Quiz

Dave Scot (in the comments to this post):

Pop quiz...

1) The process of random mutation + natural selection is observed and imagined as being capable of creating complex digital code driven machinery. It is inferred this is how the machinery of life came to exist.

2) The process of intelligent design is observed creating complex digital code driven machinery. It is inferred this is how the machinery of life came to exist.

Mark the stronger inference.

[ ] 1
[ ] 2

An Atheist Criticizes Dawkins

Interesting take.

excerpts:

This weekend I made it to my local bookstore, grabbed a copy of the "The God Delusion" and sat down with a cup of coffee to read it immediately -- even before buying it. Imagine my shock and even horror to discover that Dawkins' book is trite, facile and just plain, well, dumb.

...

The entire scope of the facileness of the book will take several posts to address, but the most immediate flaw in the book is Dawkins' uncritical acceptance of the idea that religion causes people to systematically make worse, i.e., less-humane or -accurate, decisions than does an atheistic worldview. I'll tackle this argument first because it has long annoyed me, because empirically it isn't true, and anyone with even a passing knowledge of history can discern the real pattern.

Atheists reflexively repeat the mantra that religion causes oppression, war and general cruelty of all kinds, while asserting or implying that atheism does not. Dawkins falls right into this mindless argument in the opening paragraphs of the book and never lets up. (Reading someone like Dawkins making such a pompous, counterfactual argument is like chewing glass.)

This particular fallacy arises from three sources: (1) attributing every bad decision in the distant past to religion, (2) ignoring all of the bad decisions made by atheists in the recent past and (3) ignoring all of the good decisions that religious people made in the recent past.

Laying all bad decisions of the distant past at the feet of religion comes from projecting a wholly modern western cosmology onto pre-modern cultures everywhere.

...

Until [the last couple of centuries], everyone thought about all decisions in what we would today call supernatural terms. In truth, it is better to say that people then lacked our modern conception of the natural. They saw a chaotic and random world that appeared to follow no rules or inherent order. In one of his books, Carl Sagan (another fallen idol of mine) showed how an East Indian oral poem, that told how to create a poultice for an infected tooth, began and ended with a description of the poultice recipe's relationship to the Hindu gods and the cosmos in general. In such a cultural milieu, everybody, everywhere, justified their actions, good or bad, in terms we would call religious.

This leads to a form of confirmation bias on the part of atheists. They look into the distant past, see some actions we disapprove of in the modern world, notice that the people who chose the actions had a religious world view, and conclude that the religious world view caused the problem. However, since everybody in the distant past had a religious world view, and no significant decision makers until the very recent past had an atheistic world view, the fact that decision makers in the past were religious tells us about as much about them as the fact that they all breathed oxygen.

Atheists like to single out both the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition as examples of inhumanity that occurred because of religion. (The very fact that we atheists feel compelled to reach back 400-800 years for our kneejerk examples of bad religious behavior should set off warning bells.) Yet both events had significant materialistic or practical drivers that would have created much the same events without any religion being involved. The Crusades arose as a counterattack against the Muslim military expansion that had consumed half of the Christian world. Had the United Atheist League conquered half the lands of the League of United Atheists the same dynamic would have applied. Contrary to many people's view, no atrocities occurred during the Crusades that hadn't occurred when Christians fought Christians or Muslims fought Muslims. The massacres of the inhabitants of cities that so occupy the modern mind did not arise out of religious bigotry but from the established rules of medieval siege warfare. Cities taken by storm were put to the sack. The Crusaders established Christian kingdoms in the Middle East that lasted nearly two centuries. Those kingdoms were 98% Muslim with a Christian nobility. The Christians didn't try to exterminate those populations based on religion.

Likewise, the Spanish Inquisition sprang from the very secular needs for political control and money. The purpose of the Inquisition was to create legal and cultural justifications for the seizures of vast amounts of wealth from those accused. The religious aspects of the persecution were just a gloss, as in every other action taken during that time. In modern times, atheistic communists carried out nearly identical actions for nearly identical reasons. (The most strange thing about our view of the Spanish Inquisition is that we regard it with special horror even though the use of torture for both investigation and punishment was a universal standard at the time. What so shocked the contemporaries of the Inquisition was not the fact that it tortured people. Every police power of the time tortured people. What shocked the contemporaries was the class of people who got tortured. Mutilating peasants didn't raise anyone's eyebrows, mutilating the rich and noble did.)

Dawkins simply repeats the shallow and ahistorical version of history that any hip 19-year-old college freshman can regurgitate on cue. If Dawkins had approached the question from an empirical point of view, he would have readily determined that evidence for the degree to which religion does or does not promote inhumane decisions can only be found in the history of the last 300 years or so. Only during that time frame have atheistic ideologies gained any significant power to actually make good or bad decisions. Unfortunately for atheists, recent history shows that the more atheistic a political ideology, the more destruction it wreaks when it acquires power. The first true atheistic regime in history arose during the 1792 French revolution, which promptly consumed itself in the Great Terror. Atheistic communism next assumed power, and it killed 120 million people over 80 years, and brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation more than once. Mussolini was an atheist and the Nazis, who held a diverse mixture of atheistic, deistic and pagan beliefs, were united only by their antipathy towards traditional religion. National Socialism as an ideology was rigorously secular and justified its killings with appeals to a materialistic pseudo-science. Dawkins spends about 4 pages (what about Hitler and Stalin? weren't they atheists? -- p. 291) before concluding that atheism played no part in their crimes. (He comes so close to understanding why atheists go so wrong by observing that atheism didn't cause them to commit their crimes. More on that later.)

...

Moreover, Dawkins doesn't appear to spend any time considering the positive role that religion has played in the last two-hundred years. I checked the index under "slavery" and found only three references, all of them complaining that religious people had not, throughout the history of mankind, always opposed slavery. Well, duh! Strangely, missing from Dawkins' analysis is any mention of the role that Christian fervor played in virtually wiping out slavery worldwide. Indeed, slavery went from being a human universal to virtual extinction due to the efforts of individuals whom many people today regard as the trifecta of evil: Christian, capitalistic, white males.

Dawkins spends a great deal of time damning religion, but spends very little time highlighting the real-world positive effects of an atheistic world view. That is because, beyond the sciences, atheists really don't have anything to crow about. The modern welfare-states that many atheistic democratic socialists are so proud of were actually voted into place by people who we can safely group under the description, Christian socialist. Appeals to the ideals of Christian charity, not secular socialism, sold those programs. How about the sexual revolution? The social and political debates over the sexual revolution pitted secular and often atheistic ideas against traditional religiously based morality. Yet only a historical fluke -- the HIV virus attaches to T-cells using the same protein hook as the Black Death bacillus -- prevented AIDS from killing not "just" hundreds of thousands in the developed world but millions. If so many in the developed world did not descend from survivors of the Black Death, the sexual revolution would have been the greatest cultural disaster of all times. We still don't know whether the long term effects on family structure and child rearing will be a net positive or negative. The early indications do not look good.

Like Dawkins, I am troubled by the resurgence of the supernatural in the modern world.

...

Unlike Dawkins, however, I don't shrug my shoulders in bewilderment and conclude that the reason for the decline of the atheistic world view lies in the inherent stupidity of non-atheists. I understand bitterly that atheist over promised, under delivered and spawned horrific monsters that nearly destroyed humanity. I know that the history of the Twentieth Century is dominated by smug atheists causing trainwreck after trainwreck without ever accepting any responsibility.

"The God Delusion" is a trite, shallow unimaginative book. It is not intended to evangelize to non-atheists, but instead preaches to the choir by vomiting out all of the conceits and prejudices that atheists hold in common. As a defense of the atheistic world view it is a pathetic failure. Coming from one of the century's great scientific minds, it's just sad.

Germany vs Greece

Very amusing:

But, I Don't Feel Like I'm A Traitor!

Dr. Sanity clears up a misconstrual of her position.

Victory

We can fairly easily change the dynamic for the bad guys in Iraq from "No matter what the Americans promise, they'll eventually wimp out" to "Just when you think the Americans are about to give up, they'll suddenly bring the hammer down hard and utterly shatter your hopes to win, hopes that they let you build over a period of time only to savagely rip them away from you and show you that they are utterly for naught. They are in control. You are not and can never hope to be."

But we won't.

An American Thinker piece examines the insanity of the ISG report in light of what we should be doing.

excerpts:

The political class, Republicans and Democrats alike, insists on taking the ISG report seriously. Our leaders are struggling to formulate some new policy for Iraq. But they can't succeed because they refuse to understand what has gone wrong with the old one.

There is nothing complex about the problems in Iraq. Those problems are entirely transparent to anyone with a firm grasp on reality. Unfortunately almost nobody in our political class has a grasp on reality, let alone a firm one, and very few Americans seem to notice. Most of us, after all, get our meat wrapped in plastic on Styrofoam trays. We are adept at blinding ourselves to unpleasantness and reality is relentlessly unpleasant.

Supporting the Iraqi Army

The ISG report is all about facilitating our retreat from Iraq. That is what changing our focus from combat to training would be intended to accomplish. But retreat on any terms would be defeat and we can't afford defeat.

The unpleasant reality in Iraq is that the price of victory will be both horrifying bloodshed and a commitment to be the dominant power in Iraq for decades to come. To win you must fight, and then you must hold on to your gains. The entire political establishment is desperate to avoid facing this reality.

President Bush is as guilty of confusion here as either the ISG or the softest-headed congressional Democrat. He is, in fact, the principal author of the "cut and run" strategy. From the beginning of the war in Iraq he has said that we will stay there only as long as it takes to "do the job." His undefended (and indefensible) assumption is that if we just set up a decent government in Iraq we can turn tail. The new government will then take over the task of suppressing the bad guys in Iraq which will help us move toward victory in the broader "war on terror."

The truth is that any government we set up in Iraq will be useful to us only so long as we are there to keep it under close supervision. The instant we leave, any government we leave behind will divide up among the various factions and join in a general bloodletting. With the sole exception of the Kurds, each faction has foreign sponsors and those sponsors are our enemies. When the killing finally stops, Iraq, or at least large parts of what used to be Iraq, will be securely under the influence of one or more of our enemies and the effort to win our Arab and Persian War will be crippled.

Iraq will remain in our sphere of influence as long as our troops are the dominant force within its borders and no longer. It is predominantly Arab and overwhelmingly Muslim. It isn't friendly ground. Our conquest of Iraq was a major strategic victory in the Arab and Persian War. Unless we've gone stark raving mad we won't abandon that victory.

Talking about how to organize our departure is almost as destructive as leaving would be. As long as we keep talking about removing ourselves from the picture in Iraq the local politicians will spend all their energies preparing for the full-blown civil war that will follow our departure.

We can't build Iraqi security forces if the Iraqis see those forces as assets to be secured for use in the coming civil war. We can't terminate troublemakers like Moqtada al Sadr if the powers that be are planning to rely on him for support when we depart. We can't even keep the Shiite dominated Iraqi government from gravitating toward Iran, which will remain in the region long after we go home.

If we want Iraqi partners to help us install and maintain a useful government in Baghdad we have to offer them something more than a one night stand. If we aren't committed to them they won't be committed to us and we won't be able to move forward together.

We are stuck in Iraq and we have to face that fact before we can have any hope of improving the situation there. Increasing our focus on training Iraqis and decreasing our focus on combat operations would be moving in exactly the wrong direction.

The recipe for victory in Iraq is simple. Establish that we are in charge there by killing a great many more people. This may take more troops. It might just take a shift in emphasis from politics to fighting. Try hard to ensure that the dead are enemies bearing arms, but remember that trying too hard to avoid collateral damage will only guarantee futility and frustration. Stop worrying about hearts and minds. As the old saying goes: "when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." Get a good grip and hang on.

Make it clear by word and deed that we anticipate remaining in Iraq until the jihad burns out and the oil runs dry and that, in the mean time, there are strict limits on Iraqi sovereignty.

It's pretty simple. If you don't intend to put a country under the boot, then don't invade!

Great Book Review

Takes apart The God Delusion by Dawkins.

The Immaculate Conception

Good Mark Shea essay for today's feast day.

Realism

Ace Of Spades:

The sudden determination -- now the Conventional Wisdom, according to the media -- that everything has gone to hell and that we must get out immediately if not sooner is almost entirely a creation of the Democratic victory in November, and the media's consequent emboldment to say clearly and forcefully the things they've been thinking since, oh, before the war began, and since the one-day "quagmire" in the actual invasion when our troops had to stop moving due to sandstorms.

It's not real. There was no genuine "Iraqi Tet," and even to the extent there was something of an Iraqi Tet, we know something about Tet offensives: they're designed not to achieve military victories, but public opinion victories in America.

The Sunnis cannot win this war. They are greatly outnumbered. The best they can hope for is... well, to be slaughtered en masse and ethnically clensed from all Kurdish or Shi'ite strongholds. And make no mistake: That is the inevitable consequence of an American withdrawal. The odd truth of this war is that Sunnis are fighting their greatest protector, the American military, which will not permit slaughter on a mass scale, even against the Sunnis, who pretty much deserve it by this point.

With the American forces departed, the restraints come off the Shi'ites entirely. What, precisely, will all those militias do when they no longer have American patrols to dodge, or American soldiers to snipe at?

Of course the full force and fury of decades of hatred and desire for vengeance will be visited upon Sunni men, women, and children. What we are seeing as far as "sectarian violence" now is nothing compared to what will transpire when the moderating force of American troops is removed from the equation.

If you want to talk to realism -- let's talk realism. Cold-blooded, heartless, amoral utilitarian realism. Rule by men with guns is not a "lawless" situation. It's in fact the oldest, and most primitive, sort of "law" there is -- law by superior numbers and superior military might. The Sunnis cannot win this war; their plan, to the extent they have one, is to make the country so unstable that some outside force such as -- if you can believe this pipe-dream -- America itself will come to see them as the only group capable of ruling the fractured, fratricidal country of Iraq and reinstall them as masters of the country.

That, of course, will not happen. The Sunnis will never control Iraq again; the best they can hope for is the success of the American plan to create a stable, peaceful, power-sharing and federalist Iraq in which they have, yes, a disproportionate amount of power, but not the total control they once had.

That's their best option. The other option -- the one they may finally have brought to fruition -- is to have no power at all, and to be driven out of the cities into the barren (and oil-free) wastelands of the western deserts, to live out their lives in misery and privation, and to occasionally have these sad lives cut short by Shi'ite gangs raiding villages and killing them by the dozens.

It's time to use that fact to our advantage. It's time to get "realistic." And the realistic way to settle this is to announce -- couched in diplomatic language that makes it seem less vicious than it actually is -- that unless the Sunnis disarm immediately, and before the Shi'ite militas do, the US can no longer justify the cost in lives to protect the Sunnis from Shi'ite militas. Compliant Sunni areas that give up or drive out their Al Qaeda or Ba'athists terrorists will have US/coaltion garrisons to defend them, and vigorous patrolling to protect them from murder.

Areas which do not comply will be left to the tender mercies of the law of superior firepower.

...

The warplan should be the opposite of that suggested by Baker. Baker claims we must stop making fighting Al Qaeda the priority, and instead seek peace. That's quite wrong. We should refocus on killing Al Qaeda and Shi'ite militiamen who attack US troops, and let peace seek itself, through the brutal methods by which peace is usually ultimately had.

The word "pacify" has a nice connotation, suggesting coddling a baby by giving it warm milk to suckle on. In historical reality, populations are "pacified" through extremely brutal, dirty, and nasty means, killed, raped, butchered, and driven out of their homelands until they ultimately lose all hope of military victory and all desire to fight.

So let the Sunnis be pacified. As the Shi'ites and Kurds may wish. The US will change its mission to hunting Al Qaeda and the like, and offer protection only for those populations willing to support it, where US troops can patrol in almost total safety from attacks by the locals.

In any area where the US is not so welcome by the locals, then they have chosen the manner by which their dispute shall be settled, and such disputes are never settled happily. One side is simply killed and brutalized so badly they're no longer capable of fighting at all.

Let that be the victory in Iraq.

That's "realism." And that's the sort of "realism" I would have greeted from the Baker report.

...

The cycle of violence ends when so much violence is inflicted on one oppponent or both that one or both sues for peace. War ends when one or both sides can no longer stomach seeing their children killed.

That's realism.

...

If there is a civil war, then let there be a civil war, with the US only stepping in to fight terrorists of global reach and those who specifically target Americans. If there must be a bloodbath, then let there be a bloodbath, and let the US take a more active role in rebuilding the country when enough people have been killed that those who survive are actually interested in rebuilding, and peace.

But enough of this media-confabulated rush to the exits. The American people voted the Republicans out in November, but they are not clearly in favor of losing this war. Republicans lost because they were perceived as not winning the war. If the country wanted defeat and surrender that badly, it could just as easily kept the old Republican guard in place. They were doing a fair job at it.

California

Victor Davis Hanson:

I have developed a sort of ritual recently of driving from the High Sierra (Huntington Lake, ca. 7,200 feet), descending into the San Joaquin Valley and stopping at the farm for work and maintenance (southwest of Selma, between Fresno and Visalia), and then continuing over to sea-level at the Hoover on the Stanford Campus.

Trying to be empirical rather than romantic, one nevertheless must admit that this state offers one of the most rare landscapes in the world. Anyone can leave a vast untouched Sierra alpine forest, snowbound, and on the edge of an even more vast wildness to the immediate east over Kaiser Pass, and then within one-and-a half hours descend through foothills into the richest agricultural land in the world—still at this late date not yet completely turned into a San Jose or San Fernando Valley, and replete with orange groves, table-grape vineyards, and endless miles of tree-fruit. Then in a little less than three hours, you drive over a Mediterranean-like coast range and end up near the Pacific with a climate like the Greek or Italian seaside.

We sometimes rightly cry about despoiling our natural heritage. But eastward 50 miles from the Stanford campus to the coast are literally millions of acres that are untouched, and relatively unknown—as is true even in the corridor surrounding the 280 freeway. And this radical change in landscape within hours is matched by equally radical cultural transmogrification as well.

Up in the Sierra at this time of year, there are a number of rugged, 1940s types who plow snow, supply propane, or work for the power company who are as eccentric as admirable in their contrariness and independence.

The world should visit the Valley below to see how various races and religions live in relative harmony without killing each other. Millions of Mexicans, whites, blacks, Punjabis, Southeast Asians, Armenians, and Filipinos intermarry, integrate, and assimilate. Tuesday in Fresno County in the space of 30 minutes I drove by a Catholic Church, Greek Orthodox Church, mosque, Sikh temple, and synagogue—and about thirty Protestant congregations from Unitarian to Church of the Holy Redeemer. Anywhere else in the world—the Parisian suburbs, Darfur, the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Congo, etc., such races and religions would be letting off bombs, assassinating or rioting.

And yet, and yet somehow the United States is pilloried for its “anti-Muslim” stance. When one reads that the Chinese government does not even allow the electric amplification of mosque prayers, that Moscow flattened Grozny to global silence, that the Arabs grow quiet when a Hama is leveled or the Kurds gassed, or that Africa is a story of serial genocide, and instead we are still talking of Guantanamo, then reason fails and we enter the dark world of primordial emotions, as hearts and minds are governed by envy, honor, jealousy, and a sense of inferiority.

But moving on: the most notable cultural achievement of the Valley is a shared allegiance to hard work, family tradition, and the sense of the land that combines to destroy pretension and self-importance. Valley people cannot stand affectation; and are great haters of all pretense.

Finally, under three hours away, then comes the sociology of the Bay Area …

But while it would be easy to caricature the pampered, selfish nature of many of these overachievers in Silicon Valley, and the manifestations of their newfound wealth—lavish homes, BMWs, electronic gadgetry—there is also an undeniable talent and egalitarian competitiveness, a meritocracy at work that creates new things of value to the world and, especially, to the United States. And all that energy and brilliance are sometimes apparent on the street of a Palo Alto or Menlo Park—something to grant and appreciate, albeit in small doses of a day or so. It is a world away from the Sierra or Selma, but in a strange way a logical part of this most unusual state.

Well, that was a long excursus about the eerie geographical and cultural miscellany of a great state—beautiful and majestic even at its supposed eleventh hour.

This Thing We've Been Doing Is Not War

Strong words in this FrontpageMag piece.

Excerpts:

The Iraq Study Group has issued many specific recommendations, but the options boil down to a maddeningly limited range: pull out or send more troops to do democracy-building and, either way, "engage" the hostile regimes in Iran and Syria. Missing from the list is the one option our self-defense demands: a war to defeat the enemy. If you think we've already tried this option and failed, think again. Washington's campaign in Iraq looks nothing like the war necessary for our self-defense.

What does such a war look like?

America's security depends on identifying precisely the enemy that threatens our lives--and then crushing it, rendering it a non-threat. It depends on proudly defending our right to live free of foreign aggression--by unapologetically killing the killers who want us dead.

...

We triumphed over both Japan and Germany in less than four years after Pearl Harbor. Yet more than five years after 9/11, against a far weaker enemy, our soldiers still die daily in Iraq. Why? Because this war is neither assertive nor ruthless--it is a tragically meek pretense at war.

Consider what Washington has done. The Islamist regime in Iran remains untouched, fomenting terrorism. (And now our leaders hope to "engage" Iran diplomatically.)

We went to battle not with theocratic Iran, but with the secular dictatorship of Iraq. And the campaign there was not aimed at crushing whatever threat Hussein's regime posed to us. "Shock and awe" bombing never materialized. Our brave and capable forces were hamstrung: ordered not to bomb key targets such as power plants and to avoid firing into mosques (where insurgents hide) lest we offend Muslim sensibilities. Instead, we sent our troops to lift Iraq out of poverty, open new schools, fix up hospitals, feed the hungry, unclog sewers--a Peace Corps, not an army corps, mission.

U.S. troops were sent, not to crush an enemy threatening America, but (as Bush explained) to "sacrifice for the liberty of strangers," putting the lives of Iraqis above their own. They were prevented from using all necessary force to win or even to protect themselves. No wonder the insurgency has flourished, emboldened by Washington's self-crippling policies. (Perversely, some want even more Americans tossed into this quagmire.)

Bush did all this to bring Iraqis the vote. Any objective assessment of the Middle East would have told one who would win elections, given the widespread popular support for Islamic totalitarianism. Iraqis swept to power a pro-Islamist leadership intimately tied to Iran. The most influential figure in Iraqi politics is now Moktadr al-Sadr, an Islamist warlord lusting after theocratic rule and American blood. When asked whether he would accept just such an outcome from the elections, Bush said that of course he would, because "democracy is democracy."

No war that ushers Islamists into political office has U.S. self-defense as its goal.

This war has been worse than doing nothing, because it has galvanized our enemy to believe its success more likely than ever--even as it has drained Americans' will to fight. Washington's feeble campaign demonstrates the ruinous effects of refusing to assert our self-interest and defend our freedom. It is past time to consider our only moral and practical option: end the senseless sacrifice of our soldiers--and let them go to war.

At some point we either destroy the backers of a global caliphate, or they destroy us. Flip a coin. I wish I could perceive that the West will ultimately be willing to defend its civilization. Alas, I see no such thing.

An Atheist Argues Against Abortion

Here and here.

Humor Is Quantized

Good quip:

What is man that the electron should be mindful of him!

--E. Becker

The whole Gagdad Bob post is quite good.

Hey Ya

More fun with Navy squadron VAW-116. H/T Ace Of Spades.

Boring Stereotypes Offer Diminishing Returns

John Hawkins:

Hollywood has been complaining about sinking revenues and a public that's growing less interested in what they have to offer. Of course, there is no one single cause of Hollywood's woes. The blame could certainly be cast on horrible sequels (The Legend of Zorro, anyone?), terrible remakes of old classics (The Manchurian Candidate, The Stepford Wives), and poor judgement (Did anyone besides Oliver Stone think that Alexander, perhaps the greatest conqueror in history, should have been portrayed as an effeminate prattler with mother issues?)

However, may I suggest an alternative theory? Hollywood has become enamored with a number of stereotypical characters that are not only trite, as if that wasn't bad enough, but actually patronizing to the movie-going public.

For example, there are...

Evil Businessmen: Do almost all businessmen who appear on the Silver Screen have to be greedy, ruthless, polluting Robber Barrons who'd be thrilled to sell poisoned bubble gum to orphans if they could make a couple of bucks on it? Big corporations provide jobs, pay huge tax bills, chip in countless millions of dollars to charities, and usually bend over backwards to make sure their products don't hurt anyone and comply with the law (out of fear of lawyers and government regulators, if for no other reason). Yet, if you formed an opinion of businessmen from watching films, you'd think the average corporate CEO had the same ethical standards as a Mafia Don. Isn't it time for that to change?

Deranged, Trigger Happy Soldiers: Almost every American has family and friends who've served in the military, which is why it's more than a bit annoying to see our soldiers so often portrayed as kill-crazy thugs with mental problems who'd happily kick their own grandmothers down the stairs if they got an order to do so. If anything, soldiers tend to be some of the best of us, which is what makes the way they're so often treated on film such a shame.

European Terrorists: We're in the middle of a world wide war against Islamic terrorists and yet, what do we see at the theaters again and again? European terrorists. That makes about as much sense as making movies about British redcoats threatening America during WW2. Come on, Hollywood, don't let political correctness keep you from doing movies featuring the least sympathetic villains since the Nazis. What better enemy could there be for a hero to fight?

...

Evil Priests: For most Americans, the worst sin they've ever known their preacher to commit is to deliver sermons that are overly long and a bit too dull. Yet, how often has Hollywood featured a lecherous, murderous priest behind the scenes orchestrating some evil plot? If this only happened a few times, it might make for an interesting plot twist, but when you see it over and over and over again, you have to wonder if there's an issue with religion there.

...

Genius Kids: Judging by the number of really smart kids in movies, Hollywood seems to think we have a lot to learn from the children. Newsflash: kids don't have any magical insights about life because kids are dumb! Your kid? He's dumb! You and I when we were kids? We were dumb! It's part of being a kid. You start out dumb and if you're lucky or inquisitive and the adults around you are sharp enough, you get smart over time. That's how it works in real life and movies would be better if they were more like that as well.

Ignorant And/Or Dangerous Country Folks/Southerners: As someone who has actually lived in the country, let me tell you the difference between country folks and city folks: country folks are nicer, friendlier, and considerably more polite. On the other hand, country folks do tend to have a low level of tolerance for snobby Yankees who think they use outhouses and secretly have KKK robes in their closet, which probably encompasses an inordinate number of people who work in Hollywood. Maybe that explains the way Southerners/Country folks are so portrayed in the movies. Some big shot Hollywood script writer stops at a diner in Tennessee, makes some joke about inbreeding, gets told to go take a flying leap, and then he gets them back by writing a movie that features a bunch of ignorant, buck-toothed Southern hicks. Then, he's puzzled about why the movie bombs in the South. It's not a mystery to everyone, bub.

Of course, there are plenty of other stereotypes out there, but you get the idea. Come on, Hollywood, get some fresh ideas!

Unclear On The Concept

James Taranto highlights a great example of journalistic hubris:

Fact-Free Journalism

Will Bunch, a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, is outraged at bloggers who've questioned an Associated Press story claiming that Iraqi Shiites had burned six Sunnis alive. But Bunch, wittingly or not, essentially concedes the argument:

Even if the report [was] wrong, and I'm not convinced that it is, it was in the context of horrific--and demonstrably true--escalating violence in Baghdad. . . .

In fact, it's almost not worth swatting at these gnats from the 101st Fighting Keyboard Commandos. I'd rather just concede, and let them have as their main talking points on the Middle East: The fact that smoke was added to a picture of a real Israeli bombing of Lebanon, that the AP printed an incorrect story about one of the hundreds of deadly acts of sectarian violence in Iraq, and even the allegation--totally unproven and not resulting in any actual charges--that one Iraqi photographer who has worked with the AP has ties to the insurgents.

For our main talking points that the Iraq war is immoral and that U.S. involvement needs to end, we'll take the lies about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda that didn't exist, and the unrelentingly sad fact that more than 2,900 Americans and tens upon tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have now died in an unnnecessary [sic] civil war, all for this mistake.

Let's see who wins that one.

Reporters, of course, are not supposed to have "talking points," and their paramount responsibility is to report the facts accurately. If a story isn't true, it is no defense that it is plausible "in the context."

As a side note, I wonder if the leftist tendency to treat the events of Scripture as if they were made up after the fact by "interpretive communities" is simple projection on their part. It is what they do all the time in order to establish the narrative which supports their own over-arching spurious worldview. Fake but accurate gets the job done.

Attacking The Very Weakest Arguments Of Your Opponents Proves Very Little

Except that you are probably incapable of attacking the strong ones. But uncomprehending bigotry can be a whole lotta fun!

You will not find a single one of the "arguments" caricatured in the animation in the writings of Dembski, Johnson, Wells, Gonzales, Hunter, Witt, Spetner, Sermonti, Behe, or Meyer. But hey, the animation offers big laughs and a smug feeling of "there's nothing to see here" re:ID for knee-jerk atheists.

It's Very Simple. Those Caterpillars That Reconstituted Themselves Into Something Useful After Dissolving Into A Slurry Went On To Reproduce.

And the ones that didn't, didn't. And that's where we got butterflies. You'd have to be retarded not to see it. Or probably a Republican.

Interesting post and discussion at Uncommon Descent, in response to a very lame argument made by an evolutionary scientist, which amounts to something along the lines of "because cars sometimes crash, they weren't designed."

See also this interesting page of quotes and counter quotes.

Nice Montage

"Two Of Us" by the Beatles:

Four-Oh

You paid attention during 100% of high school!

85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don't get scores that high! Good show, old chap!

Do you deserve your high school diploma?
Create a Quiz

Aced!

Try the fun quiz.

Just don't kick my ass after school.

H/T Kobayashi Maru.

You're All Losers And We're Here To Help You

Interesting Gagdad Bob post has this little aside:

Progressives, starting with Karl Marx, waged an assault on labor, eliminating its spiritual significance and reducing it to a mindless, collective “proletariat.” You might say that the left honors labor in the same way they honor the military: both are losers.