Tag: philosophy

The Facets of False Rhetoric

Something I’ve noticed over nearly 15 years of being involved in polemics on various subjects is that a certain rhetorical pattern reliably emerges on the side that has the weaker case, especially when it has the benefit of mainstream endorsement. I’ve named the elements of this pattern the Facets of False Rhetoric.

  1. It tends to refrain from specifically mentioning the advocates, adherents, and works of the other side.
  2. When it does mention them, it is primarily in an effort to disqualify them in some way rather than substantively addressing them.
  3. It fails to directly address the relevant points raised, and instead tends to mischaracterize them.
  4. It regularly sets up straw men and attacks them in lieu of the actual arguments presented. It often resorts to bait-and-switches and hides behind ambiguity.
  5. It falsely claims the other side is ignorant or misguided on the basis of petty irrelevancies and ignores the fact that the other side is discussing substantive matters in sufficient detail to belie any such charges.
  6. The other side is declared to be “dangerous” for reasons that are seldom specified or substantiated.

I’ve seen this pattern at work in the American political discourse. I’ve seen it in the atheism discourse. I’ve seen it in the Theorum of Evolution by Natural Selection and Various Other Means discourse. I’ve seen it in the global warming discourse. I’ve seen it in the economic discourse. I’ve seen it in the EU discourse. I’ve even seen it in what passes for the science fiction and fantasy discourse.

And every single time, it has been the behavior exhibited by the side that I consider to have the observably inferior case. In fact, it has reached the point that when I witness such behavior on the part of an advocate, I now consider it a reliable indicator of being fundamentally wrong even when I don’t know the subject.

For reasons that will eventually become clear, I have been reading up on what is known among military theorists as 4th Generation War. This is a highly relevant topic these days, as both the undeclared wars in Ukraine and Gaza are direct examples of 4th Generation asymmetric wars between a state actor and a non-state actor. Even the media headlines appear to be ripped out of articles on 4th Gen theory, such as the New York Times piece today: “Israel Is Facing Difficult Choice in Gaza Conflict”.

So, it was with some initial puzzlement, followed by a growing sense of recognition, that I read Antulio Echevarria’s Fourth-Generation Warfare and Other Myths, published by the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College.  Consider the boxes checked.

1. There are eleven references in 17 pages to mysterious “proponents”. Not until we get to the footnotes at the end is there a mention of William S. Lind, the most well-known proponent of 4GW, or of Keith Nightengale, John F. Schmitt, Joseph W. Sutton, and Gary I. Wilson, his co-authors of the seminal 1989 article in the Marine Corps Gazette. Col Thomas Hammes merits a pair of mentions in a single paragraph, only to set up checkbox number two.

2. From the Foreword: “He argues that the proponents of 4GW undermine their own credibility by subscribing to this bankrupt theory.”

“However, the tool that [Hammes] employs undermines his credibility. In fact, the theory of 4GW only undermines the credibility of anyone who employs it….”

“The proponents of 4GW failed to perceive this particular flaw in their reasoning because they did not review their theory critically….”

“this new incarnation repeats many of the theory’s old errors, some of which we have not yet discussed.”

“it is rather curious that the history and analyses that 4GW theorists hang on current insurgencies should be so deeply flawed.”

3. The author goes on at length about the nonexistence of nontrinitarian warfare and what he calls “the myth of Westphalia”, neither of which have anything substantive to do with 4GW theory. Westphalia merely serves as a useful starting point from which the state began claiming a monopoly on warfare, it’s completely irrelevant otherwise. I was astonished to observe that the author never even mentions what the four generations of 4GW are, let alone attempts to explain why they are a myth.

4. The fact that the Germans never formally incorporated the blitzkrieg
concept into their military doctrine doesn’t change the observable fact
that the Germans did, in fact, adopt a maneuver-and-initiative based
model to replace the centralized steel-on-target, command-and-control
French model to which the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force still
subscribe.

5.  “The fact that 4GW theorists are not aware of this work, or at least do not acknowledge it, should give us pause indeed. They have not kept up with the scholarship on unconventional wars, nor with changes in the historical interpretations of conventional wars. Their logic is too narrowly focused and irredeemably flawed. In any case, the wheel they have been reinventing will never turn.”

6.  “the theory has several fundamental flaws that need to be exposed before they
can cause harm to U.S. operational and strategic thinking.”

“despite a number of profound and incurable flaws, the theory’s proponents continue to push it, an activity that only saps intellectual energy badly needed
elsewhere.”

I am not a military expert, but one doesn’t have to be one to recognize the way in which this critic is setting off a smokescreen rather than engaging in a substantive critique, let alone presenting a conclusive rebuttal.

(NB: for future reference, the first cretin to say “Link?” is going in the spam file. If you can’t figure out how to use bloody Google, then immediately stop reading this blog and never, ever attempt to comment here again. Google or don’t Google for confirmation as you see fit, believe that I am accurately quoting the subject matter or not as you like, but do not EVER ask me for a “Link?” It’s obnoxious and the answer is always “No”.)

That being said, William S. Lind wrote a response to Echevarria’s article, which I did not read until after writing this post above. Compare the checkboxes ticked in the article compared to Lind’s response. From literally the first paragraph, the differences are observable.

Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria, II is a Director at the
Strategic Studies Institute, the U.S. Army War College’s think tank,
and the author of an excellent book, After Clausewitz: German Military
Thinkers before the Great War. It was therefore both a surprise
and a disappointment to find that his recent paper, Fourth-Generation
War and Other Myths, is really, really ugly. Far from being a sober,
scholarly appraisal, it is a rant, a screed, a red herring seemingly
written to convince people not to think about 4GW at all. It is built
from a series of straw men, so many that in the end it amounts to a
straw giant.

I suspect it would be useful to further develop this pattern of critical observation, add additional checkboxes, and see how reliable it is across disciplines and subject matters. If anyone has any insights into this, I’d be interested in hearing them. I feel this may be Vox’s Third Law of Critical Dynamics taking shape, but I have not yet articulated it in a form I find both succinct and satisfying.

First Law: Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.
Second Law: If I can imagine it, it must be assumed
true. If you can’t conclusively prove it, it must be assumed false.
Third Law (first draft): The probability of a position’s falsehood increases with the number of applicable facets of false rhetoric.

Calcio is life

Every so often, David Brooks can be insightful. This sports analogy may help put things in perspective for people who often find themselves frustrated that life does not go the way they expect it to:

Most of us spend our days thinking we are playing baseball, but we are really playing soccer. We think we individually choose what career path to take, whom to socialize with, what views to hold. But, in fact, those decisions are shaped by the networks of people around us more than we dare recognize….

Once we acknowledge that, in life, we are playing soccer, not baseball, a few things become clear. First, awareness of the landscape of reality is the highest form of wisdom. It’s not raw computational power that matters most; it’s having a sensitive attunement to the widest environment, feeling where the flow of events is going. Genius is in practice perceiving more than the conscious reasoning.

Second, predictive models will be less useful. Baseball is wonderful for sabermetricians. In each at bat there is a limited range of possible outcomes. Activities like soccer are not as easily renderable statistically, because the relevant spatial structures are harder to quantify.

Everyone knows connections and networks and friends and family are more important to success than raw ability and hard work. And yet, that recognition offends most of us. It seems unfair somehow. But why? We see examples in every aspect of human endeavor. Even Michael Jordan didn’t become a champion by scoring 63 points a game, he achieved more when he scored 30 and relied on Scottie Pippen and his other teammates to help him win the game.

The coach of my Nike team once asked me how it was that I scored a goal in every game that season, regardless of whether the team we played against was good or bad, whereas my more talented strike partner would tend to score three goals against the bad teams and get regularly shut out by the good ones. I pointed out that the other striker’s goals were almost always brilliant individual efforts that involved beating two or three defenders on the dribble. Mine were almost always one- or two-touch shots that relied upon getting a well-placed pass from a midfielder, often my younger brother.

And while the other striker was a gifted player from Ireland who could dribble right past two or three lesser defenders, he wasn’t gifted enough to beat two or three good ones in succession. For me, on the other hand, it made little difference if the defenders were good or bad, because as long as the midfielder passed the ball into the open space past the last defender, I was going to run right past them. When the defense was tough, a little teamwork reliably trumped considerably superior individual talent.

The lesson of soccer is that individual effort will often suffice when things are relatively easy. But in order to surmount the more difficult challenges, you will almost always need reliable teammates of one sort or another.

On libertarianism

Increasingly of late, people have been attempting to claim I am not a libertarian on the basis of my failure to adhere to one or another common libertarian shibboleths. Consider my purported heresies:

  1. I oppose open borders.
  2. I oppose free trade.
  3. I oppose female suffrage.
  4. I oppose “equal rights”.
  5. I oppose desegregation.
  6. I oppose the incoherently named “gay marriage”.
  7. I have observed, and stated, that sexual anarchy is incompatible with traditional Western civilization.
  8. I have observed, and stated, that female education is both dyscivic and dysgenic.
  9. I support the right of free association.

These positions are obviously anti-libertine, but are they truly anti-libertarian? I don’t see that the case can be made if one considers the actual definition of libertarianism rather than various dogmatic policies that have somehow come to pass for the philosophy itself. From Wikipedia:

Libertarianism (Latin: liber, free) is a classification of political philosophies that uphold liberty as their principal objective. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and freedom of choice, emphasizing political freedom, voluntary association and the primacy of individual judgment. While libertarians share a skepticism of authority, they diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing political and economic systems. Various schools of libertarian thought offer a range of views regarding the legitimate functions of state and private power, often calling to restrict or even to wholly dissolve pervasive social institutions. Rather than embodying a singular, rigid systematic theory or ideology, libertarianism has been applied as an umbrella term to a wide range of sometimes discordant political ideas through modern history.

All of my supposedly anti-libertarian positions are based on the idea of maximizing liberty in a society based on Western civilization. So, far from being anti-libertarian, I would argue that my National Libertarianism is more in keeping with the true concept of libertarianism than all the various dogmas that are libertarian in theory, but in practice have material consequences that are observably anti-human liberty.

The end may not justify the means, but the end is the only correct means of judging any social policy. Intentions and hypotheses and flights of fancy are all equally irrelevant. In the end, one can only look at the policy and decide: does this advance or detract from human liberty in this particular polity.

In defense of rational materialism

John C. Wright kindly lends the aid of his formidable intellect to his overmatched opponents, in the hopes that they may be able to, finally, present a coherent argument in defense of their philosophy:

My patience, albeit legendary, has finally burst all bounds of reason. Fortunately, this time, patience bursts these bounds inward into the very interior of reason.

In a spirit then of noblest military courtesy to fallen foes, and, in this case, foe unable to mount steed and couch lance, allow me to instruct the Materialist how to frame his argument.

First and foremost, one should define one’s terms.

Materialism, or, to call it by a more precise but less well-recognized name, Panphysicalism, is the position that there no substance exists aside from matter. Anything that seems at first to be made of some other substance, such as spiritual or mental entities or qualities or qualia, can be ultimately resolved to a material substrate.

The word ‘exist’ has several shades of meaning. While, it is a true statement to say that ‘Hamlet exists in Shakespeare’s imagination’ or to say ‘Hamlet exists as a great play’ or even to say ‘Hamlet exists as a word of six letters’, none of those statements would be true if Earth had never brought forth human life. For the purpose of this discussion, we are only speaking of literal, unqualified, or objective existence, that is, existence that does not depend on human imagination or convention.

The word ‘matter’ here does not mean matter as opposed to energy. Here, we mean matter as opposed to spirit. We are not using the definition from the physical sciences of matter, but the philosophical definition.

If the term confuses the undereducated or overeducated dunderhead, we may use the term ‘physical substance.’

More precisely, matter means an entity or the properties of an entity which is extensional and sensible. Extensional means occupying specific points in the three dimensions of space and occupying specific moments of time. Sensible made of something that can be apprehended by the five physical senses either directly or indirectly. For the purpose of this conversation, we can take these two definitions as interchangeable. If there are extensional entities not theoretically sensible, or sensible entities lacking extension and duration, we do not call those ‘matter’.

The term ‘substance’ is a technical term of philosophy that refers to the persistent foundational or fundamental being of reality, that is, some being that cannot be resolved into a more foundational being, some being that is not a manifestation or a side effect of any deeper being.

Second, one should state one’s position precisely.

No Materialist of my acquaintance has ever bothered to do so. Stated precisely, then, the Panphysicalist position is that ‘Nothing save physical substance exists’ or, in other words, ‘All is Matter.’

Third, one should know what manner of statement one is making and defending.

The statement ‘All is Matter’ is an a priori statement, that is, a statement used to interpret sense impression experiences but being logically prior to any particular experience. Ergo it is not an a posteriori statement, that is, a statement deduced from sense impression experiences and logically anterior to them.

The idea held by most, if not all, the Materialists of my acquaintance that Panphysicalism is a deduction of the natural sciences, or a conclusion of physics, or can be proved by experience or disproved by experience, is a sad confession of their utter paucity of understanding their own position.

The results of physical experiments cannot be used to attack or defend metaphysical conjectures or deductions, any more than music theory can be used to attack or defend a theory of astronomy.

It should be too obvious to mention that empirical experiments are always conditional in their findings, that is, under such-and-such conditions, so-and-so is seen to be the result. The statement that ‘All is Matter’ is a universal, applying to everything in existence, microscopic and macroscopic, near and far, past and present and otherwise.

No possible experiment can examine each and every object in reality past and present and hold it before our eyes, and neither our eyes nor any other sense would tell us if the foundational or fundamental being creating the sense impression is physical matter as opposed to something else — the deceptions of Maya, for example, the illusions of the Matrix, or the delirium induced by a the deceptive demon invented by Descartes or the Demiurge by the Gnostics.

Therefore the statement ‘All is Matter’ cannot possibly be a conclusion of an experiment in physics. Therefore appeals to empirical evidence to confirm or deny Panphysicalism are vain.

Fourth and finally, one should actually make an argument, that is, a set of statements resting upon a shared starting assumption, logically related to each other as antecedent and consequent leading to the conclusion one is defending.

To defend the statement ‘All is Matter’ it must be shown that the idea of a non-material something is incoherent; it must be shown that an insubstantial substance is a contradiction in terms; it must be shown to be something that cannot exist.

Read the whole thing, as Mr. Wright proceeds to present, not one, but three, arguments, on behalf of panphysical philosophy. One could consider them strawmen, as they are arguments that the rational materialists have not actually presented and Mr. Wright has previously and preemptively rebutted all three of them, except for the fact that these straw-arguments are considerably more substantial than anything the rational materialists have shown themselves able to construct on their own.

Fans of Mr. Wright might also be interested in his interview concerning TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN on the SciPhi show.

The consequences of an atheist morality

John C. Wright has entirely too much fun deconstructing what passes for the logic of an altruism-based morality of the sort advocated by midwitted atheists who genuinely believe Richard Dawkins is a formidable philosopher:

Now, the most common and most persuasive argument an atheist or materialist can make in favor of universal morality is a genetic argument. The argument is that, as a matter of pure game theory, any races and breeds that develops a gene which imposes an instinct for altruism toward other members of one’s own bloodline, will, as a matter of course, have a definite statistical advantage in the lottery of Darwinian survival, and will come to outnumber those races and breeds that do not.

The argument is that the purely blind and selfish drive of the genes we carry in us therefore mesmerizes us with an instinct to altruism and self-sacrifice which is not in our immediate self-interest, but unintentionally serves the self-interest of the family, clan, tribe, breed, bloodline, and race.

The argument is that this mesmeric spell makes us hallucinate that there is such a thing as a moral code we are bound to obey, but whether this hallucination is true or false, it serves the blind and selfish reasons of the parasites called genes dwelling inside us, whom we much, willy-nilly, serve and obey.

Putting this argument to the test, I asked a hypothetical question about the following rule of behavior:  “Abducting Nubile Young Woman to Serve as Concubines, Dancing Girls, or Breeding Stock is bad.” Is this a rule that bind only those who share the non-abduction gene, or does it bind all men, including those with not one gene in common with us? I used the hypothetical example of an abductor who is a Man from Mars. He is not of our tribe, nation, or race. He is, at least during the Obama Administration NASA days, beyond the reach of any reasonable expectation of retaliation from Earthlings.

Is it objectively wrong for the Martian Warlord to abduct a luscious Earthgirl like Yvonne Craig to his horrible harem of terror atop Olympus Mons? Or is it only wrong because the Selfish Gene says it is wrong? Is it wrong objectively, or only genetically?

(Of course I mean to use this as an excuse to post more pictures!)

The genetic argument as a basis of morality makes me laugh until I puke green foam from my nose. It is obvious enough that if my instinct for altruism is proportional to how many selfish genes I have in common with another, that I will always prefer my self over my brother, my brother over my cousin, my cousin over my second cousin, my family over my clan, and my clan over my race, and my race over the Slavs and Jews and Untermenschen.

Racism, and I mean REAL Nazi-style kill-the-Jews racism, is not only excused by the genetic argument for altruism, it is demanded by it. Aiding anyone outside your clad and clan and bloodline is treason to the Selfish Gene, ergo, by this logic, immoral.

For that matter, women’s liberation causes a drop in fertility rates, so it also is treason against the Selfish Gene. for that matter, monogamy is treason, polygamy is demanded, and the consent of the concubines in the breeding harem is not required, because the gene does not care if you wanted to have happy children, only many children.

So, logically, if altruism is basic on the Selfish Gene, abducting dancing girls and nubile starlets to the breeding harem is not only licit, it is the highest and most saintly and most moral of all possible actions!

It may not be coincidental that this “morality” is most often advocated by the sort of male atheist whose only chance of any sexual exposure to dancing girls and nubile starlets would be through forcible abduction and rape.

It should be apparent that if we were to seriously adopt this sort of biology-based “morality” on a large scale, our world would more closely resemble John Norman’s Gor than anything else. The first imperative for any human society that values stability, let alone survival, is to eliminate unrestricted female volition in sexual matters. That is why religions and governments have always concerned themselves with a multitude of rules restricting it in some manner. Because without them, the civilized society will not survive.

As Camille Paglia pointed out repeatedly in Sexual Personae, the female represents the chaotic and unreasoning aspect of humanity, vital for the survival of the species, fertile when husbanded, and insanely destructive when left unrestrained.

Spelling it out

This is for the benefit of all the logical slowpokes. It is logic so basic that even those who are intellectually limited to the rhetorical level should be able to follow it:

  • If you have the right to demand that I bake you a cake, then I have the right to force you to attend church, mosque, or synagogue.
  • If you have the right to fire me because you don’t like my political position on the legality of homogamy, I have the right to fire you because I don’t like your political position on the legality of homosexuality.
  • If you have the right to deny me access to the news media because I don’t believe in climate change, I have the right to deny you access to the media because you don’t believe in God.

If atheists truly want a power struggle for the right to be intolerant, Christians will eventually engage and win. Because we will die before we will give up our beliefs and you will not. We invented the Crusade and the Inquisition, two institutions so historically intimidating that atheists still shiver and tell each other scary stories about them centuries after the event.

We will revive them before we will abandon our faith. And while we would prefer to live with both Christian and traditional Constitutional values, if we are forced to choose between the two, we will choose the former without even thinking twice.

White liberal racism

It’s fascinating to see how white liberals the way in which make a habit of denying the undeniable whenever it contradicts their narrative. From the woman who calls herself “Pox Vay” on Twitter:

You’re not a person of color. You’re a white guy who shares genes with people of color. But you don’t share the life experience.

It’s hard to argue with this. After all, there are so few People of Color who are NCAA Division One 100-meter sprinters, right? Or study economics in Tokyo, neh?

She’s not the only one. Carrie Cuinn, a white racist who is one of SFWA’s extremist pinkshirts, specifically rejected my inclusion on her list of Hispanic science fiction writers, never mind the fact that I am probably one of the best-selling Hispanic science fiction writers after Larry Correia and Sarah Hoyt. Interestingly enough, neither of them were on her list either, although I suspect their omission was more out of ignorance than white liberal racism.

Surely this woman is a reliable expert on who is, and who is not, Hispanic….

This is a longtime pattern with the Left. I remember a feminist professor at my university openly declaring “Margaret Thatcher is not a woman” due to her ideology. The Left not only arrogates to itself the right to disqualify anyone as it sees fit, but observably believes that its narrative supersedes science, sex, and human genetics.

A house blithely divided

It would hard to have provided a better example of John C. Wright’s Unified Field Theory of Madness than we saw in the comments yesterday. And further proving that leftists will say literally anything in order to salve their feelings without concern for their past or future arguments, consider this gem from Snowflake in which he attempts to justify the Left’s primary tactic of disqualification:

the fact that one thing (a round earth) which is true, but for which at one time there was no evidence of, does not mean that anything or everything else for which there is no evidence is also true. Nor can you properly claim anything, be it a round earth, a flat earth, or a pink unicorn to be true, until you provide evidence of it. Disqualification is valid, in that until you provide evidence, the disqualification holds, and you can’t claim that your particular unproven theories are true, simply because there is no other alternate proven theory at the time.

Now, the first statement is partially true, although we know the earth is not actually round, but rather an oblate ellipsoid. It’s rather fitting that an erroneous example should be cited here, but regardless, one can hardly argue with the statement that one cannot assume the correctness of all naked assertions on the basis of one correct naked assertion.

So far so good.

On the other hand, it is absolutely false to assert that one cannot claim anything to be true until evidence for the claim is provided. This exhibits a fundamental confusion between two different concepts, a “claim” and a “proof”. One can claim anything to be true without providing one iota of evidence. Others can freely choose to accept the claim or reject it, but they cannot credibly argue that the claim is intrinsically “disqualified” on the basis of no evidence being provided.

If that were the case, then no one could ever make any statement of fact without simultaneously providing the evidence supporting it. This is an intrinsically anti-scientific perspective, as it would necessarily disqualify all hypotheses, which are claims made in the known absence of evidence. Moreover, it is an inherently self-negating statement, as Snowflake has provided no evidence to support his claim that disqualification of a statement sans evidence is valid.

Moreover, Mr. Wright’s discussion of his theory was not presented as a proof. It was, rather, an explanation of behavior that has been observed on many occasions by many observers in the past. It was a hypothesis, in other words, and one for which considerable evidence was gathered by the feverish attempts to disqualify it.

But why is the Left so eager to disqualify claims and hypotheses? Why does it make a fetish of evidence here while simultaneously denying literal millennia of evidence collected with regards to matters such as human intelligence, genetics, and even the law of supply and demand? (Recall that Wright specifically noted this very behavior in his essay, which none of the critics appear to have actually read before leaping to attack it.) Because the entire aim is to shut down the discussion, silence the perpetrator, and to divert the train of thought before the logical incoherency of the Leftist and the obvious errors of his positions are exposed.

(This is why I crack down so hard on the fools who leap in to engage the trolls on the trolls’ terms. And I use the term “fools” advisedly; one is snapping at the troll’s bait and doing PRECISELY what the troll hopes someone will do by permitting him to shift the matter being discussed away from the one that the troll finds threatening. For example, note how every single discussion of the flaws in TENS is immediately met by multiple attempts to change the subject to Young Earth Creationism. Don’t fall for it.)

The Leftist doesn’t care that his own argument would destroy his own positions; apply this standard to human equality or evolution by natural selection and both fall apart immediately. But because he has no objective standards and no attachment to the truth, the Leftist will blithely apply one subjective standard to his opponents and another to himself without even necessarily realizing it.

The irony is that in attacking Mr. Wright’s Unified Field Theory yesterday, his critics provided the very evidence that they irrelevantly claimed was lacking. If you wish to destroy the credibility of a Leftist’s arguments, you have only to go through it step by step, until you reach the change of definition, ambiguity, logical inconsistency, or outright lie that will INEVITABLY be there. A little patience and precision is all that is required.

Madness and the Unreality Principle

John C. Wright presents a brilliant explication of the Left and their relentless denial of observable reality with his Unified Field Theory of Madness:

The Leftist has only two choices here: accept reality, in which case he is no longer a Leftist, or deny reality, in which case his loyalty to the ideals of Leftism becomes rarefied and refined, and he become of their Cathari, the Pure Ones, an arhat of enlightenment.

I spoke above of the Unreality Principle. Here is where it comes into play. The Unreality Principle is the moral imperative to ignore and deny reality at all costs, and remain loyal and faithful to the make-believe illusion-choked funhouse-mirror Wonderland of Liberal Bullshit. You must bathe in the bullshit, eat the bullshit, drink the bullshit, and stuff the bullshit up your nose as far as far can be, because from now own the offal will be feast and wine to you, and will be your baptism and your oxygen. It will feed and sustain you.

However, the Unreality Principle demands a cost. First, there is something like a daily maintenance cost: you must attend closely to whatever the social cues are telling you, and believe them and not your lying eyes….

The Leftists are people who are stupider than average, less moral and
upright and decent than average, who at once combine the worst features
of a self-deceived fool and a self-deceiving conniving con-man. The only
thing that saves them from the constant pain of the dentist drill of
their conscience, the constant clamor of their wretched self-esteem
telling them that they do not deserve to live, the only thing, indeed,
keeping them alive, is their false and inflated sense of sanctimony.
Each one is a Judas, who has betrayed all he hold dear. The only reason
why he does not hang himself from the nearest redbud tree is because he
adopts the numbing hypocrisy of the Pharisee.

There is no greater high than to fly on the drug of smug moral
superiority. You may look down your nose at all fashion of men greater
than you in every other way, but if they are evil and you are righteous,
the savory odor of your righteousness in your own nostrils is finer
than myrrh. It is more than wine which mortals drink; it is nectar of
the gods.

In case you were wondering where our modern-day Chesterton was, well, John C. Wright is it. It is a little frustrating to be publishing his excellent book of essays, the forthcoming TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN, because not a week goes by that he doesn’t produce another new essay that fairly screams for inclusion in it.

Needless to say, there will be a sequel if Mr. Wright is so inclined.

And if you haven’t read his GOLDEN AGE trilogy yet, you simply must. It is more than excellent, it is inspiring. Consider this quote from THE GOLDEN TRANSCENDANCE, which I am currently reading:

“[E]very intelligent entity, human or machine, requires justification to undertake the strenuous effort of continued existence. For entities whose acts conform to the dictates of morality, this process is automatic, and their lives are joyous. Entities whose acts do not conform to moral law must adopt some degree of mental dishonesty to erect barriers to their own understanding, creating rationalization to elude self-condemnation and misery. The strategy of rationalization adopted by a dishonest mind falls into predictable patterns.”

Note that this isn’t exposition or preaching, but a concept that is seamlessly integrated into the plot in order to explain the potential of mere human minds to correctly anticipate the thinking of superhuman, supersmart machine intelligences.

Victimless sex-trafficking

The reason all sane and responsible people don’t give a damn about this so-called “sex trafficking” is that the girls involved are, quite literally, asking for it. In fact, they’re not so much asking for it as demanding it:

A 2002 Justice Department study suggested that more than 1.6 million American juveniles run away or are kicked out of their home each year. Ernie Allen, a former president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, has estimated that at least 100,000 kids are sexually trafficked each year in the United States.

Perhaps they aren’t a priority because they’re seen as asking for it, not as victims. This was Emily’s fourth time running away, and she seems to have voluntarily connected with a pimp. Based on text messages that her family intercepted, Emily was apparently used by a pimp to recruit one of her girlfriends — a common practice.

“Made about 15 or 16 hundred,” Emily boasted to her friend in one text. “Come make money with me I promise u gonna be good.”

So it’s true that no one was holding a gun to Emily’s head. Then again, she was 15, in a perilous business. And, in this case it turned out, having sex with a half-dozen men a day and handing over every penny to an armed pimp….

Maria is bitter that the police haven’t done more. She has been pleading for months for help, hounding the police — and now she finds that her daughter has been advertised in four states on multiple prostitution websites and no one seems to have checked or noticed.

“I feel very strongly that it was racism,” Maria says. In fact, the Boston police force is admired nationally for its three-detective unit that fights human trafficking. This is the gold standard, yet, even here, a missing 15-year-old girl seemed to slip through the cracks.

If a girl is old enough to be permitted to make legal decisions about murdering her unborn child, then surely she is old enough to decide if she wants to sell her body for money. It’s not racism, it’s simple common sense to leave an idiotic young whore to suffer the obvious consequences of her decisions. What are the police supposed to do, waste time and resources bringing her back so that she can run away again? That’s ridiculous.

If the mother put half the effort into raising her daughter that she appears to have put into hounding the police to fix her maternal failures, perhaps her daughter wouldn’t have run away so many times. No doubt Mr. Kristoff’s bleeding heart is in the right place, but he
would do better to concentrate his efforts on saving those who want to
be saved, not those who not only revel in their moral squalor, but
attempt to infect others with it.

God abandons the human trash determined to go its own way and leaves it to its inevitable destruction. Man should follow his example.