Wine Tasting

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Paul and I went to yet another delicious wine dinner at Il Fornaio about two weeks ago. While I didn't particularly like any of the five wines served with each course, I particularly enjoyed the pairing of the wines with the food. Perhaps I've developing something of a palate. (I only really like Riesling and Guwerztraminer, I must admit.)

Apparently, however, the palates of wine experts aren't all that they're cracked up to be:

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn't stop the experts from describing the "red" wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its "jamminess," while another enjoyed its "crushed red fruit." Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was "agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded," while the vin du table was "weak, short, light, flat and faulty". Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.

That's ... um ... not impressive.

ARI’s Growing Impact

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Yaron Brook, President and Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute, sent out this heartening bit of news today. I'm reposting it with permission:

Dear ARI Contributor:

I have outstanding news that I wanted to make you aware of as soon as possible.

As you may already know, Tom Bowden's op-ed, "Deep-Six the Law of the Sea," appeared in the November 20 edition of "The Wall Street Journal."

The impact of that op-ed has been extremly encouraging. Both Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Sen. John Kyl of Arizona have referenced Tom's article; see, for example:

http://www.jiminhofe.com/News/Read.aspx?guid=c11eaa4c-5d9e-4cfb-9a0f-1c6132903467


This is a major milestone for the Institute--with not only our views making the editorial pages of one of the nation's most prestigious newspapers, but for that editorial being cited approvingly by two prominent U.S. Senators.

I believe that this is clear evidence of the extraordinary potential that we now have to make an impact on policy issues.

Who would have thought, five or ten years ago, that something like this would have been possible?

Our ability to continue to produce articles such as Tom Bowden's--and to get them published in the nation's leading newspapers, where they come to the attention of key policymakers--is directly related to the support we receive from donors such as you.

Likewise, your continued backing of our media and advocacy efforts is vital to our success; so I hope you will consider a special contribution to ARI to allow us to keep this momentum going; you can do so online at:

http://www.aynrand.org/contribute

Thank you again for your support of our efforts!

Best,

Yaron Brook
President and Executive Director
The Ayn Rand Institute

Fantastic!

Quick Roundup 278

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Watching the debates so we wouldn't have to, ...

... Myrhaf was okay with the Republican YouTube debate, but appalled by the debaters:

The Republican Party is in trouble. The candidates are all mixed economy mediocrities, with the possible exception of Ron Paul, who is out in left field. None had specific, courageous answers about what Thompson called the "entitlement tsunami" headed our way. By all indications, the presidency of any Republican except Paul will be an extension of Bush's policies. [A Paul presidency would be both different and worse. --ed] Some made general statements about cutting spending, but only Paul gave specifics. The rest are too terrified of offending the legions of Americans who now suck off the federal teat.

...

The only two candidates who sounded like they had integrity were the libertarian antiwar candidate and the Christian big government candidate. The rest are the kind of middle-of-the-road hacks you would expect among Republican politicians. The candidates are in a welfare state bind: the only way to look principled is to risk angering some pressure groups full of voters; but being controversial is the quickest way to marginalization. It is impossible in today's America to be honest and principled about getting the government out of our lives and remain a serious candidate. I don't think I've ever been so depressed after a debate.

Given Myrhaf's previous analysis of what makes Hillary Clinton a weak candidate, the "Huckabee vibe" (to capture the superficiality of many of the voters to whom he will appeal) frightens me.

Tara Smith's "Why Originalism Won't Die" Online

I think she published the article a while back, but via Dithyramb, I learned that Tara Smith's article, "Why Originalism Won't Die -- Common Mistakes in Competing Theories of Judicial Interpretation" in the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy, is available on the web:

While each of these reasons may help to explain Originalism's appeal, none of them captures the heart of the issue. The deeper reason that Originalism will not die, I think, is that it has staked out the moral high ground, championing the objectivity of interpretation that is essential to the ideal of the rule of law. Anything other than fidelity to the written words, it seems, surrenders us to the rule of mere men (the individual justices on the bench).

Or so things would appear.

What I will suggest is that the very objectivity which explains Originalism's appeal is misunderstood by Originalists themselves. And part of the reason that criticisms have not inflicted more crippling damage is that the leading alternatives also suffer from confusions about appropriate standards of objectivity in the legal domain -- which many people sense, I think, and which sends them back to the apparently safer harbor of Originalism. [bold added]

I have heard Dr. Smith speak on this topic before. This is a very interesting and important issue.

(As I revise this post, I get the nagging feeling that I've linked to this before, but I'm leaving it in anyway.)

Saying Justice by Giving Thanks

Galileo Blogs posted an excellent Thanksgiving piece by Dr. Michael Hurd.

Most are thankful to God. I am thankful to man -- specifically, to those individuals who (over the centuries) have created the countless things I need for survival and enjoyment: automobiles, plumbing, mass produced food, medicine, electricity, computers, televisions … the list is endless. I know who many of those inventors are, and I can see, feel and enjoy the benefits of their inventions in my daily life. There are many inventors whom I don't know about -- some of them unsung heroes who never obtained the credit they deserve -- but whose contributions to the wealth and comfort around me are evident all the same.

This is an excellent example of what Craig Biddle has called "saying justice".

Good News

I figure that most of my readers have probably already seen this, but if you value the work of the Ayn Rand Institute and haven't already stopped by Noodle Food, you ought to read this.

In Telluride this summer, I reconnected with a friend who'd moved from Houston about a decade ago. One of the first things out of his mouth was that he'd attended Yaron Brook's "State of the Institute" presentation.

"I needed to hear that," he said.

So go there -- especially if you watched the Republican "debate"!

-- CAV

Doing Violence to Free Speech

By Don Watkins

The Federal Communications Commission recently asked Congress to hand it broad powers to regulate "excessive violence" on TV, the way it currently restricts "indecent" speech: broadcasters who violate the FCC's limitations on "excessive violence" will face crippling fines and, potentially, the loss of their broadcast licenses. Isn't it time to ask: How did a country that reveres free speech end up with a government agency that imposes continually expanding speech restrictions--and where will those restrictions end?

Free speech means the right to express the products of the mind (scientific conclusions, artistic creations, political views, etc.) using whatever words or images one chooses over a medium one can rightfully access, without interference by the government. It means the right of a publisher to publish a controversial novel; the right of a newspaper to run an article criticizing the government--and the right of broadcasters to decide what content will flow over their airwaves.

But in 1927, just as radios were becoming widely used, the government seized control of the airwaves, declared them "public property," and assumed the power to regulate them in the name of the "public interest"--an undefinable term that can be stretched to mean anything. Thus broadcasters' right to free speech was cut off at the root, as the government, having irrationally barred broadcasters from owning the airwaves they made valuable through their technological innovation and broadcast content, went on to dictate how those airwaves could be used.

Initially the government pledged that only "obscene" speech--materials that "depict or describe patently offensive 'hard core' sexual conduct"--would be barred from the air. But having abandoned the principle of free speech and established itself as the unchecked arbiter of what could be said on the airwaves, the government was later able to ignore its pledge and, in 1978's FCC v. Pacifica ruling, expand its speech restrictions to include the broader (and even more nebulous) category of "indecent" speech. Thus, broadcasters could be fined for anything from profanity to sexual double-entendres, to vague references to sexual acts. Now, advocates of censorship are appealing to this precedent in order to justify regulating "excessively violent" content as well.

Moreover, Americans had been assured that speech restrictions would apply only to broadcasters operating on the "public airwaves." But now, in its quest to regulate "excessive violence," the FCC is insisting that its regulatory mandate be expanded to cover subscriber-based media such as satellite and cable TV.

If we allow this progression to continue, it is only a matter of time before the FCC starts restricting "offensive" philosophic or scientific views (as some religious opponents of evolution would like). And having gutted free speech on radio and television, what is to stop the government from censoring the Internet, books, and newspapers?

What made this trend toward increasing censorship possible--and inevitable? When the FCC assumed the power to subordinate free speech to the "public interest," it declared, in effect, that individuals are incompetent to judge what speech they and their children should be exposed to, and so their judgment must be usurped by all-wise FCC bureaucrats, who will control the airwaves in their name. Given this disgraceful principle, it did not matter that the FCC's initial restrictions were supposedly limited to speech pertaining to sex: if the government knows what's best for us in the realm of sexual speech and can dictate what we watch or listen to, then there is no reason why it should not control what ideas we should be exposed to across the board. To reverse this destructive trend, therefore, we must do more than resist new speech restrictions--we must abolish existing ones and restore our commitment to the principle of free speech.

Does this mean that parents must be forced to let their children view programming they regard as indecent or violent? No. It is a parent's job, not the government's, to decide and control what his child watches, just as the parent is responsible for deciding what he himself watches. If a parent determines that a show is not appropriate for his child, he is free to change the channel, turn off the TV, or block his child's access to it in some other way. His need to monitor what his child views on TV no more justifies censoring broadcasters than his need to vet what his child reads justifies censoring authors.

Americans face a choice: free speech or censorship. There is no middle ground.

Don Watkins is a writer and research specialist at the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand--author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead."

Is Chavez in Trouble?

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

There is an interesting editorial over at Investor's Business Daily that alludes to a couple of points I made when considering the recent lesson in etiquette publicly administered to Hugo Chavez by the King of Spain.

One of them is that Hugo Chavez does not behave like a truly powerful man, but more like a child trying to see what he can get away with. Although I was thinking about him in an international context, it seems that his weakness extends even beyond the fact that his entire foreign policy is based on civilized nations doing nothing when confronted by his barbarism, threats, and meddling.

Apparently, Chavez may now have problems at home. Chavez, it seems, has threatened to help overthrow the government of neighboring Columbia, since being fired as "mediator" for talks between Columbia and rebels holding hostages.

"You seek continental domination" Uribe said, and "a Marxist FARC government" to replace Colombia's elected one. He also pointed out that it was prime time for Chavez to be trying this, with the Venezuelan's public support at home flagging just one week before a constitutional referendum to grant him absolute power.

What better way to make Venezuelans forget their problems than to whip up populist sentiment against Colombia. It also is noteworthy that he's rousing military support against the neighboring state, something he may really find use for as rebellion grows at home.

And about that "flagging support"....

Prompted by the good example of intolerance for childishness set by the King, I said of Chavez that, "For a lunatic like Chavez to hold any measure of power is possible only because so many tolerate him." Not to underestimate the power of having the apparatus of the state at one's disposal as Chavez does, but it seems that perhaps the King has helped a few people here and there grow spines:

Weekend polls showed that ever since the king of Spain publicly told him to "shut up" in Chile two weeks ago, support for Chavez's move to seize absolute power in Venezuela has fallen below 50%.

Student protests have engulfed Caracas and other towns in protest against his dictatorship. Chavez has denounced them as "rich spoiled brats." But in reality, they often are a pivotal political force, particularly since they include young people from Marxist and lower-class backgrounds. [bold added]

I suspect that the widespread dissemination of the King's good example has struck a nerve, and it is gratifying to see a little intolerance down there. But Chavez has already had his thugs open fire on the students.

A little more intolerance from abroad would be really nice right about now.

-- CAV

What's Burnin': Freedom

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Pursuant to a recent thread in the comments, I was drawn to this article ("What's Smokin': Water Pipes") on the emerging trend of hookah smoking -- and then stunned by how much of it was devoted to making the activity seem as forboding as possible.

As if nobody knows by now that regular smoking is an unhealthy activity, much ink is devoted to parroting stern government warnings about the ill effects of smoking. And then, because some results of the studies on cigarette smoking may not necessarily apply to hookah smoking, the article drones on and on about the scientific evidence on the subject and what aspects of it are under dispute. The reporter goes out of her way to consider both sides of the emerging controversy.

Interestingly enough, as with other health-related issues that our mixed economy transmogrifies into public policy controversies and as with the global warming debate, this article perseverates on a scientific question (the consequences of whose answer need concern only those individuals who choose to smoke hookahs) at the cost of completely ignoring another question: Should the state be telling people whether (or how) they should smoke at all?

Interestingly enough, the question which is being ignored has ramifications for all of us, smoker or not, and reader or not. The media get away with this partly because so many people no longer understand the actual purpose of the government (protection of individual rights) or regard it with the proper degree of suspicion when some propose its new or continued misuse for other purposes.

In fact, so many regard the role of the government as "protecting the little guy", including from himself, that I am sure that Janet Cromley will score brownie points for being so thorough about presenting the dangers of smoking yet again to hookah smoker and meddlesome activist alike. She will be regarded as thorough and good, even as through neglect or malevolence she sells them and the rest of us down the river of an ever-expanding nanny state.

-- CAV

Who Has The Oil?

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

This map shows the countries of the world, with the area in proportion to their known oil reserves. (Click on the map to enlarge it.)



(Via BBspot.)

Stewardship

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is probably the most prominent political advocate of Christian environmentalism today. He'll be joined by more people in short order, however -- particularly as younger Christian fundamentalists raised on the environmentalist propaganda taught in schools rise to power and influence.

Huckabee is interviewed on environmental and energy issues in Salon: Huckabee: God wants us to fight global warming. Here's the introduction:

"The first thing I will do as president is send Congress my comprehensive plan for energy independence," [Huckabee] proclaims on his Web site. "We will achieve energy independence by the end of my second term." The goal may sound admirable, but even if it's achievable -- and many experts doubt that it is -- Huckabee's plan for getting there is light on specifics. Rather than spell out what steps he would take, he talks of creating a market environment that encourages innovation, and he praises just about every energy source you can think of -- nuclear, "clean coal," wind, solar, hydrogen, biomass, biodiesel, corn-based ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other untapped domestic areas, and, yes, conservation too.

A conservative Republican and devout Christian, Huckabee believes he has a biblical responsibility to protect God's planet from climate change, even though he's not convinced that climate change is largely human-caused. But mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions make him squeamish.

Here's the only philosophic exchange in the ensuing interview:

What makes you the strongest Republican candidate on the issues of energy and the environment?

For one thing, I'm one of the few people who's actually talked about the fact that as Republicans we have done a lousy job of presenting the case for conservation. We ought to be the leaders, but unfortunately we've been the last people speaking out on conservation.

Not only as a Republican, but as a Christian it's important to me to say to my fellow believers, "Look, if anybody ought to be leading on this issue, it ought to be us." We can't justify destroying a planet that doesn't belong to us, and if we believe that God did create this world for our pleasure and wants us to enjoy it, then all the more reason that we should take care of it.

Christian "stewardship" environmentalism seems particularly dangerous to me. The reason isn't just that Republicans are adopting bad Democratic policies. They've done that so often, including on environmentalism, that another instance hardly newsworthy.

My major concern lies in the philosophic differences between Christian environmentalism and leftist environmentalism. Leftist environmentalism is nihilistic in its essence: it's hatred and destruction of humanity for its own sake. While its intellectual leaders are often genuine nihilists, its mass appeal largely depends on the wish of preserving nature for ultimately human ends. That's misguided in various ways, but it's not wholly philosophically corrupt.

In contrast, Christan environmentalism is not based on nihilistic hatred of humanity. Instead, it envisions humans as the exalted steward of God's creation. That difference could give it tremendous staying power and mass appeal, even in its most pure form. That's because it appeals to positive values, however mangled by supernaturalism. In the classification scheme of Leonard Peikoff's DIM Hypothesis, Christian environmentalism seems to be a form of "Misintegration" rather than "Disintegration." That's a significant shift.

Of course, that difference won't make this new form environmentalism kindler or gentler in practice. Whether of a supernatural or nihilistic variety, environmentalism will require the sacrifice of actual human values and human lives.

That doesn't bode well for those of us who value human life.

Wilson and "Scientific Humanism"

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Entomologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard has written an essay on the religion-inspired controversy concerning evolution in which he touches on a very important aspect of the dispute:

In the more than slightly schizophrenic circumstances of the present era, global culture is divided into three opposing images of the human condition. The dominant one, exemplified by the creation myths of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - sees humanity as a creation of God. He brought us into being and He guides us still as father, judge and friend. We interpret His will from sacred scriptures and the wisdom of ecclesiastical authorities.

The second world view is that of political behaviourism. Still beloved by the now rapidly fading Marxist-Leninist states, it says that the brain is largely a blank state devoid of any inborn inscription beyond reflexes and primitive bodily urges. As a consequence, the mind originates almost wholly as a product of learning, and it is the product of a culture that itself evolves by historical contingency. Because there is no biologically based "human nature", people can be moulded to the best possible political and economic system, namely communism. In practical politics, this belief has been repeatedly tested and, after economic collapses and tens of millions of deaths in a dozen dysfunctional states, is generally deemed a failure.

Both of these world views, God-centred religion and atheistic communism, are opposed by a third and in some ways more radical world view, scientific humanism. Still held by only a tiny minority of the world's population, it considers humanity to be a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning. Human nature exists, and it was self-assembled. Having arisen by evolution during the far simpler conditions in which humanity lived during more than 99 per cent of its existence, it forms the behavioural part of what, in The Descent of Man, Darwin called "the indelible stamp of [our] lowly origin". [bold added]

I set aside my major criticism of Wilson's essay -- that it makes the common error of mistaking science for rational philosophy (on whose foundations it depends) as the fundamental alternative to faith-based religion -- to focus on the crucial fact that it identifies: Man's conception of himself does indeed depend upon his most fundamental beliefs, be they based on evidence and reason or on faith.

This fact certainly accounts for much of the emotional nature of the "debate" over evolution, although Wilson does not elaborate enough on his own position to allow me to divine whether it has merit or offers any guidance for an intelligent being with free will. Is Wilson a determinist? Does he pooh-pooh any and all human aspirations as cultural relics of our primitive religious past? Would he smirk at the notion that man can lead a purposeful life and that he must break the chains of religion to do so? I strongly suspect that Wilson's "scientific humanism" is very thin gruel.

I have touched on what religion offers man quite a bit here lately, and it is not just such airier notions as reverence and awe. Many people, when confronted with a challenge to their religious beliefs, really feel on a visceral level not just the fear of others that Dostoevsky's saying, "If God is not, everything is permitted," captures, but also a chasm of emptiness that comes with a lack of purpose. Religion has taken from them the idea that their life is their own and convinced them that without its framework, life is not worth living. (And it does not help matters that when one's mind is atrophied through the life-long practice of taking the shortcuts of faith, one naturally has little confidence in his own mind.)

While I suspect that, were the philosophy of Ayn Rand only better known, many intelligent people would accept much or all of it, many others would (as many already do) still strongly oppose it on very powerful emotional grounds. It takes time to digest and appreciate an argument, but an emotion, even if a consequence of mistaken beliefs, is felt with the same immediacy and strength as a perception.

This presents a serious difficulty, but addressing such a difficulty begins with identifying it.

-- CAV

Humans Are Destroying the Entire Universe

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

A pair of American physicists claim that human astronomical activity may have shortened the lifetime of the entire universe. This is based on a combination of arguments from quantum theory (e.g., Schrodinger's cat) and cosmology (dark energy). Here are some excerpts from the article:

Mankind 'shortening the universe's life'

...The startling claim is made by a pair of American cosmologists investigating the consequences for the cosmos of quantum theory, the most successful theory we have. Over the past few years, cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe, since it began in the subatomic realm during the Big Bang.

... [T]he cosmologists claim that astronomers may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.

The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have caused the cosmos to revert to an earlier state when it was more likely to end.

... "The intriguing question is this," Prof Krauss told the Telegraph. "If we attempt to apply quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole, and if our present state is unstable, then what sets the clock that governs decay? Once we determine our current state by observations, have we reset the clock? If so, as incredible as it may seem, our detection of dark energy may have reduced the life expectancy of our universe."

Prof Krauss says that the measurement of the light from supernovae in 1998, which provided evidence of dark energy, may have reset the decay of the void to zero - back to a point when the likelihood of its surviving was falling rapidly. "In short, we may have snatched away the possibility of long-term survival for our universe and made it more likely it will decay," says Prof Krauss.

If this is the logical conclusion of integrating the current Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics with contemporary cosmology, then physicists really need to re-examine the philosophical foundations of their science.

As yet, there have been no calls from radical environmentalists for humans to stop all scientific activity in order to save the entire universe.

But it may not be too long before some people propose in all seriousness what Richard Watts suggested as a joke, namely that "we should sacrifice for the pristine vacuum of empty space"...

Ten simple poems

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Our Lying, Cheating Do-Gooders

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

An unusually trenchant article ran on MSNBC on November 15, “Do-gooders can become the worst cheats: Study says that sense of moral superiority might lead to rationalizing bad behavior.”

“In the new study, detailed in the November issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, researchers find that when this line between right and wrong is ambiguous among people who think of themselves as having high moral standards, the do-gooders can become the worst of cheaters.

“’The principle we uncovered is that when faced with a moral decision, those with a strong moral identity choose their fate (for good or for bad) and then the moral identity drives them to pursue that fate to the extreme,’ said researcher Scott Reynolds of the University of Washington in Seattle. ‘So it makes sense that this principle would help explain what makes the greatest of saints and the foulest of hypocrites.’

“Why would a person who thinks of himself as honest cheat? The researchers suggest an ‘ethical person’ could view cheating as an OK thing to do, justifying the act as a means to a moral end.”

The rest of the article focuses on college students and employees who rationalize their cheating on tests and in the workplace. But, if we accept the premise that cheating is a form of lying – that is, of faking reality – and focus instead on more notorious “do-gooders” who pose as individuals imbued with and moved by “higher” moral standards, whom does the phenomenon remind one of? Hillary and Bill Clinton? Al Gore? Mitt Romney? Michael Bloomberg? John Edwards? Ted Kennedy?

The Journal article did not define the concept of “moral.” It simply implied that the “superior” morality was one of altruism and sacrifice. The “moral identity” of most politicians today is linked to that morality. Some of them are sincere (and the more dangerous for it), while others are pragmatists who adopt a second-hand “identity,” and pose as moral men. And, in the name of that morality, both kinds are willing to cheat, lie, and steal their way to power. Power is the end that justifies their means – which includes faking reality.

And because they are willing to cheat and lie in the name of that “superior” morality, so they can “do good,” they exempt themselves from any moral judgment. Their supporters exempt them from it, as well. After all, they rationalize, their idols have “sacrificed” their alleged reputations to pursue and impose “the good” on all who are not professional “do-gooders.”

The cheating and lying can have disastrous consequences and affect the lives and livelihoods of uncounted millions.

The myth (or religion?) of anthropogenic global warming is an example of the ends justifying the means, in this instance, of fudging statistics and scientific data – or completely omitting pertinent data – in order to convince others of the cause and consequences of global warming. Although the myth has been propagated for over a decade (and before it, the myth of global cooling), it reached a crescendo with the debut and marketing of former vice president Al Gore’s Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, for which he also netted a Nobel Prize, shared by the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

It is not so much a myth as a conscious fabrication to advance a collectivist ideology and politics. Gore’s motive for making the movie and seeing it publicized and endorsed by the scientific community is compatible with the motives of those who agree with its conclusions and seek the same end, which is the drastic subordination of industrial civilization to the “needs” of an undisturbed, climatically static, “unviolated” earth.

Whatever the extent of Gore’s “study” of the subject of global climate change, he cannot help but have encountered data and arguments that contradicted his own thesis that man is wholly responsible for increases in carbon dioxide output into the atmosphere. The data and arguments are ubiquitous. These data and arguments were ignored, misrepresented, or suppressed in order to weave a “credible” fairy tale of anthropogenic global warming and to put it over the whole world with the least opposition and a minimum of rebuttal.

(Gore also authored a book, The Assault on Reason, his manifesto for remaking the world but chiefly a bully pulpit for attacking the “radical” and religious right, and for venting his spleen against President Bush and his administration. In both the book and in the “documentary,” it is Gore who not so much “assaults” reason, but dispenses with it.)

No honest scientist (or is the adjective redundant?) would resort to such fraud, but a career politician with frustrated political ambitions and pretensions of wanting to “do good,” one with a congenital need to wield power over others, would stoop to such a tactic. In his attempt to fake reality by “scientifically” blaming man for catastrophic climate change, Gore needed to lie. His greatest enemies were truth-tellers in the scientific community, and reality itself.

Dr. Tara Smith, in her seminal study of Ayn Rand’s moral philosophy, Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist, remarks in her discussion of why Rand dismissed all social reasons for why one must adhere to the virtue of honesty:

“…Rand…contends that the only effective way of achieving objective values is through refusing to fake things – regardless of how successfully a person might be able to fool others. Others’ perceptions do not dictate reality any more than one’s own do….Rand’s case for honesty, in sum, is this: Because reality sets the ultimate terms of a person’s survival, reality – rather than one’s own or others’ beliefs or wishes – must command a person’s paramount allegiance. Faking reality is futile….” (p. 88, softcover)

Gore has been successful in fooling and frightening countless people, and has been aided in this mass deception by others who share his desire to wield power, and who, at the very least, wish man to do penance for the “sin” of existing, and at the very most, wish him to cease to exist.

The fudging of statistics and scientific data by Gore and other past advocates of man-caused global warming has been exposed in numerous papers and testimonies, and the thesis itself refuted.

Even while Gore’s “documentary” was in production with the help of his Hollywood sycophants, the London Daily Telegraph of September 4, 2006, featured an article, “There IS a problem with global warming…it stopped in 1998,” by Prof. Bob Carter, a geologist at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia.

“For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact that, drawn from official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

“Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society’s continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”

Al Gore was not, of course, mentioned once in the Daily Telegraph article. At the time, he was a political has-been not yet launched by the news media and Hollywood as a prophet of environmental doom.

In many scientific papers, one finding is that an increase of carbon dioxide trails a rise in average global temperature, not the other way around, as Gore and his yea-sayers assert. That is, carbon dioxide does not cause temperature rises. Its greater or lesser presence is entirely dependent on temperature, and what causes global temperature reductions and increases is not understood. It is…unknown.

The papers, studies and reports that debunk anthropogenic global warming are as numerous as the frequent sanctimonious urgings of the teleprompter reading news anchors on ABC’s “Good Morning, America.” A search on the Internet using the terms “Global warming scam” will turn up about a dozen. For example, to pick one at random, The Heartland Institute in Chicago, in February 2003, published “Eight Reasons Why ‘Global Warming’ is a Scam.” Two of those reasons deserve mention. No. 3 reads:

“Global climate computer models are too crude to predict future climate changes. All predictions of global warming are based on computer models, not historical data. In order to get their models to produce predictions that are close to their designers’ expectations [read wishes], modelers resort to ‘flux adjustments’ that can be 25 times larger than the effect of doubling carbon dioxide concentrations, the supposed trigger for global warming. Richard A. Kerr, a writer for Science, says ‘climate modelers have been “cheating” for so long it’s almost become respectable.’”

That is, the “do-gooding” modelers prefer to fake reality by spiking their non-historical “data” with flux adjustments, which guarantee their a priori conclusions with bells, whistles, and red danger flags. For them, wishing makes it so.

No. 4 of the Heartland report is a minor shocker, and stresses that global warming alarmists cherry-pick statements from a supposed authority, the IPCC:

“The IPCC report [Climate Change 2001] did not prove that human activities are causing global warming.” That is, it concluded that predicting the weather ten years from now is as chancy and unreliable as predicting next week’s. But the “public” panel is composed of politicians and bureaucrats, not of the scientists who contributed to the report, many of whom have resigned in dissent from the IPCC or contested the veracity of the panel’s politically correct statements.

Another paper found by a random search is Derek Kelly’s “The global warming scam” from the Asia Times of February 25, 2005, when Al Gore’s “proof” of man-caused global warming was just a slide show. Kelly presents a chronology of climate change covering 15,000 years, beginning with the last major glaciation period and ending in 2005. He shows, stage by stage, that glaciers advanced and retreated in this period, that sea levels rose and fell, and that average global temperatures also rose and fell, together with carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. And most of these changes occurred long, long before the Industrial Revolution with its smoke stacks and internal combustion engines.

“4,000 years ago to A.D. 900: Global cooling begins. The Arctic Ocean freezes over, mountain glaciers form once more in the Rocky Mountains, in Norway and in the Alps. The Black Sea freezes over several times, and ice forms on the Nile in Egypt. Northern Europe gets a lot wetter, and the marshes develop again in previously dry areas. The sea level drops to approximately its present level. The temperatures on the surface of the Earth are about 0.5-1 degree cooler than at present. The causes of this period of cooling are unknown.”

In every one of the nine periods described by Kelly, which altogether is a climatic roller-coaster ride, the causes of the climate changes are unknown and are understood only in terms of post-event observations. One of his conclusions is that the more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the better, since it and the warmth accompanying it promote life. Among other things (although Kelly does not mention them), growing seasons in Canada would be longer and more productive, while the inhabitants of south Greenland are now able to grow much of their own food instead of having to import it.

What scientists like Kelly and honest, objective journalists like Bob Carter (author of the Daily Telegraph article cited above), not to mention their unheralded and besieged compatriots in science and the news media, do not understand about the “moral identity” of anthropogenic global warming alarmists is that, fundamentally, the alarmists are at root man-haters. That is their “identity,” which is “driven” by an anti-life philosophy.

Even if they “pursued that identity to the extreme,” as Scott Reynolds in the Journal expressed it (as they must pursue it to its logical end) and succeeded in destroying Western civilization and reducing the survivors of that collapse to huddling around campfires in a post-apocalyptic wilderness, the man-haters would even object to the smoke rising from those fires to “pollute” the atmosphere.

Note that when volcanoes spew billions of tons of super-heated gases into the atmosphere, when earthquakes or tsunamis crumble whole regions or erase whole coastlines, and when wild fires destroy thousands of acres of forest and kill countless animals, the environmentalist “do-gooders” have little or nothing to say, especially not about the cost in human lives. But let an oil tanker accidentally spill its cargo into San Francisco Bay and a few fish and fowl perish as a result, they are ready to kill in the name of “protecting” nature.

The lying, cheating “do-gooders” at large today may claim that their intentions are benign. But, it is their “good” intentions which must be examined, grasped, understood in all their ramifications, and exposed. Their solutions require force and fraud. That ought to be enough to indict the “custodians of the earth,” who also wish to lord it over us in prisoner road gangs, or be our executioners.

Once that is done, it will be seen that the “do-gooders” are neither saints nor hypocrites, but vicious predators who seek man’s subservience to unconquered “nature,” or his extinction.

To read Kelly’s report, go to: www.globalwarming.nottinghamshiretimes.co.uk/scam.html.

To read the Heartland Institute report, go to: http:heartland.org.

Hillary Clinton's Pravda

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Some might think calling Hillary Clinton a Stalinist is overwrought, like calling President Bush a Nazi, as leftists regularly do. After all, she has never starved millions of kulaks to death. Her secret police have never disappeared someone in the middle of the night, tortured him until he confessed to being a spy, then put him through a quick trial and shot him.

Fair enough. If those are the minimum requirements of Stalinism, then no American qualifies (yet). It would be more accurate to call Hillary Clinton an American Stalinist. It is fascinating to see how she apes a communist dictatorship in an American context.

The American Thinker has an entertaining piece by Kyle-Anne Shiver on Clinton's attempt to create an American Pravda. With the MSM blatantly on her side, it's astonishing that she would feel a need to create Media Matters to attack her attackers. She is either paranoid or she understands the importance of propaganda -- my bet is on the latter. She believes that the end of power justifies destroying truth. Words are nothing but weapons to be used in the fight for power.

Media Matters writes laughably inept attacks on Hillary Clinton's detractors, notably Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly.

To give you an idea of what passes for headline-worthy at Media Matters, Hillary's hall-monitor brigade caught Bill O'Reilly a couple of weeks ago in this misstep: "Culture Warrior" O'Reilly, who chided Dean over Book of Job misidentification, says Revelation "was written -- what? Five thousand years ago?" A paid writer expended well over 1000 words explaining that the Book of Revelation was written a little less than 2000 years ago. I'm personally shocked that in a 3-hour live radio broadcast, this was the only error the listener-monitor could find to transform into a written tattle.

It doesn't matter that Media Matters's arguments are specious and illogical. Hillary Clinton is counting on a media phenomenon in today's subjectivist culture: getting a "balanced" point of view. If a reporter brings up Rush Limbaugh's point of view, then the reporter (or analyst or spin doctor) feels obligated to note Media Matters's opposing opinion. All the "verbose mountains out of molehills," as Kyle-Anne Shiver calls it, is there to give their side prestige and weight. As long as it looks official, reporters can pass this tripe off as a point of view worth noting.

Kyle-Anne Shiver writes about a bizarre, hair-splitting Media Matters attack on Wolf Blitzer:

As a student during the Cold War, I can tell you that this tactic - seizing the detail to the exclusion of the substance -- is highly reminiscent of the way Pravda (the official news outlet of the Soviet Communist Party) used to take apart news from the free world for its unwashed masses. And I am truly appalled to see this verbal excrement make its way into the mainstream of American political discourse.

It is appalling. Hillary Clinton deserves to be derided as an American Stalinist because she shares the communists' contempt for reason and their willingness to lie in the pursuit of power. Behind her lies is the firm conviction that only one thing really matters: force.

Who's Scary? Or What?

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In the Los Angeles Times is an interesting article by Jonah Goldberg which considers a question I barely began to scratch the surface of this morning.

Who is scarier: The Reverend Mike Huckabee, or Ron Paul?

My answer was that Ron Paul is scarier in some respects:

The Reverend Mike Huckabee is dangerous for wanting to mix religion and politics, but at least he is honest about wanting to do so. Paul pretends to be a secular candidate and does the same thing. In that sense, he is more dangerous to our secular republic than the Reverend, because he will fool some who would otherwise oppose the agenda of the religious right.

And I haven't even touched on the fact that as a libertarian, Paul is a poor proponent of individual rights generally and, in particular the philosophical arguments for them espoused by Ayn Rand, who is often mistaken for (or smeared as) a libertarian.

The only qualification to this that I would add is that Huckabee is, of the two, more likely to get elected, and so more likely to find himself in a position to do some damage with the help of the government. In that sense, he is the scarier.

But this shorter-range question is mooted by the fact that the Republican Party is a coalition between economic conservatives who favor limited government and religious conservatives who favor a theocracy. In practice, this has led down the slippery slope of compromise to the current situation -- in which the religionists are entrenching themselves and co-opting the apparatus of the state for their own purposes, aided in the enterprise by the votes and moral sanction of the fiscal conservatives. In other words, Paul and the Reverend Huckabee, as members of this alliance, are both aiding the descent of our nation into theocracy.

Goldberg sees my qualification and understands on one level why this is the case:

Huckabee represents compassionate conservatism on steroids. A devout social conservative on issues such as abortion, school prayer, homosexuality and evolution, Huckabee is a populist on economics, a fad-follower on the environment and an all-around do-gooder who believes that the biblical obligation to do "good works" extends to using government -- and your tax dollars -- to bring us closer to the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

For example, Huckabee has indicated he would support a nationwide federal ban on public smoking. Why? Because he's on a health kick, thinks smoking is bad and believes the government should do the right thing.

...

As for Huckabee -- as with most politicians, alas -- his personal preferences matter enormously because ultimately they're the only thing that can be relied on to constrain him.

...

Huckabee is much closer to the mainstream [than Paul]. And that's what scares me about Huckabee and the mainstream alike. [bold added]

Unfortunately, while Goldberg is correct that Huckabee's views are close to the mainstream, he gets things completely, disastrously wrong when he considers the stated political philosophy of Ron Paul:

And therein lies the chief difference between Paul and Huckabee. One is a culturally conservative libertarian. The other is a right-wing progressive.

Whatever the faults of the man and his friends may or may not be, Paul's dogma generally renders them irrelevant. He is a true ideologue in that his personal preferences are secondary to his philosophical principles. When asked what his position is, he generally responds that his position can be deduced from the text of the Constitution. Of course, that's not as dispositive as he thinks it is. But you get the point. [bold added]

First, the notion that a libertarian can even be principled (i.e., an "ideologue") is a contradiction in terms. The whole premise of the libertarian movement is that there is no need to defend individual rights on any particular grounds of political philosophy, or indeed even to define the term! Paul's appeal to a document (that can be amended) in lieu of stating his position is in part a manifestation of this approach of evading intellectual arguments.

Second, Paul's views on such matters as abortion and national defense not only cannot be deduced from the Constitution, they are inconsistent with an advocacy of individual rights. Furthermore, they are not mere "personal preferences", but represent implicit philosophical ideas that he does wish to implement politically. (And religion, the source of his stand on abortion, is, numerous conservatives' wishes to the contrary, an ideology.)

Third, not only is Paul not really an "ideologue", his position on abortion and his willingness to ally himself with what amounts to a religious party reflect a willingness to enact Christianity into law, limited only by his (admittedly more secular) personal preferences.

This means in sum that Paul, as an allegedly secular candidate who is, as such, dismissed as a threat to personal freedom in America, functions as a Trojan horse for the religious right even as he pretends that personal freedom is as obviously good and uncontroversial as breathing on a regular basis. (Personal freedom is good, but this is neither obvious nor uncontroversial.)

Thus while in Huckabee, we have a threatening, but at least identifiable enemy, in Paul, we have a turncoat who blends in with secularists and advocates of limited government!

So neither of these men deserves my support, and both are scary. But when someone as perceptive as Jonah Goldberg can be fooled by a Ron Paul, that is scary.

The fight for freedom is, as I have pointed out, a war on two fronts: the political and the intellectual. Of the two, the intellectual is the more fundamental, and cannot be lost. The longer enemies to freedom like Ron Paul can masquerade as friends, the longer it will take for people to become aware of the actual requirements for a society that respects individual rights.

-- CAV

Happy Thanksgiving

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Today and tomorrow are pretty busy as I finish the week's work early for the Thanksgiving holiday. I'll be leaving tomorrow to go my cousins' for a feast and fun. Thanksgiving is a great holiday, an American celebration of abundance and achievement, in which we eat to surfeit, then watch boring football games.

And of course it's always great to see the family -- the liberals who think I'm a warmongering fascist and the Christians who think I'm an agent of Satan because I don't bow my head when they say grace. But aside from religion and politics, which it is best to avoid, these reunions are fun. I enjoy the games and camaraderie.

In a recent comments thread there was a lot of mockery, venom and insults. If my blog gets more popular and attracts more commenters, then I will certainly disable comments like Instapundit. I'm not going to spend time every day asking people to be polite -- or worse, deleting comments from nihilists and nutcases. Just look at Free Republic or Democratic Underground and you see that some people, left and right, are simply unable to comment about their opponents without insulting them. Some commenters at FR and DU have nothing of substance to say, but they will gladly take the time to deliver a gratuitous insult. The insults diminish the value of those forums and make them tedious to wade through.

For now, however, this blog is still peanuts, so I get few comments (and almost none from leftists). Most commenters have been civil, but they slip up now and then. I deliver the occasional insult myself, especially to the big ones like Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush, but I try to argue ideas. After years of effort I am much better at avoiding insults and ad hominem attacks than I was in 1996 when I discovered cyberspace -- a country that is still a rugged frontier.

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. I'll be back next week.

The 'Cash Value' of Mind-Body Integration: An Example

By Dan Edge from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Followers of my blog will note my fascination with the subject of psycho-epistemology, especially how it relates to mind-body integration (see The Psycho-Epistemology of Acting, Self-Love as a Prime Mover, Mind-Body Integration, The Benevolent People Premise, The Psycho-Epistemology of Sexuality, Are There “Bad” Emotions?). I love thinking about these topics, writing about them, and discussing them with friends. So I was very pleased recently when a new friend expressed an interest in my thoughts on the subject.

Before we got too embroiled in discussion, my friend smartly asked: “What is the ‘cash value’ of these theories?” He wanted to know what applications and implications could be drawn from psycho-epistemology. This is an absolutely brilliant question which can never be asked often enough. If one cannot apply his principles to his life, then his philosophical ramblings are nothing more than armchair rationalisms. With that in mind, I would like to offer an extended example of why the psycho-epistemology of mind-body integration is a very practical field of study.

If one understands the interrelationship between automatized physical, conceptual, and psychological units stored in his subconscious (see Mind-Body Integration and The Psycho-Epistemology of Sexuality Part III), then he is better able to “train” his emotions. If one’s emotional responses are not consonant with his explicit value hierarchy, then he can “retrain” his mind to respond appropriately. Consider an example:

A woman overreacts to minor disagreements with her husband. When he spills milk on the counter, she scowls at him and burns a hole into his head with her eyes. When he protests that she is overreacting, she becomes upset and defends her response by pointing out the value of a clean kitchen. She may not even realize that she was giving him a dirty look. A needless fight over spilled milk explodes.

If one asks the woman how much she values her husband, she would say that she loves him dearly. And she may freely admit that spilling milk on the counter is no big deal. Even when she acknowledges that she is overreacting, she may have difficulty bringing her emotions in line. Emotional responses are automatic, after all, and are not always easy to change. How should she proceed in “retraining” herself?

The first step is to get her priorities straight. She must learn to properly evaluate the relative importance of minor annoyances vs. the value of her relationship with her husband. She must introspect and determine with absolute certainty that she is in fact overreacting. She must introspect in the moment, while she is getting upset about something, and stress to herself her hierarchy of values. Over time, this will allay the intensity of her negative emotional reactions. But there is something else she can do that will help her “retrain”: she can make sure that her mind and body are integrated in her reactions.

One important element of her emotional reaction is the way her body responds. She automatically scowls and narrows her eyes at any minor annoyance. This kind of body language is often strongly associated with very negative evaluations and emotions. If the subconscious treats automatized physical motions, evaluations, and emotions as related units, then by scowling, she is actually communicating to her subconscious – telling it “I am very upset.” Her subconscious responds by stressing negative evaluations and emotions.

Assuming that she has brought her mind in line by clarifying her hierarchy of values, she can bring her body in line by controlling her automatized physical reactions. The next time her husband spills ketchup on the kitchen floor and she starts to get upset, she can monitor her facial movements, remove the scowl from her face, slow her breathing, and otherwise physically act as if she is not upset. Now she is sending a different message to her subconscious. Not only is she training herself to evaluate the situation properly, she is training her subconscious how to respond physically to the situation. Since mind and body are integrated in the way I have described, controlling the physical elements of an emotional reaction facilitates retraining. It can help effect a change much more quickly. As an added benefit, positive body language communicates the proper message to one’s lover as well as oneself.

Paying attention to the physical elements of one’s emotional reactions can be greatly beneficial in many areas of one’s life. It can help one become a better communicator, a better friend, a better lover and, most importantly, a better valuer. If one trains his mind and body to respond to values appropriately -- then he will be happier, more passionate, and more motivated.

Tune in next week, when I will offer another “cash value” example, this time relating to sexuality and romantic love relationships.

--Dan Edge

Blue Laws

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Ari Armstrong posted about "blue laws". These are laws that restrict various business activities on Sunday.

On the face of it, such laws violate the constitution, because they use the religious idea of a sabbath (i.e. a mandatory day of rest), to restrict the rights of non-religious people who do not agree with the day-of-rest ideology in the same sense as the democratic majority.

In 1961, the SCOTUS decided a case, [GALLAGHER v. CROWN KOSHER MARKET] and ruled 6-3 that blue-laws were indeed constitutional. The judges offered some pretty specious rationalizations. For instance, they say that the most current version of the law now had a preamble, giving secular reasons for the restrictions. Even though the law speaks of Sunday as the "lord's day", the majority said this was simply a "relic", and not the basis for the blue laws.

In essence, the majority of the SCOTUS found that those blue-laws did not have a Christian basis. A rationalist might buy that argument, but I bet you couldn't put it past a truck-driver!

The judges then pointed out how an assortment of things were allowed in the current law (unlike the old ones which were really strict). The clear reason for this is simple: the democratic majority loosened up their religious observances, and were now doing a lot of things that their forefathers did not do on Sunday. Somehow, the SCOTUS rationalized that because the law had been loosened up, therefore the remaining restrictions were no longer be religious. The court reasons thus: since the latest version allows the sales of soda and tobacco and allows amusement parks to open, therefore it cannot be religious. (In fact, the new law merely reflects the new, easier-going religion of the democratic majority.)

The SCOTUS essentially affirmed that the government has the right to force its citizens to take a day of rest and recreation. (Not sure what constitution they're reading.) And, given this right, it made sense, says the SCOTUS, for Sunday to be that day since most people are Christians. Right reasoning from the wrong starting premise.

This got me thinking: how might a "constructionists" like Scalia rule on something like this? Since blue laws have been around ever since the constitution, wouldn't he take that as proof that the founders could not have meant to disallow them? And what of the slightly older, but still post-Constitution versions that were more explicitly religious but still hung around? Wouldn't those be upheld on the same basis?

What say, you lawyers out there?

Has Scalia ever had to rule on a blue-law? If so, I'd like to know.

Predatory Legislating

Irvine, CA--Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, denounced the anti-"predatory-lending" bill just passed by the House. "This bill purports to help lower-income borrowers--by making life impossible for anyone who would like to lend them money.

"The bill tells lenders that they may not engage in vague, undefined offenses like offering loans that are not 'solely in the best interest of the consumer' or offering loans that a borrower does not have a 'reasonable ability to repay.' Since there is no clear standard of a 'reasonable ability to repay' or the 'best interest of the consumer,' lenders could be held liable for any loan a borrower fails to pay off. All an irresponsible borrower or unscrupulous lawyer needs to do is convince a jury in hindsight that the lender should have known better--and both will be in the money at the lender's expense. To compound the injustice, the new law would apply not only to those who make failed loans, but to any financial institution that buys and pools loans made by others.

"If you were a mortgage lender facing this sword of Damocles for any loan that goes bad, what would you do? The same thing that mortgage lenders will do if this legislation passes: jack up rates to account for the high risk of lawsuits--and likely avoid lending to higher-risk candidates altogether. Is this going to help the lower-income home-buyers that 'predatory lending' opponents claim to care about so much?"

Theory of Everything?

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Physicist/surfer Garrett Lisi may have come up with a physics theory that unites all the fundamental particles and forces of nature, including gravity, without relying on dubious multidimensional string theory. According to this related article:

...[H]is proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.

Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts.

In other words, it doesn't require invoking arbitrary new dimensions for which we have no evidence. Plus it makes testable predictions that are at variance with the so-called Standard Model. The New Scientist article states that his theory predicts:

...[M]ore than 20 new particles not envisaged by the standard model. Lisi is now calculating the masses that these particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider - being built at CERN, near Geneva in Switzerland - starts up next year.

"This is an all-or-nothing kind of theory - it's either going to be exactly right, or spectacularly wrong," says Lisi. "I'm the first to admit this is a long shot. But it ain't over till the LHC sings."

David Harriman mentioned in his lecture to our Front Range Objectivism group last year that any physicist who wants to challenge the dominance of string theory will have a very hard time, since nearly all the grant funding in academia for such foundational issues is controlled by people who believe in string theory. It seems that this is borne out by Lisi's experience, as reported by New Scientist:

Most attempts to bring gravity into the picture have been based on string theory, which proposes that particles are ultimately composed of minuscule strings. Lisi has never been a fan of string theory and says that it's because of pressure to step into line that he abandoned academia after his PhD. "I've never been much of a follower, so I walked off to search for my own theory," he says. Last year, he won a research grant from the charitably funded Foundational Questions Institute to pursue his ideas.

For those who are interested in the details of his theory, here's the link to his paper (click on "PDF" on the upper right). The abstract reads as follows:

An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything

A. Garrett Lisi (Submitted on 6 Nov 2007)

Abstract: All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base manifold.

Those who want a semi-technical explanation (with video) can find one here. My own mathematics background is not strong enough to make an assessment of the merits of his theory. Nor do I know any more about the Foundational Questions Institute besides what's on their webpage. But FWIW, I did meet Garrett Lisi at a dinner party several years ago as a friend-of-a-friend, back when Diana and I lived in San Diego and he was still a graduate student in physics at UCSD. At the time, he struck me as an extremely intelligent man, so he would be a plausible candidate for someone who could have come up with a revolutionary new theory in physics.

Huckabee's Latest

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

How bad is Huckabee? Salon.com has a piece called Huckabee: God wants us to fight global warming.

A conservative Republican and devout Christian, Huckabee believes he has a biblical responsibility to protect God's planet from climate change, even though he's not convinced that climate change is largely human-caused. But mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions make him squeamish.

If he has a biblical responsiblility to protect God's planet from climate change, even though he's not convinced that climate change is largely human-caused, then isn't he trying to protect the planet from the climate changes caused by God? Even by his own mystical standard, his position is incoherent.

But that last sentence in the quote, about him being squeamish on limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, is probably enough to persuade pragmatist Republicans that he is okay. After all, he's not an extremist!

Huckabee is currently running second behind Romney in Iowa. In New Hampshire, however, he is a distant fifth, behind even Ron Paul. It will be interesting to see if the best candidate, Giuliani, survives the early states, which do not favor him.

The Pro-Malaria Left

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Paul Driessen calls for "all-out war against malaria" at Spiked Online, and describes how such a war ought to be waged, but not before he makes the following observation -- and comes closer than any other mainstream commentator to saying outright that environmentalism is anti-man:

If an accident kills wildlife or people, punishment is meted out and restitution made. A host of regulators, lawyers, judges, activists, journalists and politicians help bring the wrongdoers to justice.

But when it comes to policies and programmes that sicken and kill millions of parents and children a year, these ethics cops and eco-warriors are not just silent. They refuse to hold government agencies and activist groups to the same honesty and accountability standards they apply to for-profit companies. They even oppose programmes that would reduce disease and save lives.

This is a direct result of the altruistic morality espoused by these "ethics cops", who see the sacrifice of human beings to nature as a moral ideal, and this omission weakens the piece, because it is this morality which must be challenged before significant progress against environmentalism can be made.

Nevertheless, unlike so many similar pieces, usually by economists or libertarians, that fail to even attempt to make a moral argument against socialism, this piece at least tries. Many people do implicitly value their own lives, and feel sufficient good will towards others that they will find the sacrifice of children to wildlife unconscionable. For that reason, the piece conveys a level of indignation missing from similar pieces, which will make the facts therein speak more forcefully than is usual for such pieces.

This is a must-read, particularly for those of us who do understand the immorality of self-sacrifice.

-- CAV

Creationists: Pot, Kettle, Black

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Here's a recent update on the intelligent design debate:

Evolution wars take a bizarre twist

In a bizarre twist to the evolution wars, supporters of intelligent design are accusing the producers of a TV science documentary series of bringing religion into US classrooms. The Discovery Institute, based in Seattle, Washington, alleges that teaching materials accompanying Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, broadcast on 13 November, encourage unconstitutional teaching practices.

The teaching package states: "Q: Can you accept evolution and still believe in religion? A: Yes. The common view that evolution is inherently anti-religious is simply false." According to Casey Luskin, an attorney with the Discovery Institute, this answer favours one religious viewpoint, arguably violating the US constitution. "We're afraid that teachers might get sued," he says.

A lawyer for WGBH in Boston, Massachusetts, which produces the show, says the package is covered by the right to free speech. He declined to comment on the claim that teachers risked lawsuits.

More on Sharia "Investments"

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

A few weeks ago, I noted Caroline Glick's expose of shari'a-friendly investments. Today, there's more on the topic at Front Page Magazine.

AAOIFI's members and shari'a board include Saudi Arabia's Dallah Al-Baraka Group, al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corporation and Kuwait Finance House--all implicated in al Qaeda and other terror funding, according to former national counter-terror coordinator Richard Clarke. Other board members are the Islamic Development Bank, also known as the Bank of the Intifada for funding families of suicide bombers, whose principal owners are Saudi Arabia, Iran, Lybia and Egypt, and not one, but two U.S.-sanctioned terror states, Sudan and Iran. Islamic finance experts consider AAOIFI fatwas standards to which all shari'a banks and products, even in the U.S., must adhere. But UAE’s showcase Bourse on Oct. 22, 2007 denied its Islamic "purity" to the Partnership for New York City.

...

Imposing shari'a--by proselytizing (da'wa) or jihad war--is obligatory.

U.S. banking and investment laws guarantee individual property rights, require full disclosure, and prohibit criminal or terrorist activities. Western bankers and businessmen, however, oblivious to shari'a and financial jihad history, clamor for Muslim petrodollars (supposed surpluses from overextended Middle Eastern exchanges) pouring into U.S. markets.

That last passage reminds me -- for more than one reason -- of something Leonard Peikoff noted that we could have done over a half-century ago that would have prevented this from existing as an issue to begin with: protet American property rights.

The first country to nationalize Western oil, in 1951, was Iran. The rest, observing our frightened silence, hurried to grab their piece of the newly available loot.

This failure to protect the rights of our citizens consistently in the first place is now feeding on itself in the form of tempting investments that pragmatic businessmen will not resist -- or craven politicians dare to oppose.

-- CAV

Coming in February!

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Historian Scott Powell will be starting his next history course for adults, The Islamist Entanglement, in February, and provides a very intriguing preview over at his blog, Powell History Recommends.

One theme Powell discusses is how the West has repeatedly hampered itself in its encounters with the Moslem world through short-range thinking:

The Crusades are a famous example of the violent conflict that characterizes the interface between Western civilization and the Middle East throughout history. In that series of religious wars stretching from 1095 to 1291, the powers of Western and Central Europe, then the most progressive elements in Western civilization, attempted to claim the Holy Land for Christianity. This is, of course, the basic storyline that most people are familiar with.

An episode from the Crusades from 1204 that I suspect most people don’t know about, however, demonstrates another long-running, trend in East-West relations, namely "West-West" backstabbing. Too often in the history of Western civilization, its own leading representatives have demonstrated a disturbing and tragic failure to grasp the unique virtues of their own Civilization, to see the fundamental values they share, and defend them. Instead they have acted to secure short-range benefits, usually at each other’s expense.

In 1204, this is exactly what happened. The Venetians, upon whom the Crusaders were relying for passage to the Holy Land, refused transport to the Western army because the Crusaders could not meet their price. Then, finding a convenient excuse in a contested succession at Constantinople, they convinced the knights to take the city on behalf on one the claimants, and by this means derive their desired profit. [bold added]

Powell goes on to explain how this left Constantinople ripe for its eventual Moslem takeover, as well as to point out how such behavior has continued even to the modern day.

But even when the West overall has been at its most short-sighted, there have also been examples of individuals whose work has greatly aided the continued advance of Western civilization, as you'll find when you read the rest of this post. And be sure to return to Powell History Recommends over the coming weeks: This post is just the first of a new, and very interesting-looking series!

-- CAV

(In)justice in Saudi Arabia

By Dan Edge from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I came across a truly disgusting article today on Foxnews.com: 19-Year Old Saudi Rape Victim Ordered to Undergo 200 Lashes. Some excerpts:

---------------
"A 19-year-old female victim of gang rape who initially was ordered to undergo 90 lashes for "being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape," has been sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail for telling her story to the news media.
...
The court last year sentenced the six heavily-armed men who carried out the attack against the Shiite woman to between one and five years for committing the crime.

But the judges had decided to punish the woman further for "her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media," a court source told the Arab News.

...

Saudi Arabia enforces a strict Islamic doctrine that forbids unrelated men and women from associating with each other, bans women from driving and forces them to cover head-to-toe in public."
---------------

So the men who gang-raped this girl might get as little as a year in prison, while the victim is imprisoned, beaten, and humiliated by the Saudi government for "being in the car of an unrelated male." I am beyond disgusted. This kind of thing makes my blood boil. The Saudis deserve the very worst of our ire. What more evidence do we need that they are our enemies, not our allies? They are nothing more than 3rd world barbarians who stole a fortune in oil wealth from American companies back in the 50's.

Saidi Arabia is the spiritual heart of Sunni Islam (the same sect as Osama bin Laden), and as such they are our #2 enemy next to Iran.

Death to Islamic Totalitarianism!

--Dan Edge

“Shut Up” vs. “Shut Up”

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

An interesting thing happened in Chile last week: the king of Spain asked a dictator to “shut up.”

According to an Associated Press item of November 12, “Spain’s king backed on ‘shut up’ comments,” Hugo Chavez, the Bœotian tyrant of Venezuela, kept interrupting Spain’s current prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, during his remarks at the Ibero-American summit in Santiago. When Zapatero tried to give him a lesson in manners, Chavez kept talking off-microphone.

At which point, King Juan Carlos, seated next to Zapatero, leaned forward and asked, for the whole audience to hear, “Por que no te callas?” (Why don’t you shut up?) Then the monarch rose and left the room.

That is what the British used to call “showing one’s back,” or expressing contempt. The snub and lesson in manners, however, were lost on Chavez. What he refused to stop talking about was his allegation that both Juan Carlos and former prime minister Jose Maria Aznar somehow backed the coup in 2002 that briefly removed Chavez from power in Caracas. (Aznar, a pro-American who sent troops to join the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, lost office in the elections following the Madrid train bombing in March 2004. Spanish troops were subsequently withdrawn by the leftist government in a craven act of submission to Islamists.)

“Chavez repeatedly called Aznar a ‘fascist’ in an address at the summit of leaders from Latin America, Spain and Portugal.” It was Aznar that Zapatero was attempting to defend during Chavez’s goonish behavior.

“During the two-day coup in April 2002, Aznar called interim president Pedro Carmona, and the Spanish ambassador to Venezuela met with Carmona. Chavez was restored to power after massive street protests.

“Aznar later told the Spanish Parliament he had discussed with Carmona arrangements for Chavez to go to Cuba. Aznar’s party had insisted, however, that the conservative government then in power did not back the coup.

“But Spain’s current Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos charged in December 2004 that Aznar had in fact given the putsch his diplomatic blessing. Moratinos cited diplomatic cables from the period and other government documents.”

Of course, giving a “blessing” to the ouster of a dictator must be distinguished from giving the project active backing. It would have been to Spain’s everlasting credit had Aznar and the king proclaimed for everyone to hear, “Throw the bum out!” (The U.S., with private oil interests in Venezuela, didn’t lift a finger to help the opposition, and is paying the price for such “neutral” non-interference.)

And Juan Carlos, instead of asking the bum to shut his offending trap, should have engaged Chavez in polite repartee: “Señor Chavez, please define for us ‘fascist,’ and descant why we should not insult you with the appellation. Tu haber aquél estilo.” (You suit the style.)

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) found another talk show to target for silencing, Michael Savage’s nationally syndicated radio program, which CAIR wishes to shut up.

The Cybercast News Service on November 9 reported that:

“On November 1, CAIR urged ‘radio listeners of all faiths’ to contact companies that advertise on ‘The Savage Nation’ to complain about an ‘anti-Muslim tirade’ on Savage’s Oct. 29 program. (CAIR periodically issues ‘incitement alerts,’ urging its members to contact various media outlets to express their concerns about ‘Islamophobic attitudes.’)”

“On Nov. 2, CAIR’s Minnesota chapter announced that three companies in that state had pulled their advertisements from ‘The Savage Nation.’” One of them was Citrix Systems, a computer systems application company. Another company, however, Swiss America, increased its ads.

CAIR Communications Coordinator Amina Rubin announced Citrix’s submission together with this statement:

“We urge other local and national companies running ads on Savage’s program to follow Citrix’s example in support of religious tolerance.”

The question to ask is: What has “religious tolerance” to do with Michael Savage’s First Amendment free speech right? Savage cannot “tolerate” Islam. Ergo, he has a right to speak against it. He has not taken any physical action to express his “intolerance,” such as blowing up mosques, kidnapping imams, or ambushing Muslims with a hunting rifle as they do their full-body genuflections to Allah. Those kinds of actions lately have been the exclusive modus operendi of Muslim “extremists” in their own campaign of “religious tolerance.”

“Free speech is a precious right that we fully support and strive to protect,” said Rubin in his release. “We are not seeking to curb Mr. Savage’s freedom of speech, but to demonstrate that Americans and American companies will not tolerate hatred and bigotry.”

So, the best way to not “tolerate” hatred or bigotry in speech or in print is not to listen to it or read it. But the “package deal” is the implication that Savage’s commentaries on Islam constitute “hatred” and “bigotry.” Considering the nature of Islam and the subservient psychological adherence to it demanded of Muslims, Savage is right to be concerned – indeed, angry enough to occasionally rant against it – that it is an alien presence in a nation that values independence of thought and the freedom of anyone to listen to anyone’s opinions or views without hindrance or censor.

Regardless of the rationality or its lack in Savage’s or anyone else’s public commentaries, CAIR and its companion Muslim organizations fear any level of criticism of Islam, particularly criticism that correctly identifies it as a barbarous creed of conquest and intolerance, a creed whose inherent political nature has not been emasculated by a separation of state and religious belief. This has happened to other religious beliefs. Do the Presbyterians or Methodists have an organization that campaigns to silence men who question or mock their specific religious tenets? No.

(Although that separation is crumbling as both the Christian right and the socialist left have regularly invoked God and are actually beginning to become indistinguishable. Observe the current campaign for the White House. Do any of the candidates differ in any fundamental way? No. They are all for sustaining the welfare state or expanding it, and call for sacrifices and selflessness as political virtues. If there is any difference between the candidates, it is in the degree of blatant advocacy and shrillness.)

What CAIR’s thought police wish is for American non-Muslims to remain ignorant of Islam and the political ambitions of its shady proponents while they inveigle their way into the political process and the culture. It is rational criticism of Islam that CAIR’s publicists and “intellectual cops” wish to suppress.

Have Savage’s radio commentaries “incited” his listeners to act Ku Klux Klan-style against Muslims? Or Rush Limbaugh’s? Or Michael Graham’s? If such incidents ever occurred, one can be sure that our liberal, pro-Islam news media would broadcast them immediately. That such incidents have not been reported, speaks for their non-occurrence. No one is trying to obstruct the freedom of speech of Muslims, though Muslims certainly have a record of obstructing that of anyone who attempts to practice it on radio or at universities.

What CAIR’s campaign amounts to is what Ayn Rand called the “smear,” in this instance labeling any critic of Islam, especially its most articulate critics, such as Daniel Pipes and Steve Emerson, a “xenophobe,” “racist,” “fascist,” or “bigot.” In this campaign the Islamists have an invaluable weapon, irrational, rights-negating “hate speech” laws, which are founded not on any actual criminal fact or intent, but on sheer emotion. To risk offending someone’s religious sensibilities, or hurt his “feelings,” is to court fines or imprisonment or both. The enforcement of these insidious laws has been sketchy in the U.S., but in Europe their application is de rigueur, which partly accounts for the decline of Europe and its gradual Islamification.

For a revealing article on how much the Islamists have borrowed from their old friends the Nazis in the way of waging war on the West, aside from their political tactics, see Paul Belien’s Washington Times article of November 7, “Nazis and Islamists.” His opening sentence is: “During the Second World War, the Nazis worked on plans to build the ‘Amerikabomber,’ an airplane specially devised to fly suicide missions into Manhattan’s skyscrapers.” Sound familiar? Hitler thought of it first, not Osama bin Laden or Mohammed Atta. The source of this information is no less than the diary of Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments chief.

Finally, an example of successful suppression of the freedom of speech can be found in Mainland China, whose 30,000 Internet cops are assisted by American companies such as Yahoo, Cisco, Skype, and Microsoft, whose technologies enable the government to ban “pro-democracy” ideas from circulation and to detect, imprison, and permanently shut up those who circulate them.

A Los Angeles Times article of November 8, “Yahoo isn’t the only villain,” reports that:

“Cisco is hardly alone in helping China keep the jackboot to the neck of its people. Skype, an EBay Inc. subsidiary, helps the Chinese government monitor and censor text messaging. Microsoft Corp. likewise is a willing conscript in China’s Internet policing army, as Bill Gates’ minions regularly cleanse the Chinese blogosphere. Google Inc.’s brainiacs, meanwhile, have built a special Chinese version of their powerful search engine to filter out things as diverse as the BBC, freeing Tibet and that four-letter word in China – democracy.”

Peter Navarro, author of the Times article, blames U.S. business schools for the amoral behavior of these companies. Fundamentally, he should have blamed, first, arch-pragmatist John Dewey, and then Immanuel Kant, whose philosophies underpin whatever “ethics” are taught in those business schools. As a measure of those “ethics,” note that these same morally clueless companies are at each others’ throats over the “rights” to software and operating systems, with them all ganging up on Microsoft, the giant that has caved in to American and European antitrust suits.

Commenting on the venality of the companies, whom he says claim they are advancing freedom of speech in China, instead of helping to punish it, Navarro wrote:

“What’s missing from the American corporate perspective is this bigger picture. The collaborative tools that U.S. corporations provide to spy on, and silence, the Chinese people are far more likely to help prop up a totalitarian regime than topple it.”

The “picture” is bigger than Navarro suspects. It is philosophical, and what is missing from it is reason.

Not Yet Dead

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Intelligent Design wasn't killed by the Dover court decision, but its advocates do seem to be changing tactics according to this (two-page) Ars Technica article:

The Dover trial was the latest in a long line of court cases involving the teaching of evolution, but it was exceptional in that it was the first case that tested the legality of teaching Intelligent Design in a science class. The decision at Dover determined that ID was unscientific and fundamentally religious. Tonight, the PBS show NOVA will will take a look at the trial in a show that includes dramatized reenactments of courtroom scenes.

Not surprisingly, the organized ID movement has not been pleased with the Dover decision and has disparaged it at every opportunity (they're not fond of the NOVA special, either). Regardless of their opinion, however, the court's ruling was decisive, and no court cases regarding ID have made it to the trial stage since; Dover has become an effective threat to both hasten legal settlements and changes of policy.

That's not to say that the Discovery Institute and other ID proponents have packed up and called it a day; instead, they seem to simply be changing tactics. Recent developments indicate that the next wave of anti-evolution agitation will take a two-pronged approach. The first will be to try to foster doubt regarding evolution during high school education, while the second aims to explicitly carve a space for ID proponents at the college level by pressuring for their inclusion as a form of academic freedom. We'll take a brief look at both of these developments.

The article links to a speech by Don McLeroy, an advocate of Intelligent Design and the chairman of the Texas State Board of Education. Here's a small tidbit:

But what is the main target of intelligent design? What's the main target? Is it the chemical origin of life? Research? Well, it's not, certainly, origin of life spontaneously arose chemically is not supported by the Bible. It's not supported by the evidence, so maybe that is the target. But, in fact, it's the lack of evidence of chemical origin of life and the incredible complexity of life itself that played the major role in Antony Flew, that famous British philosopher that just said that he had to abandon his atheism. So it's very powerful, the origin of life, but that is not the main target of the intelligent design movement. Oh, it's neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism is another description term for just evolution, common descent that talks about genetic variability so it gets it more precise. And is that the target? It's not supported by evidence, it's not Biblical, so that must be the target of intelligent design, but really it's not the main target either.

Actually, in intelligent design we are focused on a on a bigger target, and in the words of Phillip Johnson "the target is metaphysical naturalism, materialism or just plain old naturalism. The idea that nature is all there is." Modern science today is totally based on naturalism, and all of intelligent design's arguments against evolution and chemical origin of life it is the naturalistic base that is the target. And this is a quote from Phillip Johnson: "The important aspect of Darwinian evolution is it's naturalistic claim that life is the result of purposeless, unintelligent material causes. When Darwinian evolution and intelligent design stand in a complete antithesis. Intelligent design requires the designing influence to account for the complexity of life where Darwinian theory of common descent claims that life spontaneously arose."

Now I would like to talk a little bit about the big tent. Why is intelligent design the big tent? It's because we're all lined up against the fact that naturalism, that nature is all there is. Whether you're a progressive creationist, recent creationist, young earth, old earth, it's all in the tent of intelligent design.

In other words, the target of Intelligent Design is not just evolution, but the very metaphysics that makes science and technology possible -- not to mention respect for rights and secular government.

Win the Battle, ...

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

There is a long article about the pervasiveness of multiculturalism in academia over at National Journal that is well worth the read. The following passage is particularly relevant in light of the recent apparent victory against the left at the University of Delaware, which ceased a dorm-centered multiculturalist indoctrination program after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education exposed it to national scrutiny (and outrage):

Despite a succession of court decisions striking down university speech codes, they re-emerged thinly disguised as rules to prevent and punish "harassment," defined to include any speech deemed offensive by minorities, women, gays, or other preferred groups.

It is exactly as I said upon first learning of FIRE's success:

I see this victory as temporary. UD will doubtless let the heat die down and reinstitute as much of this as they feel they can get away with when they can.

FIRE is watching this and this will slow them down, but the real way to stop this is to get more and more academics to oppose multiculturalism.

Just as we are learning abroad that one cannot force people whose fundamental ideas are incompatible with individual rights to adopt Western forms of government in any meaningful way, we are learning it here. The multiculturalists see American society as "racist" and its institutions as tools of oppression, which they will attempt to subvert or destroy outright in the name of their code of morality. And in the meantime, they are attempting to make more of themselves by using our educational institutions to indoctrinate the young.

Far be it from me to detract from FIRE's outstanding work, but there is also an intellectual component to the war for freedom that we ignore at the peril of making their heroic efforts ultimately futile. Opposing the actions that the bad ideas of the multiculturalists inspire them to do is not enough. Those of us who value freedom have no choice -- if we are to gain more of that value or keep what we have -- but to work to understand and promote the ideas that make freedom possible. Otherwise, who will understand what freedom is, or why it is good, or even that there is an alternative to egalitarianism?

-- CAV

A Liberal On Rudy Giuliani

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Wow! Glenn Greenwald makes a powerful case for supporting Rudy Giuliani! You would think that a liberal would be against any Republican, but look at some of the glowing praise Mr. Greenwald heaps on Rudy Giuliani:

The most transparent and destructive fallacy being recited by our Beltway media class is that Rudy Giuliani is a moderate or centrist Republican.

And:

The very idea that Giuliani is a "moderate" or a "centrist" is completely absurd. Regarding the issues over which the next President will have the greatest influence -- foreign policy and presidential powers -- Giuliani is as far to what is now considered the "Right" as it gets. His views on foreign policy are far more radical and bellicose even than Dick Cheney's, and his view of presidential powers makes George Bush look like Thomas Jefferson.

And:

A warmonger with authoritarian impulses and liberal positions on social issues isn't a "moderate" or a "centrist." He's just a warmonger with authoritarian impulses and liberal positions on social issues.

And:

Whatever else Giuliani might be, "centrist" and "moderate" is not it. He is one of the most radical major candidates in memory.

And what exactly is so good about Giuliani?

He has one of the most extremist and war-loving foreign policy teams ever assembled for a major candidate. He has advocated or expressed openness to such radical policies as imprisoning American citizens with no trials, having Israel join NATO, and launching a first-strike tactical nuclear attack on Iran. And he speaks more glibly than virtually any individual in the country about torture.

All that and he supports torture, too? Enough, Glenn, enough -- I'm sold. Go, Rudy!

Creationist Museum

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

If you’re too lazy to read the bible, the second best way to become an atheist is probably to visit this place.

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False Friends Update

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I've finally updated my web page on the false friends of Objectivism. Until now, it didn't contain my last ten or so posts. (Those are at the near-bottom of the page.)

Income Inequality

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Lots of people decry the supposed inequality of income in the U.S., and claim that the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing. For instance, one web-site says the following:

The top 1 percent of Americans received 21.2 % of all personal income in 2005... a big jump from 2004, when the top 1 percent's share was 19 %, and slightly above the 2000 figure of 20.8 %
The bottom 50 percent of Americans got 12.8 %..., down from 13.4 % in 2004 and 13 % in 2000.

The problem with this type of analysis is that it is not measuring the same people. Those who were the "top 1%" in 2000 are not the same as those who are the top 1% in 2005. The same for the bottom 50%.

The bottom 50% in any year consists of many people who are earning less for some temporary reason. The analysis above was done from tax-returns. Many of those in the lower 50% were fresh out of college in the first few years of their career. When we look at the lower 50% from 2005, many of the 2000 folk have moved into the upper 50%.

The figures expressed this way can only be of interest to those who are interested in equality as a primary; but egalitarianism in the aggregate is simply pointless. If one wished to figure out whether individuals are truly able to work hard and increase their incomes, then the way to do that is to follow a fixed group of people, from various income groups, across a series of years. This would give one a picture of if and how people are able to progress economically.

The WSJ (Nov 12th, 2007) reports on one such study, that tracked over 90,000 from 1996 through 2005. Here are some of their findings:

• The lowest 20% group, were earning 90% more in 2005 than they did in 1996
• Over half of those in the lowest 20% group of 1996 had moved to higher quintiles, with almost 25% moving above the median
• From the second-lowest quintile, 17% moved down, but over 50% moved to a higher quintile

The article has more.

Thanksgiving: A Most Selfish Holiday

By Debi Ghate

Ah, Thanksgiving. To most of us, the word conjures up images of turkey dinner, pumpkin pie and watching football with family and friends. It kicks off the holiday season and is the biggest shopping weekend of the year. We're taught that Thanksgiving came about when pilgrims gave thanks to God for a bountiful harvest. We vaguely mumble thanks for the food on our table, the roof over our head and the loved ones around us. We casually think about how lucky we are and how much better our lives are than, say, those in Bangladesh. But surely there is something more to celebrate, something more sacred about this holiday.

What should we really be celebrating on Thanksgiving?

Ayn Rand described Thanksgiving as "a typically American holiday . . . its essential, secular meaning is a celebration of successful production. It is a producers' holiday. The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production." She was right. This country was mostly uninhabited and wild when our forefathers began to develop the land and build spectacular cities, shaping what is now the wealthiest nation in the world. It's the American spirit to overcome challenges, create great achievements, and enjoy prosperity. We uniquely recognize that production leads to wealth and that we must dedicate ourselves to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. It's no accident that Americans have a holiday called Thanksgiving--a yearly tradition when we pause to appreciate the "bountiful harvest" we've reaped.

What is today's version of the "bountiful harvest"? It's the affluence and success we've gained. It's the cars, houses and vacations we enjoy. It's the life-saving medicines we rely on, the stock portfolios we build, the beautiful clothes we buy and the safe, clean streets we live on. It's the good life.

How did we get this "bountiful harvest"? Ask any hard-working American; it sure wasn't by the "grace of God." It didn't grow on a fabled "money tree." We created it by working hard, by desiring the best money can buy and by wanting excellence for ourselves and our loved ones. What we don't create ourselves, we trade value for value with those who have the goods and services we need, such as our stockbrokers, hairdressers and doctors. We alone are responsible for our wealth. We are the producers and Thanksgiving is our holiday.

So, on Thanksgiving, why don't we thank ourselves and those producers who make the good life possible?

From a young age, we are bombarded with messages designed to undermine our confident pursuit of values: "Be humble," "You can't know what's good for yourself," "It's better to give than receive," and above all "Don't be selfish!" We are scolded not to take more than "our share"--whether it is of corporate profits, electricity or pie. We are taught that altruism--selfless concern for others--is the moral ideal. We are taught to sacrifice for strangers, who have no claim to our hard-earned wealth. We are taught to kneel rather than reach for the sky.

But, morally, one should reach for the sky. One should recognize that the corporate profits, electricity or pie was earned through one's production--and savor its consumption. Every decision one makes, from what career to pursue to whom to call a friend, should be guided by what will best advance one's rational goals, interests and, ultimately, one's life. One should take pride in being rationally selfish--one's life and happiness depend on it.

Thanksgiving is the perfect time to recognize what we are truly grateful for, to appreciate and celebrate the fruits of our labor: our wealth, health, relationships and material things--all the values we most selfishly cherish. We should thank researchers who have made certain cancers beatable, gourmet chefs at our favorite restaurants, authors whose books made us rethink our lives, financiers who developed revolutionary investment strategies and entrepreneurs who created fabulous online stores. We should thank ourselves and those individuals who make our lives more comfortable and enjoyable--those who help us live the much-coveted American dream.

As you sit down to your sumptuous Thanksgiving dinner served on your best china, think of all the talented individuals whose innovation and inventiveness made possible the products you are enjoying. As you look around at who you've chosen to spend your day with--those you've chosen to love--thank yourself for everything you have done to make this moment possible. It's a time to selfishly and proudly say: "I earned this."

Death by Godly Politics

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Paul sent me this horrifying story of a woman allowed to die of a totally non-viable ectopic pregnancy due to Nigaragua's strict anti-abortion law. Presumably, the doctors didn't dare to save her life for fear of prosecution.

Two weeks after Olga Reyes danced at her wedding, her bloated and disfigured body was laid to rest in an open coffin -- the victim, her husband and some experts say, of Nicaragua's new no-exceptions ban on abortion.

Reyes, a 22-year-old law student, suffered an ectopic pregnancy. The fetus develops outside the uterus, cannot survive and causes bleeding that endangers the mother. But doctors seemed afraid to treat her because of the anti-abortion law, said husband Agustin Perez. By the time they took action, it was too late.

Nicaragua last year became one of 35 countries that ban all abortions, even to save the life of the mother, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York. The ban has been strictly followed, leaving the country torn between a strong tradition of women's rights and a growing religious conservatism. Abortion rights groups have stormed Congress in recent weeks demanding change, but President Daniel Ortega, a former leftist revolutionary and a Roman Catholic, has refused to oppose the church-supported ban.

Evangelical groups and the church say abortion is never needed now because medical advances solve the complications that might otherwise put a pregnant mother's life at risk.

But at least three women have died because of the ban, and another 12 reported cases will be examined, said gynecologist and university researcher Eliette Valladares, who is working with the Pan American Health Organization to analyze deaths of pregnant women recorded by Nicaragua's Health Ministry.

When I researched this issue about a year ago, polls showed that about 10 to 12 percent of Americans support a similar ban on abortion regardless of threat to the life of the mother. That's frightening.

Also, at the bottom of the article, you'll find a map of the world highlighting the countries with a total ban on abortion.

Press Answers King's Question

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Earlier today, I was mildly entertained by news that the king of Spain told Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez to "shut up" at an international summit . Probably the most amusing account comes from the BBC:

Spain's King Juan Carlos told Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to "shut up" as the Ibero-American summit drew to a close in Santiago, Chile.

The outburst came after Mr Chavez called former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar a "fascist".

Mr Chavez then interrupted Spanish PM Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's calls for him to be more diplomatic, prompting the king's outburst.

Latin American, Portuguese, Spanish and Andorran leaders were meeting in Chile.

Mr Chavez called Mr Aznar, a close ally of US President George W Bush, a fascist, adding "fascists are not human. A snake is more human."

Mr Zapatero said: "[Former Prime Minister] Aznar was democratically elected by the Spanish people and was a legitimate representative of the Spanish people."

Mr Chavez repeatedly tried to interrupt, despite his microphone being turned off. The king leaned forward and said: "Why don't you shut up?"

According to reports, the king used a familiar term normally used only for close acquaintances - or children.

Later, Mr Chavez responded to the king's rebuke.

According to the Associated Press news agency, he said: "I do not offend by telling the truth. The Venezuelan government reserves the right to respond to any aggression, anywhere, in any space and in any manner." [bold added]

I do not know Spanish, so would not be able to tell whether the king of Spain was, perhaps in exasperation, asking why Chavez would not shut up -- or asking the question by way of a suggestion for how to behave more like a civilized adult. Be that as it may, the question does come up: Why won't Hugo Chavez shut up -- at least in the sense of allowing others to speak in turn, and not gratuitously insulting them?

The BBC, with the manner in which it frames the whole episode, answers that question for us. A ... person ... insults a man who not there to defend himself and then acts childish when someone comes to his defense. Unable to ignore the impertinence, Juan Carlos leans forward and addresses Chavez in such a way as to remind him that he is acting childish.

And yet it is the king who had an "outburst"?!?!

Hugo Chavez, who is chronologically an adult and who leads a nation, knew he was insulting the former Spanish prime minister. His insult was a brutish substitute for rational debate about politics and the manner in which he acted was a rejection of civilized behavior. He failed miserably to live up to even minimal standards of adult conduct at an event where everyone is expected to at least pretend to be a responsible adult. Juan Carlos was completely justified in addressing him like a child.

But the leftist BBC prints Chavez's insult, gets his excuse out to the world unquestioned, and makes it sound like the king has thrown a tantrum. Young children who are mollycoddled in such a way need not thank their parents for learning how to act like adults, if they ever do.

Is it any wonder that Hugo Chavez, only rarely chided for the ass that he is, regularly makes a spectacle of himself in international circles? And as with the niceties of etiquette so with all other standards of civilized behavior. For a lunatic like Chavez to hold any measure of power is possible only because so many tolerate him. His is the behavior of someone who wants to see what he can get away with, not that of a genuinely powerful man.

Hugo Chavez is has a long track record of behaving like an infant on the international stage, and is well-known for oppressing his own people, as well as for meddling in the affairs of other countries. He should remain uninvited to any summit of civilized nations. The leftist press is not blameless here, but the greater share of the blame lies with the many politicians who will not stand up to Chavez, even if only to call a spade a spade.

Now that I think of it, the king of Spain can be called for something here: stooping so low as to attend a conference in which Hugo Chavez got to pose as a civilized man in the first place!

-- CAV

Updates

11-12-07: Flibbert has embedded a video of this incident in a post about it over at his blog.

D'Souza's Confession

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Is Dinesh D'Souza making a boast here -- or confessing that his position, irrational at root, could use some more propping up?

Dawkins is in some ways a terrible representative for atheism, which I'm glad about because a bad cause deserves a bad leader. He is also a terrible advocate for science, which I'm sad about because science deserves all the support it can get.

Having debated Christopher Hitchens, I'd like the opportunity to debate Dawkins. I think I can vindicate a rational and scientific argument for religion against his irrational and unscientific prejudice. When I wrote Dawkins to propose such a debate, however, Dawkins said that "upon reflection" he decided against it. He didn't give a reason, and there is no reason.

In his writings on religion, Dawkins presents atheism as the side of reason and evidence, and religion as the side of "blind faith." So what’s he afraid of? How can reason possibly lose in a contest with ignorance and superstition? I have written Dawkins back offering him the most favorable terms: a debate on a secular campus like Berkeley rather than a church, with atheist Michael Shermer as the moderator, and a donor ready and willing to pay both our fees. [bold added]

If D'Souza is so confident in the reasonableness of his views, why not aim higher than a lightweight such as Dawkins? Perhaps it is because, as I have discussed here recently, D'Souza's own position can, by its nature, look rational only with a clown like Dawkins as an opponent.

Science does not offer a comprehensive worldview as does religion, although its implicit philosophical foundation is rational, and there is at least one rational philosophy I can think of that does offer a comprehensive worldview that can compete successfully with religion: Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand.

D'Souza knows that it is rational philosophy, rather than science, which is really the proper basis for atheism, but he isn't interested in unearthing the truth. If he were, he would scour the earth for someone who could really test the soundness of his arguments, and he would make a lot less noise about it in the process.

The boasting and the hounding of a pushover opponent reveal D'Souza's real objective: to find a stooge to help him look good as he pulls the wool over the public's eyes. His urgency is also belies his fear of others making up their own minds: He wants to fool them before they figure out that there really is an alternative to religion, and that it isn't coming from Dawkins or his ilk.

-- CAV

YARON BROOK IN OSLO

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I went to Oslo on Thursday, November 8, for two speaking events (Why 9/11 happened and what the appropriate US response should have been and the State of the Ayn Rand Institute) with Yaron Brook....

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What ever happened to "golden rice"?

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

British Prospect Magazine has a cover story, "The Real GM Food Scandal" (via Arts and Letters Daily) that reminds me of the millions of malaria deaths in the Third World that can be traced to the anti-pesticide hysteria of the environmentalist movement.

Seven years ago, Time magazine featured the Swiss biologist Ingo Potrykus on its cover. As the principal creator of genetically modified rice -- or "golden rice" -- he was hailed as potentially one of mankind's great benefactors. Golden rice was to be the start of a new green revolution to improve the lives of millions of the poorest people in the world. It would help remedy vitamin A deficiency, the cause of 1-2m deaths a year, and could save up to 500,000 children a year from going blind. It was the flagship of plant biotechnology. No other scientific development in agriculture in recent times held out greater promise.

Seven years later, the most optimistic forecast is that it will take another five or six years before golden rice is grown commercially. The realisation of Potrykus's dream keeps receding. The promised benefits from other GM crops that should reduce hunger and disease have been equally elusive. GM crops should now be growing in areas where no crops can grow: drought-resistant crops in arid soil and salt-resistant crops in soil of high salinity. Plant-based oral vaccines should now be saving millions of deaths from diarrhoea and hepatitis B; they can be ingested in orange juice, bananas or tomatoes, avoiding the need for injection and for trained staff to administer them and refrigeration to store them.

None of these crops is yet on the market. What has gone wrong? [bold added]

What went wrong is that another "green revolution" is cashing in on the fact that in the West, facts and reason have slowly been disappearing from the public debate for some time. It's long, but read the whole thing.

One point later on echoes something I discussed here some time ago:

The alleged risk to health from GM crops is still the main reason for public disquiet—something nurtured by statements by environmental NGOs, who in 2002 even persuaded the Zambian government to reject food aid from the US at a time of famine because some of it was derived from GM crops. This allegation of harm has been so soundly and frequently refuted that when it is repeated, the temptation is to despair. But unless the charge is confronted, contradicted and disproved whenever it is made, its credibility will persist. The fact is that there is not a shred of any evidence of risk to human health from GM crops. [bold added]

There will always be those who doubt the safety of new technology, but until the standards of credibility in the cultural debate improve, travesties like this will keep on happening. The burden of proof that genetically modified food is "unsafe" -- or that the drive for corporate profits is an inherently sinister motive -- lie with those who make the assertion.

-- CAV

Who are the real monsters?

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Watching a segment about the U.S. Coast Guard today, I heard an agent describe the immigrant smugglers who bring people from Cube as “ruthless” men who “care nothing for human life.” That may well be true. Yet moments before saying those words, the agent intercepted a Cuban family moments before their attempt to seek a life of freedom would have been successful. They likely paid their life savings to the smuggler – and will probably be sent back to prison – or worse.

The smugglers risk their life to bring desperate people to a free society. The border agents casually condemn people to a life of persecution and oppression and force them to undergo a perilous and financially ruinous journey. If it were not for their persecution, the trip from Cuba, Mexico, and China would certainly be far safer and cheaper for the immigrants. Yet the border agents are supposed to be celebrated as the moral heroes? The agents are well aware of their atrocities: “They hear the stories. But they need work. They need to eat. They’re desperate.” Why isn’t everyone else?

(By the way, as much as their are vilified, the smugglers have a strong incentive to keep their cargo alive and out of jail - so much that they provide free legal aid if they are caught. If they sometimes get too aggressive about making a profit, the migrants have only an uncaring and hostile immigration policy to blame.)

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It's Over

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

According to the latest poll averages at Real Clear Politics, Hillary Clinton leads the Democrat field with 45.9% of the vote. Obama is a distant second at 22.9%.

I might end up eating these words, but the election is over. The next President of the USA will be the Republican candidate, whoever he is. I'm not saying this is a good thing or that I will vote for the Republican, I'm just saying that Hillary Clinton will get the Democrat nomination and there's no way in hell she can win the general election.

Hillary Clinton's problem is TV. As Dan Rather said, the camera never blinks. TV is not the best medium for communicating ideas, but it is the best for showing who a candidate is. TV communicates a candidate's character, his personality, his sense of life. Voters have an instantaneous emotional reaction to a candidate they see on TV and for all too many voters their first reaction is their last.

Hillary Clinton has a remarkably unpleasant character. She is one of the coldest personalities I have ever seen in a politician. And she can't hide who she is on TV. When she tries to cover it up, such as the day she laughed a lot, she looks worse and ends up on You Tube.

Clinton is a statist through and through. She sees the American people as helpless, deluded creatures who need to be forced and controlled for their own good by altruist philosopher-kings like Hillary Clinton. She thinks of herself as having "compassion" and "caring for the common man," but when one thinks of people as inferior children who need to be lied to, there is another feeling just beneath the surface: contempt. Her contempt and condescension shine through on TV.

A Hillary Clinton candidacy would excite and mobilize the Republican base; it would bring out more Republican voters. At the same time, it would not excite the Democrat base much. If anything, Republican attacks on Clinton would motivate Democrats more than anything positive about their candidate. (Such is the sorry, hate-filled state of American politics.) I see very little enthusiasm for Clinton at Democratic Underground or Daily Kos.

That leaves the independents, who are least interested in ideology or party loyalty and are most susceptible to impressions of a candidate's personality on TV. In his piece on the case for Republican optimism in 2008, Jim Geraghty writes this about independents:

The Democrats have thrown away most of the reform issues that helped them a lot with independents: lobbying reform, ethics rules, earmarks, lack of disclosure, junkets, etc. The “culture of corruption” narrowly outranked terrorism on the list of voter concerns in 2006.

What can we infer about independents from this?

Placing "culture of corruption" above terrorism as a concern shows complete ignorance of politics and economics. The welfare state spends over $2 trillion a year on programs the government should not be involved in. The penny ante corruption of politicians is nothing compared to the scandalous injustice the state perpetrates legally.

People who can think at least a little in principle will evaluate whether they support the war and the welfare state and then choose their party accordingly. But people who ignore the war and the welfare state to place corruption as their number one concern are simply... well, maybe I'd better stop before I degenerate into profanity.

Why don't independents align with any party? For the most part, because they're ignorant. They don't give a damn about politics. They play video games and watch American Idol and take their kids to soccer practice and gossip about Britney and Paris. At some point in the fall they realize there's a campaign going on and they get their first glimpse of the candidates -- on TV.

So you see, Hillary Clinton is doomed. She can lie about her ideas, but she can't fake who she is. How ironic is it that a Democrat candidate will lose because a large part of the American electorate has been dumbed down by government schools (teachers unions being a huge bloc of the Dem base) to the point that they are actually too stupid to listen to Hillary Clinton's lies?

UPDATE: Slight revision. I can't believe all the typos I found in this post. In one sentence I meant to write stop but wrote the opposite, start -- a kind of conceptual dyslexia.

Ambition

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

"Rags to riches" is my favorite type of story. This one is not about money, but it's in the same spirit: the refusal to accept one's "station" in life. It is about ambition; about wanting to be more than one was "born into"; about not accepting the man-made as the metaphysical, even if it's really difficult to change. In a way, it is also a story of how great the USA really is.

This true story is about a young 19-year old immigrant, working as a farm laborer in the 1980s. Twenty years later, he's an assistant professor of neurosurgery and oncology and director of the brain-tumor stem-cell laboratory at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

The Sin of Pride

By Nicholas Provenzo from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

People manifest their pride in a host of ways. In Saudi Arabia, some enter camels that they have raised into "beauty" pageants, the equivalent of Western dog shows, yet according to one Islamic cleric, such displays are a wicked affront to God. As reported in this Reuters news story:

A leading authority of Saudi Arabia's hardline school of Islam has condemned camel beauty contests as evil, saying those involved should seek repentance in God.

Camel pageants have become major events in the desert kingdom in recent years as tribes hold ever larger competitions, with bigger prizes and wider publicity.

Delicate females or strapping males which attract the right attention during a show can sell for more than a million riyals (127,000 pounds). Sponsors spent 10 million riyals on prizes for one competition this year.

"Everyone must repent of these acts from which no good can come because of its evils, and they should beg forgiveness from God," said a fatwa, or religious ruling, issued this week by Sheikh Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak and a lesser-known sheikh.

"Millions of riyals are spent on buying camels just to feel proud and not for the reasons God created camels, like for food, drink, riding and work," he said, attacking the contests as a backward tribal custom from pre-Islamic Arabia.

And heaven help the poor Islamist who feels pride in his earthly accomplishments. Contrast al-Barrak's view of "sinful" pride with Ayn Rand's:

The virtue of Pride can best be described by the term: "moral ambitiousness." It means that one must earn the right to hold oneself as one's own highest value by achieving one's own moral perfection—which one achieves by never accepting any code of irrational virtues impossible to practice and by never failing to practice the virtues one knows to be rational—by never accepting an unearned guilt and never earning any, or, if one has earned it, never leaving it uncorrected—by never resigning oneself passively to any flaws in one's character—by never placing any concern, wish, fear or mood of the moment above the reality of one's own self-esteem. And, above all, it means one's rejection of the role of a sacrificial animal, the rejection of any doctrine that preaches self-immolation as a moral virtue or duty. [Source: The Ayn Rand Lexicon]

I say that if camel beauty pageants help lead men to reject the idea that they must pursue self-immolation as a virtue, let the camels be beautiful.

The Museum of Western Civilization

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

"Keep moving, please," the tour guide said. Her voice was cool, assured and a little bored -- it was obvious she'd given this tour many, many times.

"We now enter the 20th Century Room; this century was a little over 1,000 years ago. It is an odd century because science and technology made huge advances, whereas culture and art declined greatly. The 20th Century saw the coming of atomic power, airflight and the internet, but also saw the genocide of tens of millions by totalitarian states and the coming of non-representational art -- that is, art that is not really art because it does not recreate reality. The smears of color on the wall to your right were highly esteemed and valuable paintings in the 20th and 21st centuries. After the 2050's most of the works of that school were destroyed or neglected and finally lost, but these specimens have survived. We believe the large, splattered canvas in the middle was painted by someone called Jackson Pollack, but the other artists have been forgotten.

"In the 1960's what we now call the 'Cultural Dark Age' began. The CDA lasted about 80 years, into the 2040's. It was essentially an egalitarian movement that destroyed all standards. Before the CDA, fashion was quite stylish; after the CDA -- let me direct your attention to the exhibit on the left."

The crowd gasped. One man asked, "Are they cavemen?"

"These are the leaders of the Cultural Dark Age; they are called 'Hippies.'"

"Why do they look like that?" a high school girl asked. "Have they no pride?"

"The appearance of the Hippies is egalitarianism in style. When a culture destroys all standards, this is the result. I shall now play a sample of the primitive music of the Hippies.

The tour guide pressed a button on her belt and the music of the Everly Brothers filled the room. Members of the tour group cringed, grimaced and covered their ears. "Please, turn it off," the mother of three children shouted as her kids grabbed her legs in fear.

The tour guide shut off the music.

"Hard to take, isn't it? This music is called Rockie music. The name probably comes from the Rockie Mountains, where the music is supposed to have originated. This music features a heavy beat with some distorted harmony. The vocals are often screamed. The melodies are undeveloped and primitive. There are no melodic climaxes in which a soprano might show off her high B flat. The music has no sense of beauty, style or intelligence as our music today does."

"Does anyone still listen to that noise?" a voice in the crowd asked.

"Rockie music is listened to only by a small cult known as Deadheads. Deadhead communes can be found in the mountains of California and in the plains of central Canada. The music went out of style, thankfully, with the Neo-Romantic Counter-Revolution of the 2040's, which we will explore further in the 21st Century Room."

"I can't wait to get there!" a man quipped to general laughter.

"Then let us move on through the door ahead to that happier century," the tour guide said. "Keep moving, please."

UPDATE: Changed the artist from Van Halen to the Everly Brothers. Funnier that way.

Out of the archives

By Kendall J from The Crucible & Column,cross-posted by MetaBlog

 I was perusing my blog notebook where I keep all manner of ideas for posts, and happened upon an old summary I had done when I was reading Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah several years ago. Many of the posts I've done recently have looked at the idiocy of so-called conservative policies in an attempt to demonstrate that while the Democrats are no friends of Objectivism, neither are the Republicans. And they may actually be more dangerous to the cause than the Democrats.

What struck me about this essay was that it was all before the last elections, before Leonard Peikoff has convinced me that the Republicans and more importantly, their social/religious conservative base were as dangerous if not more dangerous than today's liberals. And yet, here was the same fundamental analysis which I'd put down on paper long before I understood the consequences of it enough to take action with conviction. The second thing that drew me to it was that here in Bork's thinking, published more than 10 years ago were the basic philosophic ideas clearly articulated that if perpetuated by the Republican party will make it a dangerous threat to liberty. So I transcribed it just out of sense of discovery...

2/7/04 - One of the things that has bothered me about most thought labeled as "conservative" is that while it has a tendency toward advocating more (though not consistent) free market policy and less socialistic policy, it seems to want to replace social policy with a more paternalistic, moralistic use of government. Interestingly enough, Robert Bork in his book Slouching Towards Gomorrah espouses just such a philosophical view on more philosophical grounds. I can clearly see the influence of his ideas and those like him on today's conservative thought...

Bork's thesis is that modern liberalism has "over-extended" two ideas: individualism and egalitarianism into mutated forms which he calls "radical". That the founders never intended and which are incompatible with a free society. He then claims that today's conservative thought represents "true" classical liberalism and that we must return to a more moderate form of these in order to survive as a culture. He then goes on to give examples of today's social and cultural decline and ascribes them to the two trends above.

In English, he claims that today's liberals use government (and change culture) to a) force equality, and b) not morality. Borks solution then is to a) stop forcing equality and b) start forcing morality [sic!]. It is Bork's second action that I have a significant problem with.

I believe that the big issue is in the intrinsic-subjective dichotomy, and that Bork's thesis is a crystal-clear example of intrinsicism run amok to the liberals subjectivism run amok. Today's liberals claim no morality is correct and want society to dictate equality in it's absence. Today's conservatives see one morality from God, but because it is arbitrary and absolute, (and divorced from reality) necessitates the force of it on society.  Both views result in unnecessary force on society. The liberal's claim to it is bankrupt (and Bork rightly exposes it) but Bork's claim is equally wrong.

Which is more dangerous, a bankrupt ideology, or one that is gaining strength in the wake of today's religious fundamentalist movement?

Rationalism

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Rationalism made ridiculous:



(Via Richard Wills)

Bailouts in Disguise

By Alex Epstein:

Irvine, Calif.--As we witness large numbers of defaults on subprime loans--loans extended to those with no credit or bad credit--many are calling for the government to do something to stop the suffering. At the same time, many recognize that a bailout of struggling homeowners would be wrong. Those proposing a government solution claim that they can save the day without a bailout: "borrower assistance" programs to refinance defaulting mortgages, crackdowns on "predatory lending" practices, or laws restricting mortgages the government deems too risky.

"In fact," said Alex Epstein, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute, "regardless of how these proposals are described, all embody the essence of a bailout: they absolve individuals of responsibility for their bad decisions--and force those who did nothing wrong to pay the price.

"The government is not a savvy lender or mortgage expert able to contribute innovative financing strategies or new knowledge to the mortgage market. Its sole power, which all the proposed 'solutions' would utilize, is the power to forcibly compel some people to give up their money or freedom for the sake of others. This applies, not just to 'borrower assistance' (read: borrower bailout) programs, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per 'assisted' homeowner, but also to measures to target 'predatory lending'--an undefined term that gives the government license to extract huge fines from any innocent lender it retroactively deems should have given better counsel to borrowers. The government is also punishing the innocent when it attempts to 'protect' future borrowers. For example, proposed prohibitions on future mortgages that the government deems overly risky punish individuals who manage risk well, many of whom will not be able to afford new homes without these vehicles.

"The proper response of the government to subprime problems is simple; commit to no new interventions in the housing market, and cease all existing intervention designed to influence home ownership--from programs like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to artificially low interest rates. Such a move would send a message befitting a free people: a message of responsibility. The current proposals in Congress send the exact opposite message."

Librivox: Some Interesting Links

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Librivox is a site where volunteers record poetry, fiction and non-fiction that are no longer under copyright. Their catalog has grown rapidly. Here's a list of recordings, mostly related to U.S. history.

• Magna Carta (28 min)
• The Ninety-Five Theses by Martin Luther (35 mins)
• The Riot Act - British Parliament of 1714 (19min)

• Letter Concerning Toleration by John Locke (in 2 parts) (2hrs:21min)
• Common Sense, Thomas Paine -- in 5 parts (2hr:2min)
• Patrick Henry - Give me Liberty or Give me death (10min)
• Declarion of Rights, by the Stamp Act Congress of 1765 (4min)
• The Declaration of Independence (10min)
• The Call to Arms by Patrick Henry - (11min)
• Articles of Confederation by The Second Continental Congress (21min)
• The Federalist Papers - 85 papers in all (21hr:11min)
• The Anti-Federalist Papers - Patrick Henry - 56 papers in all (19hr:51 min)
• Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (7hrs:30min)
• The U.S. Constitution (49min)
• Amendments to the Constitution (20 min)
• Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural Address (12 min)

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (4hr:2min)
• The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, (8hr:5min)
• On Withdrawing from the Union by Jefferson Davis (12 min)
• Lincoln's speech at Cooper's Union (51min)
• The New York Times 1861-02-18, on Inauguration of the President of the Southern Confederacy - (5min)
• The Farmer’s Cabinet newspaper, NH 1861-03-08 on The Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln (28 min)
• The New York Times 1865-02-01: From Washington: Abolition of Slavery (2 min)
• The Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln (6 min)
• Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address (6 min)
• Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Vol 1) in 46 parts (17hrs:53min)

Victory!

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

With 633 votes and a 35.8% share of the vote in a field of ten finalists , Gus Van Horn takes first place in the "Slithering Reptile" size category (top 6751-8750 blogs) of the 2007 Weblog Awards!

Thank you!

First things first.... If you're new to this blog, welcome, and if you're not, I thank you for having made this blog a part of your day as well as for your support in this contest.

I would also like to thank the following bloggers for sending their readers to the polls. (David Veksler and The Software Nerd run the meta-blog at Objectivism Online.)


I enjoy all their blogs and recommend taking a look at them. (If you know of anyone who promoted my blog, but isn't on this list, please let me know.)

I am especially grateful for the big shot in the arm from Diana's plugs, and quite proud that my blog was endorsed by no less than three more accomplished writers than I: Diana, Nick Provenzo, and Craig Biddle. Their blogs, Noodle Food, The Rule of Reason, and Principles in Practice, are all excellent.

In addition to the blogging community, I would like to thank the Harry Binswanger List, which forwarded my post on the contest to its readers. This mailing list combines the insightful commentary of Dr. Binswanger with the very thought-provoking (and often high-level) discussions of its members.

Although this blog is mostly devoted to discussing cultural and political issues from an Objectivist perspective (more on that shortly), I also owe a word of thanks to two non-Objectivists: fellow former submariner Bubblehead, and my good friend, Raymund.

Bubblehead's The Stupid Shall Be Punished combines excellent coverage of all matters related to submarines with some entertaining and worthwhile posts on a wide variety of other subjects. Raymund blogs mainly his "sci-fi writing calisthenics" these days. Raymund first gave me the idea of starting a blog, and it was Bubblehead who nominated it for the awards this year.

Objectivism

For those of you new to this blog, I consider myself an Objectivist, meaning that I agree with and advocate the philosophy of Ayn Rand, who is most famous as author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. While I do not hold myself out as an expert on Objectivism, I attempt to apply it to cultural and political issues in opinion pieces geared towards a general audience. This means that I usually assume little familiarity with Rand's ideas on the part of the reader. Also, I welcome and encourage non-Objectivists to join in the discussion here.

For those curious about what Ayn Rand had to say, the best source is obviously her own work, some of which has become available on the Internet in recent years. In addition, she has inspired a small, but growing group of intellectuals to continue her work. Much of their output is available on the Internet. From these sources I will recommend a few introductory readings below in order from shortest to longest.

1. Ayn Rand herself once presented the essentials of her philosophy while standing on one foot.

2. Craig Biddle, editor of the cultural/political quarterly, The Objective Standard, introduced his publication -- "philosophical journalism as it might and ought to be" -- with an excellent short description. Here are its first two paragraphs.

It is widely believed today that our cultural and political alternatives are limited either to the ideas of the secular, relativistic left -- or to those of the religious, absolutist right -- or to some compromised mixture of the two. In other words, one's ideas are supposedly either extremely liberal or extremely conservative or somewhere in-between. We at The Objective Standard reject this false alternative and embrace an entirely different view of the world.

Our view is fully secular and absolutist; it is neither liberal nor conservative nor anywhere in-between. Our philosophy uncompromisingly recognizes and upholds the natural (this-worldly), factual, moral foundations of a fully free, civilized society.

3. My father-in-law once suggested I write a primer on Objectivism for a lay audience. Onkhar Ghate (who is an authority on Objectivism), beat me to the punch with this four-part series in The New Statesman. (The regular feature name of "The Faith Column" where it appears is a rather amusing misnomer in this case.)

4. Returning again to Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Lexicon, edited by Harry Binswanger, was recently made available for all on the Internet. Leonard Peikoff describes it as follows in his introduction to the book:

Ayn Rand was a philosopher in the classical sense: she was intent not on teasing apart some random sentences, but on defining a full system of thought, from epistemology to esthetics. Her writing, accordingly, is extensive, and the range of issues she covers enormous -- so much so that it is often difficult for a reader to know where in her many books and articles to look for a specific formulation or topic. Even Miss Rand herself was sometimes hard-pressed in this regard.

The Ayn Rand Lexicon solves this problem. It is a compilation of key statements from Ayn Rand (and from a few other authorized Objectivist texts) on several hundred alphabetized topics in philosophy and related fields. The book was initially conceived by Harry Binswanger, who undertook it during Miss Rand's lifetime with her permission and approval.

This resource is just one example of the superb work of the Ayn Rand Institute, which promotes the spread of her ideas in the culture. If you need an authority on Objectivism, this is the place to go.

Welcome!

If you're new to this blog, a good way to get a feel for my writing is to visit this page of what I regard as my better posts. If you enjoy them, please come by again. And be sure to tell your friends!

And finally, I'm not the only Objectivist blogger out there (or the most widely-read by a long shot). If you find what I have to say interesting, take a look at the blogs I mentioned above, as well as those linked in the sidebar, of which about two thirds are by writers influenced to various degrees by Ayn Rand.

-- CAV

“Honor” Killings: East Meets West

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Two kinds of death are the subject here, and they are related in their fundamental means and ends.

The University of Delaware was recently caught flagrante delicto in an attempt to kill the selves of its seven thousand students. As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reported on its own site (and as reported on numerous other sites, but not much in the mainstream press, if at all), the University announced a campus-wide program of what I would call the nazification of its student body (“University of Delaware Requires Students to Undergo Ideological Reeducation,” October 30). (See “None Dare Call It Indoctrination” on The Dougout site, and “Indoctrinating Green Warriors” on this site.)

Others would call it brainwashing, or indoctrination. The North Vietnamese Communists “struggled” recalcitrant citizens until they not only submitted to the Party line, but actively promoted it, as well, as the sole mark of redemption. The University referred to the program as “treatment,” as though anyone passing through the school’s portals was ipso facto mentally ill and in need of getting “his mind straight” until he was certifiably politically corrected and converted into an activist robot (or, according to the mission statement, a “change agent”). Which meant being reduced to the mental and intellectual level of Winston Smith at the end of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Smith began by hating Big Brother, and ended by loving him, a state reached partly by torture and brutal persuasion by his tormenter, O’Brien, and partly by surrender.

While the O’Briens of the University of Delaware may omit the physical torture, the effect on morally and intellectually disarmed young persons can be the same.

“The Orwellian program,” reported FIRE, “requires the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism. The Foundation….is calling for the total dismantling of the program, which is a flagrant violation of students’ rights to freedom of conscience and freedom from compelled speech.”

Since being exposed, the University of Delaware has suspended the program, but may try to revive it when its academic O’Briens think no one is looking. Every one of the issues students are expected to absorb and agree with is governed by anti-reason, anti-man, anti-individualist ideas.

“The university’s views,” reported FIRE, “are forced on students through a comprehensive manipulation of the residence hall environment, from mandatory training sessions to ‘sustainability’ door decorations. Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs).”

There is also the matter of the RAs wielding the power of extortion if their reports on students are included the students’ academic records. If a student knows that if he does not demonstrate that he is a “team player” or not voluble enough in his “diversification” training or puts an “offending” poster on his dorm door, he might find his grades lowered and his record compromised. But that is a minor issue compared with the evil that is imposed on him.

The major issue is that the program was specifically designed to obliterate the self (or ego) of the individual student, so that the student becomes a mindless cell of a pliable collective, committed to, among other things, reducing his “carbon footprint,” demonstrating for the “oppressed” group of the moment, and campaigning for a “sustainable world,” with no questions asked or permitted. If the O’Briens have done their job, questions would not even be possible in the victim.

That is one form of “honor killing,” that is, a major educational institution acting to enforce a pandemic of irrational, nihilistic ideas that it believes are “pro-life, pro-earth,” but which in fact are destructive of life, liberty and ultimately of one’s existence. One might, for argument’s sake, contend that the university officials who designed the program were ignorant of the consequences of the ideas they wish to enforce. The only valid response to that question would be counter-question: Then what are they doing running a university, if they are so ignorant and so foolishly hostile?

But the creatures who designed the “treatment” program at the University of Delaware were not the Three Stooges. They cannot plead ignorance or stupidity or foolishness. They intended to kill whatever surviving, crippled sense of self students brought with them to the university after enduring milder versions of such indoctrination in middle and high school, just as Ellsworth Toohey cultivated, exploited, and ultimately killed the precarious sense of self in Peter Keating in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

“Just say that reason is limited,” says Toohey to Keating. “That there’s something above it. What? You don’t have to be too clear about it either. The field’s inexhaustible. ‘Instinct’ – ‘Feeling’ – ‘Revelation’ – ‘Divine Intuition’ – ‘Dialectic Materialism.’ [To which one might add today: ‘Community service’ – ‘Volunteerism’ – ‘Environmentalism’ – ‘Global society.’] If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you that your doctrine doesn’t make sense – you’re ready for him. You tell him that there’s something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must believe. Suspend reason and you play it deuces wild. Anything goes in any manner you wish whenever you need it. You’ve got him. Can you rule a thinking man? We don’t want any thinking men.”

Neither, apparently, does the University of Delaware. If honor, as Rand defined it, is self-esteem made visible in action, then the university’s program was planned to dis-honor its students by killing their self-esteem and turning them into compliant ciphers, ready to submit to any “higher cause” and prepared, as a way of life, to wage war on those who do not submit. It would never occur to such students that there is no honor in selflessness. Such a conclusion would require thought.

There is an eerie similarity between the means and ends of the University of Delaware’s “reeducation” program and what happens to anyone who violates the “community” standards in the Mideast. The Sunday Times (London) of November 4th carried a horrendous story, “’Honour’ killings grow as girl, 17, stoned to death.” And the “moral” barbarity the article describes is essentially what the nihilists in the West wish to reduce everyone to.

The “honor” killings are centered on the violation of Islamic social mores (one can hardly call them a philosophy, they are so concrete bound) when an unmarried woman develops a real or imagined relationship with a man not approved by his family or tribe. “According to the human rights ministry in northern Iraq, 598 women have been burnt, beaten, shot, strangled, thrown from tall buildings, force-fed with lethal drugs, crushed by vehicles, drowned, decapitated, or made to kill themselves so far this year, exceeding the 553 recorded for the whole of 2006.”

In this instance, Du’aa, a 17-year-old girl, member of a bizarre non-Muslim sect, the Yazidi (a creed composed of elements from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and minor faiths and as old as Islam itself) was found together with her 19-year-old Sunni Muslim boyfriend. Muslims are forbidden to marry outside Islam, but the pair were determined to be married.

“They were not lovers, though some in the crowd suspected they were. But Du’aa was a member of the Yazidi sect, which teaches that the Earth is in the care of seven angels. Yazidis are regarded as devil-worshippers by many Muslims and Muhannad is a Sunni Muslim.”

It did not help that the Yazidis believe that Allah or God does not govern the earth, but is “uninvolved,” leaving the governance to seven angels lead by a repentant Satan himself. Those and other beliefs of the Yazidis are abhorrent to Muslims. But the Yazidis share the same foolish notion of “honor” as the Muslims. When a local Yazidi sheik surrendered her to the mob for punishment, Du’aa was taken to the marketplace, “in a headlock, wailing and screaming as armed police watched in silence,” and stoned to death. The deathblow was delivered by a cousin, who smashed her head with a piece of concrete, purportedly as an act of mercy. Several other of her cousins also participated in the stoning.

The Times article relates that “one of the most shocking things about Du’aa’s death, however, is that although stoning is rare, honour killing is rampant, particularly in Kurdish areas of Iraq and Iran. Kurdish women are killed almost every day for ‘dishonouring’ their families.”

The “self-esteem” of such barbarians – dependent on what family members and neighbors think of them, measured by primitive concepts that form an irrational, eclectic moral code – is linked to preserving some collectivist sense of “honor.” An unmarried woman seen alone with a man not her relative automatically commits a “sin,” which “sin” must be blotted out by blotting out her life. Her family’s “honor” is thus restored.

Incidentally, it is this kind of culture which University of Delaware students would have been expected to withhold judgment of in the name of “diversity.” “Silence is consent,” states the school’s agenda for lobotomizing its white students in regards to racism. But that statement is meant to be a double-edged sword; “silence” on the subject of Kurdish honor killings can be taken as approval, and earn high marks from a student’s RA.

This is the rule in all Islamic countries, one which Islamic activists are quietly campaigning to introduce and have gain “respect” and acceptance in secular Western nations, notably Europe.

It is this kind of non-thinking tribal mentality which programs such as the University of Delaware’s seek to inculcate in Western students. In such graduates, it would be but a short step from “honor harassment” of smokers, non-recyclers, and others who refrain from joining the “community” or submitting to its standards, to literal honor killings in the role of “change agents.”

We see a form of this kind of violence in the attacks on abortion clinics and in the destruction of private property by environmentalists. Skeptics of anthropogenic global warming have been fired, harassed, and threatened with violence or the ruin of their careers by the enforcers of belief in the theory.

I make no distinction between the murder of Du’aa committed by her cousins and the murder of the egos of any student at the University of Delaware or in any other educational venue, be it kindergarten, grade, middle and secondary schools, or college. The head-bashing concrete can take either form, with the only difference in result being immediate or prolonged death.

The Art of Conversation

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Recently, I talked to a couple that has been married since 1951. That's a long time. The woman talked a lot. Our conversation was more like me saying one sentence and her giving a five-minute lecture on my statement. As she talked I noticed the husband checking a few times to see if I was getting bored.

After our conversation, I thought, "That poor guy has been living with this for 56 years."

I know a few other people who can talk about themselves for 45 minutes, no exaggeration, and if I put two sentences together in the conversation they get restless and bored. Then they remember all the other things they must do and have no time to continue talking.

I knew a woman once who, if you complained about anything, no matter what it was, would respond with, "You think that's bad? Listen to what happened to me..." I mean, if you had an accident and were in a coma for months, she would come up with something to one-up you in the misery contest. I realize now that I should have said to her, "I know a dreary woman who responds to any complaint with a story of even greater misery." Would she have gotten the message? Or would she have told me about another woman who was even worse?

How do these people fit into the Objectivist ethics, in which selfishness is a virtue? They are self-obsessed and can talk only about themselves. They have no interest in anyone else. Aren't they selfish?

It's hard to generalize because all the people in the examples above have their own personality and psychological problems. It's not a moral failing to want to talk about your day. Some people do it more than others. Some are self-aware enough to know they love talking about themselves and they make an effort to show an interest in others -- in order to buy time for them to talk more about themselves.

This might sound like a contradiction of Objectivism at first, but I think it is in one's self-interest to understand that the universe does not revolve around you. Objectivism is not narcissism. A sign of maturity is understanding that the facts of your daily life are not as fascinating to anyone else as they are to you. It takes a special talent and charm to make a story about doing laundry and getting the kids to school interesting.

One thing I had to learn as I grew up -- and I'm still learning it at times -- is that nobody cares about me as much as I do. Nobody cares. Why should they? Even people who love you will not care about your stubbed toe as much as you do because they don't feel it.

Real self-interest means understanding reality and evaluating it properly. Those who do this well would, I believe, be more interesting conversationalists. They have a heirarchy of values of which they have given some thought. They know that giving a laundry list of what they did that day is not important and therefore not interesting. They give these things some thought maybe before they speak.

Conversation is an art that involves give and take. It is in one's self-interest to be an interesting conversationalist -- if one values conversation at all. Those who bore people with monologues about their petty lives are not interesting conversationalists; they end up driving people away from them, which is not in their long-term self-interest. (Some gifted people can talk for half an hour and never cease to be fascinating. More power to them.)

Those are my thoughts. Tell me yours in the comments. Let's have a conversation.

Craig Biddle Lectures in Boulder and Denver

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Craig Biddle, the editor of The Objective Standard, will give two lectures in Colorado next week.

On Thursday November 15th at 6:30 pm, he'll speak on "Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand's Morality of Egoism" at the Wittemeyer Courtroom in the Wolf Law Building at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

In this talk, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Atlas Shrugged, Craig Biddle presents the basic principles of rational egoism, contrasts them with the alternatives, and shows why everyone who wants to live happily and freely needs to understand and embrace rational egoism. This lecture is sponsored by the Boulder Objectivist Club.

On Friday evening, Craig Biddle will speak at a a FROST supper talk in Denver on "The Principle of Purpose in Nonfiction Writing."

Craig Biddle on "The Principle of Purpose in Nonfiction Writing"

Date: Friday, November 16, 2007

Time: 6:00 pm social hour, 7:00 pm dinner, 8:00 pm talk

Location: Arvada Center for the Arts, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd, Arvada CO 80003

Cost: $55 for dinner and talk, $35 for students

RSVP: Please RSVP to Lin Zinser via e-mail (lin@zinser.com) or phone (303 431 2525) by November 13th.

Although not explicitly discussed in books or courses on writing, the principle of purpose properly dictates every aspect of the writing process. To write clearly, concisely, and convincingly, one must know, at every stage, what one is trying to accomplish and how it relates to the other parts of the broader project. From creating a laundry list of ideas to selecting a theme to writing an outline to concretizing an abstraction to structuring a paragraph to punctuating a sentence to editing a draft--the answer to the question "What is my purpose here?" properly determines how to proceed. Craig Biddle will discuss the omnipresence of this principle in regard to nonfiction writing and explain how understanding and applying it clarifies and simplifies the writing process. Whether you write or want to write articles, op-eds, letters to the editor, business letters, book or movie reviews, presentations, speeches, blog posts, or books--this discussion will help you either to improve your existing skills or to get started on the right track.

Craig Biddle is the editor and publisher of "The Objective Standard" and the author of "Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It." He is currently writing a book on the principles of rational thinking and the fallacies that are violations of those principles. In addition to writing, he lectures and teaches workshops on ethical and epistemological issues from an Objectivist perspective.

I plan to attend both lectures.

Delaware Student Strikes Back

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Last week, I blogged about a multiculturalism indoctrination program at the University of Delaware (which has since been discontinued) that "pressured or even required [students] to take actions that outwardly indicate their agreement with the university's ideology". One of the requirements of the program was that students participate in one-on-one sessions with the resident assistants of their dorms.

Although I look on the news of the program's discontinuation with a jaundiced eye, I find it heartening that some of the students showed some backbone during the one-on-ones. Here's an example:

Q. When were you first made aware of your race?
A. That is irrelevant to everything. My race is human being.

Q. When did you discover your sexual identity?
A. That is none of your damn business.

Q. Who taught you a lesson in regards to some form of diversity awareness? What was that lesson?
A. My grandparents sometimes make racial comments. And what the hell does that have to do with anything?

This was, incidentally, the same student cited in the first FIRE report as having stated that she was tired "of having diversity shoved down her throat".

As with the members of a Baptist congregation who resigned in protest some time ago after its minister kicked nine of their fellows out for not supporting Bush, such acts of open contempt for those who would push one around always make me smile with hope for America.

The sense of life of her people is not dead yet! (HT: John Derbyshire, via Glenn Reynolds)

-- CAV

Updates

11-6-07: Corrected an error in second to last paragraph.

Indoctrinating Green Warriors

By Nicholas Provenzo from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

There is a fundamental distinction between education and indoctrination; education teaches a person the process by which one obtains and validates knowledge, while indoctrination serves only to imbue a person with the ideology of the indoctrinator. To a professional educator, this distinction ought to be academic, yet when it comes to what children are taught in the public schools today, the opposite seems to dominate. Take for example this report by Jenn Wiant of the Northwest Hearld that reveals a project that turns grade school students into so-called green "warriors."

"Each one of you can do something about global warming," the Global Warming Warrior Princess told 450 young, eager minds at Olson Elementary School.

"Each one of you makes a difference when it comes to global warming."

The Global Warming Warrior Princess, as Bull Valley artist Nancy Steinmeyer calls herself, was introducing the Woodstock students to the idea of carbon dioxide and explaining that they could help remove it from the air by turning off lights and TVs, saving water and recycling.

Steinmeyer showed the students a large United States-shaped object covered with 4,500 black squares. Each time the students did something at home to help reduce their carbon emissions, Steinmeyer said, she would remove some of the squares, eventually revealing the collage she had painted beneath.

Olson Elementary is the first school where Steinmeyer has introduced what she calls the Map-Atmosphere Clear project. In the coming months, she plans to bring other global warming education tools to the school, including a global warming board game, a story she wrote called "Global Warming Warriors," a global warming art project and a global warming variety show.

It would take a global warming warrior-tyrant to transform an idea as simple as not wasting electricity because it costs money into yet another opportunity to jump on the man-caused global warming bandwagon. Steinmeyer explains her reasoning later in the article:

"When I started this a year ago, there wasn't much going on [about global warming], and now it's everywhere, but it's all focusing on adults," Steinmeyer said.

"I know that the way to get to adults is through kids ... Kids have time for this, and it gives them a chance to be a little bit in control."

When Steinmeyer moved from Chicago to McHenry County 13 years ago, she became interested in land use and preserving open space as she watched developers turn the land into homes. But because land use and growth are controversial issues, she had trouble finding a sponsor for a game she designed about land use, she said.

About a year ago, Steinmeyer changed her focus to global warming.

So only then was Steinmeyer able to take her act mainstream. One has to admire Steinmeyer's persistence in searching for an issue to push, if not her moral reasoning or scientific background. Yet notice that someone with more of a skill for green propaganda than for teaching the scientific method is allowed to address public school children and that her program is described by the press without any hint of disagreement or dissent. One would almost think that the topic of man-caused climate change or the larger aims of the green movement were utterly uncontroversial (and a perfect topic for discussion by grade-schoolers).

Except, of course, man-caused climate change is deeply controversial and hardly a perfect topic of discussion for grade-schoolers. We can leave out the ongoing debate among adults and the downright suppression of any research contrary to the view that the sky is falling. At an age when students are just beginning to grasp how science works and how one properly evaluates scientific claims, these students are being asked to take the whole man-caused climate change position on faith. They are being asked, on faith, to accept that technology causes world-wide disasters and that they must accept personal responsibility in order to prevent it.

Out of morbid curiosity, I visited Steinmeyer's personal website, which includes what she describes as her "environmental 3-d paintings." In these works, Steinmeyer paints two images, a pastoral scene on a background canvas and an image of man's various depredations against the environment on translucent material in the foreground; the effect is to present the viewer with a "before and after" image depicting the impact of man's exploitation of the Earth. According to the artist:

I'm interested in the rapid loss of natural land to new development and the environmental consequences of this change. Growth is unavoidable, but uncontrolled and unplanned expansion can have disastrous effects. Through my unusual three-dimensional painting I'm documenting the changes with the hope of raising viewer awareness to this problem.

It is here that all the cards are laid upon the table. Steinmeyer decries "uncontrolled and unplanned expansion," yet did the people who developed the land not own and control it? Did they not plan to use their land for human benefit? Was the system of tort law that protects neighbors from actual damages to their lives and property somehow suspended? Or is it that greens don't yet have the power they seek to control and coerce the population at large-but should, so as to better enshrine the intrinsic value of wilderness? Coupled with Steinmeyer's admission that her overarching goal is to use children to influence their parents, all I see is the fruits of a corrupt ideological campaign, rather than attempt to provide children with a real education.

After all, I doubt that the curriculum of the Olson Elementary School where Steinmeyer gave her presentation includes teaching science in its historical context, so that students can see how man's prosperity is directly linked with his ability to understand and command nature. I wager that these students have not been shown how man's rising affluence allows him to better control his environment (to include contending with the stranded costs of human existence). I further doubt that these students have ever learned of instances where greens have used hysteria to shut down entire industries on the basis of specious scientific claims, such as the global ban on DDT (let alone the human cost of these policies). And I wager that if these students ever saw a "Hero for Capitalism," they would think him to be their greatest enemy, rather than a symbol for individual rights, justice under the law, personal productivity and economic prosperity. And let us not forget: your taxes pay for the whole of it.

It would be better, even if the theory of man-caused climate change proves true, that children receive a real education in the scientific process and how one establishes that a scientific claim is certain. That same rational process would help equip these children with the skills they need to identify proper answers any question of their existence, let alone the question of climate change. Yet, as we see here, this is precisely the education our children are not receiving.

The Biofuel Boondoggle

By Kendall J from The Crucible & Column,cross-posted by MetaBlog

A great article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal highlighting more aspects of the idiocy of biofuels (e.g. biodiesel, and ethanol). From "Biofuel Costs Hurt Effort to Curb Oil Price" it seems that the costs of biofuel feedstocks, namely corn and oils such as palm oil are increasing with the increased demand for these products, preventing them from achieving cost-effectiveness in the face of rising crude oil prices.

A few years ago, many energy economists predicted that higher oil prices would ensure the success of alternative energies such as biodiesel or wind power by making them more financially attractive. In many cases, though, the opposite has occurred: Even as crude-oil prices approach $100 a barrel, some alternatives look less attractive than in the past.

One reason: Energy demand is now so intense that supplies of just about every kind of fuel are in short supply, driving up prices of the raw materials involved in making many alternative energies. Some biofuels also rely on agricultural commodities that already are facing higher demand as foodstuffs, a situation which drives up prices further.

Hmm, who'd have though that the price of corn would go up. Oh, wait, we forgot about a little thing called supply and demand. Not only that, but these feedstocks are commodities, meaning small changes in demand past the total industry supply capacity result in big changes upward in pricing (known as it's price elasticity). Biodiesel accounts for less than 1% of transportation-based fuel supply and already it's causing supply demand and pricing upset in the agricultural sector. Which also means the price of foodstuffs containing corn is going up as well.

What does this mean? Simple, the biofuels sector will stall. It will do so before it ever gets the levels of contribution predicted. Already, plants that were on the drawing boards are not getting built and government subsidies which are what made the entire sector even marginally attractive in the first place will dry up.

In Malaysia, an important center for palm-oil biodiesel production, the government has held back on plans to require biodiesel blends at petrol stations because of a fear it could drive palm-oil prices too high, imperiling the country's nascent biodiesel industry.

Malaysia issued roughly 90 permits for biodiesel refineries in the past three years, but only about five are in operation. It appears that most of the others will remain on hold until palm-oil prices come back down.

In Europe, officials are still committed to a plan to meet 10% of the region's transportation needs with biofuels by 2020. But Germany has cut back on some tax incentives for biofuels, and some EU officials have questioned whether subsidies for biofuel crops are necessary in the future. Spanish energy company Abengoa SA recently suspended production at one of its biofuel facilities in Spain because of high grain prices. Similar projects have stalled elsewhere, including Hungary.

The U.S. has its own alternative-fuel woes. The price of corn, a key raw ingredient, has increased even as the market price for ethanol has been held down by oversupply. That has squeezed the profitability of ethanol producers and forced new players to cancel or delay construction of more facilities.

Oh, and the final tidbit that folks haven't yet understood. Biofuels are energy neutral at best. This means that the total energy required to produce a unit of energy of biofuels is a similar unit of energy. And the energy used to produce it is: you guessed it, fossil fuels.

There is a raging debate on the exact level of energy neutrality, with many environmental types applauding studies that show that fuels such as biodiesel have reached the threshold of being energy positive. However, this threshold is useless. Why? because at energy neutrality, biofuels are still tied directly to the price of fossil fuels. If it takes 1 unit of fossil fuel to produce 1 unit of biofuel, then as the price of fossil fuel goes up, so too will the price of the biofuel produced from it, and by a commensurate amount. Again, this economic fact will contribute to the stall in share of biofuel. This doesn't account for the supply-demand driven increase in the feedstock which adds to the problem. Even a slightly energy positive profile for biofuels will not change the fact then that they are useless as a hedge against rising fossil fuel costs.

When biofuels are an economical alternative to fossil fuels, the market will not need cajoling or prodding to accept them, it will do so. Until then the only effect that mandated biofuel usage, such as California's recent law requiring 5% of the states needs to come from biofuels, will have one effect. It will drive up your costs of fuel, and it will do so as much if not more than the rising costs of fossil fuels. Government policy is not helping in this matter. It is only hurting.

When it comes to biofuel policy (and any other economic policy for that matter) you should advocate one and only one policy: laissez faire!

Maggie Gallagher on Ayn Rand

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Well-known conservative columnist Maggie Gallagher has a rather nice column on the 50th anniversary of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

The key to Ayn Rand is that she pictured America largely from early films from Hollywood. As a young girl growing up in the grim world of communist Russia, she saw America as we dreamed ourselves to be, and she longed her whole life with a child's intensity to make this vision real, to live in it. We respond to her novels because they offer us one deep strand of American self-identity -- as individualists, yes, but individualists who together dream big dreams, conquer wild frontiers, invent the future, remake our very selves.

She understood, the way so many pampered Hollywood artists don't, that much of the romance of America is in business -- in our dreams of making it, by making big new things, things no man has ever made before. Rand is virtually alone in seeing businessmen as fellow artists: makers, creators, inventors. In her novels, the greatness of the artist was matched by the greatness of the architect, the scientist, the entrepreneur and the railroad executive. The Homer of our era, she sang the song by which so many Americans live our lives.

Her rebuttal of the snide criticisms of conservative Terry Teachout is also quite delightful.

Count the Skulls for Jesus

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

This morning, I discussed how the so-called "new atheists" failed as intellectuals by dismissing wholesale everything normally associated with religion. In doing so, the new atheists make it easier to swallow such arguments as Theodore Dalrymple's that we must abdicate reason in order to hold lofty ideals or experience sublime emotions.

This evening, we see these same intellectual lightweights play right into the hands of none other than Christian apologist Dinesh D'Souza. This time, they do so directly by means of facile generalizations and indirectly by their assertions that atheism constitutes not merely the intellectual position that it is on the question of whether there is a God, but a worldview.

After minimizing or dismissing the role of religion in fomenting war throughout history by declaring that, among other things, "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not, at its core, a religious one," (!) D'Souza happily accepts Sam Harris and Richard Dawkin's help in blaming the holocaust on atheism:

Harris can go on forever in this vein. Seeking to exonerate secularism and atheism from the horrors perpetrated in their name, he argues that Stalinism and Maoism were in reality "little more than a political religion." As for Nazism, "while the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominantly secular way, it was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity." Indeed, "The holocaust marked the culmination of ... two thousand years of Christian fulminating against the Jews."

One finds the same inanities in Mr. Dawkins's work. Don't be fooled by this rhetorical legerdemain. Dawkins and Harris cannot explain why, if Nazism was directly descended from medieval Christianity, medieval Christianity did not produce a Hitler. How can a self-proclaimed atheist ideology, advanced by Hitler as a repudiation of Christianity, be a "culmination" of 2,000 years of Christianity? Dawkins and Harris are employing a transparent sleight of hand that holds Christianity responsible for the crimes committed in its name, while exonerating secularism and atheism for the greater crimes committed in their name. [bold added]

To be fair, I have read Sam Harris's The End of Faith and do recall him offering evidence that Christians did "fulminate" against the Jews and that, for example, during the Third Reich, the Roman Catholic Church allowed the Nazis access to its records for the purposes of determining whether individuals had Jewish ancestry.

However, it is one thing to note that both Christians and Nazis persecuted Jews, and to liken Nazism to a religion: It is quite another thing to explain what about Nazism and religion make them similar to each other and similarly dangerous to man and how religion might have set the stage for Nazism.

Leonard Peikoff did a far better job of this than I can, long ago in his seminal The Ominous Parallels. But just to consider one such similarity: Both religion and National Socialism promote an altruistic morality of self-sacrifice, differing only in who collects. After holding sway over Europe for centuries, Christianity had trained its people to regard self-sacrifice as normal and good. To move from subordinating oneself to an unseen being to an unseen collective is not exactly a great leap. If I recall correctly, Peikoff also has quite a bit to say about another crucial similarity between religion and Nazism: rejection of reason.

Again, atheism is just an answer to a question, regardless of how it was reached. With the Nazis, we see that one need not even be rational to be an atheist. So much for atheism being the distilled essence of reason, which so many religionists like D'Souza despise.

But recall also that D'Souza speaks of a "sleight of hand that holds Christianity responsible for the crimes committed in its name, while exonerating secularism and atheism for the greater crimes committed in their name". Recall again that all atheism is a position about one question: "Does God exist?"

Despite the wishes of the new atheists, atheism offers no position on any other question, offer a meaningful "group identity" or offer any guidance whatsoever for how to live life or organize society. D'Souza knows this, and he also knows that religion does do these things. Atheism leaves open the question of whether you should live your own life for its own sake or hand it over to other people, the state, or some imaginary being. But religion offers very specific guidance, and it is: Sacrifice yourself. Atheism has nothing to say about whether we should acquire knowledge through evidence and logic -- or take the words of some grizzled Middle Eastern tribesman on faith. But religion is based on faith.

D'Souza, so soon after accusing atheists of a "sleight of hand" hopes to cash in by invoking Dostoyevsky's old saw that "If God is not, everything is permitted," and with only the new atheists around, he could credibly get away with it. For the new atheists, their sound and fury notwithstanding, offer exactly what their one tiny similarity has to offer in the way of ethical and political guidance: nothing.

But as with Theordore Dalrymple, D'Souza ignores one atheist intellectual at his peril: Ayn Rand. As I pointed out this morning, Ayn Rand, although she was an atheist, had a great deal to say about many other philosophical issues, and particularly many widely regarded as the exclusive domain of religion. She understands what is good about religion -- and grounds it in reason. She knows what is bad about religion -- and offers a much -needed rational alternative. Ayn Rand can explain precisely why Dostoyevsky has it exactly backwards -- and why we need a secular, absolute morality as well as how to discover it.

D'Souza hopes that his readers will recognize that atheism offers man no guidance -- and rush to religion by default, and he is counting on the blatant intellectual bankruptcy of the new atheists. But Ayn Rand is one atheist who does offer a viable philosophical alternative to religion: her this-worldly, rational, egoistic, and capitalistic philosophy: Objectivism.

-- CAV

PS: On the title: I started off thinking more along the lines of discussing how religion paved the way for Nazism, as well as how miserable people are in eras, such as the Middle Ages, when religion holds sway. One quite plausible explanation for why there was no Christian Hitler is that feudal Christianity made it impossible for enough people to survive all at one time (or for civilization to be far enough above subsistence level) for such a thing as the Third Reich to even be possible.

Looked at in this way, D'Souza's argument is something like the Fallacy of the Broken Window: We can count skulls of people in the modern era who would have never lived to adulthood (or been born) in a more primitive, religious era. This doesn't make piles of skulls good, of course, but it shows that D'Souza is not looking at the whole picture of how religion affects human existence. Hence the title.

Updates

Today: Added a PS.

Religion's Gordian Knot

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

There is a rather lengthy and thought-provoking article over at City Journal by Theodore Dalrymple, himself a nonbeliever, against the various "new atheists" who have gotten so much press lately for their writings against religion.

Although there are quite a few points I disagree with, the article touches on many other points I have made here off and on, including the nihilism and the condescending tone emanating from many of these critics of religion. Perhaps most interesting, though, is what Dalrymple also says about the benefits he regards as unique to religion:

The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies. [bold added]

First of all, this paragraph is, come to think of it, quite representative of the whole essay, warts and all. Some interesting points that leap out are: The common conservative notion (to which I do not subscribe) that one should avoid ideological consistency (or "extremism"); the notion that purpose necessarily comes from something "greater" than man; and the common idea that decency and something Dalrymple calls "gratitude" must necessarily come from religion. (I read "gratitude" as something like a love of being alive and a taking of joy from existence -- given that Dalrymple is also a nonbeliever.)

Thus you have some very bad and some very good stuff here tied up into a huge knot, and for all Dalrymple's praise of the religious heritage of the West, it is within this knot that is the best of our religious heritage! (The fact that this is bound up in a knot is not a good thing!) But until we consider the ideas of another major atheist intellectual -- whom Dalrymple completely misses -- we are doomed to stare at this knot in confusion. And that is a shame for reasons I'll return to later. But back to Dalrymple....

As with so many others who have focused on the so-called "new atheists", Dalrymple misses one atheist, Ayn Rand, who takes a completely different tone with respect to the higher ideals that receive short shrift by modern intellectuals, and who also, unlike the moderns, understands that religion, for its fundamental flaws (e.g., its basis in faith), is in fact an attempt to satisfy some of man's needs. For example, in an interview with Playboy magazine in 1964, here is a how she answered a question about religion:

PLAYBOY: Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?

RAND: Qua religion, no -- in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man's life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very -- how should I say it? -- dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith.

And this is just one example of the thoughtful exploration of religion that Rand conducted over the course of her intellectual life. Here are just two others from the same page of The Ayn Rand Lexicon, which has just recently been published to the Internet:

Philosophy is the goal toward which religion was only a helplessly blind groping. The grandeur, the reverence, the exalted purity, the austere dedication to the pursuit of truth, which are commonly associated with religion, should properly belong to the field of philosophy. ("The Chickens' Homecoming," Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 46)

Since religion is a primitive form of philosophy -- an attempt to offer a comprehensive view of reality -- many of its myths are distorted, dramatized allegories based on some element of truth, some actual, if profoundly elusive, aspect of man's existence. ("Philosophy and Sense of Life," The Romantic Manifesto, 25.)

I will add, although it will seem repetitive to my regular readers, that Ayn Rand also extensively discusses the question of man's purpose in life. The answer, which she arrives at through reason, is both exalted and this-worldly, and it is within the grasp of any man.

And that is why it is a shame to leave Ayn Rand out of any discussion about atheism (or religion, for that matter). For Dalrymple, however imperfectly, is making some good points against the emptiness of modern philosophy here, but he never can quite break free of the faith-forged chains of ignorance, which are, by the way, one of the many negative aspects of the religious heritage of the West. He and others like him are doomed to consider reason, man's means of living a happy life on this earth, as impotent for that very task!

If I may use some of my own thinking as an example of how considering Ayn Rand's ideas can clarify the kinds of discussions the new atheists are causing, I will point to a few examples of my own writings on topics that Dalrymple considers or alludes to in his essay, for which I have found Ayn Rand's ideas particularly helpful: (1) how to politely discuss intellectual matters, (2) whether atheism is enough to formulate a worldview or an identity (It isn't.), and (3) how best to promote religious tolerance.

In the current cultural debate over religion, the new atheists err in throwing out the baby with the bathwater when they dismiss or show contempt for certain legitimate emotions and concepts that are traditionally associated with religion. But too often, when those who -- like Dalrymple -- realize this mistake reply, they make the same error he makes, which is to assume that there is no secular basis for the good things religion is an attempt to do. In doing so, such intellectuals permit our highest aspirations to remain hostage to those who would have us destroy our minds and our lives with blind faith.

-- CAV

PS: It occurs to me that the mixed legacy of religion lends surface credibility to the idea that one should not adopt an ideology consistently. The implicit idea most people seem to have is to accept the "good parts" of religion while ignoring the "bad parts", the various commands that would make it hard to live a pleasant or productive life (or worse). But this papers over the fact that faith and the constructive ideals a religion may have to offer are ultimately incompatible.

Updates

Today: (1) Added PS. (2) Minor edits.

Kant vs. History

By Nicholas Provenzo from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

When I look back at my study of history, I'm stuck over how a critical aspect of my intellectual development was more or less an accident. I was seven during the American bicentennial celebration and my family went on a vacation throughout New England. Much of that vacation was spent visiting Colonial-era sites and recounting the history of the American founding. At this early age I came to the view that the American founders were simply men of extraordinary high merit who put their heads to the task of defining their freedom and defending it from encroachment. Unlike any other civilization in human history, Americans were a people of both virtue and action. This lesson would not be repeated with as much moral and intellectual force until I discovered Edward Cline's epic Sparrowhawk series.

So how then does the truth of the American founding get so obscured it is reduced to a dispute about taxation waged by men who gleefully enslaved their fellow men? Scott Powell offers an interesting essay (parts one, two, three and four) on how philosophy killed history, and, by implication, how philosophy can bring it back. Speaking of the Enlightenment's impact on the study of history, Powell writes:

Newton's genius had shown the power of man's mind to penetrate nature's inner workings, but no one had been able to articulate on a more abstract level the nature of the Newtonian triumph in science, and explain how it could be reproduced in other areas.

If historians were to pattern their work on the successful model of the physical scientists, they would need to find a means of transposing the methods of physics into the domain of history. The way to do this, however, was unclear. The historian, for example, could not create the controlled conditions of a laboratory to test his ideas, nor could the actions of human beings be reduced to mathematical principles. And yet, the challenge of deriving general knowledge from historical data is in some ways the same as that of finding general laws from observed physical phenomena. It is the challenge of transforming a plethora of concrete information, by some process of abstraction, into an intelligible system. The importance of this project was evident to the more philosophical historians. If natural science could find laws and a natural order in the physical world, could a social science not achieve the same for civilization (and thus derive the proper foundation of social systems)?

Unfortunately, in their quest to give history a Newtonian clarity, historians found no worthy ally among philosophers.

Thus, as Powell intonates by the title of his series, history has become a duel between Columbus and Kant; that is, between men animated by rational ideas toward action and the proponents of a philosophy that says all man's ideas are inherently suspect simply because they come from man. Powell writes:

Kant's philosophical assault on man's faculty of reason paved the way for the historical assault on Columbus by preventing a key avenue of development from ever occurring in Western historiography. By aborting the general study of abstractions as cognitive tools, Kant prevented historians from adopting the epistemological stance necessary to define and defend the most crucial instrument in the systematization of history: historical abstractions.

Yet these abstractions are absolutely necessary if one is to understand history. Powell explains:

When integrated into "the Renaissance," Michelangelo's David, for instance, ceases to be a single artistic datum in an unintelligible flux; it becomes a representative of a wider European cultural reawakening following the suppression of classical ideals. When George Washington's crossing of the Delaware becomes a part of "the American Revolution" it no longer exists merely as a miscellaneous military factoid; it becomes a pivotal action connected to a chain of revolutionary events giving rise to the birth of a new nation. Seen in the context of "the Civil War", the Gettysburg address becomes more than a speech for the dedication of a cemetery; it becomes one of a number of steps forward in the violent, climactic overthrow of slavery in America.

In history, context is everything, so how then can such a power fail to be appreciated and investigated? Powell writes:

The answer is two-fold. First, it is not entirely true to say that historians have remained ignorant of the power of historical abstractions. Sadly, it is the subjectivists in history who have best understood this power and wielded it most effectively. Kant's offspring have taken up the philosophical tools he provided to dismantle the historical identification of key developments in Western civilization, including Columbus's unmatched efforts.

With regards to that particular issue, for example, they have labored to elevate the irrelevant wanderings of the Vikings to a status equal to or greater than Columbus's discovery, and they are striving to raise awareness of the even more nonessential narrative of America's pre-Columbian neolithic primitives in people's minds. This shift in emphasis to a new groundwork of facts is designed to permit the fostering of a new perspective on the history of America, where every element of progress is underplayed and the focus is then placed on America's brutal conquest by Europeans. The ultimate purpose of this revision is a general historical indictment of Western civilization that includes the characterization of Europe's discovery and colonization of America as the greatest example of "genocide" in history.

So rather than serving as a tool for understanding how man's ideas shape his actions, history becomes a tool for distortion and for propagandizing someone's pet cause. In this light, outrages such as the University of Delaware's residence hall program, where students were to be indoctrinated in the view that all white-skinned people are inherently racist, becomes less surprising, if not less shocking. After all, the cashing-in has been going on for years and it will take a new generation of heroes to overthrow it. After all, such is the pregnant hope with those who study history . . .

Ron Paul on open immigration: what’s the worst that could happen?

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

One of the more disturbing things about Ron Paul’s popularity is his staunch opposition to legal and illegal immigration. I pick on him not because his views on immigrants are especially harsh, but because they stand in stark contrast to his reputation as an advocate of free markets and Austrian economics. On his campaign issues page, he warns that “current reform proposals would allow up to 60 million more immigrants into our country” and that “this is insanity.” I am surprised to see Ron Paul buying into this tired bit of socialist rhetoric. The idea that simply allowing 60 million would actually result in 60 million people rushing into the U.S. is absurd, but suppose it were true. What’s the worst that could happen?

According to the Malthusian theory subscribed to by socialists and environmentalists, the amount of resources and capital in a particular region is fixed, so the average income of individuals can be calculated by dividing the total resource/capital base by the number of people. A fixed resource base means a fixed number of jobs, so a large influx of immigrants means rising unemployment and falling standards of living.

Fortunately, it is socialism, not open immigration that is “insanity.” The premise that the resources available to meet human needs are fixed - that each new human being requires a fixed amount of land, metal, and fossil fuels to live - is absurd. Each additional individual creates not only new demand for the products of civilization, but also provides new resources and insight for meeting those needs. Every self-supporting worker produces more than he consumes, adding to total productive output and raising the real wage rate for everyone. Historically, the American standard of living rose fastest during peak immigration periods and continues to rise today. Our greatest source of wealth is not natural resources or the capital base, but the ingenuity and creativity of our entrepreneurs and workers.

By increasing the division of labor, immigrants free up workers previously employed in maintaining the capital base to invest their time in growing capital and efficiency. So for example, by lowering labor costs, new immigrant factory workers free up engineers to invest in expanding production and improving the efficiency of labor. This improves everyone’s living standards. A free society allows a growing capital and knowledge base to be multiplied by entrepreneurs who find new methods to improve human life, proving an exponential growth in prosperity.

A further complaint of Dr Paul is that “taxpayers should not pay for illegal immigrants who use hospitals, clinics, schools, roads, and social services.” I completely agree. However, this is besides the point. No one has a right to live of other people, regardless of where he was born. American welfare bums do not have any more right to my property than Mexican bums. It is the welfare state that is immoral, not immigration. Furthermore, the argument is misleading because illegal immigrants and permanent residents are generally not eligible for welfare, and already pay the property, fuel, and sales taxes that pay for schools and roads. Illegal immigrants don’t pay income taxes, which Dr. Paul believes we should eliminate anyway, but they often pay social security taxes via bogus social security cards - effectively subsidizing legal workers. Do people who oppose granting illegal immigrants driver’s licenses realize that they are for forcing citizens to pay for the illegal immigrants’ share of road-maintenance costs?

For more on the issue, read my case for open immigration.

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Two Blog Nominations

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Yesterday evening and again this morning, I was honored to learn that that this blog has been nominated for two awards.

First, there is the "Intellectual Blogger Award" hosted by An Unquiet Mind, for which this blog was nominated by Ergo of Leitmotif, who has himself won this award.

And then, through a comment by Bubblehead of The Stupid Shall Be Punished, I learned that my blog is in the final polling of the 2007 Weblog Awards among the "Slithering Reptiles" (its size category in the TTLB Ecosystem as measured by inbound links at nomination time). I am glad to note that Bubblehead himself is also a finalist in the next size category up from mine.

I would like to thank Ergo for nominating me for the Intellectual Blogger Award and whoever nominated me for the 2007 Weblog Awards. The nominations are themselves honors.

Voting just opened yesterday evening or this morning. From the Poll Index for this year's awards, you can navigate here to vote for Gus Van Horn and here to vote for The Stupid Shall Be Punished.

Vote early and vote often!

-- CAV

Hollywood’s Jihad Against America

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

“During World War II Hollywood churned out combat pictures and home-front melodramas with the speed and efficiency that characterized so much war-time production. Those movies reflected a consensus that it was also their purpose to promote. The best of them were more than simple propaganda, but they tended to share a sense of clarity and purpose in their narrative structure as well as in their themes.”

So wrote A.O. Scott in a New York Times Arts and Leisure feature on October 28, “A War on Every Screen: New Films Pegged to Iraq and Other Flash Points Are Awash in Ambiguity.” After presenting brief synopses of several recent and forthcoming movies about the Iraq war and terrorism – most of them, to judge by his descriptions, viciously anti-American in theme and content – Scott concludes that they are “ambiguous,” and semi-wistfully contrasts them with films produced during World War II. By “ambiguous” one can only suppose that he means they do not overtly condemn the U.S.

In that sense, they lack the “clarity and purpose” with which most World War II-era produced films were imbued.

Scott does, however, answer some of his own questions, and in the process identifies why, to him, at least, the films are “ambiguous.”

“What is missing in nearly every case is a sense of catharsis or illumination. This is hardly the fault of the filmmakers. Disorientation, ambivalence, a lack of clarity – these are surely part of the collective experience they are trying to examine. How can you bring an individual story to a satisfying conclusion when nobody has any idea what the end of the larger story will look like?”

Much the same could be said about President Bush’s Iraq policy. It is disoriented in its aims, now that it is a certainty that “democracy” will not work in a country whose citizens will continue to vote the straight Islamic ticket. It is ambivalent, measured by a purely emotional criterion. And, the policy lacks clarity, because the “insurgency” will never end if its promoters and paymasters remain untouched by American military might. That is the “larger” story whose resolution no one can as yet predict.

Although Scott’s article rambles on in search of answers, he does make an occasional true observation.

“…[T]he public may well succeed in avoiding them [the films discussed by Scott]….Public indifference…may bolster the ideologically convenient notion that Hollywood is out of touch with the American people, and also the economically convenient idea that people go to the movies to escape the problems of the world rather than to confront them.”

I do not think the idea that Hollywood is out of touch with the American people needs bolstering or that it is “convenient,” unless the term is Scott’s substitute for “logical.” Ever since the mid-1960’s Hollywood has waged a campaign of hate of the U.S. and has left few left-wing or collectivist issues untouched or un-dramatized. Nor is the idea that people go to the movies to be inspired or at least “entertained” an illogical one, either. Both ideas are true.

“What is notable about this new crop of war movies is not their earnestness or their didacticism – traits many of them undoubtedly display – but rather their determination to embrace confusion, complexity, and ambiguity.”

The new crop of movies are that way because it is their makers’ intent to leave American movie-goers confused about the issues, baffled by their “complexity,” and in doubt about any possible resolution. The ambiguity plays an insidious role. It injects doubt into the issues and into the minds of American viewers. That is their earnest, Existentialist, “didactic” method. The ambiguity is not an accident or a consequence of confusion or an attempt to avoid what Scott calls “finger-wagging” and “sloganeering.” The ambiguity is deliberate, and it is indeed the “fault” of the filmmakers.

Although much of Hollywood during World War II was under the thumb of leftists, they did not dare insult the intelligence of the American public or attack their values or patriotism by offering films that were ambiguous about the nature of the enemy or the enormity of the effort required to defeat him. They did not begin to crawl out into the light until after the war.

Today, the enemy, Islamism or Islamofascism, is not identified as an enemy, and if Islamists are hostile to the U.S., according to Hollywood, it is the fault of the U.S. To Hollywood, the Islamists can slaughter thousands, regardless of their religion or politics, and they remain innocent. They were “conditioned” by circumstances and cannot be blamed for their actions, no matter how horrendous or murderous. Only the U.S. is blameworthy, because it is a giant.

If a handful of American soldiers run amok and commit “crimes” against members of what is (in fact) an enemy population, that deserves feature length attention. If innumerable jihadists plot to detonate bombs in New York and Boston, Hollywood will not deign to dramatize it, but ask, instead: Who can blame them?

Every one of the movies Scott discusses is a multi-million dollar instance of agitprop whose purpose is not to instill or uphold moral values, but to subvert and destroy them by instilling guilt in Americans, to make them doubt the value of being Americans. If a modern war movie is not weepy, whiny, or “grieving,” then it is blatantly nihilistic.

Parenthetically, it is a measure of America’s cultural malaise that weeping, grieving and maudlin commiseration have become the especial foci of news reportage, regardless of the tragedy or catastrophe. “Grief” and “suffering” rank just behind “sacrifice” and “selflessness” as touchstones of moral worth. I date the beginning of this sordid element of national self-pitying back to October 1983, when terrorists killed over two hundred Marines and other U.S. servicemen in their Beirut barracks, an assault that President Ronald Reagan failed to answer. As the stream of flag-draped coffins arrived in the U.S., the news media embarked on an orgy of “grief” and “doubt.” Did any one call for retaliation against the responsible terrorist groups or the state that sponsored them and demand that Reagan take action? I don’t recall.

Scott comes close to grasping the connection between the movies whose “ambiguous” purposes he ponders and the nature of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

“We have been told from the start, by both the administration and its critics, that this will be a long, complicated, episodic fight. And so attempts to make sense of it piecemeal and in medias res, in discrete narratives with beginnings and ends, are likely to feel incomplete and unsatisfying.”

He comes close, and might have understood the nature of the conflicts, were he not also a pawn of the filmmakers’ purposes, which is to inculcate doubt, confusion, and disgust. Were he able to delve into more fundamental issues, he might have asked the questions:

Are we there to ensure that no Islamic state ever attacks America again? And if we are, what is the best means of accomplishing that end? Or are we there motivated by some Wilsonian notion of spreading “democracy” as a moral duty, to indulge in what Progressive writer Herbert Croly called the “tonic of a moral adventure”? Is there a vital connection between Bush’s Christian policy of warfighting and why the U.S. will continue to expend blood and treasure in a futile campaign to win the “hearts and minds” of a people who prefer to adhere to a Dark Age morality? Is a code of self-sacrifice one of life or of death?

Finally, he might have asked: If Hollywood had turned out these kinds of movies during World War II, might not the filmmakers have been boycotted by the public, or charged with treason, or, at the very least, tarred and feathered and run out of town?

I do not plan to see any of the movies discussed by A.O. Scott in his article. I know what they are about just by watching the morning newscasts for free. My kinds of war movies are the 1939 Four Feathers, and Glory, Hamburger Hill, Gunga Din, Hell is for Heroes, and many others that, among other things, not the least of which is their cleaner, unambiguous esthetics, inspire me to fight my own battles.

John Lewis at Bowling Green

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

As many of you know, John Lewis has been working as a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University this academic year. I'm delighted to report that he's been given a new, permanent position as Senior Research Scholar in History and Classics."

Congratulations, John!

He also reports: I am progressing on my warfare book "Nothing Less than Victory"; a TOS article, "'Gifts from Heaven': The Meaning of the American Victory over Japan, 1945"; a paper for the Northest Political Science Association "Does Xenophon Have a Concept of Political Economy" (for their annual meeting in November); and plans for a book "Early Greek War Poetry and the Amorous Response."

Delightful!

Vote for Gus!

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Vote for Gus Van Horn in the 2007 Weblog Awards!

Quick Roundup 268

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Atheism is not a Worldview

At Spiked, Dolan Cummings comments on the recent efforts of certain atheists to build a group identity movement around atheism:

Richard Dawkins's campaign urging atheists to 'come out' and be counted, is oddly reminiscent of an evangelical rally where born-again Christians are implored to rush down to the stage.

...

The desire to establish atheism as an alternative identity is ultimately conservative. Rather than joining together with others who share a positive vision of the future, self-styled atheists define themselves against an external threat.

There are two things wrong with such efforts. The obvious one Cummings indicates here: Whether there is a God is just one small question in philosophy. To attempt to do anything with others who answer "No." than (perhaps, within some narrow context) build an ad hoc alliance against various attempts to desecularize the government is in fact quite a stretch.

Less obvious -- but interestingly enough -- partially as a consequence of the first problem -- is that the whole notion of building a "group identity" is based on the underlying altruist assumption that the individual belongs to the group.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to have friends or allies, but before one can do that, one must know with his own mind what is best for himself -- not for some movement, or culture, or "society". Atheism is not sufficient grounds to reach the comprehensive philosophical perspective necessary to determine (for example) whether one should live one's life for its own sake or for a collective. Any given atheist may or may not have enough in common with me to be a genuine ally, so these efforts are worse than premature. Furthermore, to really appreciate this, I had to make my intellectual journey in the only way possible: alone.

By contrast, if one permits his priorities to be set by the expectations of a group to which one wants to "belong", some form of compromise is the inevitable result, even if merely in the form of withholding valid criticism. This kind of separation of one's actions from one's rational judgement is the major goal of religion and where the rubber really hits the road in terms of where it harms man.

In the case of this "identity movement", our culture is saturated with the religiously-inspired ethics of altruism, which most people will hold by default if they do not go beyond just asking whether there is a God. So this movement is inspired by and can only reinforce altruism, and prematurely end the intellectual journey of anyone who joins. Bad idea.

Who is better off in the long run? Someone who can think independently, but who, at the moment believes that there is a God? Or someone who is an atheist, but is too worried about his "group identity" to form his own opinions about other matters or challenge what "the other atheists" are saying?

Financing Murder

Via Isaac Schrodinger comes an interesting look at the relationship between the amount of money handed over to "Palestinians" and the number of homicides they commit each year. Joe Settler's unsurprising conclusion? "You can practically estimate how many Palestinians acts of murder and terrorism will be committed in any year based on how much money they received the year before."

Some First-Wave Ska

Awhile back, I posted about ska, my favorite kind of music, which originated in Jamaica around the time it became independent. The below YouTube video plays clips of several early ska songs while showing a montage of scenes from Jamaica and England from around that time.


Among the scenes are quite a few showing legendary musicians and places of interest, such as the site of Studio One. (HT: Adrian Hester)

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a typo.

Exploit the Universe or Die!

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Some Australian academicians have expressed concern that if humanity starts exploring outer space, we may take the wrong attitude towards the celestial environment:

Dr Toni Johnson-Woods says she and her colleagues found there is a prevailing belief that other planets and their natural resources are there simply to be exploited.

"The focus is on exploitation of the minerals. Basically, it's just Australia all over again," she said.

..."There's also an idea that there's nothing already on Mars, which I presume there isn't, in the same way that Australia had that terra nullius, like there's nothing in Australia, so, 'we're just going to go there, take what we need and leave'," she said.

Instead, the group urges that we practice "sustainability":

The other thing is that space is not an infinite resource. If we go to the Moon and litter the Moon and wreck it, there's not another one just down the road.

Even though space may not be infinite, it's pretty darned large. But the article does show the silliness of the view that there is a natural environment that has some sort of intrinsic value which must be preserved at the expense of human interests, even when there are no other valuers besides human beings.

As blogger JF Beck points out, the real (but unstated) message of the panel is "Humans are evil".

As an aside, when private commercial exploitation of the moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt becomes commercialy viable, it will raise some interesting questions about how best to implement property rights and rule of law in an area where currently no government claims any jurisdiction. I've always had a fondness for the fiercely independent asteroid miner "Belter" culture as portrayed in Larry Niven's science fiction novels, so I wouldn't mind seeing something like that come to pass.

And the Objective Standard will also have to update its t-shirts to read, "Exploit the Universe or Die".

(Via Rand Simberg.)

P.S.: Jim May points me to this story from the British press that expresses similar sentiments.

Public Reeducation in Delaware

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

From the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) -- and paid for by the citizens of the state of Delaware -- comes an excellent example of why the state should not be involved in any way in educating the young:

According to the program's materials, the goal of the residence life education program is for students in the university's residence halls to achieve certain "competencies" that the university has decreed its students must develop in order to achieve the overall educational goal of "citizenship." These competencies include: "Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society," "Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression" and "Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality."

At various points in the program, students are also pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate their agreement with the university’s ideology, regardless of their personal beliefs. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations, committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20%, taking action by advocating for an "oppressed" social group, and taking action by advocating for a "sustainable world."

In the Office of Residence Life's internal materials, these programs are described using the harrowing language of ideological reeducation. In documents relating to the assessment of student learning, for example, the residence hall lesson plans are referred to as "treatments."

Note the clinical language, which simultaneously allows the University of Delaware to pretend that it is actually imparting objective knowledge, while attempting to dodge charges that it is forcing its students to be subjected to a campaign of badgering and brainwashing intended to make them adopt a certain point of view.

This is not to say that such matters as political and ethical theory cannot have a rational basis and be argued from evidence and logic -- or that universities should not offer an (actual) education in philosophical thinking. Universities can and should teach these things, but free from the funding and control of the state. Indeed -- if they can find paying customers -- universities should be free to offer brainwashing like this.

Unfortunately, when the state takes money from citizens to pay for the propagation of a given point of view -- even a rational one -- it violates the rights of all to determine which causes to support or boycott with their own money. Furthermore, it makes it difficult for parents to afford to send their children to universities that offer educations more in line with what they want for their children.

Even in the best of circumstances, a state school will have to make curriculum choices and teach from at least an implicitly-held point of view. Even this violates individual rights. But when a reeducation program is presented as an uncontroversial package of "competencies", it goes under the radar and suddenly, the state is churning out brainwashed zombies -- rather than educated adults -- at taxpayer expense.

-- CAV

PS: Incidentally, recall that many libertarians, in their disdain for philosophical ideas, regard freedom as something so obviously beneficial that everyone wants it. If this is so, how is it that the administration of the University of Delaware apparently regards it just as uncontroversial that people should be trained in a statist program to regard white people as inherently racist (!) and adopt a constellation of attitudes hostile to capitalism?

Islamo-Fascism: What's in the name?

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In the course of foraging for blogging material, I decided to look at Dennis Prager's column about his experience as a speaker for the conservative "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" campaign when I saw a link to it for the third time. I give it a mixed review.

... [T]hey saw a decent man, a sometimes funny guy, and heard a low-keyed, intellectual speech that contained not one word of gratuitous hatred.

First, I found his experience as a campus lecturer instructive: It is worth mentioning that following my lecture, the student who wrote the column comparing me to a Ku Klux Klanner came over to me and said he was writing a column of apology to me and asked to be photographed with me. This is not surprising. Students at most universities are almost brainwashed into being leftist -- and the way they are taught to disagree with their political opponents is by using ad hominem attacks. Conservatives are described over and over as mean-spirited, war-loving, greedy, bigoted, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, sexist, intolerant and oblivious to human suffering.

Such ad hominem labels are the left's primary rhetorical weapons. So when leftist students are actually confronted with even one articulate conservative, many enter a world of cognitive dissonance. That is one reason why universities rarely invite conservatives to speak: they might change some students' minds. [bold added]

Prager here demonstrates the power of politeness, an issue I once touched on here, but in a way I hadn't considered at the time: Why play the part your opponents want to assign to you when simply by acting benevolent and civilized you demonstrate to the people who count -- thinking adults -- that you are likely a man of substance?

Having said that, it's too bad that conservatives are increasingly becoming indistinguishable in their political goals from the left, as Cal Thomas and Newt Gingrich so openly admit. The chief difference between left and right these days would appear to be whether we should allow Islamists to establish a theocracy or establish a Christian one ourselves. And yet, clearly, there is a market for a real alternative. I guess I'll work to help fill that void.

But back to Prager....

Toward the end end of his column, he discusses the validity of the term "Islamo-Fascism". I think the term Islamic totalitarianism is better because fascism is only a specific kind of totalitarianism (and not really the right one at that), but that is beside the point:

First, the term is not anti-Muslim. One may object to the term on factual grounds, i.e., one may claim that there are no fascistic behaviors among people acting in the name of Islam -- but such a claim is a denial of the obvious.

So once one acknowledges the obvious, that there is fascistic behavior among a core of Muslims -- specifically, a cult of violence and the wanton use of physical force to impose an ideology on others -- the term "Islamo-Fascism" is entirely appropriate. [bold added]

So far so good.

Second, the question then arises as to whether that term is anti-Muslim in that it besmirches the name of Islam and attempts to describe all Muslims as fascist. This objection, too, has a clear response.

The term no more implies all Muslims or Islam is fascistic than the term "German fascism" implied all Germans were fascists or "Italian fascism" or "Japanese fascism" implied that all Italians or all Japanese were fascists. Indeed, even religious groups have been labeled as fascist. During World War II, for example, Croatian Catholic fascists were called Catholic Fascists, and no one argued that the term was invalid because it purportedly labeled all Catholics or Catholicism fascist. [bold added]

I have no problem with wanting not to label all individual Moslems as totalitarians. To do so would be just as wrong-headed as to pretend that there is not an Islamic totalitarian movement. It is with the notion that the term is good because it does not "besmirch Islam" I take issue.

Prager's analogy between ethnicity and religion obscures essential differences between the two behind superficial similarities. Certainly, one's personal development can be shaped by the ethnic background or religious milieu in which he was raised by accident of birth, but of the two, it is only religion -- and not ethnicity -- that offers a comprehensive (quasi-philosophic) view of of the universe and ethical guidance along with it. And the epistemological influence of religion, along with its ethical guidance shapes the political views of the adherents of a religion.

Thus Islam, unlike "German-ness" or Italian ethnicity, is a system of thought and as such, it is fair game to ask whether its premises, cognitive methods, and teachings lead to totalitarianism when applied consistently or not. And if they do, then it does not "besmirch" Islam to say so: It renders justice to Islam and invites us to examine other religions critically in turn.

Furthermore, because Islam demands unquestioning obedience to its authorities in every aspect of life, including the political, I think that it is fair to say that the religion does strongly promote totalitarianism, especially given that, unlike for Christianity and Judaism, it has no strong rational tradition as a counterweight to this blind obedience.

But this is not especially to defend any religion. To the extent that a religion quashes one's independent judgement, it promotes tyranny. Islam is simply the "purest" religion in terms of its epistemological methods and how seriously its followers take it. And it, along with Christianity, is trending away from whatever rational influence has acted upon it in the past.

Prager is right. There are rational Moslems here and there. Indeed, I suspect that few of these would take offense at the term "Islamo-Fasciscm", even without Prager's hand-holding. So why take so much care not to "besmirch" Islam? I suspect that it is because Prager, religious himself, would regard a critical (i.e., rational) evaluation of any religion as unacceptable.

That is too bad, for faith and force are corollaries, as Ayn Rand once pointed out, and to give religion a free pass is to give tyranny a head start at establishing itself. One may wish that religion were a good thing, but wishing doesn't make it so.

-- CAV

The State of Evangelical Politics

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

This lengthy New York Times article on the state of political activism amongst evangelical Christians was fascinating.

Two comments:

(1) I'm not surprised to hear more about the recent leanings of evangelicals toward the socialism and environmentalism of the Democrats. Socialism is, after all, better supported by Christian scripture than opposition to abortion. So evangelicals will likely be actively courted by both political parties for the foreseeable future. All that can be hoped for is some kind of secular candidate in the 2008 presidential election, since voting for a left-wing theocrat (e.g. Obama) over a right-wing theocrat (e.g. Huckabee) would be futile.

(2) The source of the disillusionment with Bush's Iraq War among evangelicals is instructive: the problem is that the war is not altruistic enough. That new-found Christian pacifism will not only preclude any fight against our enemies abroad but also invigorate entitlements for the needy at home. That's bad all around.

Much more could be said about the article, but I'm still too sick for much heavy thinking.

The moral atrocity of Israel’s “moderation”

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

U.N. diplomats are upset that Israel has begun to briefly cut off power to the Gaza strip in response to continuing indiscriminate rocket attacks. They do not believe in “collective punishment” they say. Israel has defended the policy by pointing out that the power cuts are moderate and do not affect critical services.

The morality of Israel’s policy can be judged under one of two scenarios. If Gaza under Hamas rule is an enemy state which is waging war on Israel, then Israel has no obligation to provide any services to the Gaza strip, and may in fact take whatever moves are necessary to destroy or discourage the enemy, including the destruction of military and civilian infrastructure. If, on the other hand, Gaza is under Israel’s sovereignty, and not subject to martial law (that is, it is not a war zone), then the standards of civilian rule apply, and cutting off badly-needed services could indeed be considered a moral atrocity. So which scenario applies to the current situation?

According to Israel’s policy, it is both.  Hamas does operate a de-facto independent state inside the Gaza strip, and is actively engaged in a war with Israel. (It is not merely “terrorism” because the Hamas combatants are not fugitives within Palestinian territory, but members of the ruling regime, and enjoy the support of the population.) On the other hand, Israel has not recognized Hamas as a foreign regime, much less an enemy state, and acts diplomatically as if the Palestinian territories are part of its territory, and therefore the welfare of Palestinian civilians is its responsibility. (Hence the current “moderation” of the power cuts and the military response.)

Israel’s attempt to make a “practical” compromise by treating the Palestinian territories as a quasi-state puts it in the worst possible situation. It can neither take the proper military action to win the war, nor establish civilian rule under Israeli law in the territories and bring the criminals to justice. If Israel wants to find a moral way to end the bloody war of attrition that afflicts both Israelis and Palestinians, it must do one of two things:

One: Israel can recognize Hamas/Fatah as an enemy regime and wage a proper war against them. This means immediately cutting off all ties and trade with the enemy, the destruction of the current regime and its war-making infrastructure and breaking the will of the population to continue waging aggression. Victory may constitute occupation and the installation of a friendly regime, or simply isolation and a military blockade until the will of the population to fight is broken.

Two: Israel can recognize the Palestinian territories as a part of its territory, and establish martial law with the goal of making civilian rule possible. This means complete occupation of the territories and the destruction of all organizations which practice or advocate violence against Israel, or Israeli authority. This option requires a commitment to eventually giving Palestinians full rights as citizens of Israel, which makes it unlikely.

Every delay to the enactment of one of the two policies means more needless Israeli and Palestinian deaths and suffering.

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