Demographic suicide, chapter XXVI

Because sometimes, 27 cats just aren't enough to fill the void in a barren womb:

Many people like to stop and play with newborn babies, but now some adult women are playing house with fake babies. Some women are even going as far as taking day trips with the fake babies to the park, out to eat, and even hosting birthday parties for them.

Forty-nine-year-old Linda is married with no children of her own. Now, she says she feels like a mother because she has Reborns -- dolls made to look and feel like the real thing.

And here we thought "cat lady" was the proper modern euphemism for "spinster". I don't know how even the most ardent fan of strong, independent, educated women and the modern secular society can read this without a cold frisson of fear for the ultimate fate of that society running down her spine. This is serious Game Over territory we're approaching here. The reproductively-challenged secular left had better pray to the gods in whom they don't believe that there is a massive pendulum swing in favor of religious conservatism and the concomitant demographics on its way soon, because that's going to be one HELL of a lot more preferable than the probable alternatives.

Everyone, of every creed or lack thereof, needs to get this basic fact through their college-thickened skulls. The shiny, sexy, secular science-fiction society of progressive fantasies is not going to happen. The demographic realities have already killed that dream, the corpse just hasn't finished twitching yet. The material choice is not Christian tradition vs post-Christian utopia, it is Christian tradition vs PRE-Christian dystopia. And if you don't understand what that entails, then I suggest you get caught up on your ancient history, starting with Caesar and Tacitus.

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The IMF system begins to fail

Ecuador defaults on foreign debt:

Ecuador’s president announced in early December that his country would not be paying the interest on its foreign debt in 2009, repudiating it as “illegal.” The value of the bonds defaulted on amounts to 19% of GDP.

Given the magnitude of the problems being experienced by massive debtors, the threat of not being able to borrow more money in the future has never looked more toothless. Contractions are survivable, but not when you're leveraged, which is why those whose revenue depends upon loan-making fight tooth and nail against permitting the business cycle to take its course.

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Mailvox: on Gaza

CD asks about the recent military operations in Gaza:

Can you share with us your thoughts on the Israel attacks on Gaza? I'd be interested to hear your perspective. I already know Justin Raimondo's

While I like and respect Justin Raimondo, appreciate his consistent criticism of America's War Party, and understand his take on the current violence, I think it's more important to look at the situation from a strategic and historical perspective than from a political perspective, particularly an American political perspective.

Raimondo is absolutely right to question the reasons behind Washington's tacit support of the Israeli attacks; there is very good reason to be suspicious of many of the individuals who insist on attempting to subordinate American foreign policy to the Israeli national interest. But none of those political realities have anything to do with the fundamental problem underlying the Gaza operations because the core issue is a straightforward one that revolves around a very basic historical reality: The Palestinians refuse to recognize the very right of conquest by which they themselves previously held claim to the land.

In considering this, I note that it is irrelevant to debate the question of whether the descendants of Ashkenazi European Zionists hold the same historical claim to the land of Israel as Sephardic Jews, given that the way in which that historical claim is based on an identical right of conquest. From the historical perspective, the primary issue is the realization that the situation will remain violent until one of three things happens:

1) The Palestinians accept their conquest and are peacefully digested into a trans-tribal Israeli identity.
2) The Israelis are forced to withdraw to the United States and Europe.
3) The Palestinians are forced to withdraw to the neighboring Arab countries.

Given the decades-long failure of various parties to force option (1) through a wide variety of measures, to say nothing of the obvious futility of attempting to construct a modern representative democracy with an electorate that would include a large and understandably bitter tribal near-majority, it's not a reasonable strategy. Option (2) is even less tenable given the military balance of power, leaving option (3) is the only possible solution regardless of one's sympathies or distaste for forced population movements.

Understand that I'm not advocating this option, I'm merely pointing out the strategic realities of the situation. My actual position is total indifference to the Gaza invasion, which those who read this blog have probably gleaned already based on my failure to so much as mention it prior to this post. If the Palestinians don't want to have their territory, which is held only by the permission of the Israeli authorities, strafed by IDF rockets and overrun by IDF tanks, then they should refrain from annoying their conquerers by firing mortars at them.

Anyhow, Israelis have the same right to Gaza as various Palestinians have to London, Stockholm, Brussels, Toulouse, and Copenhagen. Because the Western authorities so foolishly ignored the sage warnings of men such as Samuel Huntington, the forced exodus of peoples everywhere from America to Europe and the Middle East is all but inevitable now.

UPDATE - My thinking may be original, but it is by no means new. Consider John Derbyshire's 2002 article on the issue:

What, actually, are the possible futures for the Palestinians? I think the following list is exhaustive.

1. An independent state, under Arafat or someone just as thuggish.
2. Military occupation by Israel.
3. Re-incorporation into a Jordanian-Palestinian nation.
4. Some sort of U.N. trusteeship.
5. Expulsion from the West Bank and Gaza, those territories then incorporated into Israel.

Number 1 is what we are all supposed to want. As I have already indicated, I don't want it, and I can't see why anyone else would, either. Except Palestinians, I suppose: If they yearn to be ruled by amoral hoodlums (as, according to polls, they apparently do), I suppose they have some theoretical right to see their wishes fulfilled — but why should the rest of us allow it to happen, given the dangers to us? Number 2 might work for a time, but the Israelis would eventually get fed up with it, and then we'd move on to one of the other options. Number 3 would get us back to the pseudo-stability of pre-1967, but is deeply unpopular with Jordanians — and look what happened in 1967! Number 4 undoubtedly has the UNRWA bureaucrats drooling, but as with number 1, it's hard to see what's in it for the rest of us. Aren't we handing over enough of our money in welfare payments to our own people?

Which leaves us with number 5: expulsion. I am starting to think that this might be the best option

There would appear to be a high probability that in another seven years, there will be writers be making similarly keen observations of the obvious.

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Depression watch

Number Three, the Deutsch:

German billionaire Adolf Merckle has committed suicide after his business empire, which included interests ranging from pharmaceuticals to cement, ran into trouble in the global financial crisis, his family said Tuesday.

The global economy is obviously not into a full force contraction yet, otherwise these suicide reports would be occuring on a daily basis rather than a biweekly one. Although it's also possible that perceptions haven't quite caught up with the grim reality.

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In defense of socialized medicine

Okay, not so much:

NHS records show that 3,645 people died as a result of "patient safety incidents" - including botched operations and the outbreak of infections - between April 2007 and March 2008. The figure was 1,370 higher than two years earlier. Patient groups have warned that the true toll is likely to be higher because some hospitals do not record all incidents.

It would also be interesting to see how the restricted supply inherent to socialized medicine affects patient mortality rates, assuming that those who are denied treatment are even factored into the figures. Remember, in the USA, HMOs were once considered to be the solution to the problem, now they are practically considered to be synonymous with it. It's interesting to note how many self-proclaimed devotees of empiricism nevertheless support the empirical lunacy of socialized medicine.

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Cities make you stupid

This would tend to explain American voting patterns:

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

While city life has always held certain attractions for me, I've never had any serious desire to live in an urban center. I might have been an inveterate night club prowler in my late teens and early twenties, but I lived on an isolated private lake surrounded by a forest. Big Chilly and I briefly considered moving downtown when we started the Digital Ghetto, but instead we elected to set up shop in a quiet, wooded suburb. Which, of course, led to Micron's famous quote: "Dude, we are the criminal element." One thing I like about where we are now is that one can go for a nice quiet walk past the cows, the sheep, and the ubiquitous donkeys in the afternoon, then catch an opera or an intimate reading by a world-famous author in the evening.

(Not that we ever do, of course, since I'm far too busy slaughtering masses of Horde in Azeroth to have any time for culture. But we COULD, you see, that's the important thing. It's all about the perception.)

On a tangential note, I've noticed is that cities are seldom the ideal place to build stable, long-term relationships, especially not destination cities like New York City, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. It happens, of course, but people usually go there to have their big adventure, they don't go there to settle down. So, if your long-term goal is to get married and have a family, about the very last thing you should do is apply for that exciting job in the great big city.

UPDATE - LP emails a comment:

Doing the big city life ruined my social life or my hope of becoming a married mom by 30. What was i thinking! Dumb ass 20 year old.

In time we learn what we knew not;
In youth one is an idiot.
Sagacity comes far too late
To be of use in youthful state.
And bitter indeed is the joke,
Time's cruel, ironic, master stroke,
For when his ravage runs its course
We find we can afford the Porsche.

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The exodus continues

This is very good news. USA Today reports that homeschooling is not only growing, it is actually growing at an increasing rate:

The ranks of America's home-schooled children have continued a steady climb over the past five years, and new research suggests broader reasons for the appeal.

The number of home-schooled kids hit 1.5 million in 2007, up 74% from when the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics started keeping track in 1999, and up 36% since 2003. The percentage of the school-age population that was home-schooled increased from 2.2% in 2003 to 2.9% in 2007. "There's no reason to believe it would not keep going up," says Gail Mulligan, a statistician at the center.

1999-2003: 9 percent/year
2003-2007: 9.5 percent/year

At the current rate of growth, there are now 1.64 million homeschoolers representing 3.2 percent of American schoolchildren. That's nearly a third of the children who attend all of the private schools in the country combined. Since these families will represent the educated elite of the nation's future, it's also where libertarians should be focusing their political recruitment efforts.

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Don't stop until the Democrat wins

The count finally comes out the way they wanted:

A state election board on Monday will announce Democrat Al Franken has defeated Republican incumbent Norm Coleman in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race, state officials told CNN Sunday.
A board will say Al Franken won the U.S. Senate race by 225 votes, Minnesota's secretary of state says. The canvassing board on Monday will say a recount determined Franken won by 225 votes, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie told CNN.

Norm Coleman's defeat is no loss for Minnesotans or for conservatives, as the replacement with one liberal Jew born in New York with a more liberal Jew also born in New York is hardly going to make much of a difference; at least Franken grew up there and has some genuinely Minnesotan sensibilities. And, let's face it, there's even more prospective hilarity to be expected with Senator Franken than there was with Senator Wellstone and Governor Ventura combined.

Of course, his election should suffice to create some doubts among those who still seriously buy into the idea that voting is a sacred responsibility.

UPDATE - Every vote counts. And some votes count twice:

Under Minnesota law, election officials are required to make a duplicate ballot if the original is damaged during Election Night counting. Officials are supposed to mark these as "duplicate" and segregate the original ballots. But it appears some officials may have failed to mark ballots as duplicates, which are now being counted in addition to the originals. This helps explain why more than 25 precincts now have more ballots than voters who signed in to vote.

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Mailvox: the ethics of rape

In which questions are asked about one of my critics' favorite columns:

I'm a 24 year old young woman and a Christian. I happened to have stumbled across your article "The Morality of Rape" and from there I found your blog. Needless to say, you have some very interesting thoughts about rape, feminism, and other issues. I admit, they got me thinking.

I understand your opinion that "date-rape" doesn't exist (rape is rape no matter what circumstance). The thing is, I think it's just another example of our need to categorize things, case in point "acquaintance rape". Also, I do believe that there are precautions that women and girls need to take to protect themselves, especially when going out to parties and clubs. But when you say the women can be partially blamed for their rape, in what situations are you talking about in general. Know the whole "getting drunk" or "walking alone at night in a secluded area when you didn't have to" one, but what about a girl who was just hanging out with someone who she thought of as a friend? I know personally I hung out in a friend's room who was male. We weren't dating, no fooling around, and I trusted him. The only thing we did was lay on his bed for a bit and watched TV (fully clothed).

Furthermore, what about a girl on a date who made it clear that she doesn't want sex whether during the date or before? The guy just simply over-powered her. I also remember a scenario from one of your posts in which a woman changed her mind during or when she was about to have sex. Do you think that a woman has no room to change her mind and that she should just go along with it?

First of all, I think it's important for everyone, particularly women, to step back, take a deep breath, and turn on their brains before contemplating such an emotionally charged issue. Shrieking about the immorality and criminality of rape being universally axiomatic and declaring that every man accused by any woman of anything should be immediately hung, drawn, and fifthed is not only pointless, it combines near-complete irrationality with an embarrassing degree of historical ignorance.

Let me answer your questions, which as near as I can tell boil down to two, very briefly, then explain my thinking in more detail. 1. Caveat Emptor. Any woman who voluntarily places herself in a position where rape is possible bears precisely the same responsibility for any subsequent rape that the defrauded victims of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scam bear for the loss of their investment funds. Are they to blame for the fact that Madoff was a fraud? Absolutely not. Are they to blame for the fact that they trusted him? Of course, for who else made the decision to place their trust in him? Responsibility is not a zero-sum game. While one cannot blame a victim for being victimized, one can, indeed, one must, hold a victim responsible for any decisions that rendered that victimization possible. 2. In most circumstances, once given, consent is not easily revoked. This is a nebulous area, especially since explicit consent is seldom given in intimate matters. However, I would say that from a Judeo-Christian moral perspective the question of withdrawn consent is irrelevant, because if obtaining consent is an issue, in most cases the act is already determined to be immoral. (One could also raise the scriptural direction to let your yes be yes and your no be no.) From a legal perspective, the question should also be irrelevant given the probable absence of witnesses. And from the non-Christian moral perspective, well, that completely depends upon the particular morality and the individual conscience. Or lack thereof.

The first serious question, then, is whether we are talking about morality or legality. These are two completely different questions. As to the question of morality, there is no question that every form of rape, including the various forms of non-rape sometimes errantly described as "date rape" or "acquaintance rape", are immoral under the Judeo-Christian ethic, with the possible exception of "marital rape". (Forget the latter for now, however, since it can be dealt with as part of the legality question for reasons that will eventually become clear.)

Now, it's important to understand that rape was not considered to be immoral under most historical non-Christian ethical systems. To the extent it was frowned upon, it was more akin to a property-related crime with compensation due to the offended property owner. Consider, for example, the pagan sacrament of burial among the Rus, as told by Ahmad ibn Fadlān ibn al-Abbās ibn Rašīd ibn Hammād, secretary to the ambassador from the Caliph of Baghdad to the Bulgars in 922:

"The tenth day, they brought the deceased out of the ground and put him inside the pavilion and put around him different kinds of flowers and fragrant plants. Many men and women gathered and played musical instruments, and each of his kinsman built a pavilion around his pavilion at some distance. The slave girl arrayed herself and went to the pavilions of the kinsmen of the dead man, and the master of each had sexual intercourse once with her, saying in a loud voice, 'Tell your master that I have exercised the right of love and friendship.' And so, as she went to all the pavilions to the last one, all the men had intercourse with her. When this was over, they cut a dog in two halves and put in into the boat, then, having cut the head off a rooster, they threw it, head and body, to the right and left of the ship.... Then the old woman sized her head and made her enter the pavilion and entered with her. Thereupon the men began to strike with sticks on the shields so that her cries would not be heard and the other slave girls would not be frightened and seek to escape death with their masters. Then six men went into the pavilion and each had intercourse with the girl. Then they laid her at the side of her master; two held her feet and two her hands; the old woman known as the Angel of Death re-entered and looped a cord around her neck and gave the crossed ends to the two men for them to pull. Then she approached her with a broad-bladed dagger, which she plunged between her ribs repeatedly, and the men strangled her with the cord until she was dead."

It was only after the violent religious festivities had ended that the famous ship-burning took place. They usually seem to leave out the preceding parts in the movies and medieval fantasies, don't they.... In defense of the Rus, it must be noted that the girl is a nominal volunteer. On the other hand, she is a slave who is guarded closely after her "volunteering", she's forcibly intoxicated, and steps are taken to prevent her screams from being heard prior to her murder. But whether she volunteers for her death or not, the casual way in which she is passed from one man to another makes it readily apparent that the Rus had no ethical problem with a failure to obtain consent prior to intimate relations. It's a bit much to imagine one hard-bitten pagan warrior after another politely offering variants on this theme: "Oh, ah, I know you're drunk off your skull and a mad old woman is going to strangle you in a moment, but I say, you don't object if I have a go first, do you, my dear?"

The Rus were hardly alone in this either, as from a purely materialist perspective there is no logical reason to raise any moral objection to rape, because the specific location of various collections of atoms at any one point in time are simply not a moral matter. In order to construct any objection, it's first necessary to elevate the discussion beyond the purely material or the scientific.

- more later -

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NFL Round 1 Day 2

The nice thing about yesterday's wins by the Cardinals and the Chargers is that it should shut up TMQ and all the other lunatics who were crying about the fact that two 8-8 division champions made it to the playoffs. Arizona and San Diego are now 9-8 and have conclusively proved that they merited their place. The NFL isn't broken, so people who claim to be fans should stop trying to fix it.

I'd rather go the other direction and get rid of the wild card teams altogether. If you want to win a championship, then you can start by winning your division.

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At the Black Gate V

I'm not all that prone to fandom, so perhaps you'll understand my extreme enthusiasm at hearing the mere possibility that one of my longtime heroes appears to be showing some signs of returning to the area of his greatest achievement. While I respect those who are boldly going forth into the final frontier and all, it's a tragedy to waste the greatest game designer to have ever worn a cape and crown when there's six billion other spam available for the can.

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NFL the first round, day one

I like Arizona and Indianapolis today. UPDATE - Lawyer Milloy is getting eaten alive by the Cardinal WRs.

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On the quality of evidence

Dominic Saltarelli raises an interesting question:

If we all agree that "faith" is trust in a source, this still begs the question of who to trust and why. I've always taken evidence to mean things that you can verify for yourself. If my own mother came up to me and told me something outrageous, like a block of cheese told her where her favorite shoes were, I'd be skeptical. Now, I trust my Mom more than anybody, but until I start conversing with dairy myself, I simply wouldn't believe her story. I'd just think my Mom had gone nuts (and if she's reading this, Hey Mom! Love you too!)

Similarly, if the Bible tells me that Jesus really did rise from the dead, why should I believe its account, but NOT believe Hercules killed a hydra, or Mohammed flew around on a winged horse?

This is a perfectly reasonable perspective, although it is a mistake to think that evidence is something verifiable, as it is merely anything that provides grounds for belief. A man will believe his mother loved him because she told him so when he was a child, while a scientist will believe what he reads in an old scientific journal because he has confidence in the scholarly reputations of the editors. In both cases, the belief has reasonable evidential grounds even if it is not verifiable by the believer; the mother may be dead and the scientist may lack the expertise or the resources required to imitate the experiment reported. And yet, the evidence remains, even if it is only the memory of words spoken long ago.

Unsurprisingly, Dominic's perspective betrays an unconscious bias towards "scientific evidence" which is, ironically enough, a bit of a misnomer. Consider the definition of evidence: "that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief". Since scientists tell us repeatedly that science is not in the logical proof business but rather the pragmatic and effective model business, one could construct a perfectly rational case that there is no such thing as scientific evidence as the very concept borders on oxymoronic. But, as this would be taking pedantry to an inutile extreme in these circumstances, we shall forgo that line of thought for the present and focus on answering Dominic's question.

I believe the issue of Hercules has already been dealt with to Dominic's satisfaction, so let's consider the comparative value of the sources for Jesus Christ's resurrection and Mohammed's flying horse. In the case of the latter, the oldest extant source is the one written down by Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari, who is reported to have collected over 300,000 hadith told to him and wrote down the 2,602 stories that he personally felt to be authentic. Al-Bukhari wrote down these tales in 846, 214 years after the death of Mohammed. Furthermore, one of the two major branches of Islam, the Shia, reject the Sahih Bukhari, going so far as to state that "There is NO requirement in Islam to believe in Sahih Bukhari...."

The story of Jesus Christ's resurrection, on the other hand, is reportedly told by several of his personal companions, who claim to have encountered him subsequent to his very public death. The oldest manuscript to date is the Magdelen Papyrus, which contains Matthew 26 and has been dated as early as 66 AD, 33 years after the events it describes. The Lukan Papyrus is dated between 67 and 77 years after Christ's reported death, and there are another 230 extant manuscripts compiled within 500 years of the event.

Contrast with this the earliest copies of the works of historians such as Thucydides, Herodotus, Aristotle, Caesar, and Tacitus. There are no more than 20 copies of any of these manuscripts and the earliest extant copy was made more than 1,000 years after the original. If it were not for the seemingly absurd claims about a man doing miracles and rising from the dead, no one would even think to question the historical veracity of the Bible. And there's simply no comparison between the veracity of an account to which every Christian today subscribes and the Islamic hadith, in which many Muslims place no credence.

Now, it would be one thing if the event described in Gospels was claimed to be a quotidian reality that, nevertheless, no one has witnessed since. But that is not the case, as the accounts are very clear about the astonishing, even singular, nature of the event. Common sense dictates that one ask oneself the question: if the resurrection of God's Son was a one-time historical event as it purports to be, how else could eyewitness reports possibly have been recorded given the technology of the time, and what alternative explanation beyond the convincing nature of the reports will suffice to explain the enormous number of ancient manuscripts that were produced and circulated long before the Edict of Milan ended the Imperial persecution of Christianity and the Church achieved its position of intellectual domination that allowed it to put thousands of monks to work making manuscripts.

The truth is that modern doubts about the Gospel accounts have a basis that is no more objectively legitimate than that upon which al-Buhkari's rejection of the vast majority of hadiths he was told rests. They're subjective, and they're based on nothing more than personal feelings and the obvious difficulty in testing a historical event. If the ancients are trusted to have reliably passed on the accounts of the Peloponnesian war for 1300 years, then they were quite obviously just as capable of faithfully passing on the eyewitness accounts of a strange event that took place in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago for a few decades. Based on the available evidence, logic dictates that one either tentatively accept the essential reliability of the record testifying to Jesus Christ's resurrection or reject the greater part of Mankind's recorded history.

This may explain in part the peculiar nature of the New Atheism, given the obvious deficiencies of the New Atheists with regards to both logic and history. Now, does this prove beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt that Jesus Christ rose from the dead? No, it does not. But it should be more than enough to prove why that account is far more credible than the tale of a flying horse.


Note - any discussion of evolution or Creationism is off-topic and will be promptly deleted.

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America's Great Depression section IX

Last week was a surprisingly strong showing by the Voxiversians, as more than 100 people took the test despite the distraction of the holidays. This is more than double the number of individuals who survived to the same point in the Thucydides study, so well done, everyone. There's only three chapters to go, but by this point I expect the broader message of the study has penetrated through even the thickest skulls, to wit: the discomforting panoply of similarities between the reaction of the fiscal and monetary authorities to the 1930s crisis and their reaction to the present one.

For next week, Chapter 10: 1931 - "The Tragic Year".

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Wracked with doubt

The Sports Guy sums it up nicely:

VIKINGS (+3) over Eagles
The scariest game on the board and, quite possibly, in the history of mankind. Remember when I picked Philly over Dallas last week because "I hated this pick both ways, changed it 35 times and settled on being more frightened having the Cowboys than the Eagles"? This is that game, squared. The Vikings violate four of my signature rules for a decent playoff team: They're poorly coached, they have abominable special teams, their QB could self-destruct at any time, and their fans are so racked with doubt about this particular team that you can hear their sphincters collectively tightening during games.

I have zero faith in this Vikings team. Childress is the most frighteningly incompetent game coach since, well, Andy Reid, now that Art Shell is no longer coaching. It's like a Jedi showdown, only the exact opposite. The Tarvaris Jackson Experiment is proceeding and at times appears to have succeeded in developing into a robotic emulation of real NFL quarterback that goes haywire when the defensive pressure heats up. The Wall of Williams is damaged, the receivers are mediocre, the special teams are reliably horrible and our one superweapon, Adrian Peterson, is having more problems hanging on than a high school senior whose longtime girlfriend just moved to California to star in a major motion picture.

Fortunately, Vikings fans have no need of faith. We have no expectations, we have no heart, we simply watch in numbed catalepsy and hope for the best. An NFC North championship and a 10-6 record is more than we'd dreamed possible this year. Sure, there are those poor souls who shriek "Super Bowl" every time we win two games in a row, but that's just the Post-Traumatic Staubach Disorder talking. Or, in the case of younger fans, 38 Wide Syndrome. Just nod, speak softly to them, and leave them to their haunted dreams of victories that never were.

Can we beat the Eagles? Absolutely. Can we lose to them? Definitely. Either way, we porphyrogeniti will watch, all purple-clad, and hope Sons of Bud Grant will give us cause to sound the horn and wave the sword.

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Mailvox: the gay atheists strike back!

The Gayfather enters the Faith Wars. I've exchanged email with Dr. Kameny several times in the past, and his response here nicely underlines how difficult it is for even intelligent, well-educated atheists to construct a coherent and logically consistent argument on these matters:

The alleged -- or actual and proven -- consequences of a theory are not relevant to an assessment of the validity of that theory. That Gravity has caused countless injuries and deaths and other catastrophies through falls and other incidents resulting from the action of Gravity tells us nothing about the validity of the Theory of Gravity and the physical constants associated with it.

This is true. I wrote as much in TIA.

And the evils visited upon us by various historical figures allegedly atheists are utterly irrelevant to an assessment of atheism itself, just as the claims of the evils which some allege to arise from organized religion tell us nothing whatever about the validity or invalidity of the supernatural upon belief in which those religions are based.

Now this, on the other hand, is not quite true and dances perilously close to a No True Atheist fallacy. If Christianity can be criticized for the failure of Christians to not wage the occasional war over the last 1,000 years, then surely atheism can be assessed and even criticized for the failure of open and avowed atheists - there's no "allegedly" with regards to any of the individuals involved - to not slaughter tens of millions of defenseless people during the last century. However, it is true that the question of the existence of the supernatural does not enter into the equation.

I write as one who has termed himself a "good pious atheist" for some 68 years. I write as a scientist by training and background, with a BS in Physics; and an MA and Ph.D in Astronomy from Harvard University. The fact is that there is not a shred -- not the tiniest shred -- of valid, credible, persuasive evidence -- actual EVIDENCE -- for the existence of anything supernatural. There is just no actual evidence for the existence of any kind of supernatural beings: Gods, devils, angels, demons; nor of supernatural events: miracles, resurrections, and the like; or of supernatural places such as heaven and hell. And there is certainly no evidence for an afterlife: When you die you"re dead; it's pemanently over for you. All the claims in support of the supernatural boil down to what I term "philosophical dithering". They do not even begin to rise to the level of actual evidence and certainly not of proof.

Oh dear. All those years, that expensive Harvard education, and yet apparently no one ever taught him to open a dictionary. And perhaps if he'd attended Harvard Law instead of wasting his time on star-gazing, he might even grasp the law's definition of evidence. Since Dr. Kameny is not a complete idiot, I shall charitably presume he is referring to a lack of SCIENTIFIC evidence and content myself with pointing out that scientific evidence is not only not the only form of evidence, it is not even considered the most credible form of evidence. For all that scientists sometimes whine about this, it is actually all to the good considering the fact that science is an inherently dynamic process and therefore a very poor foundation for what must be a generally static principle. Dr. Kameny should be downright embarrassed to make this argument, as even Richard Dawkins has tacitly conceded the point. To blithely label documentary and eyewitness evidence nothing more than "philosophical dithering" and so disprove the existence of everyone from Julius Caesar to George Washington is to do nothing more than demonstrate one's philosophical incompetence.

One wonders, naturally, upon what scientific basis does Kameny assure us that once you're dead, it's over for you?

These whole complex structures of supernaturalism, whether the truly bizarre Christian one, or those equally weird ones postulated by other religions, are nothing more than imaginary fantasy-fiction and wishful thinking, utterly devoid of fact. The Bible ia nothing more than the attributed maunderings of a gaggle of intellectually-primitive, culture-bound near-barbarians who lived two to four millennia ago and have little of use, value or worth to offer to us today, structured around a flimsy, distorted skeleton of historical events of no relevance to anyone nowadays aside from scholars and historians of that era.

It's more than a little ironic that Dr. Kameny should declare that the Bible is of no relevance to anyone nowadays. After all, the Bible states that homosexuality is abomination and the wages of sin are death. Dr. Kameny, on the other hand, was integral to convincing the American Psychiatric Association that homosexuality is normal. On the basis of his experience and his scientific training, he has also declared that it is objectively healthy and good. Of course based on the statistics, one has no choice but to score it Attributed Maunderings 1, Dr. Kameny and Science 0.

I allow no one to do my thinking for me on any subject including morality. I am no more going to allow my thinking to be done for me by those ancient primitive, barbaric biblical figures than I am going to allow my thinking to be done for me by Grimm's Fairy Tales or Aesop's Fables.

This sounds very intellectually brave, but it's actually one of the most common atheist fables, because the reality is that he hasn't reasoned his way to what passes for his morality. Instead, he has done what all other moral parasites do in accepting the traditional moral system and subtracting the few bits and pieces he doesn't like. As for disregarding Grimm's, well, if he's foolish enough to enter a gingerbread house and partake of a feast there, he can't say he wasn't warned.

In those of your articles which I have seen (granted, I have not read your book) I have seen nothing which even begins to make a case for the existence of anything supernatural or to rebut a firm atheism. There is just no supernatural. There is just no god. There is just no afterlife. There is just nothing other than the natural and the material. It's just not there. While I might easily have missed some of your writings, I have seen nothing by you which shows otherwise.

This keen observation is most likely due to the fact that I have never even begun to make any such case in my articles or in any of my books. Nor, given the near-complete inability of so many atheists to comprehend well-documented critiques of their flawed champions, do I see any reason to bother casting pearls of reason before intellectual swine. It seems to somehow escape the attention of many atheists that I am not an apologist or a theologian, I am simply a critic of the New Atheism and a chronicler of the many logical flaws of atheism. As for that brilliant summation, complete with an appeal to the powerful authority of Dr. Franklin E. Kameny his own gay self, I should say that only Richard Dawkins could possibly demonstrate a more overwhelmingly conclusive proof!

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Dispatches from the Clueless Deist

Ed Brayton is unable to follow a simple analogy regarding Richard Dawkins's illogical defense of historical crimes committed by atheists:

That may be the single most idiotic analogy I've ever seen.... And all while criticizing the claim that religion can lead to similar massacres.

Brayton is a journalist, so it's not hard to understand why he's not only historically ignorant and phillosophically incompetent, but can't even read properly. Like most journalists, he's simply constructing a narrative, the observable facts be damned. And the fact that he can't comprehend the analogy doesn't make the analogy idiotic, it simply demonstrates Ed Brayton's obvious intellectual inadequacies. The claim of Richard Dawkins that was being addressed in the column to which Brayton refers is this statement from p. 273 of The God Delusion:

"What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things.

As I pointed out in The Irrational Atheist, Dawkins is incorrect because determining who was or was not an atheist matters tremendously in figuring out whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things or not. (I should note that Hitler was not an atheist nor was he a Christian either.) For how can one possibly figure out whether atheism is systematically influencing people or not if one doesn't first take the trouble to determine precisely which people it has influenced? On p. 238 of TIA, I wrote:

Dawkins, like Harris, focuses on the wrong question. Like medieval philosophers they focus on the explanatory logic of the perceived problem, and they do so ineptly, instead of examining the matter in a scientific manner by observing the relevant evidence.

Brayton is taking very much the same approach, which is why he can't understand the analogy. Let me spell out both illogical processes inherent in the analogy nice and slowly so that the dim-witted "brights" can follow it. This is what passes for Dawkins's logic; Sam Harris, on the other hand, tends to prefer the No True Atheist argument.

1. People were slaughtered.
2. Those people were ruled by atheists.
3. But those people were not slaughtered in the explicit name of atheism.
4. Therefore, atheism does not cause slaughter.

And now for the Marlboro analogy utilizing the same Dawkinsian logic:

1. People died of cancer.
2. Those people smoked Marlboros.
3. But those people did not smoke cigarettes in the explicit name of Marlboro.
4. Therefore, Marlboros do not cause cancer.

Dawkins is trying to argue that because he cannot figure out HOW atheism causes atheists to kill large quantities of people, it does not systematically influence them to do so. This is not only illogical, it is fundamentally unscientific. No one really cares why atheists kill innocent people en masse, they are primarily concerned with the undeniable problem that atheists do it with such an astonishing degree of regularity on the occasions they find themselves in a position to do so. In fact, the statistical analysis will show that the 58 percent chance an atheist leader will order the deaths of more than 20,000 people is much greater than the 16 percent probability that a lifetime habit of smoking cigarettes will cause lung cancer. Correlation is not causation, but such a strong degree of correlation is, at the very least, evidence of a systematic influence that Dawkins claimed to be unable to find.

Brayton has obviously not read TIA, or he would understand that there is a perfectly rational explanation for how it is not atheism alone, but rather the lethal combination of atheism with an ambitious vision of secular progress that has such a high probability of leading to the guillotine, the gulag, and the gas chamber.

As for his assertion that I criticize the idea that religion can lead to similar massacres, he's merely demonstrating his ignorance. I specifically cited 123 wars caused by religion in TIA and covered all of the usual subjects, from the Crusades to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in more detail than any of the New Atheists; the relevant points are that the very worst crime commited by any of Christendom's many medieval monarchs killed less than half as many people as the 50 most bloody-handed atheist leaders, and that while 58 percent of historical atheist rulers have committed mass slaughter, less than one percent of historical Christian rulers have done so. I have never argued that religious massacres don't take place, I have only pointed out that they take place much less frequently and are orders of magnitude smaller than non-religious massacres. And the liquidation of the Midianites cited by Brayton is rather different than the example of the Vendée massacres because the Old Testament example describes a bloody intertribal war, whereas the destruction of the Vendée was the massacre of a people by their own rulers.

Now, it is true, as one commenter noted, that none of this can prove that God does or does not exist. What it does call into question, however, is the common atheist assumption that a godless society is likely to be an improvement of any kind, let alone the shiny, sexy, secular paradise that Hitchens and others have faith that it will be.

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Princess Pooyan strikes back

Spacebunny doesn't play a lot of games, but when she does find a game she likes, she plays hard. She's currently the Queen of the Wii, having been the first to unlock her own Mii. As a game designer, it's been fascinating to see how she has enjoyed various Nintendo games over the years, but has never had any interest in anything on the XBox 360 or Playstations.

On a related note, if you have a Nintendo Wii, you may wish to be apprised of a sporadic known problem with the machines not booting or not turning off. If the red light doesn't appear and you're unable to turn the machine on or even get it to respond, don't panic. Unplug the machine from the power adapter and also unplug the adapter from the outlet. Wait an hour, then plug everything in again. This should reset whatever is preventing the Wii from turning off or turning on.

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Voxiversity II - America's Great Depression

This is a complete list of all of the readings and related quizzes for the study of Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression.

Section 1: The Introductions - TEXT

Section 2: The Positive Theory of the Cycle - TEXT

Section 3: Keynesian Criticisms of the Theory - TEXT

Section 4: Some Alternative Explanations of Depression: A Critique - TEXT

Section 5: The Inflationary Factors - TEXT

Section 6: The Development of the Inflation - TEXT

Section 7: Theory and Inflation: Economists and the Lure of a Stable Price Level and Prelude to Depression: Mr. Hoover and Laissez Faire - TEXT

Section 8: The Depression Begins: President Hoover Takes Command - TEXT

Section 9: 1930 - TEXT

Section 10: 1931 - 'The Tragic Year' - TEXT

Section 11: The Hoover New Deal of 1932 - TEXT

Section 12: The Close of the Hoover Term - TEXT

America's Great Depression: 25-question Final Exam

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Rules of the blog

1. You will be addressed in the style you choose. If you come in here slinging insults and acting disrespectfully, you will be treated with a contemptuous and derisive disdain that will, based on past experience, probably upset you. This is particularly true for visitors who are under the impression, mistaken or not, that they are far more intelligent than the average individual here. If instead, you elect to offer substantive and civil criticism, then you will meet with a similarly civil response. Because I am equally capable of polite intellectual discourse and appallingly creative verbal cruelty, the form the interaction will take is up to you. Vox Popoli is not an echo chamber, but it is also not the typical Internet cesspool where you can expect to get away with spouting factual nonsense or blatant illogic with impunity.

2. You are expected to back up your assertions, so don't be surprised if you happen to get called on them. If you fail to back up an assertion when called on it, but refuse to retract the statement, understand that I reserve the right to delete the relevant comment and all subsequent comments you attempt to make. If you are asked a direct question relevant to the topic, then you will be expected to answer it in a straightforward and non-evasive manner; providing links in lieu of answers is not acceptable. (Links providing additional information in support of your answer are great, of course.) The dishonest and evasive tactics that are so common in Internet argumentation are not permitted here. If you refuse to either answer a question or admit that you cannot answer it, then you will not be permitted to comment here and all of your subsequent comments will be deleted.

3. Cross-comments and off-topic comments will usually be deleted. If your comment gets deleted, deal with it. Don't try to argue with me about it, I'm truly not interested. If you have a serious problem with the deletion of a comment, then email me. More than one individual has managed to get himself banned by refusing to accept the reality that his precious comment was seen to be of no value here and deleted.

4. This is not a democracy. Commenting here is a privilege, not a right. If Spacebunny or I tell you not to comment here, for whatever reason, then please go share your unique gems of wisdom somewhere else. There are thousands of blogs out there and perhaps some will value them; I clearly don't. So, just go away, this isn't an appropriate venue for you to work out your personal issues for our entertainment. On a related note, please don't respond to the trolls. There are at least five people who have been banned that insist on trying to comment here from time to time under different names; just ignore them as someone will get around to deleting their comments as well as the comments of those who respond to them soon enough.

5. You are expected to be polite to your fellow commenters, especially if you don't know them. The regulars, who have been commenting here for years and know each other reasonably well, often engage each other in a vicious and vituperative manner that you should not try to imitate because you are not an accepted part of the group yet. Take your best shot, by all means, but attack the idea, not the individual.

6. You will not call me a liar without providing any evidence of my lying, nor will you attempt to attribute to me words I have not written or actions I have not performed. If you do, your comments will be deleted and you will probably be banned. A similar consequence will meet any attempts to "out" me or any other individual commenting here; in my case, such attempts are particularly stupid as they demonstrate little more than a lack of familiarity with both the classic languages and Wikipedia.

7. I am fair game. Spacebunny and other members of my family are not, so any personal attacks on them will be immediately deleted. Also, it is unwise to annoy Spacebunny as I have no problem with playing favorites; she and the long-time regulars will always be favored over drive-by commenters.

8. Don't make assumptions about the regulars here based on my ideology and religious faith. They're not all Christians, much less Creationists. Most are not libertarians. A fair number are not Americans. And some don't even play computer games or read SF/F fiction. They do, however, tend to skew much more intelligent and broadly educated than you're probably accustomed to encountering. And I don't expect everyone to agree with me on everything, in fact, given my oft-stated belief that most people are idiots, it would greatly concern me if they did.

9. If you haven't read The Irrational Atheist, don't bother trying to critique it. You're wrong. Your arguments are not new and they have been brought up many times before, usually by atheists who are smarter than you are. While you won't be banned, you will be humiliated and even your fellow atheists will point at you and laugh.

10. Any insertion of evolution or Creationism into a post that is not directly and specifically related to either subject will be deleted. Repeated efforts to do so will result in banning. Do not attempt to hijack posts; if you are interested in a discussion of a particular subject, email me a request.

11. If you have made several comments that lead me to observe you have nothing interesting to contribute to an ongoing discussion, I reserve the right to tell you to stop commenting on that post. A refusal to abide by my decision will lead to banning. This is at my sole discretion.

12. In general, you will be well-served if you stop to think for thirty seconds and read everything twice before responding to it. It's also wise to ask if your assumptions are correct before launching critical attacks. I have been writing controversial opinion commentary on a very public site for seven years now, so the chances are pretty high that I saw and successfully dealt with your argument long before you first formulated your thoughts on the subject. Remember, there are few original thoughts under the sun.

13. If you have repeatedly shown yourself to be the sort of petty, ankle-biting critic who has no genuine interest in discussion or debate, but merely wishes to criticize by any means necessary, it is very unlikely that I will respond to your questions or arguments. This failure to respond should not be interpreted as the difficulty of the former or the strength of the latter. If you are not willing to argue in good faith, then I see absolutely no need to pay any attention to you. Furthermore, if you are one of the small group of persistent anklebiters who insist on making the same tedious and incompetent attacks over and over again, I will simply delete your comments. This group includes, but is not necessarily limited to Beezle, Cabal, Cisbio, Dan Picaro, and the weirdo who keeps posting about his ancestors being fish.

14. It is my intention to give individual commenters up to three opportunities per post to criticize what I have posted there. Since I do not have any interest whatsoever in wasting time on futile attempts to explain things to the willfully obtuse, the intellectually underpowered, or the disingenuous, I will cease to engage with a commenter after he has committed three demonstrable errors of fact or logic in that comment thread. While I will identify those errors, I am not inclined to be drawn into tangential discussions of them. Attempts to claim that my refusal to further engage with a commenter whose arguments have repeatedly been demonstrated to be flawed are the result of cowardice or an inability to respond are false and will be deleted.

29. These Rules may in no case be interpreted contrary to the purposes and principles of Vox Day, as determined by Vox Day.

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