Tag: history

Mailvox: the disqualification game

Stuck in the 1990s, Truth seems to think that successfully tarring someone with “raciss” is still a form of effective disqualification as he attempts to convince Tom Kratman to denounce me for my crimes of BadThink:

And how about if the claim of “ignorant half-savage” is based on
Vox’s tribe-to-society ratio or whatever it is he calls it? Would you
consider that genetic and therefore racist? Because as I recall, he
professes that blacks haven’t had enough time to adapt from savage to
social, generationally speaking. Which, is to say, he believes savagery
runs too thick in their genes. Would you consider that racist Mr.
Kratman?

I feel like your character is a higher quality than that. Of course, I have only the slightest evidence for that feeling. But I’d like it to be true. I’d love to be able to read a local sci-fi author who’s published through a major outlet. The only other I know of in this area code is Rod Belcher and I enjoyed his work. I’d probably enjoy yours. I’m just not one of those folks who can separate art and artist.

Disqualify… disqualify… disqualify. I find it amusing that Truth appears to think Tom
is sufficiently naive to fall for the rabbiting. But neither Tom nor I care what a Random Internet Rabbit defines as “racist”. By Truth’s lights, Tom is already disqualified because he admitted to being scientifically literate about genetic science.

Truth then addressed me:

I notice Mr. Kratman didn’t include, “calling black people ignorant half-savages is not racist.” What say you, Vox? Cultural or genetic marker? In the past you’ve said genetic. If not, correct me.

I will first ask a question of my own, which Truth will answer if he wishes to participate in the discussion: Truth, do you assert that there is not a single black individual in the U.S.A. who is an ignorant half-savage?

Now, in answer to Truth’s question, and contra Tom’s position, my observation is that you cannot possibly separate culture and genetics. It is logical to conclude, and it has been repeatedly observed, that cultural differences are derived from genetics. A society with an average 85 IQ will inevitably feature a very different culture than a society with an average 115 IQ. Among other things, the lower IQ culture will have shorter time preferences and its social mores will feature less consideration of the logical consequences of an individual’s actions. This is why secular progressives tend to equate intelligence with higher forms of civilization.

But it is also logical to conclude, and it has been also been observed, that genetic differences are derived from culture. A society where women have children at an average age of 18 will have genetically superior children to those produced in a society in which women have children at an average age of 35. Even something as purely cultural as the average number of children a woman bears will have tremendous genetic implications; there is reason to believe that some of the differences between r/selected and K/selected are genetic, and those genetic differences are, in part, derived from the culture that produces them.

(It must be made clear that this is NOT related to TENS in any way. We’re not dealing with the differences between species here, but intra-species differences for the most part and partial sub-species differences at most. Nor is most of the selection naturally imposed.)

In any event, the trivial thinkers who look at my time-to-civilization hypothesis and focus on its racial implications aren’t seeing its true scope, much less grasping the potential horror of it. The much more serious aspect of the hypothesis is its implication that civilization is the consequence of a centuries-long eugenic program that eventually, and inevitably, transforms itself into a dysgenic program. If the hypothesis holds, this would not only explode, once and for all, the secular conceit of linear progress, but would provide an elegant explanation for the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations as well as the observed inability of Africans to collectively reach a self-sustainable civilized standard despite the best efforts of well-intentioned individuals of various races for more than 150 years.

And if the fact that I occasionally contemplate such things offends you to the point that you don’t wish to read anything that I write or edit or publish, well, that leads to the obvious question: what in the name of the 1,200 sister-wives of Shaka Zulu are you doing here? Especially in light of Truth’s self-admitted anti-intellectual outlook:

I can deal with the economics, military policies, and other right wing stuff, but dismissing an entire race of humans as ignorant half-savages is beyond my threshold. The history of such thought has given rise to countless atrocities.

First, Truth’s personal thresholds do not dictate objective reality. The only thing that matters is if the observation is true or not. In this particular case, there is a considerable quantity of evidence supporting both the singular example provided, as well as the current state of civilizational progress of the human sub-species concerned. Second, we are discussing the collective mean here. In any group with more than two individuals there will obviously be those who exceed the mean, but that is totally irrelevant in this context.

As for the appeal to historical atrocity, has it never occurred to Truth that it is reality that dictated those atrocities and not the mere observation of the reality? He is assigning causal value to a consequence. If the savage behavior of a group of savages leads another group to wipe them out, it is not the second group’s belief that the first group was savage that was the causal factor, but rather, the fact that first group was a) savage, and b) aggressive.

To give one example, Julius Caesar would never have killed one million Gauls and enslaved another million had Gaius Marius not been forced to defend Rome from repeated invasions from the north 50 years prior.

Dead Horse: the conclusive beating

Longtime Ilk will recall that once upon a time, in 2004, a lengthy debate was inspired by a book written by Me-So-Michelle that insisted the WWII-era internment of Japanese-Americans was justified on the basis of legitimate military fears of an invasion of America’s West Coast in early 1942. I took extreme exception to that ludicrous attempt to justify internment, knowing that the argument was complete nonsense, and demonstrated that Malkin hadn’t done even a modicum of military research given her incorrect count of US carriers and inability to correctly interpret the significance of US carrier movements in early 1942.

This did not prevent a number of Malkin fans from attempting to defend the woman, mostly on the sophisticated grounds of “yeah, but, how can you REALLY know, for, like, you know, sure?”

As it happens, the recently released gray book of Admiral Chester Nimitz, published by the American Naval Records Society, not only makes for fascinating reading, but conclusively settles the matter of the US military’s historical concerns regarding a potential invasion of the American West Coast in 1942. These are the verbatim words of the US Navy’s assessment of the situation in January 1942, quoted from Volume 1 of the briefings for the USN Commander in Chief, United States Pacific Fleet (CINCPACFLT). There is considerably more information than this available, but I have only transcribed that which is directly relevant to the subject at hand.

January 8, 1942
EMPLOYMENT OF CARRIER TASK FORCES IN JANUARY

ENEMY SITUATION
From the best intelligence we have, it appears that:

  1. The Far East offensives are occupying practically all of the amphibious forces of the enemy plus 3 or 4 carriers, 2 BB’s, about 13 cruisers, about one-third of his destroyers, some submarines and many auxiliary types. How long these forces will be needed in the Far East is problematical but it is believed that the end of January will see them there.
  2. Since the raid on the 7th, all First Fleet units and carriers have apparently remained west of the Eastern Marshalls.
  3. Carrier groups are being refitted or exchanged.

ENEMY INTENTION

In other estimates the enemy’s intentions in general order of priority have been deduced as follows:

a) The prosecution of the offensives in the Far East until all of Malaya, Philippines and NEI have been captured. In this will probably be included Rangoon.
b) Consolidation of this territory.
c) Advance upon Australia.

    While these are going on:

d) Continued submarine raids on our forces and communications, minor attacks against outlying islands and Alaska.
e) Cruiser raids against the routes to Australia, and possibly to the Mainland.
f) Capture Samoa.
g) Capture Canton. [Canton Island (Kiribati)]
i) Capture Java.
J) Attack with strong forces, including carriers, for demolition Johnston, Palmyra, Midway.
k) Sweeps in force along our communications to outlying islands; along our route to Mainland.
l) Carrier raids on West Coast.
m) Attacks for capture of Midway, Palmyra; main Hawaiian Islands; Oahu.

One of the basic questions facing us is: Is the close cover of Oahu necessary at this time? Taking in combination the present state of its defenses and our deductions as to enemy intentions, the answer is “no”.

In other words, the admiral commanding all the US military forces in the Pacific had absolutely no fear of a West Coast invasion, knew perfectly well that the limited Japanese transport capacity was committed elsewhere, and even went so far to conclude that the risk of a Hawaiian invasion was so low that it was not necessary to closely defend Hawaii, let alone California. Not only were Japanese naval forces fully engaged in the Far East, but their anticipated next move was in precisely the opposite direction from the West Coast!

As for the prospective carrier raids, I addressed the logistical aspects of them back in 2004 and showed that no amount of carrier raids could have even slowed down the American production of war materials, much less “cripple the war effort”, as evidenced by the INCREASE in German manufacture under heavier and more regular bombing than the sort permitted by carrier raids.

The lesson, as before, is this: Michelle Malkin is an ignorant media whore with risible intellectual pretensions. To the best of my knowledge, she has never come out and admitted that she was wrong, nor has she publicly disavowed the ridiculous argument she presented in her book In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror.

Mailvox: A brief history of the Reconquista

In which Toni corrects me concerning my observations concerning the Reconquista of Spain and the current invasion of European America:

You mention the Islamic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 AD. You say: “Consider how small, in comparison to the present number of invaders, the earlier immigration was,” after mentioning a force of no more than 15,000 men.

Of course, those populations were smaller. But it was not a one-time event and that number greatly underestimates the whole inflow. The Muslims sent wave after wave against the peninsula.  You also mention that “the people invaded at the time also did not realize it was an invasion that was taking place around them”. That’s not exactly the case. In a way, it’s worse than that.

In 711 AD, the peninsula was under Visigoth rule. Even before the Western Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, several Germanic tribes had invaded the peninsula (Suebi, Vandals, etc). Eventually, around 410 AD, one of these, the Visigoths (the Western Goths), managed to retain the control of the territory. Rome actually encouraged the Visigoths to pacify the peninsula against the other Germanic tribes.

But the Visigoths were a foreign minority (not more than 200,000) ruling over a larger and already diverse population. A demoralized and tired population that had recently gone through the fall of ‘their’ Empire (a few Roman emperors were actually from Hispania) and through successive invasions.

The Visigoth ruling elite was plagued by constant infighting. They had an elective monarchy and in late 710 AD they elected Rodrigo as their king. However, some Visigoth noblemen chose to side with Agila II instead. Agila II did effectively rule the Visigoth provinces of Iberia and Septimania, that is, the former Roman provinces of Tarraconense and Narbonense (northeastern Spain and southern France). Rodrigo ruled from Toledo, the Visigoth capital in the center of the peninsula.

The pro-Agila II faction sent envoys to North Africa to get military support in their fight against Rodrigo. In early 711 AD, Arab, Syrian, and Berber mercenaries crossed the Straits of Gibraltar from Africa to fight for Agila II. These Muslim forces broke their agreement with Agila II and decided to stay in the peninsula.

It is not that the locals couldn’t tell the difference between trading ships and an invading army (one has to admire Muslim historiography). It’s that the invading army was originally fighting for one of the ruling factions. And most importantly, all ruling factions were made up of foreigners anyway. So:

  1. The locals had little to no attachment to their leaders.
  2. The leaders were too busy fighting among themselves to care for the people (they were not their people after all).
  3. The invaders were disloyal to the “king” that had hired them—a king who had been disloyal to his own rightful king. Compare this to the Roman attitude “Rome does not pay traitors who kill their chief”.

About the size of the invasion:

The Muslim invasion received wave after wave of new blood both from Africa and Arabia. It usually went like this: some new Muslim leader appeared in North Africa advocating a purer observance of Islamic law. They set their eyes on Al-Andalus (the Muslim invaded Iberian Peninsula, present-day Spain and Portugal), a land of wealth, were the Muslim leaders often lived in decadence, corruption, and infighting in a soup of racial tensions between Arabs and Africans. The new sect got plenty of followers in North Africa and easily overthrew the Muslim elite in Al-Andalus, only to repeat the cycle… The newcomers were always numerous and ready to fight and far more fanatical.

In 1162, for instance, Abd-al-Mumin launched a new campaign from Africa to purify Al-Andalus and fight the Christians. Ibn Abi Zar says there were “300,000 horsemen, 80,000 volunteers, and 100,000 infantrymen.” In 1184, Abu Yakub Yusuf also crossed the Straits attempting to attack Lisbon with 100,000 men. In 1195, Yusuf II crossed the Straits with 300,000 men (mostly Berbers and black slave foot soldiers, archers, and Arab horsemen) and marched towards Toledo, Alfonso VII tried to stop them with his heavy cavalry of 10,000 men while reinforcements from Leon and Navarra were on their way. (That’s just a sample of about one million ‘”immigrants”” in less than 40 years in a context of almost 800 years). Etc…

When the Muslims crossed the Pyrenees, the Franks led by Charles Martel very soon managed to stop them at the Battle of Poitiers in 733 AD. Then the Muslims had to abandon their goal of crushing the Christendom from the Western front and retreated back to the Iberian Peninsula. The Franks set a protectorate north and south of the Eastern Pyrenees, the Spanish March, in present-day Catalonia and southern France (roughly, what Agila II had controlled, and would later become the Crown of Aragon, one of the founding kingdoms of Spain). And ‘Europe’ forgot about the peninsula. Indeed the peninsula looked like a lost cause to the European Christians, as local Christians retained only a few microscopic kingdoms up north in the cold mountain ridges that used to be Celtic.

So Europe, unlike Africa and Arabia, did not send wave after wave of new blood. Only when the Spanish and Portuguese Christians had managed to reconquer a significant size of the territory did some fellow Europeans join the fight, in Almeria and Lisbon, for example, but never in the overwhelming numbers of the relentless Muslim tide.

By the way, it is because of these difficulties that feudal serfdom never took root in Spain and Portugal. (Medieval Europe and Feudalism are not synonyms). Most of the Reconquista was actually achieved by dirt poor free men who rode southward to retake the plains and the towns, founded free cities and charter cities, years ahead of the royal armies, the religious orders, and even the hidalgos, who were exempt from paying taxes and had a right to bear arms because they fought.

Three final notes,

  1. A recurring topic in the history of (and prelude to) the Reconquista is infighting (first among the Visigoths, and then among the Christians Kingdoms and in Muslim Taifas). This is commonly referred to in Spain as “Reinos de Taifas”. As soon as 740 AD, the Muslims in the peninsula were fighting among themselves. (The Musa you mention was condemned to death by his superiors for taking too much booty for himself, the death sentence was commuted, but eventually he was murdered in a mosque in Damascus anyway in 716. His son married Rodrigo’s widow, converted to Catholicism, and was also murdered, his head sent to Damascus. Musa’s lieutenant, Tarik ibn Ziyad —Gibraltar is named after him, Jabal Tarik, Mountain of Tarik—was also murdered by his own people.)
  2. In 1492, when the Reconquista was completed with the liberation of Granada, the plan was to take the fight all the way to Mecca and rid the world of Islam. But in that same year the very same kings who rode into Granada also funded an expedition that stumbled into a New World, and then Christians decided that Islam was not such a big deal after all and that there were more exciting adventures ahead.
  3. As late as 1756, the Spanish navy was still fighting off Muslim pirates raiding the coast, without much help from anyone as usual. A thousand years had passed since the invasion of 711 AD.  Fifty years after that, an American president refused to pay the ransom that the Muslim African pirates were demanding to free the enslaved American mariners. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War.

So there was a large native population being politically dominated by a small immigrant elite that encourages an invasion by a much larger group of immigrants that turns out to be disloyal to that elite. The historical analogy between 700s Spain and 2000s America may not be precise, but it is even more similar than the one I had previously drawn. In either case, it should be encouraging to traditional Americans to know that after 780 years of invasion and occupation, Spanish Christians were able to reconquer their own country.

The butter knife at the gun fight

While Tom Kratman doesn’t assert there are no atheists in foxholes, in the afterword of the Tuloriad, he expresses his doubts about the survival prospects of a culture that relies on putting large quantities of atheists on the front lines.

Where was Secular Humanism at Lepanto?
The moral of this story, this afterword, is “Never bring a knife to a gunfight.” Keep that in mind as you read.

In any case, religious fanatics? Us? We don’t think so.

We’re not going to sit here and lecture you on the value and validity of atheism versus faith. We’ll leave that to Hitchens and Dawkins or D’Souza or the pope or anyone else who cares to make the leap. One way or the other. Hearty shrugs, all around. A defense of the existence of God was never the purpose of the book, anyway, though we would be unsurprised to see any number of claims, after publication, that it is such a defense.

Sorry, it ain’t, either in defense of Revelations or in defense of Hitchens’ revelation that there was no God when Hitchens was nine years old. (Besides, Dinesh D’Souza does a much better job of thrashing Hitchens in public than we could, even if we cared to.)

Moreover, nope, we don’t think it’s unethical to be an atheist. We don’t think it’s impossible, or really any more difficult or unlikely, to be an atheist and still be a highly ethical human being. The same, sadly, cannot be said for governments. Thus, consider, say, the retail horrors of the Spanish Inquisition which, from 1481 to 1834 killed—shudder—not more than five thousand people, few or none of them atheists, and possibly closer to two thousand. Compare that to expressly atheistic regimes—the Soviet Union, for example, in which a thousand people a day, twenty-five hundred a day by Robert Conquest’s tally— were put to death in 1937 and ’38. And that’s not even counting starved Ukrainians by the millions. The death toll in Maoist China is said to have been much, much greater. Twenty million? Thirty million? A hundred million? Who knows?

Personally, we’d take our chances with the Inquisition before we would take them with a militantly communist, which is to say, atheist, regime. The Inquisition, after all, was a complete stranger neither to humanity nor to the concept of mercy.

But that’s still not the point of this book or this afterword. Go back to the afterword’s title. Ever heard of Lepanto? Everyone knows about the Three Hundred Spartans now, at least in some form or another, from the movies. Not enough people know about the battle of Lepanto….

Now let’s suppose, just for the moment and just arguendo, that God doesn’t exist, that He’s a pure figment of the imagination. What then won the battle of Lepanto? No, back off. What got the Christian fleet together even to fight the battle, for without getting together to fight it it could never have been won?

The answer is, of course, faith, the faith of the pope, Pius V, who did the political maneuvering and much of the financing, and also the faith of the kings, doges, nobles and perhaps especially the common folk who manned the fleet. And that answer does not depend on the validity of faith, only upon its sincere existence. Faith is, in short, a weapon, the gun you bring to a certain kind of gunfight.

If you’ve got any interest in the atheism/religion debate or military history, you simply must read the whole thing. And then reflect upon the likelihood that the West’s secular humanist culture will survive either the challenge of Islam in the Dar al Harb or the third world’s Christian revival.

The ahistorical atheist

Armarium Magnum explains why so many atheists are historically illiterate:

After 30+ years of observing and taking part in debates about history with many of my fellow atheists I can safely claim that most atheists are historically illiterate.  This is not particular to atheists:  they tend to be about as historically illiterate as most people, since historical illiteracy is pretty much the norm.   But it does mean that when most (not all) atheists comment about history or, worse, try to use history in debates about religion, they are usually doing so with a grasp of the subject that is stunted at about high school level.

This is hardly surprising, given that most people don’t study history past high school.  But it means their understanding of any given historical person, subject or event is (like that of most people), based on half-remembered school lessons, perhaps a TV documentary or two and popular culture: mainly novels and movies.  Which is why most atheists (like most people) have a grasp of history which is, to be brutally frank, largely crap.

Worse, this also means that most atheists (again, like most people) have a grasp of how history is studied and the techniques of historical analysis and synthesis which is also stunted at high school level – i.e. virtually non-existent.  With a few laudable exceptions, high school history teachers still tend to reduce history to facts and dates organised into themes or broad topics.  How we can know what happened in the past, with what degree of certitude we can know it and the techniques used to arrive at these conclusions are rarely more than touched on at this level.  This means that when the average atheist (yet again, like the average person generally) grasps that our knowledge of the past is not as cut and dried and clear as Mr Wilkins the history teacher gave us to understand, they tend to reject the whole thing as highly uncertain at best or subjective waffle at worst.  Or, as Grundy put it, as “crap”.

All this leads some atheists, who have fallen in to the fallacy of scientism and reject anything that can’t be definitively “proven”, to reject the idea of any degree of certainty about the past.  This is an extreme position and it’s rarely a consistent one.  As I’ve noted to some who have claimed this level of historical scepticism, I find it hard to believe they maintain this position when they read the newspaper, even though they should be just as sceptical about being able to know about a car accident yesterday as they are about knowing about a revolution 400 years ago.

This is something I, too, have noticed with regards to many atheists, beginning with Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins. It is obvious they don’t know any more about history than they do about theology; no one who knows anything about history believes religion causes war, thinks that the Spanish Inquisition was one of the most lethal institutions in human history, or finds the assumption that Jesus was not a legitimate historical figure to be a reasonable one.

However, I do have to take exception to this statement: “This rejection can be more pronounced in atheists, because
many (not all) come to their atheism via a study of science.“ This observably isn’t true. Armarium Magnum has the order reversed. The vast majority of atheists become atheists as teenagers, before they have embarked upon any course of study, and they become atheists for reasons that are entirely emotional by their own account. They then turn to science for the explanations that they can no longer seek in religion, and are understandably disappointed and embittered when they cannot find them there either.

The reason the rejection is often more pronounced in atheists is because they are observably less rational than most people who are interested in history. No one who does not believe in the existence of gods through a rational process can legitimately call himself an atheist, for the obvious reason that it is impossible to rationally prove the non-existence of gods. An agnostic’s lack of god belief may have a rational basis, an atheist’s non-belief never can. Their irrationality not only makes them unusually susceptible to swallowing falsehoods that thirty seconds on Wikipedia would render obvious, but makes it hard for them to give up their ahistorical dogma.

What’s worse is that I’ve also experienced
atheists who have been shown extensive, clear evidence that the medieval Church
taught the earth was round and that the myth of medieval Flat Earth belief was
invented by the novelist Washington Irving in 1828, and they have simply
refused to believe that the myth could be wrong.

Neat historical fables such as the ones about Christians
burning down the Great Library of Alexandria (they didn’t) or murdering Hypatia
because of their hatred of her learning and science (ditto) are appealing
parables.  Which means some atheists fight
tooth and nail to preserve them even when confronted with clear evidence that
they are pseudo historical fairy tales.  

And before anyone angrily denounces Armarium Magnum as another theistic polemicist cut out of the same godbothering cloth as me, perhaps it should be noted that the gentleman is himself an atheist. It’s a good piece and I even learned something. It’s more than a little amusing to be informed that belief in the medieval belief in a flat earth is intellectually akin to belief in the Headless Horseman. And that will certainly make for a useful rhetorical device.

The real death of Erwin Rommel

This first-person account
of the death of the brilliant German general illustrates why one should
never believe the Official Government-Approved Histories:

A
seven-page report [Dr Friedrich Breiderhoff] made to Cologne police on
July 22 1960 has now been found in the city’s archive in which he
details how he was threatened with pain of death by an S.S. man to lie
on Rommel’s death certificate.

Dr Breiderhoff was
brought from his post at the reserve military hospital at Ulm where he
was the chief physician. He was told to inspect a person in a car
outside by two senior army officers. He told police: ‘It was Herr
Rommel.  His hat and his marshall’s baton were lying to the right of his
upper body on the floor.

“Then a man in civilian dress
appeared and ordered me to begin resuscitation attempts and told me
that I must not tell the staff that he was dead. I made a direct cardiac
injection and then attempts at resuscitation with heart massage and
breathing exercises, as if the Field Marshall had drowned.  I felt
completely that Rommel was a dead man already. Then an S.S. man ordered
me to remove the vomit from his mouth and I found an empty cyanide
capsule in his throat covered with brown and yellow mucus. I was then
ordered that I had to put ‘heart attack’ on the death certificate on the
express orders of the High Command of the Armed Forces.”

Now,
I very much doubt that anyone still believes that Rommel died of
natural causes, but the point is that even when the factual information
is documented and in the possession of the government authorities, it
often fails to make its way out to the public.

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.