Tag: trainwreck

In defense of mass murder

I find myself contemplating quitting. No, not the blog. And not writing in general. But it is really incredible to see how few people at WND are interested in substantive matters like a conceptual revolution in economics versus other, considerably less significant issues.

There are all of two comments on today’s WND column. That’s less than one-twentieth of how many comment on any given column. And it’s not the WND readership, it wouldn’t be any better if I wrote for Salon, the New York Times, or the Daily Show. I mean, it’s not that I don’t understand MPAI, I coined the acronym after all. But that’s true for varying degrees of “most” and sometimes the percentage is just a little higher than I can fathom. I mean, the world is on the brink of a total economic meltdown, and still no one gives a damn about why? I feel like Jonah staring at the walls of Nineveh, stomping up and down the beach, gesticulating wildly and saying: “Go ahead and do it, Lord, let them have it, you know they deserve it!”

Seriously, I’m not sure I can deal with trying to pretend I don’t think a world where the best-selling novel is Twilight fan fiction deserves to perish in fire and ice. I used to wonder to whom the old Norse pagan religion held any appeal, but now I understand completely. If I read one more idiot Republican bank apologist claiming that the root cause of the financial crisis was Democratic politicians forcing banks to provide home loans to minorities, I may climb the Rainbow Bridge, wrest the horn from Heimdall and blow it myself. Then I’ll sit there and cheer for the frost giants and fire demons.

I’m considering a literary experiment of sorts. I’m wondering how much more interest would be expressed in the dumbest, most lowbrow column I can get past the editors devoted to the simple and straightforward concept of Obama being bad. Bad for the nation. Bad for the world! Bad. So bad. I’m thinking of calling it: Obama is Bad. Subtitled: Obama is really and truly very bad for America.

And if the column hits Drudge and results in an offer from Fox News to host my own cable news show, I’m going to give up op/ed, study genetics, build a lab, and start creating customized killer viruses.

Hultgreen-Curie strikes again

Yet another pioneer is struck down by the infamous Hultgreen-Curie syndrome:

Maria De Villota, 32, from Spain, was taking part in her first test for the F1 team at Duxford Airfield in Cambridgeshire this morning when she inexplicably crashed into a support truck for her team after completing her opening lap. After treatment by trackside paramedics, she was taken to the local Addenbrooke’s Hospital. One of only two females in test-drive roles at F1 level, she was running the rule over the Marussia car which will be raced by Timo Glock at the British Grand Prix in Silverstone this weekend.

Inexplicable… and yet somehow entirely predictable.

German court finds Muslim guilty; Jews suffer most

I was pretty sure when I read this that we could count on some hysterical reactions from those who can detect anti-semitism in cloud formations:

German Court Declares Judaism A Crime

Hard to believe, but that’s what the decision handed down by the regional court in Cologne, Germany means: circumcising a child under the age of consent is a crime, notwithstanding the religious beliefs of the parents…. Jews believe that the circumcision of infants is a necessary act; the command to circumcise male children at the age of eight days is the first command that God gives Abraham to mark their covenant; for thousands of years this has been a foundation of Jewish life. To ban infant circumcision is essentially to make the practice of Judaism illegal in Germany; it is now once again a crime to be a Jew in the Reich.

First of all, no one seems to have any problem with ignoring the religious beliefs of the parents when it comes to circumcising girls, so it seems more than a little bit hypocritical for anyone to simultaneously claim that there is a religious right to chop off part of a boy’s body off, but not any part of a girl’s body. Does Mr. Mead support the right of female circumcision for those Muslims who practice that?

Second, there are severe restrictions on religious freedom in Germany. One cannot homeschool there, wear a headscarf, or be excused from classes on evolution for religious purposes, so it seems a bit much to expect to be able to cut pieces off other people’s bodies there on that basis. If you want to practice your religion in freedom, Germany is simply not the place for you. This is neither news nor rocket science.

Third, circumcision is not Judaism, as should be obvious given the fact that many Christians and Muslims are circumcised and are not Jews. So, it is simply false to claim that Germany has declared Judaism to be a crime. And fourth, why do Jews still want to live in Germany anyway? One finds it hard to imagine that the Germans have not made it sufficiently clear that they do not cherish living with Jews among them any more than Israelis enjoy living with Sudanese in their midst.

UPDATE: I have zero sympathy for Jews whining about this court decision. They have no grounds for complaining about finding themselves on the short end of the freedom of religion law this time given this previous German court case: “In 1973, a Jew complained successfully that his freedom of religion was violated by the obligation to speak in a German courtroom decorated by a cross.“

Do you want your traditions to be respected? Then keep your nose out of everyone else’s.

Oh, relax and enjoy it, Kate

One of the things I find remarkable is the readiness of outspoken feminist women to crucify themselves with their own words. It’s as if they have absolutely no conception of the logical consequences of their ideas, and despite their confrontational tone, they appear to have no expectation that their position can or will be criticized.

Consider the following excerpts from the linked cartoon, which features a retarded form of Socratic dialogue between a cartoon figure and an even more cartoonish version of anti-feminist arguments.

It’s not fair that I have to be terrified when I go jogging after 6 PM or when I’m on the bus or going to get milk.

Then don’t go out alone at night. That’s common sense.

That’s rape culture! When you tell me it’s my responsibility not to get hurt, you take away the responsibility of a human being not to rape!

Why are we even talking about this? I’m not a rapist.

Because it gets really fucking exhausting trying to believe in a future where I’m not treated like a crazy person for believing in equality!

First of all, Kate being terrified of rape when she goes to get milk is her problem. Some women are terrified of bats, others are afraid of heights, and those fears are no more your problem or my problem than Kate’s terror of rape on the milk run. It is very, very easy for Kate to significantly reduce her chances of being raped, as getting a concealed carry permit and avoiding the company of black and Hispanic men will virtually eliminate the possibility that she will be forcibly raped. Even without taking any such defensive measures, the national rate of forcible rape is only 24.7 per 100,000 population, one-third lower than it was in 1990. This means that in a population of 308 million, Kate’s chances of being raped in any given year are less than one in 12,000 and declining. This cannot be reasonably described as a “rape culture”.

If Kate genuinely lives in constant terror of a one in 12,000 risk, she is delusional and may be clinically paranoid. And this doesn’t even begin to take into account that unless a woman is raped at home by someone breaking into her residence, it is very difficult for a woman to get raped without her not only contributing to the situation, but contributing significantly to it. And yes, in such situations, that does make the victim at least partially culpable from a legal perspective. If you don’t understand that, try looking at it this way. If insurance companies sold rape insurance, are there any behaviors that would conceivably increase or decrease the premium?

Furthermore, Kate is quite obviously crazy. If she had said “it gets really fucking exhausting trying to believe in a future where I’m not treated like a crazy person for believing in rainbow-tailed unicorns”, everyone would quite correctly conclude that she is a lunatic. But there is no more evidence for equality than there is for rainbow-tailed unicorns. Human equality simply doesn’t exist and it has never existed. As I have pointed out before, both logic and genetic science demonstrate that human beings are not even all equally human. Her lunacy is further evidenced by her bizarre attempt to justify her broaching the topic with the non-rapist by an appeal to her own exhaustion. That does not follow. Moreover, it is apparent that Kate, by her own admission, doesn’t actually believe in equality anyway. Consider her final rant:

So fuck ANYONE who thinks they have the right to tell me not to care! FUCK THEM! I do care. I will always care.

Here Kate is expressly denying that others have the right to free speech, which is not only encoded into various legal systems but also happens to observably exist in a material manner, while simultaneously asserting the legitimacy of her attempt to believe in a future that is not only nonexistent, but improbable to the point of near impossibility. From which we are forced to conclude that she’s not only crazy, she’s outrageously stupid to boot.

The fundamentally nonsensical thing about her position is that she wants others to do what she will not. If she can’t be bothered to put any effort into defending herself against rape, why should anyone else? If it’s not her responsibility to act on something about which she professes to care so deeply, how could it possibly be mine, or anyone else’s, when we do not care in the slightest about her feelings or her fate.

Kate declares her opinion that angry posturing on behalf of nonexistent female rights is “hot as hell”. Which is fine, I suppose, so long as she is hoping to attract angry, rancid feminist women. But it certainly isn’t going to be attractive to men who have access to better options, such as Internet porn or voluntary chastity.

For further amusement, I highly recommend the emotional posturing in which various Pharyngulans are engaging as they attempt to demonstrate which one of them is the anti-rapiest of all. Apparently the winner will be awarded a tiara carved from the horn of a pink unicorn by PZ Myers himself. This was one of the finer examples of the intellectual fireworks on display:

I can’t think of one, even one, precaution that a woman (or man) can take that actually has a good chance of preventing rape that would also be considered “reasonable” by any rational or honest individual…. And if you want to talk about “reasonable” precautions, I think, the first burden on you is to describe your proposed precaution and demonstrate that it actually works to prevent rape.

This total inability of humanity to prevent any rape no doubt explains why rape rates never change over time and do not vary from one nation to another. It is a very strange belief system indeed where human action can modify the global climate, but rape is random, inevitable, and completely immune to human action. Of course, it would be deplorably raciss to notice that a 31 percent increase in the number of incarcerated black men, mostly for harmless drug charges, has corresponded with the 33 percent decline in forcible rapes per 100,000, from 41.2 in 1990 to 27.5 in 2010.

At least it gets the kids outside

I would have thought it would be difficult to come up with a less intelligent, more oblivious response to my explication of why David Sloan Wilson was correct to declare that PZ Myers does not think or act like a scientist when it comes to religion. But somehow, someone named David Futrelle actually managed to surpasss the Fowl Atheist when he asked “Does Manosphere Blogger Vox Day Really Support the Murder and Mutilation of Women?”

I suppose it depends. Does a hobby counts as “support”? Anyhow, Mr. Futrelle managed to rise from his fainting couch long enough to demonstrate that he has all the reading comprehension of an illiterate, brain-damaged chimpanzee raised in poverty by a single mother:

In one of the most repellant manosphere rants I’ve run across yet, Vox attempts to rebut PZ Myers’ critiques of evolutionary psychology with a series of bizarre and hateful assertions about women, offering his own “scientific” rationales for keeping women down. Is this all somehow satire on his part? He certainly seems sincere.

TRIGGER WARNING for all that follows; Vox explicitly defends the maiming and murder of women….

Despite Vox Day’s repellent ideas about women – and his proud racism – he’s an influential figure in the manosphere, mentioned approvingly and regularly cited by others who present themselves as more moderate voices. It may not be a shock that the reactionary antifeminist blogger Dalrock includes Vox in his blogroll, and cites his work with approval (see here and here for examples). But, astoundingly, he’s also regularly cited approvingly by antifeminist “relationship expert” Susan Walsh of Hooking Up Smart (see here, here, and here). And she has even written at least one guest post on Vox’s “game blog” Alpha Game. At this point I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked by any of this. But I still am.

Based on the level of intellectual sophistication shown here, I would expect Mr. Futrelle to be surprised every time he hears voices come out of the magic box with the moving lights. I wasn’t attempting to “rebut PZ Myers’ critiques of evolutionary psychology with a series of bizarre and hateful assertions about women”, I wasn’t attempting to rebut anything. I was simply demonstrating that Wilson was correct and Myers’s arguments, if they can even be described as such, were intrinsically unscientific. Which I subsequently proved, utilizing PZ Myers’s own words, to show that scientific answers to his questions could be provided and that his own arguments were based on his biological predisposition, his culture, and his personal values rather than science, thus supporting Wilson’s claim. The fact that I can make an intellectual case does not mean that I subscribe to it any more than every defense attorney who argues a case on behalf of a client believes in his client’s innocence. Pointing out that the maiming and murder of women can be defended on various grounds is not tantamount to defending it on any of them.

Note that Myers himself wrote the following about the Taliban’s oppression of women. “We cannot, though, say a priori that it is wrong because abusing and denigrating half the population is unconscionable and vile, because that is not a scientific foundation for the conclusion.” I am sure we can all eagerly anticipate Mr. Futrelle’s next histrionic post: Does Godless Blogger PZ Myers Really Support Sharia and Stoning Women?

And one more thing. Yes, Mr. Futrelle, in my mind “female fetuses are “unborn women.”” At least, those female fetuses carried by members of the species known as homo sapiens sapiens. What on Earth do you think they are? Chimpanzees? Caterpillars? Prospective unicorns?

Still sniping, still running

It would appear PZ Myers is now too delicate to respond to me directly, so he’s responding to someone else quoting what I wrote, which totally doesn’t count as responding:

I don’t do debates anymore. One reason is that they give the other side far too much credibility; another is that the format rewards rhetoric, not honesty. But the other big reason is sheer disgust at the spectacle these loons can put on.

Imagine this metaphorical situation: you’re at a debate, and your opponent stands up and in the first round, starts punching himself in the face. Punching hard, until the blood spurts in great red rivers out of his nose. You’re aghast, but when your turn comes up, you try to make your points; in rebuttal, he pulls out a knife and starts gouging out one of his eyeballs. You just want to stop the whole debacle, call an ambulance, and have the poor warped goon hauled away. But then afterwards, he crows victory.

That’s a bit of hyperbole, but not by much. Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day, has leapt upon my post in which I used the status of women as evidence that religion does harm to humanity, and eagerly tries to rebut me in a spectacular act of self-mutilation. I won’t link directly to poor sick Theodore Beale — he needs psychiatric help — but fortunately Dave Futrelle quotes him extensively, so you can get the gist without feeding Beale’s pathology directly.

Right, that’s why the man whose intellectual courage inspired me to dub him “The Fowl Atheist” doesn’t debate anyone. It’s not because he can’t argue his way out of a paper bag and knows that he’ll get his pudgy ass exposed to the public before it is kicked all over the place, it’s because he’s too much of a humanitarian. You’d think he would know no one is going to buy that excuse, he’s a high-AQ militant atheist after all. He’s a fierce and focused hunter, with hunter’s hands and hunter’s eyes, not Sister Mary Margaret feeding the poor at the homeless shelter! I find it a little ironic that a man who openly admits to being closer to having Asperger’s Syndrome than being neurotypical is attempting to claim I need psychiatric help.

I never cease to find amusing how quickly these inept atheists resort to accusations of mental illness whenever their illogic is publicly illuminated and dissected. Why, one might almost begin to suspect they are projecting!

But there’s enough bile to make you wonder. I was arguing that many features of religion clearly don’t benefit women, so I asked:

How does throwing acid in their faces when they demand independence from men benefit women?

So Teddy rebuts that in the most appalling way.

[F]emale independence is strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills. Using the utilitarian metric favored by most atheists, a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages, stable families, legitimate children, low levels of debt, strong currencies, affordable housing, homogenous populations, low levels of crime, and demographic stability. If PZ has turned against utilitarianism or the concept of the collective welfare trumping the interests of the individual, I should be fascinated to hear it.

Say what? So his answer to how this benefits women is to say it’s bad for society for women to be independent, and that honor killings, stonings, and mutilation of women is a small price?

I think he just made my case for me.

Yes, that is precisely the answer. But this doesn’t make his case for him, instead, his response to my scientific answer only confirms Wilson’s original case against him, in which he claimed that PZ doesn’t act or think in a scientific manner. And while Wilson is correct and PZ truly doesn’t think like a scientist in any way, shape, or form, it’s actually worse than that because it’s clear that he also doesn’t understand what he reads. I not only provided an answer to his question that can be empirically and objectively analyzed, it was a scientific answer that was entirely in keeping with PZ’s own previously expressed statements on the subject. Consider what PZ wrote about the Taliban’s oppression of women only two years ago:

I also think that the desire for a successful society is not a scientific premise…it’s a kind of Darwinian criterion, because unsuccessful societies don’t survive. Can we use science to determine whether that is a good strategy for human success? I think we can, but not in the way Harris is trying to do so: we could ask empirically, after the fact, whether the Taliban was successful in expanding, maintaining its population, and responding to its environment in a productive way. We cannot, though, say a priori that it is wrong because abusing and denigrating half the population is unconscionable and vile, because that is not a scientific foundation for the conclusion. It’s an emotional one; it’s also a rational one, given the premise that we should treat all people equitably…but that premise can’t claim scientific justification.

So while the desire for a successful society is not a scientific premise, determining the way in which a society can become successful is. Note that Myers admits that one cannot say throwing acid in a woman’s face when she demands independence is wrong from the scientific perspective. He even acknowledges that science could support, on the basis of the Darwinian criterion, horrific actions in support of societal success and survival. This is not to say he supports such actions, only that his opposition to them is based on entirely non-scientific reasoning. In that previous post, he adds:

I agree with Harris entirely that the oppression of women is an evil, a wrong, a violation of a social contract that all members of a society should share. I just don’t see a scientific reason for that — I see reasons of biological predisposition (we are empathic, social animals), of culture (this is a conclusion of Enlightenment history), and personal values, but not science. Science is an amoral judge: science could find that a slave culture of ant-like servility was a species optimum, or that a strong behavioral sexual dimorphism, where men and women had radically different statuses in society, was an excellent working solution.

So, we see that Wilson was correct. PZ is not thinking as a scientist about these matters, by his own words he is clearly thinking about them according to his biological predisposition, his culture, and his personal values. Of course, the biological predisposition, the culture, and the personal values of those who throw acid in women’s faces to keep them in their place are not only different than PZ’s, but may actually be superior to them in both scientific and moral terms. PZ hasn’t even begun to attempt to make any case for the superiority of his own biological predisposition, culture, and personal values, in fact, he has devoted considerable effort over the years to demonizing the Christian culture in which he was raised.

But how about this: Beale has not made the case that destroying women’s lives is a necessary price to pay for social stability. I reject his bargain; I say we can have a more stable, healthier, stronger society if human beings live in mutually loving and respectful relationships. I do not have to hover over my wife with a threatening jar of acid in order for both of us to live together happily; in fact, a life where I had to compel a partnership with terror would be a horror and a nightmare.

One more. I also asked this:

How does letting women die rather than giving them an abortion benefit women?

Here’s his answer.

Because far more women are aborted than die as a result of their pregnancies going awry. The very idea that letting a few women die is worse than killing literally millions of unborn women shows that PZ not only isn’t thinking like a scientist, he’s quite clearly not thinking rationally at all. If PZ is going to be intellectually consistent here, then he should be quite willing to support the abortion of all black fetuses, since blacks disproportionately commit murder and 17x more people could be saved by aborting black fetuses than permitting the use of abortion to save the life of a mother. 466 American women die in pregnancy every year whereas 8,012 people died at the hands of black murderers in 2010.

A fetus is not a woman. I’m used to hearing those wacky anti-choicers call the fetus a “baby”, with all those emotional connotations, but this is the first time I’ve heard them called “women”.

The racist tirade is just sickening. So now Beale wants us to lump all black people together as “murderers” to justify forced sterilization, as a logical consequence of my values? I’ve heard of that tactic somewhere else before.

Again with the logical fallacies. Here’s a hint: the death of women in back-alley abortions can be directly addressed by legalizing abortion and providing responsible medical treatment; the socioeconomic conditions that create an environment of crime are not addressed by racially-defined forced abortion. If we want to end murders by any population (yes, please), the answer is not the extermination of that population, but the correction of social and economic inequity and providing opportunity for advancement.

Of course I haven’t made the case that destroying women’s lives is a necessary price to pay for social stability. I didn’t need to make that case in order to make my point, which is that the scientific case could be made and that in refusing to consider it, PZ was proving Wilson right about his failure to think like a scientist about it. He can say whatever he likes, but his position would be no weaker if he had instead declared that we can have a more stable, healthier, stronger society if human beings began the day by pledging their loyalty to Yog-Sothoth and committing seven deadly sins each morning before breakfast.

PZ then reveals that in addition to his demonstrated inability to think like a scientist, he’s not even able to think logically. If “a fetus is not a woman”, then obviously “a black fetus is not a black adult”. It’s simple multiplication by zero. If there is no harm done in aborting one fetus, there can be no harm in aborting all the black fetuses in America, plus there will be a net benefit that will save 17 times more lives every single year than merely permitting abortions to save the lives of pregnant women. The logical consequences of PZ’s position on abortion are inescapable. If it is worthwhile to utilize abortion to save 466 pregnant women every year, then it is clearly worthwhile to utilize it to save 8,012 murder victims, as either way, the cost is trivial, since according to PZ, the fetus is not a baby, a woman, or a black adult meriting protection of the law. The appeal to socioeconomic conditions is irrelevant, as PZ is wrong and murders committed by blacks can be directly addressed by utilizing abortion; nonexistent people cannot murder anyone. That there may or may not be other ways of addressing the same social ill does not change that simple and undeniable fact.

I further note that I am not a supporter of abortion for any reason, including the elimination of crime and the life of the mother. I am merely explicating the logical consequences of PZ’s reasoning. Nor is it racist to cite the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report; one could make precisely the same case, although it would be a less effective and efficient one, for the abortion of white fetuses. If PZ doesn’t like the inescapable logical implications of his reasoning, then I suggest he should consider rethinking his assumptions. And if he doesn’t like scientists and non-scientists alike pointing out the obvious fact that he does not reason or behave like a scientist, perhaps he should start trying to actually think like one rather than like an irrational, emotional, atheist propagandist.

And with that, I’m sufficiently repulsed not to want to continue. Beale/Day has apparently been whiningly demanding to debate me for the last few years; now you know why I won’t even consider it. Getting his words as second-hand text is nauseating enough, I’d rather not have to deal with the poisonous little scumbag directly.

Still sniping and running. After all these years, still sniping and running. The thing is, as anyone who has ever fired a gun knows, it’s a lot easier to hit your target if you stand still and take the time to aim at it. Of course, then you have to take the risk that you’re up against a much better marksman who will blow you away before you can even get a shot off….

Sam Harris and the epic self-evisceration

My original intent upon finishing Sam Harris’s latest book was to write a detailed critique of it. However, in reading it, I realized that it actually contained something much more interesting than the expected collection of conventional Harrisian errors, as it amounted to a rebuttal of the man’s previous work! So, although I intend to critique Free Will in the near future, I thought it would be more important to look at how Harris’s latest arguments affect his earlier ones. In The Irrational Atheist, I noted that Christopher Hitchens had committed a marvelous exercise in self-evisceration when he declared that “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”, then proceeded to pronounce no fewer than 52 different declarations, each of which was presented completely without evidence. However, it would appear that Sam Harris is more than worthy of filling the late Mr. Hitchens giant clown shoes, as he has effortlessly surpassed that feat of self-defeating logic with his latest adventure in science-flavored polemic. However, to fully appreciate the full scope of Harris’s unique achievement, it is necessary to return to his most popular work, The End of Faith, and revisit that book’s central thesis.

The basic concept at the heart of The End of Faith is that belief is the root of all human action. From this core postulate, Harris then concludes that because belief causes action – he actually goes so far as to state that “beliefs are action” – that some actions are so potentially dangerous that they justify pre-emptively killing people who possess the beliefs that cause them. He then attempts to show that those causal beliefs are generally religious in nature; the end of faith to which he refers in the title is the violent elimination of faith by, (or on behalf of), a one-world government justified by the religious faithful’s opposition to global government as well as faith’s potential danger to the human race as per the extinction equation, in which Religious Faith + Science and Technology = Human Extinction.

This encapsulation of Harris’s argument will likely sound outrageous until one considers the evidence taken directly from The End of Faith:

“A BELIEF is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life. Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings.”

“As a man believes, so he will act.”

“It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely private. In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potentia. The belief that it will rain puts an umbrella in the hand of every man or woman who owns one.”

“Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene…. Even apparently innocuous beliefs, when unjustified, can lead to intolerable consequences.”

“There seems, however, to be a problem with some of our most cherished beliefs about the world: they are leading us, inexorably, to kill one another. A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion. It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with words like “God” and “paradise” and “sin” in the present that will determine our future.”

“The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others.”

“We can say it even more simply: we need a world government…. The diversity of our religious beliefs constitutes a primary obstacle here…. World government does seem a long way off—so long that we may not survive the trip.”

Now, Harris’s argument is as fallacious as it is dangerous, for as I showed in TIA, even if one accepts the logic of the extinction equation, a perusal of history shows that the danger purportedly posed by religion is a second-order one at most, and furthermore, is not supported by the historical evidence, whereas the first-order danger stems directly from science. In 116 centuries filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of diverse religions, all competing for mind share, resources and dominance, the species has not merely survived, but has thrived, while a mere four centuries of modern science has created multiple clear and present dangers to the continued existence of the human race. Even if one accepts the general thrust of Harris’s argument in The End of Faith and believes that the danger to the species demands immediate action, it is obvious that Harris’s target is the wrong one and he should have been advocating the end of science rather than faith.

However, instead of either retracting or revising his argument, Harris has taken the surprising approach of undermining it by destroying its very foundation in his most recent book, Free Will. I suspect, however, that he has done this unintentionally and in complete ignorance of having done so, as he happens to be one of the laziest and most careless intellectuals to ever be embraced by the public. For in Free Will, he completely disassociates action from belief, in fact, he disassociates it from conscious thought altogether. Consider the following quotes from Free Will:

“The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present. As we are about to see, however, both of these assumptions are false.”

“The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it.”

“The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it…. These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are in the process of making it.”

“The brain is a physical system, entirely beholden to the laws of nature—and there is every reason to believe that changes in its functional state and material structure entirely dictate our thoughts and actions.”

“Our sense of free will results from a failure to appreciate this: We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises. To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose.”

“Unconscious neural events determine our thoughts and actions—and are themselves determined by prior causes of which we are subjectively unaware.”

“People feel (or presume) an authorship of their thoughts and actions that is illusory.”

As he declares that the illusory nature of free will erodes the concepts of moral responsibility, punishment, and the religious concept of sin, Harris appears to be completely unaware of how he has also destroyed his previous case against faith and religion. Being either the product or the resident of the conscious mind, belief can no longer be equated with action or serve as its causal factor, indeed, we are informed that the very possibility that belief can even be linked with action is nothing more than an illusion. He not only abandons, but actively attacks the basic concept upon which all the arguments in his previous book rest, the idea that belief is the root of all human action. Now he insists that a man will not act according to his beliefs for the obvious reason that he cannot; at most, his beliefs can only be seen as consequences that run more or less in parallel with his actions and therefore cannot serve as indicators of his future actions. This severing of the link between belief and action completely eliminates the viability of Harris’s claim that religious beliefs are intrinsically dangerous as well as any justification for the sort of lethal pre-emptive action he previously declared to be ethical.

Therefore, in light of the new material, one of his previous declarations quoted above must be rephrased thusly: “Given the absence of the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs as well as diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene…. Even apparently deadly beliefs, whether they are justified or not, cannot lead to harmful consequences.”

One imagines that one of his more intelligent fans will eventually notice the way in which Mr. Harris’s latest arguments have rendered his older ones incorrect and bring it to Mr. Harris’s attention, so I’m sure we can all anticipate a retraction of the various anti-religious claims presented in The End of Faith in the reasonably near future.

The deadly tarpit

Curt Schilling is only the latest lover of games with money to learn that game development isn’t anywhere nearly as easy as it looks:

After remaining silent as his video game company collapsed around him, Curt Schilling is finally speaking out — and he’s not happy. The former Red Sox pitcher responded to critics, pointing out that he stands to lose as much as $50 million dollars if his troubled 38 Studios can’t be saved…. 38 Studios laid off all 379 of its employees last week. The workers, who received no warning about the cuts, also reportedly have seen their health benefits expire. The tolls of the shutdown have affected Schilling as well, as the former All-Star has lost 33 lbs. in the past 45 days. The company’s woes stem from a $75 million loan acquired from the state of Rhode Island in 2010, a move by the state to lure the then-promising company away from its home base in Massachusetts. In February of 2012, 38 Studios shipped its first game, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. While the game was a mid-level hit, selling over 1 million copies, it was unable to help the company stay afloat.

What a nightmare. I always expected it to end this way, only I had no idea 38 Studios had been conceived on so large a scale. Being an ASL player, I’m very remotely acquainted with Curt, and I even sent him an email offering to give him some advice on either development or design when I first heard that he’d set it up. He sent back a friendly email thanking me for my good wishes, but it was clear that he felt he’d put an all-star team together and everything was well under control. But when I looked at the names involved, I didn’t recognize any of them as producers I would trust to finish a project and it looked very much like a repeat of Ion Storm, with more money and celebrity involved than good sense or productivity.

I absolutely hate seeing this sort of thing. I’ve seen it happen too many times now, to too many good and smart people who simply fail to understand how difficult it is to build a successful game, let alone a successful game company. If you look at the successful ones, even the ones that seem to come from nowhere, they’ve almost always got a long track record of creating and completing a whole host of little games you’ve never heard of. You simply don’t do a WoW, or even an Angry Birds, the first time out of the gate. How is it that people are still wasting $25 million, $50 million, even $100 million in developing nothing while a proven developer like Tarn Adams has been releasing brilliant, innovative games on a shoestring for years?

There are tremendous dangers on every side in the game development process, and worst of all, you’re constantly working against a ticking clock. Just a few weeks ago, someone sent me a link to this page, with some screen shots of our never-released Traveller RPG game that was cancelled by Sega of Japan when they closed their Sega of America operations and ended all US-based Katana (Dreamcast) development. I don’t know if we got out at the right time or not; sometimes I wish we’d gone ahead and done what was essentially CoD/MoH – or as we called it, first-person ASL – five years before the first WWII shooters came out. But we were burned out, we’d already done very well out of the Rebel Moon games, and the industry was becoming more about the business and less about the games. But when I see one successful guy after another crash and burn while trying to shoot directly for the Moon, it makes me want to set up shop as a consultant, telling these people to spend a lot less money, hire a lot fewer people, and directing their focus on making entertaining games and not failing to even release what is supposed to be the next CoD/WoW/AB.

Wängsty doubles down again

His posterior still clearly giving him an amount of pain, R. Scott Bakker keeps desperately trying to come up with a means of attacking me while avoiding the direct engagement that will expose him as the intellectual fraud he so clearly is:

Vox, it appears, has decided to wage a war of attrition, to keep throwing his cherries until people turn their bowls upside down. I’ve decided to oblige him. But since it stings my vanity knowing the self-aggrandizing way he’ll inevitably spin this, I figured I had better lay out some reasons, as well as discharge an old promise I made regarding the uses of abuses of arguing ad hominem.

Vox literally believes, if you recall, that he really is the winner of the Magical Belief Lottery. You might be inclined, on a occasion, to think that he is simply having one on, but I assure you, when he says things like, “Of course, I am a superintelligence, so the fact that [delevagus] been studying it for years whereas I read Sextus once on an airplane meant that it really wasn’t a fair contest,” he genuinely means it.

At this point, I’m inclined to simply take him as ‘Exhibit A’ of human irrationality. Some, in the jungle that has overrun the comment thread on the previous post, have suggested that I’m ‘running scared’ and the fact is, I am. But from what he represents, not what he ‘argues.’ Vox is what you might call an ‘epistemic bombast’–self-described. He literally believes he has the most powerful three pound brain in the universe. That, in my books, counts as delusional.

One thing I was always big on in my teaching days was what I called the ‘minimum condition of rationality.’ Once you realize that reason is primarily argumentative, as opposed to epistemic, you realize that reason is just as liable to deceive as to reveal. So the question you always need to ask yourself in any debate is whether you are the victim of your own ingenuity. You are more apt to use you intelligence to justify your stupidity post hoc—to rationalize—than otherwise. And that’s a fact Jack.

Thus the crucial importance of epistemic humility. Rational debate is impossible with epistemic bombasts simply because, as more and more research shows, reason is primarily a public relations device, a way to snag other three pound brains, and only secondarily epistemic, a way to snag the world. It is quite literally impossible to convince an epistemic bombast of anything on theoretical subject matters lacking any clear, consensually defined truth conditions.

This is why some cognitive psychologists are now arguing that rationality is quite independent of intelligence.

So what then is the measure of epistemic humility? How can you tell whether you should trust yourself, let alone your interlocutor?

Well some interlocutors, like Vox, make things easy for you. Vox is a self-declared epistemic bombast. As such, given that you accept that science is the best tool we have ever devised for sorting—even if only contingently—fact from fiction, you can write him off as a serious interlocutor.

In other words, you can safely dismiss him on ad hominem grounds.

He’s certainly desperate to do so. This is little more than another attempt to justify his own cowardice in failing to either answer my questions or accept my invitation to a written debate concerning his claims regarding the importance of Uncertainty and the intrinsic dangers of Certainty. His argument that he can safely dismiss me on ad hominem grounds, much less do so convincingly, doesn’t hold up, however, not only because it is a logical fallacy, but also because it is based on a complete falsehood. Wängsty is such a shameless liar, can anyone wonder why I repeatedly call him out for being such an intellectually dishonest charlatan? I don’t believe, literally or otherwise, that I possess “the most powerful three pound brain in the universe”. I’ve never claimed anything like that. I’m not the smartest one in my extended family and I wasn’t even the second-smartest in a house I shared with three other guys after college; both Horn and Big Chilly test out higher than I do. But I am a superintelligence nevertheless, and I do believe, with considerable evidence to justify that belief, that I’m observably more intelligent than Wängsty and his fellow wannabe PhD, Delavagus. This quite clearly, bothers them, as it appears to offend their sense of multiversal order that someone who does not share either their left-liberal ideological orientation or academic credentials could actually be more intelligent than they are.

Of course I genuinely believe it wasn’t a fair contest between Delavagus and me. Is there anyone who read the Dissecting the Skeptics series who did not? If so, do speak up and share your reasoning with us.

It is amusing, to be sure, that Scott asserts I am delusional while being simultaneously dumb enough to lie about things that anyone can easily check and confirm to be false. And it is even more amusing that he insists on a “minimum condition of rationality” while apparently failing to be aware that in the aforementioned unfair contest, Delavagus’s argument attacked human reason and asserted its self-refuting nature.

Scott is running scared and inclined to simply take me “as ‘Exhibit A’ of human irrationality” because I have consistently exposed his cowardice, his dishonesty, and his inability to argue his way out of a paper bag. He’s desperate to avoid direct engagement because he knows that what I will do to his arguments will make what I did to those presented by Delavagus look merciful in comparison. People have been telling Wängsty nearly from the start, eight months ago, that he had gotten me all wrong, but he keeps doubling down again and again on his original position… because you are a complete fraud when it comes to your Uncertainty Doctrine.

But as all the long-time readers here know, I won’t hesitate to continue beating the dead horse that is The Prince of Wängst until there is no longer so much as a maggot wriggling in the corpse. By the time the white flag flies, absolutely no one will take any of his claims seriously, mostly because he’ll have stripped every last vestige of intellectual integrity from himself.

Greens causing local warming

This is an application of the “think globally, act locally” directive that I’d certainly never imagined:

Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world’s largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built. This could have long term effects on wildlife living in the immediate areas of larger wind farms. It could also affect regional weather patterns as warmer areas affect the formation of cloud and even wind speeds.

Almost 1 degree Celsius? That’s more warming than we’ve seen in the last decade. Now, obviously there aren’t enough wind farms yet to have a global impact, but if one considers how many would be required to replace conventional sources of energy, it should be obvious that this renders the Green energy program dead prior to arrival. I suppose that leaves Plan B: mass population reduction.