Slapped By The NYT

The paper of record takes note of a particular bigoted academic-backwater pipsqueak:

But the bloggers’ eek-a-mouse posturing wasn’t the most striking part of the affair. Instead, it was the weird vindictiveness of many of the most prominent blogs. The stilted and seething tone of some of the defection posts sent me into the ScienceBlogs archives, where I expected to find original insights into science by writers who stress that they are part of, in the blogger Dave Munger’s words, “the most influential science blogging network in the world.” And while I found interesting stuff here and there, I also discovered that ScienceBlogs has become preoccupied with trivia, name-calling and saber rattling. Maybe that’s why the ScienceBlogs ship started to sink.

...

Recently a blogger called GrrlScientist, on Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted), expressed her disgust at the “flock of hugely protruding bellies and jiggling posteriors everywhere I go.” Gratuitous contempt like this is typical. Mark Hoofnagle on Denialism Blog sideswiped those who question antibiotics, writing, “their particular ideology requires them to believe in the primacy of religion (Christian Science, New Age Nonsense) or in the magical properties of nature.” Over at Pharyngula — which often ranks in the Top 100 blogs on the Internet— PZ Myers revels in sub-“South Park” blasphemy, presenting (in one recent stunt) his sketch of the Prophet Muhammad as a cow-pig hybrid excited about “raping a 9-year-old girl.”

Clearly I’ve been out of some loop for too long, but does everyone take for granted now that science sites are where graduate students, researchers, doctors and the “skeptical community” go not to interpret data or review experiments but to chip off one-liners, promote their books and jeer at smokers, fat people and churchgoers? And can anyone who still enjoys this class-inflected bloodsport tell me why it has to happen under the banner of science?

Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd. Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that’s not what’s bothersome about them. What’s bothersome is that the site is misleading. It’s not science by scientists, not even remotely; it’s science blogging by science bloggers. And science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word “science” and from occasional invocations of “peer-reviewed” thises and thats.

Under cover of intellectual rigor, the science bloggers — or many of the most visible ones, anyway — prosecute agendas so charged with bigotry that it doesn’t take a pun-happy French critic or a rapier-witted Cambridge atheist to call this whole ScienceBlogs enterprise what it is, or has become: class-war claptrap.

Good Point

From the latest Denninger screed:

Something I wrote about many years ago: all production comes from mining something, growing something or manufacturing something.

"Financial engineering" is a stripping operation - that is, it's a tax and redistribution scheme on production - it is not production.

It just happens to be a private tax as opposed to a government one.

Outstanding Piece Of Agitprop

Hard-hitting. Accurate. Devastating.

Link

After The Train Wreck

Reasons for optimism.

Pwned!

Deepak Chopra refutes himself due to a laser guided question. It results in a big laugh for everyone involved, leaving Chopra bemused, and (apparently) one of his acolytes decidedly non-plussed.

To The Leftist There Can Be No Higher Outrage Than The Idea That There Are Explicable Reasons Behind Religious Teaching

Hence the firing of Professor Kenneth J. Howell.

Brutally Honest highlights the actual text of the e-mail that got him fired. It is an absolutely calm, rational, charitable explication of Catholic moral teaching. But in the leftist universe such a thing should never be allowed to see the light of day.

Little Children Should Not Have Positions Of Leadership

But they do:

Predictions of cost savings through ObamaCare, like most liberal politics, were based on magical thinking. If they want something to be true with sufficiently intensity, liberals know it must be true.

Small children are natural magical thinkers. Ask any psychologist, pediatrician, or parent. Magical thinkers believe that because they want it or can conceive of it, "it" is so, or will be so. The magically thinking child ties a cape on his back and knows that with it on, he can fly. When he jumps off the roof, he will, of course, fall, not soar like Superman. The usual cure for magical thinking is ToT (tincture of time) and evidence.

People in Congress and in the White House, though not physically small, behave like children: They depend on magical thinking. Because they say it, "it" will be. The latest example is the passage of ObamaCare (HR 3950).

If House Speaker Pelosi says that HR 3590 will save money, it must save money. If President Obama says his health care "reform" will increase care, reduce errors, and improve quality, it will happen (because he said so).

A realistic thinker recognizes that spending a trillion dollars in order to "save money" is like putting on your superhero cape.

The reason most adults do not don capes and jump off roofs is evidence. They may have tried it as a child and have the painful evidence in memory of a broken leg. They may have read in the newspaper or seen on TV the evidence of what happened to a child who tried it. They may simply consider the centuries-old evidence about gravity and deceleration trauma.

Is there any good evidence about health care, evidence that Washington has ignored living in its magical fantasy world? Absolutely!

HR 3590 will "save money"! Practically every entitlement program Congress ever enacted has a) cost more than projected and b) spent money we did not have or do not have. No entitlement program has ever saved money. There is overwhelming evidence to prove this. For instance, there is the GAO report issued 25 years after passage of Medicare showing that it cost 854% of what was projected.

One of my personal favorites is the president's assurance that "HR 3590 will provide care for 30 million uninsured Americans." This is magical thinking in three parts...

...

Magical thinking by children can harm them. Magical thinking by Washington can kill us. Those with power in Washington are not children, but they think like children -- magically -- and ignore mountains of evidence.

We tolerate magical thinking by children; that is part of childhood. Why do we tolerate such behavior in our "representatives" in Washington and the White House?

This Probably Nails It

Jay Tea unravels a probable meaning behind the curious unfolding of the Sherrod affair.

Link

Sullivan: See I'm Not The Only Crazy One!!

That's just super, Andy.

A Ruthlessly Hard-Hitting Piece

And not at all from a usual source.

Leftism In A Nuthshell

Instapundit:

STANDARDS: Leaks that could embarrass lefty reporters: BAD. Leaks that could get American troops killed: GOOD.

What's The Big Deal?

Hugh Hewitt:

The Daily Caller may yet have even more damning e-mails from the collective of peoples' journalists established by the Washington Post's Ezra Klein, but it will be the Ackerman e-mail inciting a campaign of slander again Barnes or Rove that ought to be taught in every class devoted to "ethics in journalism" over the next few decades.

Weeks and weeks in such classes are given over to the Pentagon Papers case, but that drama involved choices made by a handful of senior news media executives and a similar circumstance is highly unlikely to ever confront even a handful of elite journalists.

The Ackerman question, "What should a journalist do when he or she knows one of his colleagues is set out on an immoral and repulsive abuse of their position?" is by contrast one that will recur again and again in the life of most journalists. It certainly confronted every member of JournoList who read the Ackerman post in question, and, apparently, every single one of them flunked the test it presented.

...

Whether the inaction is born of callousness or cowardice doesn't matter much in the minds of most people. The near universal moral judgment about people who could stop harm to victims but don't is that they are guilty of a significant character flaw.

...

There have been many posts and many articles about the episode, but none of the commenting journalists or their bosses has yet thought it necessary to say that what Ackerman did was repulsive and ought to have provoked a strong condemning reaction from any real journalist seeing it.

This silence is a damning admission about the craft of the Manhattan-Beltway media elite. It is, for its overwhelmingly liberal members, a guild, and members of the guild will not readily state even obvious things about the failings of their fellow guild members.

They will not do so even when the offense is one directed at a fellow professional reporter such as Fred Barnes, who is widely admired and understood to be among the real gentlemen of the business. It will be simply impossible to listen to lectures on ethics from any of the editors who have said nothing about this episode, any more than it would be possible to take pointers on ethics from Charlie Rangel's accountant or lawyer.

Either you know disgusting abuse of power when you see it and you condemn it, or you don't.
The second and third explanations for the silence of the lefty lambs are the two mentioned about callousness or cowardice.

Some will admit over a drink or two or three that they read the Ackerman post and didn't think it was that big of a deal. Ackerman's a third-tier scribbler without much swing, they will explain, and a known hothead to boot. There was no need to rebuke a bit player.

Others will shrug and admit that they didn't need the grief that would follow if the lefty hive turned on them for daring to point out that Ackerman had suggested the very sort of smear campaign that was a favorite tactic of the old East Bloc nomenklatura about the business of disciplining dissident writers. The Union of Soviet Writers may have officially disbanded, but its spirit lived on in the JournoList.

Keep watching for any big name inside the Manhattan-Beltway media elite to step forward with a focused, thorough and tough assessment of what JournoList generally and Ackerman specifically means for the news business. As in the aftermath of Rathergate in 2004, you will be waiting a long time...

You've Shown That It Is True, But You Haven't Explained Why It Is True. Therefore It Is False.

Good insight:

The reason "Who then created God?" is not a good objection is because the cosmological argument already addresses that issue. The whole point of these arguments is that there must be a cause that is not an effect of a previous cause itself. To ask why this first cause is this way is to ignore the argument that has just been made that this first cause is this way. Of course, showing that something is the case is not the same thing as showing why it is the case. (I would argue that one can answer the "why" question, but that's another issue.) But the atheist is claiming -- at least with this objection -- that unless the argument proves why something is the case, it doesn't prove that it's the case. This is obviously false.

So, for example, I could say that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter equals pi (in Euclidean space). I could then prove this mathematically. The atheist objection would be "Why should this ratio equal pi?" The answer would be, "It does. Here's the proof again." The atheist would then object "Your mathematical proof doesn't explain why this ratio equals pi." And again, the answer would be, "It does equal pi. Here's the proof again." "But why should it be this way?" "It is this way. Here's the proof again." Etc. It reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin balks at his math homework. You put two numbers together and they magically become some third number. No one can say how or why it happens, you just have to accept it on faith. "As a math atheist, I should be excused from this."

So when an atheist asks why God should be excused from having to have a cause, the answer is simply to repeat the argument, which (allegedly) demonstrates that there must be a first cause that does not have a cause itself. Perhaps the argument fails to demonstrate this, but the objection that God would then require a cause doesn't even address it.

I Scored 91/90 On This One.

Link.

I Knew It. This Is Why I Tend To Think Of Militant Atheism As Little More Than "The Revenge Of The Chess Club Poindexters."

P.Z. Myers serves up some helpful biographical information here:

We're happier out of a straitjacket than in one.

I saw something wonderful at a science fiction convention a few weeks ago. At these events, people often put on odd and extravagant costumes, and I saw one rather obese young man who'd made a minimalist choice: he'd come as one of the Spartans from the movie 300, which meant he was standing in the crowd wearing a red speedo and a bright red cape…and nothing else.

Now imagine this same young fellow at an event at your high school. It would have been brutal. I know; when I was in high school, I was a little poindexter, ostracized, laughed at, and treated like a space alien, and I was treated mildly: being even more different, being the fat kid or the gay kid or the homely kid or whatever excluded you from the Jock Clique or the Heathers or whatever ideal the majority of the student body worshipped meant merciless torment and unremitting cruelty. Often in our culture socialization is achieved by maltreatment and unkindness and is directed towards shaping superficialities.

But do rest assured: Myers' militancy is based on purely rational considerations.

From The Hard Drive

I just stumbled across a Word document I wrote a while back that treats of the idea that Christianity leads to bad science:

---------------

Would it be fair to say that a principle should be regarded as sincerely and honestly held only if it is applied consistently? And conversely, that if it is invoked only when convenient and ignored when inconvenient, then it is not honestly held and, hence, not really a principle?

Would it be fair to say that you are invoking the principle that ideological/worldview biases can result in untrustworthy or incorrect science?

Would it then be fair to say that the degree to which faulty science will be done or asserted depends on how crucial a particular scientific stance or result is to upholding a particular ideological/worldview bias?

Would it be fair to say that if apparently unguided evolution via random variation and natural selection (AUEVRVANS) turned out to be true that a great many theists would be able to shrug their shoulders and say “well, that’s the way God did it?” For example, I personally have been informed on many occasions by proponents of AUEVRVANS that one can be both a theist and acknowledge the truth of AUERVANS. I believe this is the position of the NCSE. On the other hand, I’ve read frustration expressed by scientific atheists that theists go on believing regardless of scientific arguments, because they can always say “that’s the way God did it”. Thus, the atheist himself testifies that he is aware that the question has little de facto impact on many theists (even though he thinks it *should*). I’ve also seen theists berated by atheists for not changing their views due to the atheist’s understanding of the scientific evidence. In effect, these atheists are telegraphing that they hold the scientific evidence to be absolutely pivotal to the worldview question. So we have some atheists proclaiming (or complaining) that AUEVRVANS is no threat to theism, while others proclaim that it is a decisive support for atheism (otherwise why would Richard Dawkins have proclaimed “Darwin makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”?). In effect, they are saying that AUEVRVANS is a “don’t care” for the theist position, but very much *not* a “don’t care” for the atheist position. And a great many theists would certainly agree.

Would it be fair to say that if AUERVANS turned out to be demonstrably false then a great many atheists would find their atheism to be untenable? For example, I personally have never heard or read an atheist proclaim that if it turned out that evolution were a guided process that this would have absolutely no effect on their atheism. I don’t believe that opponents of AUEVRVANS typically inform atheists that one can be both an atheist and a believer in guided evolution. After all, it is Richard Dawkins himself who said, “Darwin makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Do you assert that Darwin being essentially wrong would not matter?

Given this asymmetry in cruciality-to-worldview of the truth of AUERVANS, then wouldn’t it be at least equally prudent to consider how atheism might have skewed the interpretation of scientific evidence?

Would it be fair to say that if scrutiny only needs to be applied to theism as a skewer of scientific interpretation, then a non-existent general principle is being disingenuously invoked, and therefore that if atheism does not really *need* to be scrutinized as a skewer of scientific interpretation then neither should theism, and finally that if theism does, in fact, *need* to be scrutinized as such a skewer due to such a principle, then so does atheism?


Possible weasel out:

Theism is obviously false, therefore anyone who believes in it has an incompetent intellect, therefore anything they have to say scientifically would obviously also be false.

Would it be fair to say, then, that the work of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Pasteur, and Maxwell should be ignored?

A Veritable Fusillade

A bravura John C. Wright post.

It begins:

A reader, briefly named EdV, hurls down his gauntlet at me. He makes the asseveration that Christianity retards the progess of the arts, sciences, and the cause of liberty.
I humbly submit for your candid consideration that Christianity provides the only rational ethical basis for human liberty, and the only rational metaphysical basis for empiricism.
The ethical basis of liberty is the obviously counter-intuitive principle that all men are created equal in dignity and should be equal under law, and that the law is not make by law-makers but is discovered by them, since it exists in a metaphysical or ideal form, produced by a source beyond human making.

Logically, there are only two possibilities: law are manmade, like poems, or laws are discovered, like geometry proofs.

If laws are manmade, any man with the power to change the law is right to do so, and law is merely the will of the stronger. No liberal or equal laws can be erected on such a basis.
If laws are discovered, then they must pre-exist mankind, and the justice of those laws must be a stubborn fact no human will can change, and ergo their justice must derive from a non-human source.

Justice cannot come from the material universe, from the merely by-play of atoms in motion, because Justice is a non-material and non-temporal thing. Justice is a mental thing: an ideal or an idea. Mental things only exist in minds. Justice is also universal and eternal, or else it is not justice. Ergo the only mind that could have invented or decreed the idea of Justice is an eternal and universal Mind. And this all men know to be God.

Without such a Divine Mind, there can be no justice, merely partisan interest or temporary Hobbesean armistices. Without justice, there can be no liberal or equal laws.
Since men are evidently not equal in every measure except their dignity as human beings, only a mystical belief in the dignity of human beings, that is, the belief that men are made in the image of God, can sustain that dignity.

Any other measure leads to immediate inequalities. If we say the dignity of man is based on his capacity for reason, then logically neither babies nor senile crones nor anyone who can be painted as ignorant or stupid has any right to enjoy the benefits of equal and free laws. Indeed, it cannot have escaped the notice of any observer of the modern world that those political parties and regimes who base their laws on any principle other than the divine equality of man all too soon become elitist: the Soviets were run by the Nomenklatura; the Democrat Party in America is surrounded by an atmosphere of sanctimonious elitism so thick that you could scoop it into bowls and eat is as soup.

(The Political Correctors in the US and Britain are composed of people stupider or wickeder than average whose only claim to moral superiority is their laughably transparent claim to be smarter and purer than average. They are so braindead and morally retarded that they cannot even tell if babies are human or not. They cannot deduce whether or not members of the same sex can mate, and need laws to protect their mating rituals and vows. Even the simplest moral calculation, such as asking whether minorities can be ‘racist’ or such as asking whether it is right to concede civilization, unfought and undebated, meekly to the Jihad, is too complicated for their pea sized brains, and requires moral courage beyond the power of their subpea sized testes. All these things are beyond their allegedly titanic intellectual efforts. ‘A is A’ is something they don’t know what it means, these paragons of the intellect. Fie on them all.)

But, my scorn for the anti-intellectual intellectuals to one side, whether you agree or not of the moral and mental caliber of these Morlocks, let us at the minimum agree that they are elitist: they believe a cadre of experts, learned, or concerned citizens should have the right to order the affairs of the layman, the ignorant, or the unconcerned, based on the superiority of their learning and their compassion. They do not believe in the equality of man (or the privacy of property, which is a corollary thereof).

The modern intellectual does not believe that a stupid man or an evil one has a right to earn his
own money as he would, and spent it as he would, to speak as he would, worship as he pleases, consume as he pleases, dig up or drill as he pleases, and burn what he pleases on his own land. The only liberty that the modern intellectual is eager, nay, is sanctimoniously devout to grant the subjects of his enlightened despotism is the right to sin as they please, especially sexual sins.

In short, the claim that all men are created equal cannot be based on any empirical or scientific claim, because then it can be empirically disproven. It must be based on a mystical claim, a spiritual reality that all enlightened men perceive by spiritual means, because then to dispute or dismiss it is benighted.

Without equal government, a liberal (I mean liberty-protecting) government is not logically possible. Once you grant that the elite moiety has the right to dictate the education and behavior of the benighted majority, the idea of restrictions on the government, the idea of Constitutional prohibitions on that the state may do, the very idea that the state is only authorized to do those things the governed authorize, will be greeted with Pellosian bewilderment and indignation. “Are you serious?”

...

And that was just the warm up.

Excellent Point

One I've not seen made before:

New Atheists claim that science can determine whether or not God exists. When they actually attempt to be specific about the type of evidence they would count as scientific evidence for God’s existence, it immediately becomes clear they are demanding gaps. Thus, it makes no sense to complain about God-of-the-gaps reasoning while demanding people use God-of-the-gaps reasoning to show God’s existence. The New Atheists’ problem with Francis Collins is not that he invokes a gap, but that it is not gappy enough for them. This is a glaring example of employing double standards, and is disingenuous.

Cultural Stasis

Gagdad Bob:

So the birth of rock as a cultural phenomenon can be traced to early 1956. Even as it was occurring, the seeds of its subsequent rebirth and transformation were being sowed, for it was at the St. Peter's Church Hall fête in Woolton on July 6, 1957 -- almost three years to the day that Elvis had revealed it in the studio -- that John met Paul. Like early Elvis, there was a purity to what the Beatles were doing at the time. In fact, I would say that they were motivated by the identical spark that animated Elvis that day.

Eventually the spark was extinguished and the fire put out. Elvis entered the military in 1958, at which time he was taken into captivity and replaced with the "false Elvis" who put out all that lame music and made all those crappy movies. Buddy Holly in the grave, Chuck Berry in jail, Little Richard in the ministry, Jerry Lee Lewis in his fourteen year-old cousin. The music business quickly "contained" the messianic revelation, so that by the early 1960s, popular music was again almost as banal as it had been prior to Elvis. (Of course, there were exceptions.)

But then the Beatles arrive in early 1964, eight years after Elvis, and just eight years later the Beatles are already a thing of the past.

Now, eight years ago is 2002. Has anything in music changed since then? Does 2002 feel like a different era? Is anyone nostalgic for 2002? How about 1992? 1982? I mean, people still listen to U2 like they're contemporary, but their first album came out over 30 years ago. 30 years! I sometimes listen to music that came out in the early 1980s, say, early REM, but it doesn't feel at all like nostalgia. But very few people in 1975 listened to the music of 1945. And if they did, they were certainly aware of how different it was from contemporary music. No one confuses disco and swing.

And yet, to listen to Elvis in 1964 was already nostalgia, just as to listen to the Beatles or Beach Boys in 1973 was already nostalgia.

Worth A Thousand Words

Seen here: