Tag: mailvox

Answers for MJ 3

It appears MJ is in dire need of some Stoic philosophy:

How exactly do you handle humanity? What I mean is this: when I get up in the morning I either find myself incredibly depressed because humanity is remarkably stupid and beyond hope, or I find myself incredibly hateful because humans are parasitic creatures, stupid, hopeless, hedonistic, narcissistic, and ungrateful among many other things. Or, on even worse days, I wonder if only I am the one being parasitic, stupid, narcissistic, etc. and I am simply projecting these internal characteristics on the world (as much as I don’t care for Freud and psychology in general, I think along these lines). I suppose these emotions stem from a weak faith. I would not be frightened, depressed, or hateful toward humanity if I had hope, faith, and trust in God. I am working on that. I just wondered if you had any other suggestions.

TL;DR: I roll my eyes and move on. This is not exactly an unusual feeling. About 1,900 years ago, a Roman emperor wrote the following:

“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody,
the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things
happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But
I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the
bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is
akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it
participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the
divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on
me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we
are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the
rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another, then, is
contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and
to turn away….


“Thou must now at last perceive of what universe thou art now a part, and of what administrator of the universe thy existence is an efflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return. Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice, and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts. And thou wilt give thyself relief if thou dost every act of thy life as if it were the last, laying aside all carelessness and passionate aversion from the commands of reason, and all hypocrisy, and self-love, and discontent with the portion which has been given to thee.”

Most people, being idiots, fail to understand the purpose of my regular resort to the acronym MPAI. It is not a reminder to hold others in contempt; it is a flaw in my character that I seldom need any such reminders. Rather, it is a reminder that most people do not think before speaking or acting and that one should therefore not take pointless offense at their thoughtless words and actions. It is a reminder that people are making decisions with differing amounts of information and differing cognitive capacities, and that it is foolish to expect people to respond to the same input factors in the same way that I would.

God is an ever-present reminder that we are not the center of the universe. We are natural and instinctive Ptolemaics; from birth we are inclined to believe that our awareness is the center of all Creation and that without us the universe does not exist. This is why pride is a root of so much evil and why humility is a virtue. Humility is the child’s acceptance of his true place in the grand scheme of things, and it is little wonder that so many minds cling to their foolish pride and flee from that awful reality.

The observable fact is that without God, humanity is without hope. That is why even the finest minds have never been able to do better than the ancient philosophers did in advising calm acceptance of the daily horror show combined with the firm resolution to make the most of what little time one has.

Answers for MJ 2

In which MJ asks about Platonism and Socrates:

I wanted to ask you about your view of Platonism. I have two acquaintances who are fellow classical language majors; they are both atheists (I view them as rather militant at times) and as far as I understand they became Platonists after having taken a Greek philosophy course. I was wondering how compatible atheism and Platonism are.

While I am convinced that the human mind is able to fuse even contradicting philosophies together to its liking, avoiding the inconsistency in the process, I am not so sure that they form a coherent pair. In particular, Platonism opens up the necessity of a non-material world of the Forms. While a non-material level of existence does not immediately imply the existence of god, I conjecture that the necessity of a non-material world does at least open up the possibility of the existence of god more greatly than atheists would like. After all, I ask, if a non-material realm of the Forms exists, what is preventing there from being a non-material realm of flying monkeys, or other nonsensical abstractions? I don’t believe Plato’s philosophy expressly and logically forbids the possibility of other non-material worlds.

While Occam’s razor could be invoked, the razor alone wouldn’t necessarily bring truth to the discussion. Plus, the razor could work against Plato’s world of the Forms if there were a simpler non-material realm available. I don’t particularly care for Plato or Socrates. They’re fun to read at times, but…well, I think you have similar sentiments. While definitions may be the beginning of wisdom, they can also be the seeds of deceit; Socrates takes advantage of that time and time again.

I am a nominal platonist in the sense that I believe in the supernatural realm but I am not a Platonist who subscribes to Plato’s various theories concerning that realm. Just to be clear, “platonism refers to “the philosophy that affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to “exist” in a “third realm distinct both from the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness, and is the opposite of nominalism”, which is either the assertion that everything that exists is a particular thing, or that everything that exists is concrete.

So, while it is technically possible for an atheist to be a platonist, at least in the case of a Christian atheist such as Scheisskopf from Catch-22 who does not believe in a very particular god with very specific attributes, it is extraordinarily unlikely. A platonist, by definition, believes in the supernatural, and it is absolutely impossible for a platonist to be a rational materialist, which is the spectacularly ill-named nominalist philosophy to which most atheists subscribe.

MJ’s two fellow students are no more platonists than they are giraffes, indeed, they demonstrate very beautifully the intellectual shallowness of the militant atheist as well as the truth of Chesterton’s quote concerning how those who do not believe in God will readily believe in anything, no matter how absurd.

As for definitions being the seeds of deceit, well, we have certainly seen that in the series on the Fifth Horseman. While I am a fan of utilizing the Socratic method, I believe it should be used honestly, to better open men’s eyes to the truth, not deviously in order to trap people into confessing falsehoods in which they do not believe. As I demonstrated in The Irrational Atheist, Socrates is not above cheating and moving the goalposts, taking his opponent’s agreement and applying it to something to which Socrates himself admits the other man did not agree.

I vastly prefer Aristotle to either Socrates or Plato. And Aristotle correctly identified “ambiguity” in definition as being one of the chief rhetorical tactics of the sophists. And indeed, we see that very ambiguity utilized on an almost daily basis by intellectually dishonest interlocutors here on this blog and elsewhere. The sophistical manual of the Street Epistemologist is nothing but one long exercise in rhetorical ambiguity.

Mailvox: Answers for MJ 1

This was a long letter from MJ, so I’ll have to address it in parts:

I am 21 years old and a student at a small Jesuit college in Ohio. I just recently came across your blog. To be precise it was introduced to me last spring–March, I believe. I wasn’t part of your regular traffic until October or so. Now I think hardly a day goes by that I don’t read what is stirring in your head. First, thank you both for your insights and your (at least I consider it) courage (maybe you consider it normalcy). To be brief, I grew up in a relatively conservative Roman Catholic household. However, as one who prefers to avoid confrontation, I rarely engage in debates about politics or religion. I’ll speak vehemently about such subjects with people with whom I agree. When it comes to others, I prefer to keep quiet or, if necessary, appease. I say this so that my thanks might be better placed. You have no desire to avoid or appease those whom you consider wrong. Your example is a great help.

Perhaps it was divinely ordained, but I had been reading through a handful of literature on science, atheism, and religion at around the same time that I grew fond of your blog (I didn’t read any Dawkins; I skimmed the first five chapters of Hitchens’s memoir; I gravitated toward Stenger’s God the Failed Hypothesis and Cunningham’s Decoding the Language of God)…. At the time I started this endeavor and even during the initial stages, I probably would have classified myself as an agnostic….

Now, I am not contacting you solely for the sake of encomium; I have a few things that I wish to ask. First, I remember reading some comments you had about the omnipotence, omniscience, etc. of God. You suggested replacing such attributes with ideas about tantipotence, tantiscience, etc. I prefer to think of my theology almost in terms of mathematics (just to note, my theology is incredibly uninformed. A current goal of mine is to become both more biblically literate and theologically literate. The downside of a Catholic upbringing!). I have never been a fan of the arguments of god’s nonexistence by means of syllogism (that is, God is A, but A leads to B, and B is inconsistent with well known fact C, so God is not A or something like that) since syllogisms of this sort seem to be equivalent to abusing and mutilating the dictionary. However, since these arguments are out there, I began to consider the following. I don’t wish to jeopardize God’s infinite nature.

However, pure omnipotence can cause logical problems (if we wish to impose some logical structure on God’s nature, something that I think objectionable). In your suggestion of tantipotence, you (I think) mentioned that to the human mind tantipotence would virtually appear to be omnipotence. To the human mind, there is no significant difference between a God who can do all and a God who can do nearly all things. My only qualm is that to the believer this might be an acceptable concession; but I would imagine that the non-believer would love to poke fun at the not-fully-all powerful God. I was wondering what you might think of this idea. In mathematics there are different gradations of infinity (I am sure you are aware). The set of integers has a cardinality of infinity, but this infinity is less than the infinity that is the cardinality of the set of real numbers. That is, there are more real numbers than integers even though both are technically infinite in extent. If we take omnipotence as the cardinality of the real numbers and tantipotence as the cardinality of the integers, then God still remains infinite even if “less so.”

My point is to ask your opinion about thinking about theology in terms of mathematics. To some degree I think that mathematics presents the universe (or multiverse, hyperverse, or whatever they are calling it now) with its own mind-body problem of dualism. How is it that mathematics, something so abstract, can interact with the physical world? (I suppose something similar could be said about language; how does an abstract concept such as language reflect, relate, and influence the material world?) I read your post today from Spengler’s Decline of the West. I am definitely going to look into that book. As a final point, I am awestruck at one of the most basic ideas in mathematics, continuity, and how continuity affects infinity. For example, I am still puzzled by how an infinitely long number line can be looped up into a circle of radius 1 through a simple compactification method….virtually allowing me to hold infinity in my hand! I am also intrigued that through a few simple lines a mathematician can prove a statement that can solve an infinite number of problems. I suppose it’s akin to what you write in The Irrational Atheist that a few lines of programming can generate the infinitely complex Serpinski Triangle.

In relation to the above, I encountered on Richard Dawkins’s website the classic argument that atheists make: if god is all-powerful and all-loving, then he should wish to stop and be able to stop evil. You know the rest. Just out of curiosity, does this argument presuppose that God operates on a kind of utilitarian moral code? After all, the alleviation of suffering is precisely Sam-Harrisian…er…I mean utilitarian. Not for a second do I imagine a utilitarian God! If, indeed, this argument presupposes such a God, it seems to me all the more reason to throw it out immediately! 

I’m glad that some people are finding my anti-anti-apologetics to be useful. I’m not going to pretend I don’t enjoy beating up on the intellectual cripples of evangelical atheism, as one agnostic described them, but there is a more serious aspect to the activity than my own personal amusement.

First, I think it is important to always keep in mind that whether it is theology, psychology, philosophy, or even history that we are contemplating, we see as though through a glass, darkly. Nothing we do, think, or say can jeopardize God’s nature, whatever it actually happens to be, from nonexistence to omnipotent omnipresence. We are not debating the truth, we are not even capable of perceiving the truth, we are merely debating our superficial observations and our momentary perceptions of the truth. The truth is out there, but it is grander and more complicated than we can possibly hope to comprehend.

In other words, don’t flatter yourself, sport. Neither God nor nature depend upon MJ’s opinion of them. Or mine.

So, the idea of shying away from an idea due to its potential effect on us or anyone else is fundamentally misguided. Anyone who attempts to make hay with regards to the imagined limits of a tantiscient and tantipotent God is doing nothing more than demonstrating himself to be a midwit and a fool. The analogy of the limits of the two infinite sets MJ mentions is a very good one; regardless of whether one is considering integers or real numbers, it is objectively stupid to claim that the number 100 is bigger than the upper limit of either set.

As for the idea that an all-powerful and all-loving God should wish to stop and be able to stop evil, to say nothing of the idea that the existence of evil therefore disproves the existence of such a god, well, that doesn’t even rise to the level of midwittery. One has to have a truly average mind and remain ignorant of basic Biblical knowledge to find either of those concepts even remotely convincing.

Imagine the Sisyphean hell that is the existence of a video game character, literally created to die over and over and over again. Does the misery of his existence prove that the video game developer does not exist? Of course not. Does it prove that the developer has any limits upon him that the video game character can observe? Of course not. Does it prove that the developer has any particular enmity for the character? Not at all.

Now, it does prove that the developer is not all-loving. But then, the Christian God is not all-loving. He plays favorites. He loves some and He is very specific about others for whom He harbors not only antipathy, but outright hatred. It is fine to attack the idea of an all-loving god, but it is a mistake to assume any such attack is even remotely relevant to the Christian religion.

The argument is stupid, ignorant, and while it can theoretically rest on a presumption of utilitarianism, more often it rests upon the clueless moral parasitism of the atheist who subscribes to it. It is ironic that the more foolish sort of atheist often attempts to disprove Christianity by an appeal to Christian morality, but then, as MJ has already discovered, we’re not dealing with intellectual giants here.

Mailvox: pressing for the kill

Revan put some of my arguments to the test and finds they are effective in practice:

Your posts have inspired me to start debating atheists and the early results are amusing to say the least…. In short, arguments presented on your blog were able to put them on their heels and quickly retreating toward rationalization mode.  The problem I’m having is being able to go in for the kill and expose their weakness for what it is. If you or any of the Ilk have suggestions on how I can improve then I would appreciate it.

I posed versions of three questions that I have read on your blog:

  1. What is the average rate of speciation?
  2. How many mutations, on average, are required per speciation?
  3. Even if it can be demonstrated that speciation has occurred then what is the evidence that the various mechanisms are sufficient enough to make a creator unnecessary?

The first response I received was a wall of talking points:

• All life shows a fundamental unity in the mechanisms of replication, heritability, catalysis, and metabolism.

• Common descent predicts a nested hierarchy pattern, or groups within groups. We see just such an arrangement in a unique, consistent, well-defined hierarchy, the so-called tree of life.

• Different lines of evidence give the same arrangement of the tree of life. We get essentially the same results whether we look at morphological, biochemical, or genetic traits.

• Fossil animals fit in the same tree of life. We find several cases of transitional forms in the fossil record.

• The fossils appear in a chronological order, showing change consistent with common descent over hundreds of millions of years and inconsistent with sudden creation.

• Many organisms show rudimentary, vestigial characters, such as sightless eyes or wings useless for flight.

• Atavisms sometimes occur. An atavism is the reappearance of a character present in a distant ancestor but lost in the organism’s immediate ancestors. We only see atavisms consistent with organisms’ evolutionary histories.

• Ontogeny (embryology and developmental biology) gives information about the historical pathway of an organism’s evolution. For example, as embryos whales and many snakes develop hind limbs that are reabsorbed before birth.

• The distribution of species is consistent with their evolutionary history. For example, marsupials are mostly limited to Australia, and the exceptions are explained by continental drift. Remote islands often have species groups that are highly diverse in habits and general appearance but closely related genetically. Squirrel diversity coincides with tectonic and sea level changes (Mercer and Roth 2003). Such consistency still holds when the distribution of fossil species is included.

• Evolution predicts that new structures are adapted from other structures that already exist, and thus similarity in structures should reflect evolutionary history rather than function. We see this frequently. For example, human hands, bat wings, horse legs, whale flippers, and mole forelimbs all have similar bone structure despite their different functions.

• The same principle applies on a molecular level. Humans share a large percentage of their genes, probably more than 70 percent, with a fruit fly or a nematode worm.

• When two organisms evolve the same function independently, different structures are often recruited. For example, wings of birds, bats, pterosaurs, and insects all have different structures. Gliding has been implemented in many additional ways. Again, this applies on a molecular level, too.

• The constraints of evolutionary history sometimes lead to suboptimal structures and functions. For example, the human throat and respiratory system make it impossible to breathe and swallow at the same time and make us susceptible to choking.

• Suboptimality appears also on the molecular level. For example, much DNA is nonfunctional.

• Some nonfunctional DNA, such as certain transposons, pseudogenes, and endogenous viruses, show a pattern of inheritance indicating common ancestry.

• Speciation has been observed.

• The day-to-day aspects of evolution — heritable genetic change, morphological variation and change, functional change, and natural selection — are seen to occur at rates consistent with common descent. Furthermore, the different lines of evidence are consistent; they all point to the same big picture. For example, evidence from gene duplications in the yeast genome shows that its ability to ferment glucose evolved about eighty million years ago. Fossil evidence shows that fermentable fruits became prominent about the same time. Genetic evidence for major change around that time also is found in fruiting plants and fruit flies. The evidence is extensive and consistent, and it points unambiguously to evolution, including common descent, change over time, and adaptation influenced by natural selection. It would be preposterous to refer to these as anything other than facts.

When I pressed them to answer the first question I got this:

That’s impossible to quantify. Mutations are random and we cannot predict exactly how the environment will determine which mutations survive and which will not. Those kind of predictions in evolution are like meteorologists trying to predict the weather next year. Both evolution and the weather are chaos systems.

I’ll leave it up to the Dread Ilk to indicate how Revan can best press for the kill once it has become apparent that the advocates of evolution by natural selection have no ability to quantify the very processes they claim to be incontrovertible fact. But rest assured there are several effective lines of attack. The key is to not permit them to do what they will almost always try to do, which is to change the subject away from the specific matter at hand.

Remember, concepts which cannot be quantified may exist, but they cannot be reasonably described as either mathematic or scientific except as axioms or hypotheses.

Mailvox: on the distribution of atheist intelligence

Kaneadvice fails to recognize how sampling bias will tend to skew the statistical results:

Every commenter who knows how to use the GSS has been able to disprove the claim of atheist over-representation among the low-IQ population…. Why did Vox fail to conduct an accurate analysis? Was it primarily a cognitive or emotional failing?

Either way, I suspect Vox is smart enough to know he is wrong. Even if his emotions are driving him to go through rationalization gymnastics to justify his faith in theist superiority, the part of his brain that is still thinking logically knows that he has been proven wrong.

I am not wrong. The claim of atheist over-representation among the low-IQ population has not been disproved at all. As it happens, there is absolutely no contradiction between the chart I posted and the charts posted by those who have failed to understand it or recreate it. I charted apples, they charted oranges. It’s actually rather funny that they have had such a difficult time recreating my charts, considering that not only the data, but the second chart I posted, was literally right in front of their eyes. But let’s see if any of you can spot the obvious source of the problem with their critique of my intelligence distribution charts.

What we have here on the left is a normal intelligence distribution chart. I didn’t create it, I didn’t cherry-pick it, and it is literally the first chart to appear when searching “intelligence distribution chart on Google. It’s a standard bell curve.

Now let’s look at the chart on the right, which was produced by indpndnt, who couldn’t recreate the results of my charts despite putting considerable effort into it. What is the obvious difference between these two charts? They both peak at 100, but both lines on indpndnt’s chart clearly overweight the right side at the expense of the left side, especially in the case of the blue God=1 line, which represents the “I don’t believe God exists” answer. Why does it do so? The answer is very simple. I’ll give you one guess.

Can’t figure it out? The answer is that the GSS results are heavily biased towards high intelligence responders. Of the 9,920.5 responses tabulated with the default weighting, 420.8 were in the highest category and only 169.3 were in the lowest. This is not consistent with what we know of intelligence distribution in the general populace. Neither indpndnt nor Daniel Haas noticed this high-IQ bias nor took it into account, and so their results are naturally skewed by it. The consequence is that the legitimately higher percentage of atheists in the highest-IQ category creates an exaggerated effect when the comparison is made to the total number of respondents rather than as a percentage of distinct IQ categories. This is not to charge them with being intellectually dishonest, however, as it is apparent that they simply failed to observe a problem with the dataset. They are not superintelligences, after all.

Even if we simply chart all 9,920.5 responses without regard for religious belief and we exclude the 65- category because there is no corresponding 135+ category, the high IQ bias of the GSS bell curve is apparent. At (114-86) it is +12 percent, at (121-79) it is +40 percent, and at (128-72) it is +28 percent. There are 300 excess 121+ respondents, 13 more than there are total atheist respondents.

Given this statistically significant sampling bias towards respondents of higher intelligence, it should be obvious that the only legitimate way to calculate the intelligent distributions is to utilize the percentage of respondents within each separate category. That is exactly what I did: 8.5 percent of 169 respondents is manifestly a higher percentage than 6.4 percent of 420.8 respondents. All the critics have managed to show here is that 27 is more than 14.4, which is true, but also happens to be irrelevant. The claim stands.

As for the difficulty they had recreating my charts, I will simply show a screen capture of the chart produced by the very GSS site at Berkeley from which I took the data. This is the original chart with the zero column removed for the sake of clarity.

And below is the exact same chart with the non-atheist categories grayed-out and my Calc chart superimposed on top of it. Look familiar? The only difference is one of scale; my X-axis maximum was 7 percent compared to 100 percent for the GSS chart. Given the observed nature of the GSS bias towards higher IQ respondents, the use of percentages rather than numerical totals is more likely to be a statistically credible method than the one utilized by the critics.

Mailvox: the distribution of atheist intelligence

As some of you have probably noted by now, I am not inclined to suffer fools gladly. And the fools I am least inclined to suffer are those who are prone to smugly offer erroneous corrections. Now, I have repeatedly pointed out that the small average atheist IQ advantage is small in comparison with the much larger number of highly intelligent theists and that most atheists have sub-100 IQs. These are all facts, easily verified by examining the GSS datafile.

Nevertheless, this did not prevent CLK from leaping in and attempting to correct me:

Now the unknown here is what is the data that you got #1 from —and
what does the distributions look like. The only way your statement #3
could possibly correct is if the two distributions are shaped
differently and the atheist one is much wider and shewed severely to a
low IQ .. which would seem very very unlikely… Its likely that
variance of the distribution of intellegence of theists will match the
general population variance and that the distribution of the atheists
will be in fact a subset of the theists….I do apologize for getting in the middle of the private conversation …
and for being right.. I will try to be less right in the future. 🙂

To which all the response needed is this graphic, taken from the latest 2012 General Social Survey and combined with the WORDSUM/IQ conversion table calculated by the estimable Aoli Pera. There is the explanation for the nonexistent dichotomy that CLK identified. The distributions are not only dissimilar, they are very nearly opposites. And note that as I predicted, the peak number of theists is precisely at 100 IQ.

As you can see, the two most common types of atheists are the High Church atheists with +2SD IQs (128+) and Low Church atheists with -2SD IQs (65-72). Note that the Low Church atheists actually outnumber the High Church atheists, 22.9 to 17.2 percent. This will surprise no one who has read TIA; as I noted there, we can observe a similar phenomenon at work in the Democratic Party membership.

Now, the statistically naive might look at this chart, note that the +2SD theists only account for 3.5 percent of the theistic population, and assume that this means there are more highly intelligent atheists than highly intelligent theists. This is not the case. As it happens, there are 11.4x more +2SD theists who either know God exists or believe God exists despite having the occasional doubt than there are +2SD atheists who don’t believe God exists.

The bad news for theists is that the overall number of those who know that God exists has declined from 63.8 to 62.6 percent from 2008. However, the number of those who believe, but are less certain has stayed the same. Interestingly enough, the increase in the agnostics (no way to know) and the spiritualists (higher power), has outpaced the increase in the number of atheists, with the spiritualists gaining the most, increasing from 8.1 percent of the populace to 8.8 percent. I’m not sure that’s quite what the anti-woo campaigners had in mind. Regardless, the chart below should put into perspective how mostly irrelevant atheists are to the population at large as it shows the percentage of atheists at the 10 different IQ levels in comparison to the most fervent categories of believers.

My guess is that most of the atheist trolls we see here from time to time are in the midwitted 114-121 category. In any event, I would think that most commenters here would understand by now that I don’t write anything here without having some evidential basis for it. I’m not saying that I’m always right, because that’s not the case. But I am saying that if you detect an apparent contradiction in what I’ve written, it would probably be a good idea to verify your assumptions before leaping in to correct me.

UPDATE: This amused me while playing around with the GSS. Of the dumbest strata of college graduates, nearly half, 46 percent, are atheists. That’s twice as many as all types of theists combined. We finally have an explanation for the Richard Dawkins fans.

Mailvox: shut up, he explained

The Great Martini doesn’t permit his complete unfamiliarity with Sextus Empiricus get in the way of his expressing a demonstrably incorrect opinion about Boghossian’s clear-cut violation of Sextus’s Sceptical teaching of “suspension of judgment”:

He hasn’t seemed to run afoul of this yet — I just started reading the
Kindle version. Sextus advised suspended judgement but didn’t preclude
the assertion of claims, that seems to be how his skeptical philosophy
would be conducted. As far as I’ve gotten, Bog affirms Dawkins’ 1-7
level of belief, that Dawkins only claimed a 6, and that the definition
of “atheist” he wants to use is a person who doesn’t believe there is
enough evidence to confirm the existence of God. I’m sure he’s not
going to spend the entire book holding to strict suspension of judgement
(I mean the entire purpose of the book is to weaken the societal
influence of religion, which implies a judgement), but at least he seems
to be aligning himself with the skeptical stance from the beginning.

This is completely and utterly wrong. Boghossian has done nothing of the sort. Do you want to know why I am so openly contemptuous of so many people who are fairly intelligent and sound more or less reasonable? Do you want to know why I am inspired to describe myself as a superintelligence? The reason is that it often feels as if I am the only intelligent individual who writes these days who ever bothers to take five minutes to actually read the bloody material upon which I am intending to opine. I don’t know if it was TGM’s intent to defend Boghossian or if he simply happened to miss the obvious, but either way, it is readily apparent that he doesn’t know anything about the Scepticism of Sextus Empiricus.

Scepticism does not mean “I am dubious about X.” It does not mean “I am going to convince you that X is better than Y”. It does not mean “I will only believe X if there is sufficient evidence to justify it”. It means: “I have no opinion about either X or Y, and if you assert that X is better, I will argue that Y is better in order to produce a contradiction of equal weight and thereby allow me to suspend my judgment.” What virtually no one who talks about skepticism seems to understand is that for the Sceptic, suspension of judgment is not the method or the initial approach, it is the objective. If Boghossian was a genuine Sceptic, he would have presented an argument for the primacy of faith over reason to his atheist audience.

TGM is disputing this: “ Boghossian’s very stated purpose is in direct and explicit
opposition to everything Sextus Empiricus advises, beginning with
“suspension of judgment”.”

In the fourth sentence of Chapter One, Boghossian explains his purpose:  “The goal of this book is to… help [the faithful] abandon their faith and embrace reason.”

So, already we know that the Fifth Horseman clearly has an opinion on at least two things. Faith is bad by nature. Reason is good by nature. That this is a correct summary of his opinions on the two matters is confirmed repeatedly throughout the book. Now let us turn to Sextus Empiricus and the Outlines of Pyrrhonism.

Sextus: “He who is of the opinion that anything is either good or bad by nature is always troubled…. But he who is undecided, on the contrary, regarding things that are good and bad by nature, neither seeks nor avoids anything eagerly, is therefore in a state of tranquility of soul…. The Sceptic… rejects the opinion that anything is in itself bad by nature. Therefore we say that the aim of the Sceptic is imperturbability in matters of opinion.”

Boghossian reveals his clear-cut opinions concerning faith being bad by nature and reason being good by nature. He is not even remotely imperturbable with regards to either matter of opinion. Therefore he is not only troubled, but his very stated purpose is in direct and explicit opposition to the heart of what Sextus Empiricus teaches. Which is exactly what I stated in the first place. Boghossian can’t possibly be said to be “aligning himself with the skeptical stance from the beginning”, not when he is expressly violating the very aim of the Sceptic.

And, in doing so, the Fifth Horseman shows himself to be a fraud, given his risible attempt to claim the intellectual mantle of Sextus Empiricus. As it happens, I very much doubt that Boghossian has ever read anything Sextus wrote that isn’t on Wikipedia.

DH had a much more informed take on Boghossian’s little book:

This has all the hallmarks of petty atheism which has as its main feature a
stunning lack of scholarship and education. One of the main
attractions of the RC church is that despite all the many faults, and
theological questions I may have, the long and ancient history of
scholarship remains unbroken. Whatever you think of any given Pope,
it’s unlikely that anything he ever wrote would be so filled with rote
unverifiable garbage.

Oh, we haven’t even gotten to the juvenile, self-serving definitions of terms such as “faith”, “hope” and “atheist” yet. It is a stunningly dishonest little book and is unlikely to impress anyone with an IQ over +1SD who reads it with an open or critical mind.

Mailvox: frying the pig

Not content with the crashing and burning of his political wise man act, Porky dives into the boiling oil again:

Porky: I’m not surprised that the libertarians here are falling over themselves
to praise the leftist for coming up with a hi-tech version of the Jew
badge. Funny how they hate the NSA for creating dossiers on citizens
minding their own business, but they drool like Pavlov’s dog at the
thought of being able to have a dossier on any complete stranger. As I’ve said previously, libertarians are the pupal stage of authoritarians.

VD: As we’ve all observed previously, you’re an idiot.

 Porky: Yet here you and the ilk are… giddily peeing your pants at the thought of spying on some stranger’s magazine subscriptions. ie:
Josh, who never lets me forget that libertarians “just want to be left
alone” yet salivates over the idea of an internet dossier on private
citizens.

What Porky is clearly failing to take into account is that the system DH is creating is actually a technological recreation of the virtual one that is already in place in the government, in the universities, and in the big corporations.

All of the blackballing and stigmatizing goes only one way. The Left forcibly keeps those of the Right out of its organizations and institutions while the Right blithely permits leftists to infiltrate and suborn those that remain to it. The Right doesn’t realize this, in part because it keeps creating new ones, then losing control of them within a generation or two. Or sometimes, as in the case of Facebook, within a few weeks.

Opposing the idea that small private companies should have the same ability to defend themselves from infiltration by their political enemies that the giant left-leaning institutions do is little different than advocating gun control for the people while the government and police remain armed.

The Right has very little to fear from the proposed service. Everyone who is even remotely outspoken is already banned from employment with many, perhaps even the majority of existing companies in America. The persecution is real, even though it is passive, reactive, and remarkably gentle in historical terms. Keep in mind that I have not only been expelled from the SFWA for a single tweet, (an infraction of the sort committed by no less than 60 other current members), but I have experienced contractors told by major NGO’s that they would lose their contracts if they continued to work with me. The Left is playing hardball while the Right isn’t even aware that the game has begun.

So, like the Jews of the European ghettos, we of the traditionalist Right have no choice but to work with each other since no one else wants us around. We have no choice but to work harder, to work smarter, and to make ourselves more valuable than those who persecute us. And we can do that, because working harder and smarter has always been our strength; we are the builders. But how can the ants hope to build up new institutions if the moment they begin to succeed, their organizations are infiltrated and co-opted by the grasshoppers who are opposed to everything they believe?

We need to know that the prospective employee is a self-appointed activist who boasts of having no morals and a predilection for attacking those with whom he disagrees. Pajamaboy is hardly going to bring that up when he’s applying for a job now, is he? We need to know that the girl trying to sell us computers is a fire-breathing Jezebelle who believes all sex is rape. We need to know that the professed libertarian is heavily partial to left-wing entertainment. We need to know that the student applying for seminary is a radical homosexual whose primary interest in the priesthood is access to altar boys.

Above all, we have to bypass the corporate gatekeepers and take our case directly to the people. We have to become the very populists they fear. They will call us names, they will call us Nazis, they will call us fascists, they will call us a hundred other names that don’t reasonably apply to us. That doesn’t matter, because we have two things on our side that will always triumph over their vast edifice of temporal power: our faith in God and our acknowledgement for objective Reality.

As always, Porky is arguing in favor of despair, surrender, and unilateral disarming on the part of the Right. Perhaps this is because he is short-sighted, perhaps this is because he is an agent provocateur, or perhaps he is simply an idiot. It doesn’t really matter, all that matters is that he is wrong.

DH explains:

I see this as exactly what VD is talking about. I can work really well with libertarians. I can work really well with populists. But I can’t work well with GOP true believers. If you spend your working day listening to Shawn Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and thinking they are the greatest thing ever, it’s over. We are not going to work well unless it is quite literally a work-for-hire remote employee contracted position. Same thing with Glenn Beck. If you are real Glenn Beck believer, it’s probably not going to work out. I certainly can’t have you interacting with my clients and risking going into hysterics about whatever he was talking about the radio today. Oddly, almost the same thing is true of Rachael Maddow fans. If you are an activist liberal firebrand it’s probably not going to work out. In the real world Obama is a failure and everyone knows it. I can’t have you representing to the world otherwise. And what’s a good way to find this out? If I know you’ve posted 8,000 messages to TheBlaze.com, or Glenn Beck’s forums, if you’ve re-tweeted Rachael Maddow 500 times, those are great indicators you won’t fit in.

How, precisely, can anyone reasonably argue with that? Conversely, if you are a true blue Real American in the Hannity sense, do you really want to be dependent upon the Maddow retweeter? Those of us whose views are already public have nothing to fear from this sort of thing because we already deal with it on a daily basis. Seeing the playing field leveled and applied to everyone on both sides hardly seems unfair.

Mailvox: The Fahrenheit Registry

Anang laments his inability to continue supporting authors who are his political enemies: 

As an author you
obviously want your works reaching the widest possible audience without
sacrificing your own creative vision. At the same time, I believe an
author’s ideology, his Weltanschauung is
reflected in his works. I’m a new and proud male American citizen. Why
should I pay my good money to read or watch something that ignores and
insults my gender, my politics or the things that made me want to be an
American?

 It’s
a little sad actually, having discovered I think this way. It means I
can never enjoy some of the most creative artists currently living. I
threw away my collection of Naomi Novik’s fantasy books after I realized
she was a local party volunteer for John Kerry’s 2004 election. All her
meticulous research into creating an alternate, fantastical history of
the Napoleonic Wars was just to insert leftist ideology and harp on
social justice/race theory/gender inequality.

It’s
a very lonely feeling, to know you are cut off from nearly every work
of popular entertainment and art if you wish to avoid propaganda-filled attacks on your existence. I suppose that is why most men watch
sports.

I knew Novik’s books fell completely apart upon the visit to Australia, (never managed to finish that one), but I didn’t realize there was a sound political reason for it. I think Anang forgets that there are actually many excellent writers who support and sustain the Western intellectual tradition; the fact that they have been exiled by the Left’s gatekeepers doesn’t mean their works don’t exist or can’t be found. In fact, increasing the exposure and awareness of Blue SF/F writers is one of my objectives in the coming year.

Perhaps it would be helpful to maintain a political registry of SF/F writers so we can permit those who don’t wish to financially support their enemies to avoid doing so. This doesn’t mean one has to avoid reading them entirely, of course, as The Pirate Bay, LibGen, and other sites have far more books that one can hope to read in a lifetime. For example, here is LibGen’s list of the current SFWA president Steven Gould’s books, in the unlikely event that anyone feels any pressing need to read them. As an added bonus, I can tell you that the SFWA absolutely hates and fears those sites; the idea that people can download their books for free seems to bother them considerably more than simply being ignored.

Never mind that there is no evidence indicating that pirated books actually harm an author’s book sales. As I’ve noted, about one in five free Amazon downloads turns into a purchase of A Throne of Bones, which is why I’d love to give away more than the 21,760 copies that were downloaded in 2013.

My thought is that one can rate an author in terms of “noviks”, in honor of Anang’s epiphany.  10 noviks would indicate an author that conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, and traditionalists should avoid at all costs on the basis of his anti-civilizational beliefs and activities. On the other side, 10 “kratmans” would indicate a staunch defender of Western civilization. Here are a few suggestions for the scale:

Naomi Novik: 5 noviks
China Mieville: 9 noviks
Charles Stross: 7 noviks
Larry Corriea: 8 kratmans
JRR Tolkien: 10 kratmans

I leave it to the rest of you to provide the ratings. I shall merely post them as they are added.

Mailvox: the Flat Gene Society

Physphilmusic inadvertently reveals the inner fascist that lurks within most cultural liberals:

I guess that is the root of our disagreement. It’s not that I don’t think genetics plays a significant role (although concerning exactly how much I probably disagree with you), it’s that if I adopted your strategy, I see no reason to stop at merely discriminating against blacks. Why not eugenics altogether? Your concern about genetics logically leads to this. You advocate measures which are effectively indirect, long-term forms of eugenics. But if you have no qualms about hurting a few people’s feelings, why stop there? Why not support the sterilization of people below certain IQ levels?

A focus on feelings is a reliable hallmark of those with no moral core at their center. The idea that opposing forced desegregation is necessarily indicative of hatred, much less a secret desire for genocide, is not only irrational, but exposes the ravenous, immoral beast at the heart of modern left-liberalism.

Observe the twisted left-liberal logic. First, there is the determination to deny reality. The genetic differences between the various human population groups either exist or not. The intellectual and behavioral limits imposed by those genetic differences either exist or not. And while for the last 50 years it has been de rigueur to claim that there are no genetic differences between various population groups, or that any differences are meaningless, advances in human genetics mean that is now the genetic equivalent of belonging to the Flat Earth Society.

Second, there is the illogical claim that recognizing those genetically imposed limits between various groups must necessarily lead to eugenics. This can only be true if one is operating from an immoral assumption of the right of some central authority to impose minimum capability requirements on the population. Needless to say, I completely reject this notion. The fact that some people are observably incapable of living in an advanced civilization does not justify harming them or treating them as sub-human. There is no reason they should not be able to live in the sort of society in which their predecessors have successfully lived for thousands of years.

Why stop with mere feelbad? Because human beings do not have the right to not experience hurt feelings. It is not possible to construct a legal system, much less maintain a society, on the basis of the avoidance of hurt feelings. However, humans of every genetic melange and intellectual capacity have the right to life, the right to self-defense, and the right to procreate. Segregation may advantage some and disadvantage others, it may cause many to feel hurt and rejected, but it does not intrinsically cause material harm to anyone; billions of people of every creed and color would not have historically self-segregated if it did. Sterilization and eugenics, on the other hand, obviously do inflict a considerable amount of direct and material harm on the individual.

Moreover, segregation is a natural and organic process. To fight it is to literally fight nature. Consider that despite its overall population being swollen by an alien invasion and relentless propaganda cheering the manifold blessings of diversity, London has seen its white-British population fall by 620,000 in only ten years, much faster than any of the experts expected. After fifty years of “civil rights” America is still unofficially segregated by neighborhood, by city, by suburb, and even by state.

Leo Tolstoy wrote about the great tides of human events that are totally beyond any human capacity to control. He used the example of Napoleon at Waterloo and showed conclusively how Napoleon didn’t know what was happening during the battle or even what units were involved in its most critical phases. In like manner, the precise way in which the inevitable reaction to the imposition of mass immigration and cultural invasion is impossible to predict, but no one with any sense of history can reasonably deny it is going to take place.

My opinion is that it would be much better for the governments of the West to align their actions with that inevitable reaction than to oppose it, but I have little hope that will be the case. Many will argue that because the reaction has not taken place yet, it will never happen, but one could have accurately said that prior to every large-scale event in human history.

Cry raciss all you like. It will change nothing. Deny the existence and the significance of human genetics until you turn blue. It will change nothing. Profess your undying allegiance to the religion of human equality with all the fervor of an early Christian martyr. It will change nothing. For as the white liberal aid worker raped in Haiti came to discover, there is no magical incantation that will save you from being out-group when the in-group turns against the outsiders.

The Flat Gene Society is even more ridiculous than the Flat Earth Society. At least those who belonged to the latter had the excuse of correctly observing what they saw with their own eyes. The Flat Gene Society requires ignoring science and history as well as the evidence of one’s own eyes.