Tag: philosophy

Spengler and the geography myth

In Form and Actuality, Spengler also appears to have anticipated my expressed doubts about the ability of non-Anglo Saxons to correctly grasp, let alone uphold and sustain, the Common Law-based Rights of Englishmen, on the basis of changes in their geographic locations:

“Today we think in continents, and it is only our philosophers and historians who have not realized that we do so. Of what significance to us, then, are conceptions and purviews that they put before us as universally valid, when in truth their furthest horizon does not extend beyond the intellectual atmosphere of Western Man?

“Examine, from this point of view, our best books. When Plato speaks of humanity, he means the Hellenes in contrast to the barbarians, which is entirely consonant with the ahistoric mode of the Classical life and thought, and his premisses take him to conclusions that for Greeks were complete and significant. When, however, Kant philosophizes, say on ethical ideas, he maintains the validity of his theses for men of all times and places. He does not say this in so many words, for, for himself and his readers, it is something that goes without saying. In his aesthetics he formulates the principles, not of Phidias’s art, or Rembrandt’s art, but of Art generally. But what he poses as necessary forms of thought are in reality only necessary forms of Western thought, though a glance at Aristotle and his essentially different conclusions should have sufficed to show that Aristotle’s intellect, not less penetrating than his own, was of different structure from it. The categories of the Westerner are just as alien to Russian thought as those of the Chinaman or the ancient Greek are to him. For us, the effective and complete comprehension of Classical root-words is just as impossible as that of Russian and Indian, and for the modern Chinese or Arab, with their utterly different intellectual constitutions, “philosophy from Bacon to Kant” has only a curiosity value.

“It is this that is lacking to the Western thinker, the very thinker in whom we might have expected to find it — insight into the historically relative character of his data, which are expressions of one specific existence and one only; knowledge of the necessary limits of their validity; the conviction that his “unshakable” truths and “eternal” views are simply true for him and eternal for his world-view; the duty of looking beyond them to find out what the men of other Cultures have with equal certainty evolved out of themselves. That and nothing else will impart completeness to the philosophy of the future, and only through an understanding of the living world shall we understand the symbolism of history. Here there is nothing constant, nothing universal. We must cease to speak of the forms of “Thought,” the principles of “Tragedy,” the mission of “The State.” Universal validity involves always the fallacy of arguing from particular to particular.”

It would be a mistake to confuse Spengler’s historical relativism with modern moral relativism.  Anyone who speaks more than one language is familiar with the phenomenon of the untranslatable word; how much more untranslatable are the concepts that cross temporal, genetic, and cultural boundaries as well as mere linguistic ones? What the Ancient Greeks meant by the term we translate as “barbarian” is very different than our concept of the word, while even words as seemingly simple and straightforward as “African” and “infringed” are today interpreted very differently by people living at the same time within the same political boundaries.

Spengler’s observation underlies the problematic nature of mass immigration in general as well as the total madness of permitting mass immigration from non-European nations in a quasi-democracy in particular.  To expect any respect for the totemic foundations of Western civilization from those whose very structural worldviews are, quite literally, alien, is to defy both logic as well as millennia of recorded observations through history.  And even the modern fear of addressing the consequences of this madness beautifully illustrates Spengler’s point; would the highly civilized Athenians who brutally butchered the Melians for the crime of remaining neutral in the Peloponnesian War, hesitate to act in seeing their agoras overrun by aliens?  Would the Romans, who went to war with their own socii rather than permit them to claim Roman citizenship? Would the Chinese, past or present?

Mailvox: the utility of rhetoric

NorthernHamlet objects to the rhetoric inherent in the post Homeschool or Die.  He writes, in response to my explanation:

“Trying to talk about big pictures or summoning statistics is about
as relevant as reciting the Iliad. [Rhetoric] is not petty politics or point
scoring, it is the only possible form of dialogue.”

We both can run through this line of thinking easily.

Your
public audience, at least some of it, knows you could have it both ways
in a blog post, the rhetorical argument, the statistical reality,
and the meta-argument. You yourself admit that the situation has already
been politicized; suggesting that you are purposefully furthering that
politicization process for argumentative gain, and nothing more. You can
claim all day that the only audience you care about is your own (a
claim easily disputed) or however you choose to put it, but from an
outside perspective, the post comes off as extremely petty.

I’m
sure more of your public audience than you realize would appreciate both
the amusing rhetoric you are known for and which I’m sure sells books
and gains site traffic in addition to the insightful observations you
are equally known for peppered in to the post as opposed to the
comments; leaving room for even better conversation in the thread.

How the rhetoric in the relevant post comes off to conventionally-thinking conservatives who happen agree with me on the issue of the primacy of gun rights is totally irrelevant, not only to me, but to the argument.  I mean, I harbor very little concern for what most people think anyhow, as per MPAI, but the group whose opinion least concerns me is the most rhetorically impotent and argumentatively challenged group in American political discourse today.

It tends to remind me of those who used to insist that Ann Coulter would be more “effective” if she was only nicer and less strident.  Never mind that no one would have heard of her or that she didn’t really have a whole lot to say other than ruthlessly pointing out the hypocrisy and malicious intent of the American Left.

First, note that the post was linked to by Instapundit.  Why?  Because Instapundit recognizes an effective rhetorical argument when he sees one even though his primary public response was dialectic.  Does anyone think that his perfectly rational, perfectly correct argument about the false sense of security provided by gun-free zones will have any effect whatsoever on the minds of women who are posturing about how hard they are crying and how they are “hugging them close today”?

Of course not.  The dialectic cannot reach the rhetorically-minded.  Yes, it is logical nonsense to say “if you do not homeschool your children, they will die”, just as it is nonsense to say “because one crazy individual shot 27 people, we must forcibly seize 300 million privately owned firearms that prevent government tyranny.”  And yet, these logically nonsensical rhetorical arguments that shamelessly play upon the emotions of individuals are the only ones that the majority – the majority –  of the electorate find credible and convincing.  And so they must be made.

Is this rhetorical assertion a genuine surprise to NorthernHamlet or anyone else: “Standing up to the gun lobby is the best way to honour the innocent victims.”  If so, it shouldn’t be.  This is hardly our first shooting-inspired gun control rodeo.  In the past, the pro-control crowd reaped a rhetorical harvest in the early days while the pro-freedom crowd remained silent out of fear of politicizing the tragedy or limited itself to weakly protesting in a dialectical manner.  Those days are done.  We know the drill.

As I’ve already explained, any argument that focuses on the rhetorical aspect of “homeschool or die” can be easily turned against the rhetorical arguments made by the other side.  That is the power of the meta-argument that utilizes both rhetorical and dialectical arguments; the other side can either lose on rhetorical grounds, or, after attacking the rhetoric and stripping itself of its own rhetorical arguments, lose on the more substantial dialectic grounds.

There is nothing petty about it; to claim that it is petty is to fundamentally miss the point that the argument being won and lost on petty grounds because it is mostly being fought on ground that primarily consists of petty little minds.

What is wrong with killing children?

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed about all the emotional posturing about the Connecticut public school shootings is that a fair share of it is being done by people who claim there is no God, no good, and no evil.  Some of those people also happen to be those who assert that the Earth has too many people.

So, I find myself wondering if they are knowingly striking false poses in order to hide their amoral inhumanity at a time when sensitivities are particularly acute or if they are merely intellectually incoherent.  The logical fact of the matter is that if there is no divine spark within us, if we are merely bits of stardust that happens to have congregated in one of many possible manners, then therre is nothing wrong or objectionable in rearranging the stardust a little.  What difference does it make to an atom if it now happens to be part of arrangement X instead of arrangement Y?  What difference does it make to the universe?

And if consciousness does not exist, if it is the illusion that some of the more imaginative neurophilosophers claim it to be, then how can anyone possibly object to the elimination of the nonexistent?  What tragedy can be found in the transformation from nothing to nothing?

And if there are too many people on the Earth, in the country, then is not the reduction of that excessive number to be celebrated?

And if it is good, moral, and legal to kill a child in a trans-natal abortion, how long after birth is such killing truly licit?  Would it make the deaths of the young public schoolchildren more palatable to describe them as 24th trimester post-natal abortions?

In an increasingly post-Christian pagan society, what is is wrong, precisely, with killing schoolchildren?

Embrace the cruelty

Isn’t it remarkable how this excellent essay on heterotopic discourse versus sensitivity-based discourse sounds very much like a description of two blogs for which I serve as a bête noire?

Lacking a high tolerance for difference and disagreement,
sensitivity-driven discourses will typically manifest a herding effect.
Dissenting voices can be scapegoated or excluded and opponents will be
sharply attacked. Unable to sustain true conversation, stale monologues
will take its place. Constantly pressed towards conformity,
indoctrination can take the place of open intellectual inquiry.
Fracturing into hostile dogmatic cliques takes the place of vigorous and
illuminating dialogue between contrasting perspectives. Lacking the
capacity for open dialogue, such groups will exert their influence on
wider society primarily by means of political agitation.  The fear of conflict and the inability to deal with disagreement lies
at the heart of sensitivity-driven discourses.

As bad as Pharyngula can be in its mindless groupthink regard, PZ’s focus on science tends to somewhat reduce its author’s ability to be sensitive to the feelings of others.  It doesn’t matter how many times a reader bravely confesses to having been abused by a mongoose at the age of 4, PZ isn’t going to tolerate her nonsense if she sets herself against the tenets of the current scientific consensus, whatever it happens to be at the moment.

Even Amanda of Pandagon has more intellectual integrity, at least in this regard, than John Scalzi. His Whatever is a veritable warren of the Rabbit People, who compete for status by being more sensitive than each other.  No matter how convincingly John cringes and attempts to make himself accommodating to the ample concerns of his readership, he can never succeed because the sensitivity horizon is an ever-receding one.  I go into that aspect of the essay in more detail on Alpha Game.

But here, I want to focus on the vital importance of never giving the Rabbit People any entrance or respect on their terms.

When these two forms of discourse collide they are frequently unable
to understand each other and tend to bring out the worst in each other.
The first form of discourse seems lacking in rationality and ideological
challenge to the second; the second can appear cruel and devoid of
sensitivity to the first. To those accustomed to the second mode of
discourse, the cries of protest at supposedly offensive statements may
appear to be little more than a dirty and underhand ploy intentionally
adopted to derail the discussion by those whose ideological position
can’t sustain critical challenge. However, these protests are probably
less a ploy than the normal functioning of the particular mode of
discourse characteristic of that community, often the only mode of
discourse that those involved are proficient in.

To those accustomed to the first mode of discourse, the scathing
satire and sharp criticism of the second appears to be a vicious and
personal attack, driven by a hateful animus, when those who adopt such
modes of discourse are typically neither personally hurt nor aiming to
cause such hurt. Rather, as this second form of discourse demands
personal detachment from issues under discussion, ridicule does not aim
to cause hurt, but to up the ante of the debate, exposing the weakness
of the response to challenge, pushing opponents to come back with more
substantial arguments or betray their lack of convincing support for
their position. Within the first form of discourse, if you take offence,
you can close down the discourse in your favour; in the second form of
discourse, if all you can do is to take offence, you have conceded the
argument to your opponent, as offence is not meaningful currency within
such discourse….

The power of offence and outrage was very much on display in that which
followed. Those who protested that they have been offended were able to
close down Jared Wilson’s voice and get him to apologize, something that
was regarded as a victory for those prepared to attack ‘misogyny’.
While I believe that Jared was right to apologize, the empowering of
offence-takers is far from a salutary development in Christian
discourse.

So close, and yet so far.  The author is completely wrong about how heterotopicals should engage with the Rabbit People.  There is simply nothing there to understand in the first mode of discourse, the sensitivity-based mode.  It is a binary mode of thought where there is only submission or rejection.  Jared Wilson should never, ever, have apologized; he had done nothing for which TO apologize and by apologizing, he surrendered in the eyes of the Rabbit People.  All of his arguments were rendered vain and instantly dismissed in his interlocutors’ eyes by that single act of submission.

Never surrender to emotional manipulation.  Never back down in the face of nonexistent arguments and appeals to sensitivity and feelings.  Embrace the cruelty. Meet each demand for submission by amping up the ridicule, jacking up the humiliation, and increasing the pressure of intellectual precision.  Drive the Rabbit People out mercilessly whenever they show themselves; rest assured they are actively seeking to do the same to everyone who doesn’t submit to their never-ending demands.  Force them to expose their total inability to accept contradiction and criticism to everyone. Pull their triggers with all the angst-filled remorse of an ice-cold hitman.

I understand the intrinsically dictatorial nature of the Rabbit People.  As I noted at AG, that is precisely why I give sensitivity-driven discourse no respect whatsoever. I don’t
care if you were
raped every day of the year and twice on Mondays by the family cat,
after which your father killed you with a knife and danced on your
grave. Your
personal victimization grants you neither moral authority nor
intellectual credibility, much less any form of veto on what others are
permitted
to think, say, or feel.  Vox Popoli will always be a bastion of heterotopic discourse; it would not be unreasonable to think of it and Alpha Game as the
Wild Hunt for Rabbit People.

 Call me Herne.

UPDATE: John Scalzi helpfully underlines my point for me:   “The irony of a dude griping that my blog caters to sycophants, on a
blog which caters to sycophants, never loses its clueless
deliciousness.”

Who is griping?  Scalzi is only doing what Rabbit People always do.  Notice the reference to a nameless “dude”.  On a nameless blog.  And note the accusation that this nameless place caters to sycophants, when the majority of the Dread Ilk of Vox Popoli, let alone the more casual readers, a) don’t belong to the same political party or ideology that I do, and b) don’t belong to the same religious denomination that I do, and c) cheerfully argue with me vociferously over everything from inflation/deflation to the limits on God’s knowledge.  If you guys are sycophants, you must be the worst sycophants in the world!

It is remarkable but not surprising that Scalzi is such a complete rabbit that he can’t even imagine a blog of this size not being sycophantic in the manner that his observably is.  For example, you will seldom see me, or anyone else, congratulating me on my “courage” for posting something.  Meanwhile, Scalzi’s posts are always an interesting race between John and his readers over who can pat him on the back more vigorously.

I will bet that on any post of over 100 comments at Whatever, one can find at least 10 comments that are amusingly sycophantic.  And I’ll bet one cannot do the same here.

Mortality

You know you’ve officially reached middle age when people you knew in your youth start dying of adult things like heart attacks and cancer.  I got an email from a friend today; a man who’d graduated with him, with whom I’d ridden to school from 7th through 9th grade, died recently of cancer.

He wasn’t a friend and I never really knew him, even though we were sitting next to each other practically every day for three years.  (In other words, there is absolutely no need for expressing any condolences.)  I didn’t dislike him, but I didn’t like him either.  I can’t say I’d even thought about him one single time since he graduated the year before me more than 25 years ago.  But, by all accounts, he turned out to be a good man, a good Christian, and a good father.

And yet, it seems impossible that he could be in his forties, lead alone dead.  When I think of him now, I still picture a slightly overweight blond guy, 17 years old and of average height, wearing a t-shirt that is a little too tight and an air of calm superiority.  Of course, when I look in the mirror, I wonder who that weary-eyed Lovecraftian monster staring back at me could be. 

Our time here is short.  Make the most of it, in the knowledge that one day you’ll be accountable for it.

Mailvox: the logic of God II

In which Passerby attempts to poke holes in the logical argument demonstrating the irrationality of his position concerning the simultaneous existence of evil and the nonexistence of God.

Well! I wasn’t expecting an entire fresh post devoted to my challenge
in that other thread. I’m so honored. Pardon my late arrival.  Okay,
first off, VD, looks like you threw a gutter ball from your second
premise, as Riki-Tiki-Tavi already sensed. Let’s have a look at it:

2.
The existent fact of wrongdoing necessarily requires that there is a
material universal standard of right and wrong by which actions can be
classified.

Incorrect. The existent fact of wrongdoing/evil
does not require a material universal standard of right and wrong. The
existent fact of wrongdoing is self-evident because the alternative is…
the nonexistence of wrongdoing. Good luck making a sound argument for
the nonexistence of wrongdoing. Think anyone can do it passably? I
don’t and I suspect you don’t either. So we should agree there. That’s
point number one.

Point number one is incorrect.  Notice here that Passerby is not only taking exception to my point, but to entire philosophies such as nihilism, existentialism, and, ironically enough, rational materialism.  His argument is surprisingly weak, based as it is on the self-evidence of wrongdoing.  Is it self-evident that stealing is wrong?  That not voting is wrong? 

Consider how little sense his argument makes if we substitute a non-existent fact for wrongdoing/evil.  The existent fact of unicorns
does not require a material universal standard of unicorns and not-unicorns. The
existent fact of unicorns is self-evident because the alternative is…
the nonexistence of unicorns.

If we cannot tell the difference between a unicorn and a not-unicorn, then we cannot possibly declare that unicorns do or do not exist.  But if we have established the fact that unicorns do exist, we have necessarily established a material and universal standard for what a unicorn is and what a unicorn is not.  Therefore, point number one fails and the second step in the logical argument remains standing.

Point number two. Another thing wrong
with this “necessary universal standard” claim of yours (I noticed you
used that word “standard” seventeen times in your post, so to continue
the bowling metaphor, it’s like your very bowling ball to bowl with,
without which… well, game over — but I’ll give you a dollar so you can
go play some Ms. PacMan) is that six billion people in the world could
have six billion different standards of wrongdoing, but everyone would
nonetheless agree that wrongdoing does exist in the world.

So
let’s imagine those six billion individuals’ six billion different
standards of wrongdoing can be each given a numerical value. I’m not
saying it can ever actually be done, but just go with me here. After
they’ve all been given a numerical value, they’re arranged in order on a
vertical meter with a red zone on the bottom and a green zone on the
top. Put the meter on the lowest setting of “1”. That setting belongs
to a guy who disagrees with all 5,999,999,999 people above him whom he
considers to be an increasing bunch of prissy Miss Manners types who see
wrongdoing in all kinds of ways he doesn’t. But he at least sees one
instance of wrongdoing in the world and everyone above him agrees that
he at least got one right. So it seems to me (I’m just now coming up
with this, but I’ll try to land this thing in one piece) that this
minimum setting of “1” is the standard, if anything, for the existence
of wrongdoing. Below that is “0” which represents nonexistence of
wrongdoing.

Point being, our subjectivity is flawed, but it’s far
from useless! There is, after all, communication and agreement. It’s
precisely because of our limitation as trapped individuals of
subjectivity that science is the best idea we’ve ever come up with (or
happened upon) to make gains on objectivity. To paraphrase Steven
Pinker, science is our highest, purest expression of reason.
Objectivity is perhaps an unattainable goal, but we’ve seemingly made
lots of progress toward it given our technological conquests, our
steadily decreasing rate of violence in ever larger, more complex
populations, etc. I say seemingly because a cosmic rug pulling could be
in store for us a la The Matrix at any time, but that caveat aside,
it’s our processes of communication, cooperation, record keeping,
rhetorical persuasion, experimentation, reason, science, etc. that we
arrive at standards of right and wrong be they amoral (e.g., math,
chemistry, physics) or moral. And we arrive at them, to the extent we
do, through our own shared reasoning, thank you very much. No divinity
needed or even evident. 

Point number two is not so much incorrect as irrelevant, bordering on a category error. In this section, Passerby fails to grasp that an objective standard is more than the sum of six billion subjective opinions, and in fact, no number of subjective opinions can produce an objective standard, by definition.  The more the standard is “influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice”, the less objective it can be, regardless of whether those competing feelings, interpretations, and prejudices are harmonious or not.  Existent evil/wrongdoing requires a material and universal standard, even if our subjective experience of the objective reality is different in six billion different ways.

If the readers don’t mind indulging me in following Passerby on one of his tangents, I will add that Stephen Pinker is wrong about science as he is wrong about so many things.  Science is most certainly not the highest and purest expression of reason.  Not only is it not reason at all, it was specifically conceived, developed, and utilized to replace pure reason.  This is why Science is so often at odds with Philosophy as well as Religion; Science is nothing more than the systematic codification of experience.

Mailvox: the logic of God

Passerby’s challenge somehow tends to remind me of this series of photographs.  But who knows, perhaps the stag will surprise us:

Definition of evil:  the fact of suffering, misfortune, and wrongdoing

I’m an atheist and going by Merriam-Webster’s def. of evil above, I say evil exists.  According to VD, my stance is irrational. Prove it. Anyone. Show your work. Lay out the steps proving my logic is flawed. You’ll fail. I will crush you.

Well, let us see about that.  He has made his claim that his stance is rational, (which is to say that evil exists but God does not), so I’ll take up the burden of attempting to falsify it.

  1. Passerby asserts that “the fact of suffering, misfortune, and wrongdoing” exists.
  2. The existent fact of wrongdoing necessarily requires that there is a material universal standard of right and wrong by which actions can be classified.
  3. A material universal standard of right and wrong must be objective.
  4. Man’s standards of right and wrong are inherently subjective and non-universal.
  5. Therefore the objective, material, universal standard of right and wrong cannot be produced by Man.
  6. The most likely source of an inhuman, objective, material, universal standard of right and wrong is an intelligence of grand scope possessing a direct connection to the area in which that standard applies.
  7. The scope required for that inhuman intelligence to provide the universal standard implies, though it does not necessarily require, extra-universality.
  8. The most reasonable connection between the presumably extra-universal intelligence providing the standard and the area in which that standard applies is that of creator to creation.
  9. The presumably extra-universal intelligent creator that provides the objective, material, universal standard to its presumed creation is quite reasonably described as God.

This logic provides for a small degree of wiggle room here.  A being need not necessarily be either extra-universal nor the creator to successfully impose an objective standard on the universe.  However, since any act of creation that results in an observed objective standard necessarily requires the creation of a standard of some kind, the most rational conclusion is to assume that the standard observed was provided by the creator rather than by some other intelligent, inhuman entity that successfully replaced the original standard.

But I think even if the logic-dictated provider of the universal standard of right and wrong is neither the creator nor extra-universal, its observed ability to impose such a standard upon the universe suffices to justify its recognition as an existent god, at the very least, if not necessarily the Creator God or the Creator God of the Christian Bible.

The atheist problem of evil

I have pointed out many times that the so-called “problem of evil” is not an actual problem for Christianity. Indeed, Christianity is predicated on the existence of evil. This post, discussing how the modern academy blunders about completely failing to grasp the basic concept of evil, tends to underline that point:

Hindered by their postmodern moral relativism, many participants tended to be tentative and vague in their ruminations on moral evil (except when it concerned political conservatives). Some of the better papers concerned the theme of evil in great writers such as Kafka and Dostoevsky but left the concept of evil undefined. Only a few papers addressed the problems of the origin of evil and the essential nature of evil. One of these was a Hungarian scholar’s treatment of Plato’s thoughts on how a good deity (the Demiurge) could allow for the existence of evil. I had no idea that thinkers other than Judeo-Christian monotheists had dealt with this issue. The paper demonstrated that the existence of evil is a real intellectual puzzle that merits deeper attention than the sort of superficial, conventional moralizing on display in other presentations

As a general rule, if your first thought concerning evil revolves around political party identities, you’re totally missing the point.

Snowflake morality

Some of you may find this exchange at Susan Walsh’s place to be as familiar as it is amusing. INTJ attempts to call JutR and me to account on the basis of our bigoted belief in the superiority of Western culture:

The level of arrogance and superiority you seem to have for Western culture is frankly shocking to me. I have better things to do then to have a lengthy argument about your bigoted views, but I’ll throw in a couple of points:

First, if the Bible and the Quran are interpreted literally, both Islam and Christianity are absolutely horrific religions. Christianity has no right to hold the moral high ground here. The only difference between the two religions is that radical Islam is far more prevalent and powerful than radical Christianity. But this has nothing to do with religion. The only reason for this is Cold War politics. It was the American government that propped up reactionary governments like the Saudis, and it’s the America and Israel that funded jihadist groups in the Middle East to destabilize pro-Soviet governments.

Second, it is clear cut that the West as a whole is far more promiscuous than the East, reflecting a cultural legacy of individualism. This culture had its pros (such as work ethic, meritocracy) and cons (promiscuity, narcissism). But there’s no question that the West is more individualist, and in America in particular, more materialist due to the consumer society.

I’ve spent time in enough third-world shitholes to vastly prefer Western culture to all of the alternatives, yes. I’m not excusing the USA’s insane meddling in empire and the West is now indubitably in decline, but if you’re going to defend cannibal cultures and pagan ones that couldn’t figure out the wheel, running water, or the rule of law, well, I’m simply going to laugh at you. Perhaps when the West collapses economically and you end up in a part of it dominated by non-Western cultures, you’ll learn to appreciate what was once Christendom.

Oh, this should be amusing. By what universal moral standard are Islam and Christianity “absolutely horrific”? Your personal and subjective one? Some pagan Indian one? If you are clueless enough to try to claim they are self-condemning by their own standards, this is going to get very embarrassing for you very fast. You would appear to be unaware that Doug Wilson absolutely handed Christopher Hitchens his head on a platter when Hitchens tried to make this very argument.

Cannibal cultures? Seriously? You should at least reread what you type before you post such shit.

You conveniently overlooked the conditionality of my statement: “if the Bible and the Quran are interpreted literally”. Yes, slavery, rape, and genocide are horrific according to my own moral standard. Do you disagree with this aspect of my own moral standard? If so, feel free to fuck off.

What, you didn’t hear about the German who got eaten earlier this year in Papua New Guinea? It’s not “shit”, it’s historical fact and it is still happening today. Do you really not know that albinos are being slaughtered across Africa and even in Europe now for “muti”? Or that the UN confirmed that pygmies were being eaten in the Congo in 2003?

I didn’t overlook it at all. In fact, the literal interpretation of both the Bible and the Koran is obviously assumed if one is going to judge their respective moralities by the standards imposed by the respective scriptures. And you call yourself an INTJ….

Who cares about your stupid little personal moral standard? It is no more valid to the other seven billion people on the planet than Hitler’s, Stalin’s, or anyone else’s who doesn’t subscribe to an objective one with a universal warrant. “Fuck off if you don’t agree with me” is a borderline retarded argument, but by all means, feel free to run away crying like a little girl who can’t make a rational case for her own position if you like. And you should care what that fool Hitchens did, because he was trying to defend exactly the same position you appear to be holding.

As an INTJ, I come to my own conclusions and make sure they’re internally sound. Hitchens may or may not share my conclusions, and may or may not have sound reasons for those conclusions. Either way, I don’t care, as I do not attribute much value to Hitchens’ political/philosophical activity.

And I’m not arguing with you when I tell you to fuck off. I’m simply following my own “not very valid” moral standard, which requires me to take react aggressively to those who aren’t against slavery, rape, or genocide.

You may subscribe to the moral standard as literally expounded in the scripture of the Bible, which includes Exodus 21, Numbers 31, and Deuteronomy 20 & 21. If so, I repeat what I said earlier: feel free to fuck off.

An appeal to the authority of your personality type. That’s certainly a creative logical fallacy. Since you are the author of those conclusions, no doubt you are the ideal person to be certain your conclusions are internally sound.

How very admirable [. I suppose I must be doing the same thing, although my unique and subjective moral standard requires me to point and laugh at philosophically ignorant individuals who genuinely believe they have constructed a sound and logically consistent moral standard when they are doing little more than attempting to rationalize their feelings. Seriously, speaking as a fellow INTJ, you’re really letting the side down here. In fact, we appear to have a real conundrum here, as I can appeal to the same authority to which you are appealing in defense of a very different conclusion.

I most certainly do. God’s Games, God’s Rules. Even Socrates couldn’t quibble philosophically with that; it solves the second horn of his false dilemma. To paraphrase the voice in the whirlwind, who do you think you are, creature, to judge your Maker? You are like an NPC on a World of Warcraft server shaking its fist at Rob Pardo, demanding to know why it has to watch orc after orc after orc die at the hands of invading parties, seeing them rise again from the dead only to die in agony once more. Slaver! Murderer! Genocidal Maniac! And then Pardo flicks a switch and that entire universe vanishes in an instant.

On closing comments

Walter Russell Mead shuts down comments at The American Interest:

After almost three years and well more than 40,000 published reader comments (and half a million spam comments that either we or our spam filter managed to identify and trash), Via Meadia is joining the ranks of non-comment blogs. We’re grateful to readers over those years who have shared their reactions to what they read here, and hope to develop new ways to interact with readers even as we continue to benefit from their thoughts and responses, but the traditional comments section no longer seems like the right way to go. To make the comments section work in its present form we would have to edit and curate much more aggressively than we do now and in our current judgment the effort needed to do that is better spent improving other features of the blog.

One uncomfortable truth I have observed over time is that most bloggers really don’t want “to interact with readers”. What they appear to really want is to be admired, to be praised and to see their opinions echoed back to them. The primary reason they permit comments in the first place is because comments serve as a metric of both status and success; one of the hallmarks of a successful blog is a plethora of comments following every post. In most cases, even if they claim to value discourse and diversity of opinion, the spectrum of permissible discourse is quite strictly limited, regardless of the blogger’s place on the ideological spectrum.

Contra the assertion above, it is really not very much work keeping comments from getting out of hand. Mr. Mead purports to be overwhelmed by the difficulty of managing 40,000 comments in three years, whereas there have been 33,494 comments here at VP in the last five months alone. During that time, precisely one person had to be banned and that one person was only banned after first making dozens of comments and even having multiple posts dedicated to directly responding to him. The reality is that if you have a few good commenters capable of defending their own arguments and criticizing the overtly nonsensical arguments presented by others, there is very little that the blogger has to do himself. In nine years of this blog, which began in October 2003, I don’t think there have been more than 20 people banned out of the thousands who have left a comment here at one point or another.

Granted, a few of those 20 or so people have been banned repeatedly under an impressively long list of pseudonyms. Who, after all, can remember all of the various identities belonging to the infamous Jefferson or that would-be literary critic, Dimwit Dan? However, the true troll is both rare and very easy to identify. As a general rule, the sort of individual who doesn’t have the self-control to avoid getting banned in a comparatively relaxed environment also lacks the self-awareness to stop doing what got him previously banned.

Now, please note that I’m not criticizing Mr. Mead’s decision to shut down comments, any more than I have criticized John Scalzi’s decision to aggressively delete all comments from all sources that he so elegantly labels “assbags”, or Instapundit’s decision not to permit comments in the first place. Every blogger has a perfect right to run things however he happens to see fit and I can’t see that comments would actually suit Instapundit’s quick-hit, news-breaking format anyhow.

What I am criticizing in both the Mead and Scalzi situations is the pretense involved. In the former case, it is provably untrue that it is a lot of work to permit comments. In the case of the latter, it is provably untrue that differences of opinion on many subjects are permitted. As a blogger, one should do what one wants, but one should also be honest about what that is. If you want a one-way megaphone or you only want to permit dissent within certain parameters, that’s not a problem.

But in such cases, you cannot try to claim that you also value the sort of open discourse and competitive exchange of ideas that takes place on a regular basis here at Vox Popoli. That is simply false advertising. What John Scalzi describes as “a feculent miasma” is actually the rich and pungent aroma of intellectual freedom. But his description is extremely informative. Only a man who spends his days with his nose up his own ass could mistake the scent of freedom for bullshit.

Vox Popoli is not, and will never be, an echo chamber. There are not, and will never be, any topics that are definitively outside the scope of permissible intellectual discourse. If, for whatever reason, you wish to defend racism, sexism, cannibalism, the Holocaust, the designated hitter, the nonexistence of God, or even the novels of Robert Jordan, you can certainly do so here provided that you do so on-topic – I’ll even create a topic for you if necessary – and in an intellectually honest manner. The only commenters whose participation I will not tolerate is those who repeatedly lie, who demonstrate proven intellectual dishonesty, and who simply refuse to admit it when someone else has publicly shown them to be wrong. If you are not at least capable of acknowledging that you could be wrong about an idea, no matter how near and dear it is to you, then you will probably be better served commenting at a place where your ideas will not be questioned or criticized.

This may not be the best blog on the Internet, but I do hope that it is at least among the most open to ideas, however crazy they might be, and to genuine debate and discussion. I know I have changed my mind on numerous topics, from universal suffrage to free trade, as a direct result of the discussions that have taken place here, and I suspect I am not the only one.