Tag: philosophy

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.

An irrationality of atheists

I find it encouraging that more of the concepts I introduced in TIA six years ago, like the argument that religion does not cause war and the hypothesis that atheism is a mild form of neurological abnormality, have gradually percolated into the mainstream discourse. In this New York Times article, the philosopher Gary Gutting interviews Alvin Platinga:

GG: Especially among today’s atheists, materialism seems to be a primary motive. They think there’s nothing beyond the material entities open to scientific inquiry, so there there’s no place for immaterial beings such as God.

AP: Well, if there are only material entities, then atheism certainly follows. But there is a really serious problem for materialism: It can’t be sensibly believed, at least if, like most materialists, you also believe that humans are the product of evolution.

GG: Why is that?

 AP: I can’t give a complete statement of the argument here — for that see Chapter 10 of “Where the Conflict Really Lies.” But, roughly, here’s why. First, if materialism is true, human beings, naturally enough, are material objects. Now what, from this point of view, would a belief be? My belief that Marcel Proust is more subtle that Louis L’Amour, for example? Presumably this belief would have to be a material structure in my brain, say a collection of neurons that sends electrical impulses to other such structures as well as to nerves and muscles, and receives electrical impulses from other structures.

But in addition to such neurophysiological properties, this structure, if it is a belief, would also have to have a content: It would have, say, to be the belief that Proust is more subtle than L’Amour.

GG: So is your suggestion that a neurophysiological structure can’t be a belief? That a belief has to be somehow immaterial?

AP: That may be, but it’s not my point here. I’m interested in the fact that beliefs cause (or at least partly cause) actions. For example, my belief that there is a beer in the fridge (together with my desire to have a beer) can cause me to heave myself out of my comfortable armchair and lumber over to the fridge.

But here’s the important point: It’s by virtue of its material, neurophysiological properties that a belief causes the action. It’s in virtue of those electrical signals sent via efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, that the belief about the beer in the fridge causes me to go to the fridge. It is not by virtue of the content (there is a beer in the fridge) the belief has.

GG: Why do you say that?

AP: Because if this belief — this structure — had a totally different content (even, say, if it was a belief that there is no beer in the fridge) but had the same neurophysiological properties, it would still have caused that same action of going to the fridge. This means that the content of the belief isn’t a cause of the behavior. As far as causing the behavior goes, the content of the belief doesn’t matter.

GG: That does seem to be a hard conclusion to accept. But won’t evolution get the materialist out of this difficulty? For our species to have survived, presumably many, if not most, of our beliefs must be true — otherwise, we wouldn’t be functional in a dangerous world.

AP: Evolution will have resulted in our having beliefs that are adaptive; that is, beliefs that cause adaptive actions. But as we’ve seen, if materialism is true, the belief does not cause the adaptive action by way of its content: It causes that action by way of its neurophysiological properties. Hence it doesn’t matter what the content of the belief is, and it doesn’t matter whether that content is true or false. All that’s required is that the belief have the right neurophysiological properties. If it’s also true, that’s fine; but if false, that’s equally fine.

Evolution will select for belief-producing processes that produce beliefs with adaptive neurophysiological properties, but not for belief-producing processes that produce true beliefs. Given materialism and evolution, any particular belief is as likely to be false as true.

GG: So your claim is that if materialism is true, evolution doesn’t lead to most of our beliefs being true.

AP: Right. In fact, given materialism and evolution, it follows that our belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

Here’s why. If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent. Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of beliefs are true is the multiplication of all their individual probabilities. Even if we set a fairly low bar for reliability — say, that at least two-thirds (67 percent) of our beliefs are true — our overall reliability, given materialism and evolution, is exceedingly low: something like .0004. So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

But to believe that is to fall into a total skepticism, which leaves you with no reason to accept any of your beliefs (including your beliefs in materialism and evolution!). The only sensible course is to give up the claim leading to this conclusion: that both materialism and evolution are true. Maybe you can hold one or the other, but not both.

So if you’re an atheist simply because you accept materialism, maintaining your atheism means you have to give up your belief that evolution is true. Another way to put it: The belief that both materialism and evolution are true is self-refuting. It shoots itself in the foot. Therefore it can’t rationally be held.

I’ll have to think more about that argument before I accept that it holds any water. But I was disappointed that Platinga readily ceded so much ground on “the so-called problem of evil”. He wrote: “The so-called “problem of evil” would presumably be the strongest (and
maybe the only) evidence against theism. It does indeed have some
strength; it makes sense to think that the probability of theism, given
the existence of all the suffering and evil our world contains, is
fairly low.”

However, the observable existence of evil is not even the smallest problem for the varient of theism that is Christianity. Indeed, as I have pointed out repeatedly, the existence of real and material evil is an absolute prerequisite for Christianity.

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: 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.

Throwing out Aristotle

To say nothing of more than two millennia of theology, philosophy, and modern science. And you wonder why I’m dubious about the survival prospects of equalitarian society, or indeed, any society where feminism has grown roots:

What is a feminist logic is a question I’ve spent the past six months
thinking about and researching. There are not a lot of women in
philosophy, and there are definitely not a lot of feminist philosophers,
so I don’t have a good answer for this question. There is great
scholarship talking about weather a feminist logic can build off of
formal logic or if it has to reject the laws of identity and create
something entirely new. There are solid arguments for both camps,
personally I’m swayed by the constructive theories that would build onto
formal logic through a feminist lens. There exist logics that handle
contradiction as part of the system, namely paraconsistent logic. I
think this type of logic represents the feminist idea that something can
be and not be without being a contradiction, that is a system where the
following statement is not explosive: (p && ¬p) == 1.

It should be readily apparent that once you’ve decided that X = !X, you have essentially doomed yourself by denying reality. It is only a matter of time before you make the fatal determination that the hungry bear wants you to play with it, the November ice is thick enough to drive on, or you can leap off the cliff and fly.

This holds as true for societies as it does for individuals. Consider the paraconsistencies that Examerican society has adopted as truths.

  • Third world immigrants are effective substitutes for native children.
  • Expanding the vote to women will improve society.
  • Paying money to the unemployed will not discourage them from working.
  • Debt can expand infinitely without risk of default or currency devaluation.
  • Female labor is as productive as male labor.
  • Free trade in good, services, and labor benefits the economy.
  • Increasing the supply of labor doesn’t reduce its price.
  • Men will marry women and support children regardless of financial disincentives.
  • Members of non-European population groups will behave more like European population groups in European geographies than like non-Europeans in their original geographies.

Pop culture is utter filth

Vile, abusive, and occasionally lethal filth, especially where animals and children are concerned:

American Humane Association monitor Gina Johnson confided in an email to a colleague on April 7, 2011, about the star tiger in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. While many scenes featuring “Richard Parker,” the Bengal tiger who shares a lifeboat with a boy lost at sea, were created using CGI technology, King, very much a real animal, was employed when the digital version wouldn’t suffice. “This one take with him just went really bad and he got lost trying to swim to the side,” Johnson wrote. “Damn near drowned.”

King’s trainer eventually snagged him with a catch rope and dragged him to one side of the tank, where he scrambled out to safety.

“I think this goes without saying but DON’T MENTION IT TO ANYONE, ESPECIALLY THE OFFICE!” Johnson continued in the email, obtained by The Hollywood Reporter. “I have downplayed the f— out of it.”

The full scope of animal injuries and deaths in entertainment productions cannot be known. But in multiple cases examined by THR,
the AHA has not lived up to its professed role as stalwart defenders of
animals — who, unlike their human counterparts, didn’t themselves sign
up for such work.

Corey Feldman and others have spokenly openly about the homosexual pedophiles who infest Hollywood. But they’re also active in the music industry, as the guilty plea of Ian Watkins, the former lead singer of Lostprophets, demonstrates:

The police faced serious questions last night over why they failed to act sooner to stop Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins after it emerged fans had warned for nearly four years that he was obsessed with child porn.

From early 2010 horrified fans who had become friends with Watkins went online to beg for help after discovering vile images on his computer. Friends claim they called police to tell them the 36-year-old was a paedophile but officers did nothing, allowing him to go on to subject babies to the most horrific abuse.

A disturbing child porn profile created in that time by Watkins was viewed by more than 40,000 people on the internet and yet appears never to have been monitored by authorities.

In one post, written before his arrest, a fan wrote: ‘His on-off girlfriend reported him to police twice for being a paedophile.

‘He sent pornographic pictures of a little girl to a few girls telling them it was a five-year-old girl he’d raped. He also watches child porn constantly. Sick sick man.’

Watkins allegedly boasted to obsessed female fans that he had HIV and was on a mission to pass it on to children.

Child abuse and animal abuse are two of the inevitable consequences of secular culture. It’s not an accident that these predilections are beginning to come out of their closets at this time. It is both logically and empirically obvious that the tolerant, non-judgmental moral parasitism of secularism cannot survive the absence of its host. This is not to say that all men and women will inevitably descend into total depravity, only that their inability to prevent those who are more susceptible to such sins becomes complete in a moral vacuum.

You who pride yourselves on your tolerance, know that you are tolerating the rape and slaughter of the innocent. If you cannot say: “these things are wrong and they are evil because they are against the Law of God and Nature”, you are part of the problem. You’re not responsible, but you have rendered yourself useless with regards to assisting in the solution.

I liked Lostprophets. But, not unlike the band members themselves, I really don’t care to have anything to do with it anymore. Ian Watkins did, indeed, turn out to be a Prophet of the Lost.