, thus proving Muslims have contributed something, or they are not, in which case his comparison is pointless.

Of course, all of this is irrelevant, since Dawkins is merely playing his usual game of vomiting forth rhetoric in the guise of dialectic.

Milton Friedman: heretic Keynesian

I find it fascinating that as time has gone on, more and more economists are coming around to my view, which I explained in The Return of the Great Depression, that Milton Friedman was not an opponent of Keynesianism, as was always taught in the economics department of my university, but rather, a practitioner of a heretical form of it.  The freshwater vs saltwater conflict was an entirely internecine battle between Keynesians, it was not on the level of Hayek vs Keynes, let alone Mises vs Marx.

In an excerpt from his new book, David Stockman writes about how Friedman’s activities as an influential economist completely contradicted his very good essays on human liberty:

At the end of the day, Friedman jettisoned the gold standard for a
remarkable statist reason. Just as Keynes had been, he was afflicted
with the
economist’s ambition to prescribe the route to higher national income
and prosperity and the intervention tools and recipes that would deliver
it. The only
difference was that Keynes was originally and primarily a fiscalist,
whereas Friedman had seized upon open market operations by the central
bank as the
route to optimum aggregate demand and national income.

There were massive and multiple ironies in that stance. It put the
central bank in the proactive and morally sanctioned business of buying
the government’s
debt in the conduct of its open market operations. Friedman said, of
course, that the FOMC should buy bonds and bills at a rate no greater
than 3 percent
per annum, but that limit was a thin reed.

Indeed, it cannot be gainsaid that it was Professor Friedman, the
scourge of Big Government, who showed the way for Republican central
bankers to foster
that very thing. Under their auspices, the Fed was soon gorging on the
Treasury’s debt emissions, thereby alleviating the inconvenience of
funding more
government with more taxes.

Friedman also said democracy would thrive better under a régime of free
markets, and he was entirely correct. Yet his preferred tool of
prosperity
promotion, Fed management of the money supply, was far more
anti-democratic than Keynes’s methods. Fiscal policy activism was at
least subject to the
deliberations of the legislature and, in some vague sense, electoral
review by the citizenry.

By contrast, the twelve-member FOMC is about as close to an unelected
politburo as is obtainable under American governance. When in the
fullness of time,
the FOMC lined up squarely on the side of debtors, real estate owners,
and leveraged financial speculators—and against savers, wage earners,
and equity
financed businessmen—the latter had no recourse from its policy actions.

For me, Milton Friedman is, like Margaret Thatcher, a tragic figure of history, an well-intentioned individual with a genuine love of human freedom who nevertheless betrayed his ideals with his professional actions.

Diversity is the death of the republic

This isn’t a thought that is new to me; HongKongCharlie reminds us that the Founding Fathers knew it very well:

“The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common
national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the
exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice; and on that
love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely
connected with birth, education, and family. The opinion advanced in the
Notes on Virginia [by Thomas Jefferson] is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will
generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have
left behind; to the country of their nativity; and to its particular
customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government
congenial with those under which they have lived; or if they should be
led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that
they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential
to real republicanism?”
-Alexander Hamilton, From the New York Evening Post: an Examination of the President’s Message, Continued, No. VIII, 1802″

Those
who advocate diversity and immigration are not merely foolish, or
ignorant, they are as actively and effectively anti-American as the most
antipathetic individuals who are consciously attempting to destroy what
is left of traditional, constitutional, civilized, European America.

So,
do keep this in mind:  The rabbits and pinkshirts loudly proclaim that
my opinion is outrageous, offensive, and intrinsically unworthy of
debate… despite that opinion being, in the words of Alexander
Hamilton, “undoubtedly correct”.

Mailvox: they want to disbelieve

Obvious challenges my statement about introducing 16-bit color and 3D graphics hardware to the game industry:

Oh, you did? Which game was that? Do you have anything at all that backs that up?

Yes, I did. Concerning the hardware, see Computer Gaming World’s 1994 article on the 3GA and its reference to my title as “Trans-Dimensional Evangelist”.  Concerning 16-bit color, I direct your attention to the September 1997 Computer Gaming World review of Rebel Moon Rising.

“Rebel Moon Rising makes use of Intel’s new MMX technology. Fenris Wolf used MMX to gain a reasonable frame rate at high resolutions with 16-bit color. This let them create dynamic lighting effects that could change on the fly and even move with the different characters.  For example, a moving orange glow might indicate a nearby enemy jump trooper.

Another new technology feature is voice recognition. One early Windows 95 game, ACES OF THE DEEP, used speech recognition, but the implementation was very limited.  In Rebel Moon Rising, the list of usable words is quite large.  While you can actually give orders to AI squad mates in a limited way, it’s mostly used to communicate with other players in multiplayer games. You can speak into the microphone to chat, rather than having to hunt for keyboard commands – something especially handy for Internet play, which the game also supports.”

Now, none of this proves the feature we are going to introduce to the game industry in our upcoming announcement of our forthcoming game is going to make that game successful.  And it demonstrates that even if we are the first to introduce it, we will not necessarily be the primary beneficiaries of it, or be generally known to have introduced it.  I have, in fact, repeatedly expressed my belief that every game company is going to follow our example very quickly; that is the primary reason the innovation is going to be significant. The mere fact that people like Obvious see fit to doubt what was once known by literally everyone involved suffices to prove that credit primarily tends to be given to those who are both innovative and massively successful.  And sometimes only the latter.

But Jensen Huang, Hock Leow, Steve Mosher, Chris Taylor, Marc Rein, John Carmack, Andy Grove, and those who were executives at companies like Intel, Rendition, 3D Labs, Diamond, and Hercules, all know what happened.  And thanks to Mike Weksler at CGW, it’s a matter of public, if obscure, record.

This is another fundamental difference between Right and Left.  The Right is mostly indifferent to the various successes of the Left, whereas the Left is desperate to not only deprive the Right of any opportunity to succeed, but also to deny every last vestige of whatever success was already achieved.  Obvious’s petty desire to disbelieve one minor chapter in the history of the game industry is the goblin to the ideologically censorious behavior of the SF/F publishing ogre lords.

Abortion is slaughter

In case the advances in technology haven’t made it perfectly clear yet to the morally challenged, the case of Kermit Goswell should suffice to demonstrate to even the most avowed feminist that abortion is pure and simple murder.  Note that this link is safe, but you may wish to be careful about reading through the court documents or looking at any of the pictures, as they are downright stomach-turning.

Abortion provider Kermit Gosnell, 72, is charged with killing a woman patient and seven babies allegedly born alive, and with performing illegal, late-term abortions at his thriving inner-city clinic. Co-defendant Eileen O’Neill, 56, of Phoenixville, is charged with billing as a doctor and participating in a corrupt organization.

Eight former employees have pleaded guilty, some to third-degree murder, and have testified this month about bizarre, often-chaotic practices at the clinic.

Ashley Baldwin spoke Thursday of starting there at age 15 through a high school training program, and soon assisting with abortions and administering intravenous drugs. Baldwin, now 22, said she worked nearly 50-hour weeks, often well past midnight, when abortions were routinely performed.

No doubt this case will spark protests that Not All Abortion Clinics Are Like That as it gradually leaks into the public consciousness despite the best efforts of the media to keep it contained.  But that is akin to claiming that there was nothing wrong with Bergen-Belsen because, after all, things were worse at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Let’s make it perfectly clear.  If you are a doctor or a nurse who performs abortions, you are every bit as bad, every bit as purely evil, as the SS-Totenkopfverbänder who slaughtered people in the National Socialists’ extermination camps.  And if you are a woman who aborts her child, you are every bit as bad, every bit as disgusting, as the SS guards at those camps, who may not have bloodied their hands themselves, but were complicitcollaborated by making the killing possible.

And if you simply support the so-called “right” to legal abortion, you are no better than a card-carrying member of the National Socialist German Workers Party.  In fact, you are even worse.  For all their many flaws, the National Socialists at least had a substantive cause: the preservation of a defeated and economically devastated German nation.  Your cause is mere female convenience, rendering you even more repellant and abominable in the eyes of anyone who values human life.  Their symbol was the reversed Swastika, but yours should be a pyramid of infant skulls.

I understand you have your rationalizations and your justifications.  I am aware that you firmly believe that an unborn, or partially born, or newly born, child is either not human or is for some reason or another unworthy of the same right to life possessed by adult human beings who hate racism, support sexual equality, and voted for Barack Obama. I appreciate that you are absolutely convinced that acting to terminate the life of a genetically unique individual who is dependent upon his mother for his continued survival is no different than cutting one’s hair or trimming one’s nails.  I know you assert that because it is a woman’s body, she can do whatever she wants with it, all the various trespassing and drug and flasher laws notwithstanding. Or perhaps you have a different reason, in which case feel free to make your case for it here.

But remember this: the Nazis had their justifications too. And those justifications were considerably more soundly rooted in science, history, and logic than yours are.

I assure you, I guarantee you, that future history is going to remember feminists and everyone else who supported the 20th-21st century Holocaust of the Unborn with every bit as much disgust and horror as today’s progressives regard 18th-19th century slavers and 20th century Nazis.  The tide is already beginning to turn, as many feminists have finally realized a few of the unforeseen, but retrospectively obvious consequences of their so-called right and begun lobbying for laws against sex-screening and the free exercise of their unholy “right” for officially unapproved reasons.

So, I call on you to rethink your stance, truly rethink it, and repent. Redeem yourself by turning against this evil practice you have supported and speaking out against it. Ask for forgiveness from God and from the millions of innocents whose deaths you rationalized and even encouraged.  What is done cannot be undone, but it is never too late to turn away from evil and refuse to continue walking along its dark path.

Stop all the endless rationalizations and justifications. Just stop. They are pointless. You know, in your heart of hearts, they aren’t convincing anyone.  They aren’t even convincing you.

RIP Margaret Thatcher

The Iron Lady is dead at 87:

Baroness Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minster, has died after suffering a stroke at the age of 87. Her children Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness had died peacefully following a stroke this morning.

I had the privilege of meeting her once. In my youth, I considered her a great and courageous leader of a nation in decline. I now consider her to be one of history’s tragic figures, who through naïvety and an inclination to take words at face value, betrayed the country she loved and sold its sovereignty for nothing more than empty economic promises. In light of how the European Common Market has finally revealed itself to be the fascistic, anti-democratic union the skeptics always believed it would become, one will read few sadder words in an autobiography of a world leader than these:

“We had to learn the hard way that by agreement to what were
apparently empty generalizations or vague aspirations we were later held
to have committed ourselves to political structures which were contrary
to our interests.”
– Lady Margaret Thatcher, “The Downing Street Years”

Dr. Sean Gabb, a UK libertarian, has more on Thatcher’s legacy, which is considerably different than you will likely glean from the conservative paeans you will be seeing in the Republican media today.

Daniel Day-Lewis accepts the Oscar

Perhaps he didn’t give this speech, but really, he damned well should have:

Tonight I had the great honor of receiving the Academy Award for Best Actor for my performance in the film Lincoln. It is my immense privilege to receive an Oscar for the third time in my career, especially for portraying such an historic figure. And as I look back on this role, I can only feel deeply honored and humbled for the praise and respect I’ve received, even though I personally believe that Abraham Lincoln was an American traitor who deserved to die.

Honestly, this award truly is a tremendous thrill for me. And the fact that I’m being awarded for portraying a liar, a fraud, and an enemy of justice whose murder was fully justified doesn’t change that.

After all, just because you play a character in a movie doesn’t mean you have to agree with the views and actions of the character you’re portraying. Far from it! In fact, I saw this role as a real actor’s challenge considering my own deeply held belief that Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant and a hypocrite and that the South should have won the war. It has always been my strong opinion that the Confederate forces had a political and moral imperative to defeat the Union army and that America’s 16th president was a monster who deserved to be murdered in front of his wife, so just imagine what a test it was for me to try to humanize this repulsive figure. All of which makes this third Oscar win particularly satisfying.

It still amazes me that no one in the South ever stopped and thought, you know, since Lincoln is about the only one hell-bent on this war, and nearly everyone else seems to accept the Constitutional concept of allowing the various sovereign states to express their self-determination and go their separate ways, how about we shoot him instead of tens of thousands of immigrant German farm boys being forced to fight against us?  How is assassinating a single dictator somehow considered out of bounds when the alternative is butchering hundreds of thousands of innocents whose only crime was to get drafted into military service?

The last days of US empire

And both its soldiers and its enemies know it:

During lunch, as my hosts casually pointed out the site of the holly-oak barrier and other places in the village where the British had been massacred in 1842, we compared our respective family memories of that war. I talked about my great-great-uncle, Colin Mackenzie, who had been taken hostage nearby, and I asked if they saw any parallels with the current situation. “It is exactly the same,” said Jagdalak. “Both times the foreigners have come for their own interests, not for ours. They say, ‘We are your friends, we want to help.’ But they are lying.”

“Whoever comes to Afghanistan, even now, they will face the fate of Burnes, Macnaghten and Dr Brydon,” agreed Mohammad Khan, our host in the village and the owner of the orchard where we were sitting. Everyone nodded sagely into their rice: the names of the fallen of 1842, long forgotten in their home country, were still common currency here.

“Since the British went, we’ve had the Russians,” said one old man to my right. “We saw them off, too, but not before they bombed many of the houses in the village.” He pointed at a ridge full of ruined mudbrick houses on the hills behind us.

“We are the roof of the world,” said Khan. “From here, you can control and watch everywhere.”

“Afghanistan is like the crossroads for every nation that comes to power,” agreed Jagdalak. “But we do not have the strength to control our own destiny. Our fate is determined by our neighbours….”

The following morning in Jalalabad, we went to a jirga, or assembly, of Ghilzai tribal elders, to which the greybeards of Gandamak had come, under a flag of truce, to discuss what had happened the day before. As Predator drones took off and landed incessantly at the nearby airfield, we chatted over a pot of green tea.

“Last month,” said one tribal elder from Gandamak, “some American officers called us to a hotel in Jalalabad for a meeting. One of them asked me, ‘Why do you hate us?’ I replied, ‘Because you blow down our doors, enter our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children. We cannot accept this. We will fight back, and we will break your teeth, and when your teeth are broken you will leave, just as the British left before you. It is just a matter of time.”’

“What did he say to that?”

“He turned to his friend and said, ‘If the old men are like this, what will the younger ones be like?’ In truth, all the Americans here know their game is over. It is just their politicians who deny this.”

“These are the last days of the Americans,” said the other elder. “Next it will be China.”

Americans who still contort their minds and imaginations to justify their foreign empire are ignorant of history and blind to historical patterns.  Now what was obvious to a few skeptics like me is becoming increasingly obvious to everyone around the world.

The collapse of the Soviet Union led to an unwarranted hubris on the part of Americans, particularly the pro-empire ruling class, because the “Morning in America” of the 1980s was a false dawn funded by credit expansion, not genuinely increasing wealth.  In retrospect, the retreat from Vietnam and the Iranian hostage crisis appear to have marked the true inflection point.

Hesse and Spengler

Now, I could be completely off-base here, but in reading the following passage, I was left with the very distinct impression that reading Spengler very likely inspired, in some way, Hermann Hesse’s creation of the magnificent Glass Bead Game.

“Who amongst them realizes that between the Differential Calculus and the dynastic principle of politics in the age of Louis XIV, between the Classical city-state and the Euclidean geometry, between the space-perspective of Western oil-painting and the conquest of space by railroad, telephone and long-range weapon, between contrapuntal music and credit economics, there are deep uniformities? Yet, viewed from this morphological standpoint, even the humdrum facts of politics assume a symbolic and even a metaphysical character, and — what has perhaps been impossible hitherto — things such as the Egyptian administrative system, the Classical coinage, analytical geometry, the cheque, the Suez Canal, the book-printing of the Chinese, the Prussian Army, and the Roman road-engineering can, as symbols, be made uniformly understandable and appreciable.

“But at once the fact presents itself that as yet there exists no theory-enlightened art of historical treatment. What passes as such draws its methods almost exclusively from the domain of that science which alone has completely disciplined the methods of cognition, viz., physics,and thus we imagine ourselves to be carrying on historical research when we are really following out objective connexions of cause and effect….

“Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and interprets the immediate impressions of his senses. History is that from which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality. Whether he is capable of creating these shapes, which of them it is that dominates his waking consciousness, is a primordial problem of all human existence.”

I should be very interested to learn if Hesse ever happened to read Spengler prior to his writing Das Glaspernspiel.

But secession is unpossible!

Events are making it increasingly difficult for the anti-secessionist scoffers in the USA to credibly claim that secession is unthinkable and impossible, either here or anywhere else in the world.

Separatists in the Spanish region of Catalonia moved one step closer to independence on Tuesday when the two largest pro-independence parties announced their intention to form an alliance and push for a referendum in 2014. As the New York Times notes, these two parties hail from opposite ends of the political spectrum and have failed to see eye-to-eye for years. The fact that they are now uniting suggests that Catalonia is getting serious about independence.

Madrid did its best to spin the results of the Catalonia election as a defeat for the secessionists, but as we predicted, the new Catalan coalition has united behind the demand for an independence referendum that Madrid says is illegal.

Notice that Catalonia has not been independent of Castille since 1516, and lost its right to its own laws in 1716.  This voluntary union is considerably older than the federal Union violently imposed upon the southern States by Washington in 1865; the US union is younger, shakier, and much more morally suspect than the Castillan-Catalonian one.

Of course the government in Madrid says Catalonian self-determination is illegal.  Those who rule without the consent of the people always say self-determination is illegal; like the great dictator Abraham Lincoln, they will say anything in order to prevent those over whom they wish to rule from gaining their freedom.