Saturday, October 31, 2009

On flu shots

I don't distrust the idea of the State saying that influenza vaccines are a good idea. If the State wanted to control us with injections, they could sneak stuff in to the other vaccinations: polio, measles, etc.

As for the hucksters claiming that vaccines cause autism, I see them as enemies. Behind that claim is the assumption that people on the autistic spectrum are diseased. I am on that spectrum myself and I take that talk personally. Beyond that, the claim is bumcombe; autism is genetic. Extreme forms of autism are a problem, but they won't be solved by lies.

(Some disclosure here: I was a regular at LGF's Parachat lounge, whose regulars migrated to Table 9. When LGF went with a pro-vaccine stance - which, I must add, opposed conspiracy-theorists on the Left as well as Right, here - the people in both lounges mounted an insurgency against it. For that, Charles Johnson shut down the former lounge. I am, like Moldbug, a believer in sovereignty. I applauded Johnson's decision and I still support it. I have more mixed feelings about the attendant mass banning since dubbed "The Night Of The Vaccine Needles". But all that is over and done with now.)

I'm more concerned about the State mandating who can get the vaccines. And, yes, there is a concern that the State might force a shortage by its own policies; and to fight the emergency, demand control over the healthcare system. In the Left's history of the past decade, Bush used 9/11 as a pretext to curtail civil liberties. The Left has been casting about for its own emergencies to do the same. The economic crisis has already led to mass takeovers of our industries and banks. Global warming is another supposed crisis, but the people have been losing faith in that.

H1N1 could serve as the next "manbearpig" that we all have to Unite Against. But, so far and touch wood, it's not acted as our generation's 1918 pandemic or even as SARS. H1N1 has just acted like... the flu.

Labels: bullshit, enemies, lgf, progressives

posted by Zimri on 17:54 | link |

The gay Jesus, again

The latest Biblical Archaeology Review has revived the corpse of the gay Jesus. We may as well brace ourselves for another round of That Flamewar.

To introduce our Conservative guests to this dustup: one Morton Smith - who as far as I know is not related to Joseph Smith the discoverer of the plates of Moroni - went to the monastery of Mar Saba and found a copy, the ONLY copy, of a purported letter written by Clement of Alexandria. In it, Clement is discussing two rogue texts of the Gospel of Mark, neither of which are or were in any version of Mark available to the general public. One text talks about Jesus meeting with a young man, alone, to teach him "the mystery". The other makes it explicit that both men were naked. Clement endorses the former, "mystery" text against the "naked" text and against our text; and he tells the reader, don't let this secret leave these walls.

A decade or more ago, I'd made public my opinion that these versions of Mark were unknown even to Matthew and Luke. That is: they were forgeries. I thought that Smith had found an authentic letter of Clement and that Clement was telling the truth up to a point; I just figured that someone had screwed with the text of Mark before Clement read it. This was not unknown in Judaeo-Christian literature; the Gospel of Matthew is such a plagiarism, standing in relation to its source much as Chronicles stands to Kings, the Book of Jeremiah to Septuagint Jeremiah and so forth.

More recently I've grown to wonder if the forgery might be datable... a little later. I first showed my hand in 2005. I carried this on here, and I put down a Morton defender here.

Since Helmut Koester, a grey eminence of Biblical scholarship, is not backing down from his endorsement; we skeptics are pretty much left to the "withholding judgement" argument. This is cowardly and lame of us, and (for the Christians amongst us) even Pascalian. But it's either that or get dragged into a dispute over a text with many problems for all sides.

I won't get into all the problems here, but I have one: that we haven't seen mention of the rogue Marcan texts from Clement's contemporaries. Even if we accept that these texts were available only to Egypt, the sex-averse Gnostics in Nag Hammadi should have said something. Maybe one day we will uncover an Egyptian bathhouse with a well-preserved library.

Labels: ghey, religion

posted by Zimri on 17:06 | link |

Friday, October 30, 2009

Ismism

"Ism" is today a marker for a school of thought. This is a classic exploration of the theme, which I first viewed in the Alamo Drafthouse out on highway 6, west Houston.

The new Biblical Archaeology Review (35.6) has Steve Mason's article on Ism. X-ismos comes from the Greeks, up to 2 Maccabees and Ignatius. When I was in school, I learnt this in the context of "Medism". It was the act of X-ising; becoming X. It was never the marker for the ideology of X. For that, the Greeks had the construct X-ia; "sophia" for the domain of the wise, for instance.

This article, being a BAR piece, riffs on "Judaism". It claims that the term applied to one who was not at first a Jew; but was Judaising into one. This didn't happen much in antiquity, the Jews then being a marginal bunch who didn't take to converts; but Hanukkah changed everything. That is why the word crops up in 2 Maccabees.

Mason blames the Ism-ism of Ism on Tertullian; which he used to define Christianity ("Christianism").

In that light I'm tempted to take back the Ism. The construct X-isation for the act of X-ising has never sat well with me; it's a mix of Greek -iz and Latin -atio. Now that I know, or have been reminded, that it's just -ism; I can put down that misbegotten seven-digit horror.

I might not even have to change a lot of what I've written about Islamism or Progressivism. Ism is inherently progressive. It never gets to Dr Utopia's promised land; it is always a Whig journey. Given that Marx never quite managed to define what the end state of his Ism should look like, even that old Communist might have got it right.

That still leaves the non-Whig ideologies - and we do need new words for them. Jew-hating, for instance, is not inherently progressive. The conservative mindset (as opposed to the sundry reactionary ideologies) is anti-progressive by all definitions; it cannot contain the "Ism". "AntiSemity" and "Conservaty" would be better, at least befitting the Latin, but these terms look like a joke even to me.

Labels: antiquity, linguistics, progressives

posted by Zimri on 18:00 | link |

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Weather advisory for Harris County

This is what we've got coming for us:

Updated: 3:40 PM CDT on October 29, 2009
Wind Advisory in effect until 6 PM CDT this evening...
Flash Flood Watch in effect through Friday morning...
Tornado Watch 782 in effect until 9 PM CDT this evening...

Niiiice.

Labels: personal

posted by Zimri on 18:44 | link |

CAIR package

Someone shot a couple of Jews in a parking lot. The cops don't know why; but given LA, the suspicion is Sudden Jihad Syndrome. The 24 Hour Rule would apply here.

Just in case, though, CAIR have a press release. That much is fair game.

This reminds me of what I was saying earlier about criminal enterprises. You get a group which is inherently criminal, like the Crips. But not all the crimes the criminals do in Crips are what that gang actually wants. Here, CAIR doesn't want the headache of addled Muslims puttin' a jihad on bystanders.

CAIR used to get on TV and say "ofcoursewecondemnthisattack BUT! Palestine, Zionists, al-Aqsa, Jerusalem blah blah". That but-headedness turned off the American people. They're not doing that anymore, which means they've learnt something.

They are still a terrorist organisation though.

Labels: bullshit, crime, islam

posted by Zimri on 17:36 | link |

Banned Bibles

According to the AP, 15000 Bibles were confiscated in Malaysia. (h/t WrathOfG-d from the blogmocracy.) It was because they used the word "Allah" to translate "God".

Putting the aspie / nitpicker's hat on, I somewhat agree with the Malaysians in that “Allah” is too Qur’anic for use as the name for God. I’d prefer al-Ilah to stand in for the Hebrew El. (And al-Rabb for Lord / Adonai / the four letters.) But that's a distraction.

"Allah" is the translation that the Middle Eastern Churches demand of their Bibles, ever since they moved away from Aramaic. So it's not controversial. And I doubt that any Christians have sponsored a conference considering exactly what word they should use in Malay Bibles. It’s obvious that Something Else Is At Work in the Malays’ anti-Bible drive.

It's safe to say that what's at work is Malay and Muslim intolerance.

Labels: islam

posted by Zimri on 16:57 | link |

Why freedom?

Conservatives, if they argue for freedom (as American Conservatives do), tend to justify it as a gift from God which no man may alienate. Liberals take God away and then proceed to alienate people of their freedom. Is this inevitable - are secularists bound to be crushers of peoples' dreams?

I think not. There are two arguments I can come up with, which support individual liberty against serfdom. This should work even for secularists.

Ayn Rand had one: morality can be constructed from the axiom “human life == good”. Liberty allows humans to live their lives; oppression does not. We might call this the mathematician’s libertarianism. It’s kind of... cold, but that’s Ayn Rand for you.

There’s also the school of thought that people have two innate drives: to avoid being crushed under someone else’s boot, and to be the person crushing others under your own boot. Libertarians understand that there are a limited number of job openings for boot-crusher. They also understand that even if they got to be one of the boot-crushers, they would no longer be able to enjoy the society of their peers; it’s a life of fear. So, liberty is better because it’s just easier and more fun to live that way.

I used to believe the former but I am leaning to the latter these days.

Labels: liberty, misanthropy, secularism

posted by Zimri on 16:40 | link |

Click it or ticket!

Another signboard: On the left hand, a chalkboard with repeated lines, "I will fasten my seatbelt". On the right hand, a plain message: "OR GET A TICKET!"

It's the same mentality as the commercial featuring a flock of tickets, flying toward a car wherein is some hapless middle-aged white man who has not done his Civic Duty.

Or: the commercial wherein a longer-haired white man is stopped at a light, and slowly surrounded by cop cars. He tries quietly to put on his belt. At that point all five, or more, of the cops turn on their lights. He is caught!

This isn't even a public-safety message. This is just the State saying, do what I say or I will punish you. It's the message of the lord to his serfs.

Under Mayor Bill White, Houston doesn't care about fighting real crime. Houston cares only about fighting that perception.

Under White, Houston is all about criminalising the violation of ordinances. They want the cash from "violators". They want the appearance of being strict. Most of all they want to run up the stats for Group A so it doesn't look so bad when, or I should say if, they should arrest a member of Group B who is committing (say) a mugging.

I've already dealt with this. But it's getting worse.

Labels: bullshit, crime, propaganda, race

posted by Zimri on 16:37 | link |

Lost battle

In 2003, Amir Taheri called out hijabis and niqabis as being political extremists, and not merely devout Muslims. I cannot find the original article but many clips survive. The upshot is that the head-cover first came into being in the late 1970s.

One rather hilarious expression came from Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He announced, "scientific research had shown that women's hair emitted rays that drove men insane". I'm not disputing the existence of insanity-inducing radiation from women, but I'd always assumed it was emitted from the cleavage. (Maybe Iranian women have different DNA.) At any rate the Hair Ray became part of the Right-wing lexicon over here, labeled a "Zionist hair ray" by LGF at the time.

Anyway that was in 2003. Nowadays the hijab is everywhere. I saw a black lady in line at the local Fadi's. She was wearing the black hood... and beneath it, a skin-tight and revealing outfit. Which, you know, I have no objection to. But it defeats the purpose of Islamic modesty. So why the hijab? Something Else Must Be At Work.

She was just showing off the numerical strength of Islam, even though she clearly did not believe a word of its moral injunctions. She was expressing "brave resistance" against the American cultural majority.

Labels: islam

posted by Zimri on 16:36 | link |

Oldspeak, Newspeak

The LGF dictionary is gone now. This represents the end of a shared language amongst that community.

The old language represented, for the most part, a community of friends with a shared set of values, and its enemies were shared among enemies of all civilisation: Iranian extremists ("hair rays"), Left-wing trolls ("mobies"). Some were assumed to be insane and naive ("moonbat").

A new lexicon has emerged. This represents a new community. Its enemies are personal enemies of that blog ("downding", "stalker"). Some are assumed to be insane and evil ("bad craziness").

Labels: lgf, propaganda

posted by Zimri on 16:30 | link |

Republicans as a third-party

Given the three-person races in New Jersey and New York district 23, I am now hearing excitable Conservatives describe the Republicans as being the "third party" in 1860. I do not think it fits.

This is based on a memory of early nineteenth-century politics: the pro-Congress Whig Party, versus the strong-executive Democrat Presidencies of Jackson and Polk. The memory is accurate enough... up to the Compromise of 1850.

They're forgetting that the Whigs were dead by the mid 1850s. Even looking at the 1856 map shows that the Republicans already existed, already had a base of support, and were already the effective second party as of Election Day that year.

By 1860 the Republicans had an even more consistent and electable platform than they had in 1856. No-one else had their degree of organisation, will to power, and popularity. So they were not a "third party".

What happened in 1860 is that it was the turn of other "third parties" to shatter the Democrat coalition. There was a North Democrat, a South Democrat, and a Constitutional Union.

So, were the Republicans ever a third party? Maybe in 1855. There were Congressional races up to then wherein the former Whigs played around with, for instance, the American Party. But most of this was shaken out of the system by 1856. And it wasn't caused by a challenge to the Whigs; the Whigs had already collapsed.

Labels: republicans

posted by Zimri on 16:18 | link |

The unwinnable debate

I tried to wrestle with Gödel Incompleteness last night. I had to define a few terms, so I cut that part out, and will try again here.

Gödel says, if I'm reading it right, that if any given branch of mathematics is big enough to handle basic arithmetic - then that branch is already too complicated for all theorems in it to be decided true or false. An insoluble problem in that branch might be solved using other branches, but then you'll run into the same underlying flaw with those branches. Nothing in this universe can solve all the problems in mathematics.

This is separate from those debates gone Pascal-complete. (Those debates do have their resolution; the side which invokes Pascal is the loser.) Some debates have no resolution under the terms laid out. It's a sobering thought and, yes, there are religious implication to that as well. Gödel himself thought that God existed. (Gödel's God would have sentenced Pascal to Hell, if he was just, but that is quite another rant.)

Labels: algorithms

posted by Zimri on 12:37 | link |

Proofs and algorithms

I mentioned below that an argument is a class of automaton. I may have jumped ahead a little bit. Really what an argument is, is a chain of reasoning. In mathematics, arguments are conducted in a more formal means. We call these arguments, "proofs".

A mathematical proof assumes that its audience accepts base mathematics and logic. To communicate these findings means that mathematical proofs must be laid out in terms of a "formal language" which all mathematicians are bound to accept. In short, a mathematical proof is itself a mathematical object. That means we might be able to prove things about ways to express mathematical proofs.

That is how we get from arguments to automata; even bad arguments, like Pascal-complete debates, follow these rules.

Labels: algorithms, science

posted by Zimri on 01:25 | link |

Renewable energy

I mentioned it in passing below, but Understanding E = mc² bears posting again. What it boils down to, is that "renewable energy" doesn't scale for a population of our size.

Solar energy is good only for dealing with peak daylight usage; and it doesn't solve the problem of the baseline energy we must use when the air-conditioning isn't running and the offices are powered off (at night).

Geothermic, wind, and hydro power together won't make up that difference.

There's another equation to keep in mind here: total energy = number of people x energy use per person.

Environmentalists have a principled case to levy against coal and oil (less so, natural gas). If we find a principled environmentalist, who is fine with our population the way it is, and wouldn't mind lower energy bills: he would then support nuclear power. However we don't see this amongst the Al Gore set. Something Else Must Be At Work.

That Something is that these "environmentalists" are not, in fact, environmentalists. They are simply a coalition of those who would set a ceiling upon the nation. Here, the ceiling is allowable power usage. With total energy capped, the number of people becomes too high, and energy use must be rationed.

The Left wants either fewer people, or a return to the Dark Ages - except for the Left elite.

Labels: bullshit, energy, progressives, propaganda, science

posted by Zimri on 00:59 | link |

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

We are not ready for this

Daily Mail says: we can create a sperm cell from a stem cell, and an egg cell from a stem cell.

The article claims this was done through embryonic stem cells; which I'm against, as a pro-lifer. But it could just as easily have been done through stem cells in the bone marrow. The researchers are talking skin cells. So I am not going to get into the embryonic / pro-life dispute here. What is going on here is bigger than that.

I see here humans being cloned by strange humans, humans who have no genetic relation to the humans being cloned. This scenario is not exactly new; there was always rape, most bluntly, but also (since 1978) we could have had forced harvesting of eggs and sperm, and in vitro fertilisation. But those methods were crude and difficult to implement. Now someone can have the needed cells when he bumps into us on the subway.

I see here the fulfillment of The Abolition Of Man (CS Lewis) toward the Brave New World (A Huxley).

If human society worldwide, the technologically-advanced nations anyway, all took part in stable, contractual unions for the purpose of procreation then I would be embracing this discovery. (I have supported government discrimination for the sake of heterosexuality; but supporters of gay marriage and even polygamy should agree with me here, within their equivalent unions.) Human society would enact laws worldwide that mandated that only a stable family had the right to this technology. This would end the curse of infertility; at the same time, no child would be born except to parents who loved them.

But if there is a theme to this blog (this month anyway) it is this: human society is not inherently nice. We are higher primates; the act of being good is a conscious effort. There are evil people in the World Jungle, who don't bother; there are even evil nations. An evil nation of high IQs - I have in mind here, North Korea - can and will use this to mix and match the genes the nation wants. They will use this to create a genetically engineered caste of bastards. Worse than bastards; they will not even know a mother's love, and their real father will be the Dear Leader.

Labels: fascism, misanthropy, science

posted by Zimri on 23:46 | link |

The SHOCKING x That y DOES NOT WANT You To See

Are there people who still fall for that? To me it is obviously both an appeal to one's natural curiosity for "forbidden knowledge" ("x"), and an appeal to the hatred the audience has for their common enemy ("y").

It is likely technically true that person y doesn't want to bother with x. On the assumption that y is like most non-sociopaths, and x a pile of crap, then y would prefer that belief in x is minimised. I may not be a good example of a non-sociopath, but even I don't want you to be watching Expelled, dabbling in UFO theories, or hunting down copies of the Protocols. There are enough malinformed lunatics in this nation without adding to the pile of People I Must Avoid.

Or maybe I'm in on it! Oh noes!

Labels: bullshit, misanthropy

posted by Zimri on 17:06 | link |

And Another Thing

Actually that's the title of a new book. It's by Eoin Colfer. "PART SIX OF THREE", it announces; the "three" being a reference to the funny byline to "Mostly Harmless" ("increasingly inaccurately titled trilogy").

A lot of the features of this book are like that. They are references to the original that aren't played for more than fanservice. "Goosnargh", etc. It kind of reads like the fanfic I wrote in seventh grade which, I suspect, I burned.

His ear isn't entirely tinny. There's good stuff alloyed over it. Bronzy, one might say.

Labels: books

posted by Zimri on 16:43 | link |

Yay, flu shots

I had a flu shot yesterday (not H1N1 - this was the vaccine for the normal flu). It made my right forearm sore. Now I feel sore all over and a little headachy.

Bah.

Labels: personal

posted by Zimri on 16:40 | link |

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Former market-dominants

GNXP, and now Van der Byl in UR, have commented that the Mesticos in Angola - a mixed-race bunch - are now the overclass in an ostensibly Marxist nation.

This is notable because before that the Mesticos started out as the most pro-Portuguese bunch in the colony. They remind me of the mixed-race people in Haiti. In Haiti, famously, the Whites wanted what we might call a unilateral declaration of independence and a slave state; the Blacks wanted blood. Mixed-race people are a natural middle group - they know they don't stand a chance without help. In Haiti this group supported France.

What pushed the Angolan Mesticos to Marxism was Salazar the dictator, in the mid twentieth-century. Salazar had exported a lot of Portuguese trash to this colony. There they predictably set to discriminating against the locals. The former elite resented that.

Mestico Marxism followed the Russian "socialist worker" model and not the Chinese peasants'-party model. They knew that a peasant-party would be indigenous and, if the worst happened, Haitian. In effect the Mesticos found new colonial masters, in Moscow.

Labels: misanthropy, progressives, race

posted by Zimri on 22:05 | link |

Slicing pi

Okay, say you've got a number you're trying to find, but it takes too long to get there. Like: you want to find the 31st prime number. Or, the 1,000th digit of Pi.

In the classical methods, you just go and... grunt out all the prime numbers up to #31 using the Eratosthenes Sieve. Or, you calculate pi to 1000 digits.

There are certain things you'd like to do in number theory - like density. You'd like to know if the distribution of numbers in a sequence is random. Dealing with digits in an extended transcendental number, like Pi: if the digits are truly random, in the same density no matter what "snapshot" you take (digit 200 to digit 300, say) - we call that number normal. We don't know if Pi is normal. Because it just takes too long to get as far as digit 200. We have to keep calculating digits 1-199 first.

One David Bailey has got us part of the way, with Pi at least - he wrote a computer programme, with which one Simon Plouffe found a sum which can get you to the place you want to be in the Pi sequence, a lot faster. (If you don't mind hexadecimal; but in the field of computer nerdery, who does?)

We don't yet have that ability to plug in a number and get that sequential prime, though.

Labels: algorithms

posted by Zimri on 19:33 | link |

Quit torturing your kids

I was thinking about longhand multiplication of multidigit numbers. (Even worse: the aptly-labeled Long Division.)

Say you are multiplying 234 x 567.

Here are the steps as we learnt them in, I think, fourth grade:

• 1. Make a mark below the underline below the two numbers - at the right.
• 2. Set your position to the right-hand digit on the bottom row.
• 3. Set your position to the right-hand on the top row.
• 4. Line up the digits in these positions (4 and 7).
• 5. Think back to the multiplication tables you memorised in third grade. (If you're me.) (Here it's 28.)
• 6. Add whatever number you had to "carry". (Here, nothing - first digit and all.)
• 7. Write down the right part of that number at the mark mentioned in #2 (8).
• 7. "Carry" the rest - (Put the 2 above the next-to-left digit on top, which is the 3.)
• 8. Set your position to the next-to-right hand digit on the top row.
• 9. Go back to #3. Repeat until out of digits on the top.


• 10. Awesome, we have a number on the bottom (234 x 7 = 1638).
• 11. Now set your position for the SECOND number, one digit over to the left. (Instead of 7, we'll be working with 6. Or, you know, 5, once we get there...)
• 12. At the same time, shift where you plan to start the next single-digit multiplication result.
• 13. Go back to #2. Basically, do the whole thing over again except 234 x 6, or 234 x 5.
• 14. Those three multiplication results? Add them up. The way you learnt in second grade.

If you ask me, this is about the worst algorithm in the worrrrrld.

For a start, you're telling your brain, on multiple occasions - "quick, what's 4x7?" Most of the time you're also dealing with "carried" numbers which means, in addition, "2+1, STAT!" Every time you go to memory, it's a headache. It's a neural SQL call: connect, SELECT.

Worse, it doesn't scale well. With m digits on the first row and n on the second, the work is on the order of m x n. For my two three-digit numbers I had to do nine sweeps. That includes recalling times-tables, and fer cryinoutloud addition-tables. I particularly enjoyed feeling like a retard when I didn't get them immediately. Nine times to make that double neural SQL call. Computer geeks call this a polynomial-time problem. I call it a pain in the rear.

At least it's soluble in polynomial time unlike that damned rodent problem we had last fortnight; so your computer can manage it. Also it guarantees an exact result (if you did it right). Still, Sammy would never have put up with it.

Nor should you. Here's a better idea: get a slide rule.

I never got to use one of these puppies. By the mid 1980s we had the notion that the Calculator was going to save us. But calculators get stolen, and broken, and run out of battery life. No-one's going to do that to a slide rule and they are cheaper anyway.

A slide rule runs on a logarithmic basis. If you are trying to do 234 x 567, it's the same as doing exp[ln(234) + ln(567)]. In layman's terms -

• Find the log of the first number.
• Find the log of the second number.
• Add those two logs. (This is also a recursive process - it runs as many times as the number of digits in the smaller of the numbers.)
• Reverse the log of the total.

So instead of O(n^2), where n is the number of digits; we've got O(n)! And the original had twice as many "SQL calls" (mult and add) as the slide rule did (just add). There are SIGNIFICANT savings here especially if you have a lot of digits and/or a lot of numbers.

You sacrifice a little in accuracy but this is worth it. Numbers that big don't usually have to be that precise.

PS. Also note that polynomial-time processes can be done, in some cases, in linear time...

Labels: algorithms

posted by Zimri on 18:14 | link |

Too much stuff

When the blog gets over 1000 posts and a span of seven years... it gets harder to tell if I've posted about an issue before.

I'd thought I'd dealt with gay marriage and apparently, I hadn't. At least not in an existential way. I had to use the search feature of Blogger to find that out.

And I'm not even particularly prolific. I have huge gaps in the record. We've just returned from one that lasted, what, two and a half years?

Labels: meta

posted by Zimri on 00:26 | link |

Monday, October 26, 2009

Know your place

I think this blog's bias might be toward aristocracy.

I'm not talking about bringing the House of Lords back into the US (the Lords these days are a bunch of Labour Party hacks anyway so, no thanks). And I'm not so undemocratic as to support the Sulla solution.

Aristokratia means, literally, "rule by the Better Sort of people". But I take it as locally-applicable. In my place in the world, I can strive to be the best I can; and I will know enough not to dabble too far in stuff I'm not so good at. We would all be happier if we all learnt our place.

Religious people tend to reject modern science; some of them claim that their religion forces them to. When they propose to affect scientific standards, that causes trouble. Religious people are still good at preserving cultural and moral norms. They just need to stick to what they are good at, within their limits.

I was born in the UK, and raised in elite-ish circles, and I didn't have significant contact with the average American until I first ventured into an AOL chatroom in 1996. Someone like me shouldn't be elected President and, as it happens, I legally can't be elected President. I'm not sure I should be running for any public office. I know my place and it's not public office.

So, that in mind, let's talk gay marriage. Here, as elsewhere, homosexuals want to be treated the same as heterosexuals.

Conservatives, and most people in general, counter-argue that self-perpetuating cultures have an interest in promoting - that is, discriminating in favour of - stable heterosexuality. The demand for equality for group B must necessarily mean the loss of prestige for group A. That's fine and dandy if group A doesn't deserve its prestige. But in this case, Conservatives insist, group A does deserve it. If heterosexuality loses prestige in a given culture, that culture will die.

I side with Conservatives here. But I reject Andrew Sullivan's contention that this means I have "contempt" for him. (Beyond my general distrust of humanity, of course.)

The culture retains an interest in recognising reality (as with evolution). The two relevant realities are that homosexuality is an innate trait that cannot be changed, and that sex is dangerous. In that spirit, society has an interest in taming sexuality among homosexuals - as among heterosexuals. Therefore I disagree with National Review insofar as that a system of state-sponsored monogamy makes sense for homosexuals. This would be a second-tier of interpersonal contract - "civil union" - with a limited slate of rights associated with the first class (which is marriage).

What Sullivan doesn't seem to understand is that just because I put him in a lower caste on this issue, that doesn't mean I think he has no place at all; and I would put him on a higher caste on other issues. He has this opinion that it's all or nothing. This sounds narcissistic to me.

It's not that I have anything in particular against homosexuals. They, and Sullivan, just don't matter all that much to me. I've got an inventory of many other nails who stick out too far and need hammering down - including religious Conservatives, and including marginal-Americans (like myself and Obama). Besides even gays should have more important concerns.

Everybody should make their peace with the state they live in. For those who feel like overreaching - imagine what you'd get if the culture collapsed, went Muslim, and/or went through a Reaction. Rather less than what you have now, most likely.

Labels: conservatives, ghey, misanthropy

posted by Zimri on 16:34 | link |

Moderation is no virtue

So off I go to Obsidian Wings, where the slogan is "This is the Voice of Moderation".

Moderate ideas for them: equalising homosexual marriage to heterosexual marriage (it's bigotry to think elsewise), National Health By Stealth (to the Left of Obama, note), and punitive taxation.

Take it away, Vitruvius!

Labels: bullshit, progressives

posted by Zimri on 16:33 | link |

Autistic atheists

PZ Myers of Pharyngula thinks that these opinions of Christians are weird:

Over 65% of Christians believe angels really exist. Over 70% think the Bible is the most important book in the world. 75% think Jesus' execution atoned for our sins. Over 50% think the book of Genesis is a true account of our origins. 75% believe Jesus was literally born of a virgin. Over 70% literally believe in a Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

I've bolded the statement that is testable. Unfortunately for PZ Myers that statement is also true.

When we talk about "importance" in a document, we must define that as "influential". That means it has an influence on people and the planet.

I agree that the Jewish scriptures, precursor to the Christian Bible/s (and to the Jewish Tanakh), had negligible influence on classical culture, outside the circles of a few antiquarians (and anti-Semites) like Manetho.

But then the Christians edited the Jewish literature alongside their own literature into "the Bible" (mind you, this would have been the Catholic Bible with the deuterocanonica, but bear with me here). The Bible, as so defined, absolutely became important. If nothing else look at how much it was copied. It remains important today - even to nonbelievers, who are stuck with it as part of their culture (and also it incorporates a not-bad Near Eastern history text, as Baruch Halpern has proven).

Some here are exhibiting the mental trait that when they think something shouldn't be important, that means it objectively isn't. We call that trait "autism" and some of the rest of us have had to work to overcome it. PZ Myers and certain of the commenters on his site ought to give that a try.

Labels: autism, bullshit, religion

posted by Zimri on 16:32 | link |

Mithridates in Burma

China supports the SLORC in Burma. Much of that is because China is protecting its citizens, now the effective elite in Burma. The role of the Chinese goes beyond a simple market-dominant minority. It's more like the position of Italians in Asia just prior to Mithridates. If the SLORC were to disappear then things would go badly for the itinerant Chinese. This has always been the case.

The SLORC right now seem to be letting their subjects vent their frustrations upon the Kokang. I'd not heard of the Kokang before now. They are a different sort of Chinese. They came originally from Yunnan province, whence they'd moved into Burma centuries before. They're not political adventurers like the SLORC-supported Chinese.

China's lack of support is strange to me. It seems natural that a non-democratic, proud nation with a sense of grievance should step in on their co-ethnics' side. This is what Germany did to then-Czechoslovakia, 1938.

I'm guessing that China sees the Kokang like the English see the Ulstermen today. The English and Irish have been doing okay together over the past two decades, and the English don't need the headache of yet another Orange march. Second, the people over there are throwbacks: Ulstermen are Scots who were ported over in the late 1600s, and the ancestral Kokang are apparently the losers of a Ming-era power-struggle.

Labels: race

posted by Zimri on 16:31 | link |

United We Stand

After 9/11, "The Nation Came Together" - the way two spouses who hate each other come together, around the time the cops show up. There were still signs that the necessary conversation had not taken place. One such symptom, I think, would be the bumper-stickers.

One set had the "In God We Trust" stickers. Another set had the "United We Stand" stickers.

The people who had "In God We Trust" were presumably religious and patriotic. Conservatives, in short. The people who had "United We Stand" were more secular; and I'd expect those would have been the neo-cons and the "9/11 Republicans", each a strain of Liberal voting for national-security in 2002 and, less so, in 2004.

One might see an irony in that it was the "United We Stand" people who voted against the nation in 2006 and 2008 (and 2004 to a point). But it might just be that they were national-unity people all along. They treated the national will as the national deity and, given another chance to Come Together As One, they voted for the "unifying candidate" Barack Obama. Jonah Goldberg has a word for that.

Labels: fascism

posted by Zimri on 16:28 | link |

Hypocrisy

I have to say that it is a little bit rich of Liberals to complain about the far-right associations of Conservatives now.

For decades Liberals fêted outright Communists as their vanguard and as their literary élite. If anyone like Horowitz pointed out these networks, all the nice moderate people snickered and sneered and called it conspiracy-theorising. ACORN-bashing became a little more respectable last year but the Left still got its sneer on.

But now it's a taint when someone is buds with an extremist.

Sure. Go on, pull the other one.

Labels: bullshit, liberals, progressives

posted by Zimri on 16:27 | link |

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Internet "Bad Craziness" as social pathology

Here's a pretty good article, from Research News: EXTREMISTS MORE WILLING TO SHARE THEIR OPINIONS, STUDY FINDS.

There's a slight irony in the hat-tip. It comes from the anonymous "Vitruvius", who shares the site "Small Dead Animals" with one "Kate". Their associations with extremists bear scrutiny.

The base group of extremists I have chosen are the essayist "Fjordman" and the blog "Gates of Vienna". These two share a consistent, principled, and courageous stand for indigenous Europe against foreigners. This happens to be about the definition of "racism" although, to their credit, they don't much mind that tag either. That much is out of the pale for American Republicanism, which has been what we now call "neo-con" at least since Frémont in 1856. As a result, when Little Green Footballs called out Fjordman & Co., they were frozen out of the mainstream American Republican-leaning blogs.

Where Kate links 76 times to "Gates of Vienna", Vitruvius links 26; and for "Fjordman" the stats are similar. Vitruvius is a third the extremist Kate is. He probably sees himself as a moderate by comparison with his friends; and, being a moderate in his own mind, sees "Small Dead Animals" as a blog which accepts moderates and, therefore, a moderate blog.

I don't have much of a "blog in this fight". I know my views are extreme, if only because most Americans like democracy and I don't.

My self-awareness as an extremist may well derive from my choice to be as antisocial as possible. People in a community, like cobloggers (here, Vitruvius) always establish a Somebody Else's Problem Field when they come across a friend who disseminates what the LGFers call "Bad Craziness". Vitruvius doesn't agree with all of the positions of the sites his blog has linked so many times. But he's chosen his side and he knows who his friends are. Which is a comfort.

I don't mean to pick on this one poor guy. On the Left side, propagandist scum like Jones, Zinn, and Lerner ought to be poison; ditto, ACORN. Some, like David Corn, get it. Most Left bloggers don't.

It's just a microcosm of what happens in the wider blogosphere. It's easy enough to diagnose. When you see a blogger attack the extremists in a given community, it might be a principled stand. But if the blogger is only attacking the former community, at the same time making excuses for extremists in another community, it is not. "Something else must be at work." That something is that he is a member of that latter community. He's a hack, maybe even a shill; and his pretensions to higher principle are to be laughed at.

The blogosphere enables this pathology, this willful hyperopia. Even among Sagacious Iconoclasts.

Labels: fascism, misanthropy, progressives

posted by Zimri on 15:43 | link |

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Ends and means

Looking through the recent "tags", I see that a strong plurality of posts I've done here have been about "conservatives" and mostly hostile at that. This is an artifact of the time I've spent hanging around (and occasionally trolling in) Conservative and generally right-wing blogs. If I spent more time at the blogs of Progressives (or Liberals), people being the primates they are, I might find similar, or at least analogous, problems with them.

I have not been disappointed.

For instance, take the blog "Holocaust Controversies", which I linked at the end of "LGF Considered Harmful". A first draught of that post below was a comment to the HC blog. HC delivered a few retorts, which mostly boiled down to "lighten up", but some were substantive and bear reproducing:

So Charles pointed out that mere appearance of V[an]J[ones]'s name on a document on a truther site (which is known for putting other names there of people who did not give their consent) doesn't necessarily prove that he is a truther. He is right. Such a crime! He also noted that Van Jones is too far left to be in the admin. Somehow you omitted this.

Since when is ACORN a "criminal enterprise"? And please, don't bring up videos of a few individual ACORN employees being naughty. It doesn't prove that ACORN is a criminal enterprise. (Not that I give a damn about ACORN. But let's not be ridiculous.)

[Killgore Trout trolling Hot Air] was a clumsy act of anti-racist sabotage.

The first of these has two parts: whether Van Jones was in the Truther movement, and whether Charles Johnson supported Van Jones.

The first is an historical question which may be demonstrated via the documents of the relevant period, which would be late 2001 to Election Day 2008. By the principles of historical research, Van Jones's trutherism should have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Buttressing the point, Jones was at a truther rally in San Francisco in 9/11/2002 (from topsecretk9). Against the counterargument, two of the guys covering for the man, Lerner and Zinn, are hard Left themselves, and long known by responsible academics as ideologues; and these two were also signatories to Truther events (from Ace).

Time was when LGF itself would be a clearinghouse for commenters to run that level of fact-checking. Now, LGF bans people who find this stuff. So when Charles Johnson covered for Jones, while still saying he was "too far Left": what Johnson was doing was dismissing a genuine evil (trutherism) and forbidding talk about it; while allowing for a relatively harmless political disagreement ("far Left"). Jones shouldn't be allowed to get away from his Truther past; and here was Johnson letting him do it. HC may think the view of the Right is hypocritical; my view, histrionic and aspergerish. But Van Jones's trutherism ought to be an objective conclusion from the facts at hand.

Let's talk ACORN next. ACORN was always against the rule of law in a capitalist society; which laws it views as a tool of the ruling class. I mentioned in the link (which HC didn't follow) that ACORN wasn't technically an inherent criminal enterprise but that it should be. Reading more about ACORN, though, I find that it got into the Motor Voter campaign, which was designed to create voter registrations without allowing checks into actual voters. ACORN became an explicit mafia at that point, where before it was just a parasite.

Lastly, Killgore Trout. An "anti-racist" action might be to publish a paper, or even a comment at LGF, refuting Putnam or otherwise detailing how races might mix and diversity be celebrated thereby. KT instead elected to go to a Conservative forum in the middle of the night, knowing that the moderator was asleep, and to post racist comments. KT didn't prove anything about any HotAir moderators and he didn't inspire any HotAir commenters to cuddle up and sing kumbaya. What he did do was to reinforce the prejudice Black visitors to any Conservative site might have, which is that White Conservatives are racist. This played to a racial stereotype others have of White Conservatives and, therefore, was racist.

"Holocaust Controversies" concludes, "I will survive". He doesn't care about the harm LGF does to history (in the case of Jones), to the nation (ACORN), or to race relations (Killgore). HC is just glad the harm is done "to certain people" which means, all Conservatives; and not just to the people with holocaust on their minds, the pretended concern of his site.

"Holocaust Controversies" is not a principled blog. It is not willing to expose Leftist websites, organisations, or celebrities to the same level of scrutiny it exposes Rightists. What HC has to say about RS McCain, or other Conservatives, will have to be balanced against that knowledge.

Labels: enemies, lgf, progressives

posted by Zimri on 20:40 | link |

Little Green Footballs Considered Harmful

I am seeing an ongoing fight between Robert Stacy McCain of "The Other McCain" and Charles Johnson of "Little Green Footballs". McCain has the support of the general right wing. Johnson has received the support of Liberals.

McCain is, I believe, a Conservative who has accepted the logical conclusion of Conservative thought in the South. He is a racist, although since I am an evolutionist myself I must give that a guarded pass. Less forgivably he is a Confederate. That last is nothing to be proud of, and it appears he is un-proud enough that he has tried to hide many of his comments he had posted in FreeRepublic.

Johnson for his part has had "much to be modest about" himself, lately, and in this post I will lay out that case.

Johnson has banned close to two thousand people from his site over the past couple years. At first, given the rules Johnson had established, many of those deserved it. But the current flood of bannees have been banned not because they are racists, or creationists, or general thread disruptors. They were banned because, LGF having supported anti-American saboteurs close to the Obama administration, the commenters objected.

The saboteurs I have in mind are, firstly Van Jones the hard-left "ex" Truther, and shortly thereafter the Alinskyist criminal enterprise ACORN. Johnson's support of these scum was made public in the Right not by McCain (then considered a rather extreme figure). It was the centre-Right (if foul-mouthed) Ace of Spades who called Johnson out. Hundreds of LGF's commenters agreed with Ace of Spades that Johnson was in the wrong; and they took it personally, as a betrayal of all LGF had stood for. If they said so - wham, out the door.

(My own account at LGF, "Zimriel", had been banned already in 30 June; I deal with some of that here.)

Yes, Conservatives are an inherently non-intellectual movement with a pack mentality. Yes, Johnson has turned over a rock. But Johnson's swift move over to the hard Left, and the tyrannical way he runs his blog, have discredited him, and bolstered his enemies.

Since then, Johnson has only moved further. Johnson has been an accessory after the fact for the deliberate act of racist sabotage by his enforcer Killgore Trout. And he's deleted at least hundreds of thousands of comments I know of, maybe millions; in some cases in mere spite against, for instance, buzzsawmonkey who was a supporter of LGF too. He has turned a dozen or so formerly critically-thinking commenters into slavish sycophants and bullies; hundreds more are lurking in fear and sorrow wishing they could have their community back. It's like Ukraine shtetls in the 1800s over there.

To put it in computer terms, Little Green Footballs is to be Considered Harmful.

To the McCain skeptics like Barrett Brown and Holocaust Controversies who are citing Charles Johnson: He's just using McCain, and you, to get his credibility back and this time from the Left. He'll stab you in the back too once his site crawls back up in the Alexa ratings.

Labels: enemies, lgf

posted by Zimri on 16:31 | link |

The mind of the troll

There's a discussion going on at Ace's. One of the sporadic commenters dropped a troll post. The brawl went along its merry way, and then - as I expected - one of the "good guys" dropped an equally bad comment.

I've been a troll in some boards, including Ace's. It's a bit like why the Joker liked to cut people with knives. He wanted to know which of his victims were cowards. Sometimes I want to know which of Ace's commenters is/are going to come up with something stupid.

There is something in Internet impersonality, when I'm in a crowd like a comment-thread community, which brings out the "sociopath" in me. I wouldn't hurt someone in person. I don't even like killing ants, when I find them wandering the house (although I know I'll have to get rid of them somehow). But when I see an anthill outside, I wonder about what the ants would do if you kicked their hill.

Labels: misanthropy, trolls

posted by Zimri on 14:46 | link |

Barack Obama: dumbass

Steve Sailer thought that Obama was a genius, and as for his college SATs "he aced them". Sailer based this largely upon two presumptions: that Obama actually wrote Dreams From My Father, and that the book was something other than an extended wank. Sailer took the book seriously enough to write a lengthy tafsir entitled "America's Half Blood Prince".

There's a controversy about Dreams. Some think Obama wrote it, and it's rubbish. Others (myself included) think Ayers wrote most if it. Either theory doesn't reflect well on Obama's verbal skills.

One might then ask Sailer, if Obama is such a brainiac, why is he keeping his college transcripts locked away; well, Sailer responds, because he didn't want people to see how smart he was. That argument may have been tenable last year but I don't think it is anymore.

From energy to green jobs to climate change to healthcare, Obama has evinced a profound lack of interest in objective reality. From what I've seen of humanity, this derives from lack of ability to handle the "hard subjects" like the sciences. In short, he is bad at math.

So were his parents. Barack Senior's economics, I kid you not, was "100% taxation". Ann Dunham's thesis, I kid you not, was entitled "blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and thriving against all odds". The whole point of HBD is that intelligence is an inherent genetic trait, and that such traits are hereditary. Barack's parents were dullards. The chances were very low that these two clowns were going to spawn the next Gauss.

President Barack Obama, Harvard Law alumnus, and Nobel Prize laureate is a certain lefthander on the Bell Curve for g. Also I doubt very much that Obama's math SAT cracked 500.

(Not that there is anything wrong with that; but then, we're not talking about a candidate for the assistant manager at the corner Barnes & Noble, here.)

His verbal skills were probably higher (they might even have to be) so his overall IQ may still be 120+ (and his combined SAT >1000), but when I see him off Teleprompter I have to wonder.

If we're handing out George Armstrong Custer "Kicked Ass!" Awards like we did on UseNet, for the most cocky prediction that then collects the most arrows in its throat, Sailer's "he aced them" would be in serious contention. Somewhat ironic given Sailer's stated views on heredity (and this even without the four letter R tag).

P.S. Obama's temperament stinks too.

Labels: bullshit, HBD, obama, sailersphere

posted by Zimri on 01:45 | link |

Friday, October 23, 2009

Criminal enterprises

The post I linked earlier from Barrett Brown rang mostly true for me. "Mostly." (As Newt would say.) It did have one section which made me sit up (labeled "The Thomas Paine Affair", although 'tis not really about Paine):

Protein Wisdom contributor Darleen Click, who has been running the site for a while now, at some point got into the habit of characterizing ACORN as a “criminal enterprise,” presumably because some of its employees were found to have committed crimes while engaged in the enterprise in question. I suggested that, if this was how a “criminal enterprise” is to be defined, then the Catholic Church must also be a criminal enterprise insomuch as that many of its employees were also found to have committed crimes while engaged in the enterprise in question, and that these crimes were not only of a more serious nature, but also seemingly more widespread even when taking into account the relative size of the church. ...

If ACORN is a criminal enterprise, then so are plenty of other things that the gang at PW would probably not want to see referred to as a criminal organization. Incidentally, ACORN is indeed kind of a criminal enterprise insomuch as that it is an enterprise with several employees that have broken the law in the course of their duties – just like ... and also the Catholic Church. So perhap we should save the term “criminal enterprise” for those enterprises that are involved first and foremost in crime, such as the Crips

Brown and Click, and I, are all agreed on the inherent criminality of the Crips; if what they did became legal, they would move to something else illegal. I reject Brown's terms of debate. The crimes which ACORN and the Church in his argument were committing were non-inherent. Even bringing in the Crips as a control group, he's talking about the gangbanger's nephew engaging in a coked-up shootout with the division head of ACORN and the local priest. The Crips then would be forced into doing the same damage control as ACORN and the Church: it would be a distraction from the work (or crimes, if you like) that they wanted to do, and they would all be saying in unison "I don' need this shit, yo". It's entirely pointless, for the purpose of this debate, to talk about individuals engaged in crimes which the parent organisation does not approve.

That's not even what Click was talking about or, at least, it shouldn't have been. I think it's worth discussing the criminality of the Catholic Church and ACORN as designed.

The Catholic Church spawned from a "proto-Orthodox" hierarchical group extant in the third century CE. This group formed its hierarchy mostly as a means to enforce stability upon a religion, Christianity, which prior to that was chaotic. Before the proto-Orthodox became the Church, we have the hostile witness of the pagan Celsus around 178 AD, "On The True Doctrine", preserved by the Christian (but not Catholic) scholar Origen and whose extracts I am reading from the translation of R. Joseph Hoffman (1987) pp. 90-1. As an organisation founded to define and preserve Christianity, the infant Church arrogated to itself the right to disobey laws against Christianity, then on the books in the Roman Empire. In that respect the Church was by definition potentially criminal; analogous to the 1950s civil-rights groups involved in disobedience.

ACORN, the "association of community organisations for reform now", spawned from the Rathke / Wiley National Welfare Rights Organization in 1970. It formed in order to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy via the tactic of Alinsky, which was to weasel into Liberal programmes which had been addressing poverty and to wreck the US Government thereby. Here too I am citing a hostile witness, Discover The Networks. Unlike the Catholics (and the civil-rights groups) ACORN was founded explicitly to work within the written law (to exploit it). Civil-rights and then the Great Society were the law of the land already in 1970.

The difference between the Church and ACORN, and the reason the Church is not inherently criminal and the reason we can call ACORN "anti-law", lies in the two organisations' core missions and in their relationship to the State. Remember here that "the State", by the Hobbesian and more recently Heinleinian definition, can be nothing less than law enforcement.

The Church's core mission, as mentioned, is to protect Christianity. Whatever lawbreaking is done on behalf of Christianity, or against Christianity, is incidental; and the Church has no interest in ending the State. If the Church is allowed to operate, and its people obey the law: then no laws will be broken. Even if everybody becomes good practicing Christians, the Church will still hang around if only for the charity works it does.

ACORN's core mission is the collapse of the State, and therefore ACORN is an organisation designed to end law itself. If ACORN is allowed to operate, the State will collapse and there will be an anarchy; after which, a new State will arise, which doesn't have the liberties ACORN now assumes, and which will not tolerate an ACORN of its own.

So Click is wrong in practice. ACORN is not a "criminal" organisation. It is following our legal standards. Even its aim, to destroy our standards of "law" and "crime" in this country, is legal under the First Amendment.

But for me, and I suspect for Click, it distorts the very meaning of "criminality" to exclude a group so structurally anti-law. What ACORN has done for four decades should be illegal. This is an example of the Liberal Loophole, analogous to that which Obama followed in becoming President. Our system allows for community organisations, and community organisers, to exploit said system so as to destroy it.

Labels: liberals, progressives, religion, trolls

posted by Zimri on 19:55 | link |

Look into a publisher, the publisher looks into you

The long post just below agrees nicely with a discussion they're having over at Zombie's. The gay-rights movement, like the Conservative movement, has its own library and (therefore) its own publishers. Where the Conservatives have Regnery, homosexuals have Alyson.

Say a mainstream conservative wants to publish a book. He would consider Regnery as a prolific publisher with similar interests. But Regnery puts out a number of books of questionable content: in 1996, for instance, it put out “Inventing the AIDS Virus” by Peter Duesberg. (And then there are the Politically Incorrect Guides…) Someone who gets published by Regnery faces a real risk of having others dismiss him by association as a nut bar.

Or, take the book Tales Out Of School. This just dealt with growing up gay. Mainstream gays like it. Alyson has a reputation for putting out books dealing with homosexuality and youth, so why not?

...You see where I'm going with this. Alyson wasn't at core a gay-oriented publisher; it was a paedophilia-oriented publisher - which is owned by Pat Califia, and which issues forth a literature so vile that I can't repeat much of it here. (Go to Zombie's.)

Rogue publishers like Regnery and Alyson have no problem with putting out a book which is both true to their overt mission statement and of high quality. But any activist publishing outfit ultimately has to cater to activists. Since activism attracts sociopaths, a nontrivial number of books by activist publishers will be evil. The publishers' motives for publishing good books will be less than pure, and their record of publishing infamy will taint the good books under their imprint (unfairly perhaps).

I think the takeaway from all this has to be, if you are a prospective author then BE CAREFUL. In addition I think some of the more reputable publishers might consider not ruling out gay books, or conservative books, out of hand as "fringe". Some of these books aren't inherently fringe and they shouldn't be pushed out to the edge so easily.

Labels: conservatives, ghey

posted by Zimri on 19:23 | link |

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Robert Spencer, LGF, and me

Not long ago I draughted a slightly laboured epigram: "If there's a PIG in your library, your library is a pigpen. If you write a book for this series, you're covered in mud." The link in that quote was to The House of David's first mention of Robert Spencer (of JihadWatch fame) in May 2006. That post had a parenthesis which cited the man with disapproval, but the article's main body cited his words with approval.

There's more to this saga between 2006 and now. Believe it or not.

I'll start with the positive. I do not believe that Spencer is a racist. A better such case, in the eyes of today's academy, could be leveled against me. (I'm a "believer" - I would say, accepter - of human evolution, including into the modern period.) Second, I don't have a problem with his belief in Western cultural superiority; except to quibble that by comparison with the Chinese culture, this may turn out to be a matter of preference only. Third, where he argues that democracy doesn't work for some cultures, I can't argue with that. Here too I may be more authoritarian than he is. Lastly, Spencer has an enviable grasp of Islamic history, language, and culture; and has written and edited several books, of which I cannot do other than recommend The Truth About Muhammad. Robert Spencer matters.

My fundamental disagreement with Spencer has to do with the Crusades. Spencer is still fighting them. He argues for the cultural and Christian West. There's a slogan for that in German: ein Reich ein Volk ein Gott. In my opinion this path can lead Conservatives at least to oppressive and, worse, sclerotic government if not to capital-F Fascism. The systems of government I would hold up as alternatives are probably not your cup of tea either, but at least I want a State that can be reasoned with.

Around the time I was lurking in LGF, among the commenters there was one Kejda "Medaura" Djermani. Medaura had already brought up Spencer's associations with the fascist (and not just right-wing) fringe in Europe, but did it in a less sober format than in the link here.

In 2007 I registered with LGF and, in their parlance, became a "lizard hatchling". I was not, then, on Medaura's side against Spencer. I was on her side that Kosovo is Albanian turf. That put me against Serge Trifkovic, a viciously anti-Muslim Serb who even then I knew had at least a literary association with Robert Spencer. At this point I wasn't sure which of the Djermani-said, Trifkovic-said comments I should believe. I reached an internal initial conclusion that Medaura was a troublemaker, and so I did not then wade in.

At some point in early 2008, I believe, Spencer disappointed me finally with his blurb for Hutchison's "PIG to the Bible". At this point I fell in solidly beside Medaura.

12 September 2008, Spencer had noticed (or rather, LGF had informed / shamed him) that racists in Gates of Vienna and Brussels Journal were tagging along behind him, and so Spencer turned against them. LGF noted that in post Spencer on Cologne 'Anti-Islamisation' Meeting. I had additional thoughts in #247, 4:16:34pm (but I can't link directly thereto, because I'm an ex-lizard "stalker" now, and links hence may be redirected; so you'll need to research that and scroll):

I am pleased that R.S. has acted against racialist opportunism on that site. (To his credit he has been consistent on this.) However he still troubles me -

"2. To form one group for indigenous Europeans, as has been done in several countries, reduces virtually every issue to the one non-negotiable issue of race and ethnicity, discourages cooperation, and thus encourages Balkanization, works against the idea of representative government, and obscures the common values of Judeo-Christian civilization that are shared by people of many races and ethnicities."

Note that he can't help but slip "Judeo-Christian" into his definition of civilisation in a European context ("common values"). In place of a racial definition of Europe, he wants a religious definition.

And then came the The Great Halloween Ban. Here's my wrap-up (not among those I've apologised for - #655 / 6:25:58pm):

A certain Albanian atheist poster and I were banging on this theme for some time back in the day, that the cut of the jib of this Spencer fellow was not as likeable as one might, uh, like. Colour me unsurprised. I absolutely guarantee you that the Lady M, for her part, is dancing around right now to the strains of New Order's "Told You So".

There have been signs for months that this was in the works. Spencer's pro-Crusades contribution to the "Politically Incorrect Guide" series was a freakin' HUGE sign. Providing the blurb to the obscurantist P.I.G. Guide To The Bible was, in my view, worse.

My understanding, which I believe I shared with That Other Commenter, was that Spencer holds himself as a believer in European civilisation as European, and defines Europe in magical terms. He always claimed that his beliefs were Catholic - and maybe they would be, in Pope Innocent III's Vatican.

I hope everyone has learnt something. You see someone ranting about "culture", no matter how well you think you know him, watch out.

Some months after that LGF sent sporadic swipes at Spencer, with varying degrees of fairness. I don't even remember if I said anything.

Then, on Thursday, April 23, 2009 2:33:16pm: commenter "Bubblehead II" announced that Spencer's friend, the shrill blogger Pamela Gellar, was about to take a trip to Cologne on behalf of Manfred Rouhs's group Für Volk und Heimat uh, "Pro Köln". (These guys assured us they were NOT racists, because they'd invited a guy from the Society of Pius X. Apparently.) 3:37:33 pm PDT, Johnson followed up on this with a post devoted all to her - Pamela Geller: Poster Girl for Eurofascists. In this post we learnt that Pro Köln had announced Spencer as one of the other speakers.

I mused, 5:07:24pm, in #268:

Recneps Trebor has to be thinking hard about this one. He wants to be taken seriously as a scholar and overt participation in a fascist conclave would undercut that. On the other hand if he doesn't go, Geller and Belien might squeal that they've been "thrown under the little green bus".

Soon enough Pro Köln breathlessly reported Spencer's agreement, as Johnson reported the next morning 8:38:01 am PDT. Longtime commenter "Ayatolla Ghilmeini" 4:35:37pm relayed an email from Spencer that he was NOT going; but there was still no word from the man himself. Instead Johnson reported 5:43:00pm, that Spencer had posted, he was "looking into the group and the people involved".

I'd given this fracas a semi-pass at this point, but then Spencer said that Rouhs "has no neo-Nazi connections and is not an extremist". Big mistake. Charles posted the Rouhs library Saturday, April 25 at 3:56:17 pm PDT, Pro Koln Organizer's Nazi Merchandise. We all found a LOT of bad shit in that library. The merchandise Charles himself showcased included a Hess book, which I found was more properly Nazi themed than Nazi, but that was just nitpicking. In its place I found two books by Herbert Taege: a truly evil man, who was in the Waffen SS when they burned down the Warsaw Ghetto, and who graduated to guarding Dachau; I have no idea how he avoided the hangman. And it had holocaust apologetic from Dirk Bavendamm. And it had Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein, Jewish Bolshevism: Myth and Reality. Other "lizards" found other material. A man's library shows the man's mind: Rouhs was absolutely an extremist, and he would have supported the Nazi regime if he had been alive. Why Spencer covered for this refuse is beyond me.

The whole mess sprayed egg upon the faces of all involved, as summed up by gegenkritic. Spencer has shown that there are few far-right and, yes, Nazi alliances he will not accept; and he has to be shamed into not accepting those. Both he and Gellar would be blogospheric footnotes by now, were it not for the subsequent self-footnoting of Lord Charles himself.

At any rate: since then, Robert Spencer has compared me to Ezra Pound, so I gather these opinions are mutual.

Labels: fascism, lgf, propaganda

posted by Zimri on 19:08 | link |

Proteaniety

I should disclose, in the context of the post below, that I'd not seen Jeff Goldstein as being on my side for some time even before this year (for instance, the Newdow affair; he sided against), and going through his archives... I see no reason to change that assessment.

For instance, the snark on Intelligent Design this April: "Or, can’t we just all get along? Because if not, so help me, people: Locusts!" The April post had a link. Surely the source would explain how creationists and biologists could "get along" ...?

Sadly, no! (As they say.) The source was not all Jeff G pretended it was. The source separated evolution from biogenesis and said of intelligent-design (accurately) "it’s not scientifically falsifiable, first of all, which means it isn’t a scientic theory, regardless of how vehemently the anthropocentic proponents of irreducible complexity insist it is". "Irreducible complexity" is precisely the argument of god-of-the-gaps intelligent design. So which is it - is intelligent design something that can "get along" with biology in a classroom? or is it something that needs to stay out of that classroom? DOES NOT COMPUTE [ERROR] [ERROR] [ERROR]

When I see a disconnect like that, I have to go look at the context of the piece which created the disconnect - that is, of the April post. This was the morning after the Protein Wisdom attack on LGF and on its then commenters (including me), for being overly solicitous of Obama in his eyes. In that context, his "locust" comment was another you're-being-obsessed concern-troll leveled at LGF, of which the latter site then had too many.

The Jeff G of the source comment (assuming he were consistent) would have praised Charles Johnson's recent posts on the topic. At least he would have approved Johnson's posts concerning Texas (and Louisiana); the intelligent-design crowd down here want to neuter classes of evolution, even before anyone gets to life's "first cause". The Jeff G of this April doesn't care.

Jeff G is also not bothered about theological creeds slipped into our patriotic standards, although that insouciance is more longstanding. I've opposed his de minimis poo-poo'ing almost since I first found his blog (the link I posted there has gone bad, so you will need to go here). "De minimis" means, it's something I've got to "lighten up" on. That's bullshit. What about the people who fight to put this crap into the so-called "public square" - how about they start lightening up? Since the lightening-up only goes one way, this has to be about something else.

That something else, and his dissonance over intelligent-design, is simply that Jeff G has chosen a side. That side happens to have a lot of Conservatives in it. He is not going to tell them anything they do not want to hear. He has sacrificed his objectivity and, on the subject of the church and state particularly, I question whether he is even speaking his true mind.

Since Jeff G appears to disapprove when people give a guy the benefit of the doubt, I'm sure he'll appreciate it when I don't bother for his sake: Mr Goldstein is a talent wasted in ideological hack-work.

P.S. / UPDATE: Barrett Brown of True/Slant has reported his own experience at PW.

Labels: conservatives, secularism

posted by Zimri on 18:11 | link |

Presidential Fail

In the run-up to reviving this blog, I was writing essays in other peoples' comments. I posted a few comments about to what degree we can hope for Obama's failure. I had first taken Jeff Goldstein's position, but then at LGF I posted "to hell with Goldstein" because he was acting like a schmuck. Maybe the most thought-out of my comments was at Roses' on 3 October.

The occasion for that last comment was Obama's personal failure to get the Olympics for Chicago. Many Conservatives and Libertarians cheered that failure. Obama's supporters were upset about it all, including about the cheering.

When the head of state sticks himself out this far: he is not just himself, but he is also the mascot for the position of "head of state". Therefore when Obama fails, the Presidency is weakened. I do not know anyone who can argue otherwise.

The question then becomes: does it weaken the country when Obama fails? To answer that we need to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the Presidency.

School A is that the Presidency as an institution is kinda bogus, in which case weakening the Presidency isn't a problem for the US. School B is that the Presidency is sacred, and that weakening the Presidency is a problem for the US.

In the short-term, A isn't going to be replacing the Presidency with their chosen head of state in the next two years. As a result we have to put off that discussion and move on to B.

Where the office of "head of state" is strong: when the ruler is seen as a success, the display of power helps make his country a success. I'd love it if Obama could pick the right battles and win them, and I don't hope he fails overall. But Obama first has to learn to pick the right battles. If he is fighting for the crooks in Chicago, or for the bureaucrats' takeover of the medical industry: those are battles Obama is waging against me and mine. I want him to fail in what he is trying to do NOW: first, because what he's trying to do is wrong; second, because he has to learn that it is wrong.

Obama's predecessor Bill Clinton began his stint as Carter Junior in 1993-4. In 1994 he was taught a sharp lesson and in 1995 he was close to irrelevant. Then he hired Dick Morris, who taught him he would be personally better off if he governed more like Reagan Junior. This, Clinton did: 1996-2000.

When Obama learns humility, I will root for him. Where Obama and his defenders are being attacked unfairly, I will defend them as if I were defending this country. But until then and otherwise, I will root for Obama's humiliation. The country cannot succeed until Obama's current course fails.

Labels: obama, presidency

posted by Zimri on 16:44 | link |

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Funny pages

I'm reading up on Obama's talking-points which he sent to his media lackeys (h/t Ghost of a Flea (itself found via Table 9)). Obama is pushing for these stooges to run stories "about service and volunteerism".

In the Houston Chronicle comics this week: the daughter in Baby Blues has signed up her mother for "all" of the volunteer-work her school offers; Mutts refers to volunteerism; and (less surprisingly) so does Luann.

If you read a mainstream newspaper, there is no escape.

Labels: obama, progressives, propaganda

posted by Zimri on 20:49 | link |

Lord Barack the Humble

A most annoying verbal tic from Obama: whenever someone gives him an attaboy, like the Presidency and now the Quisling Prize, he tells everyone how "humbled" he is.

If Obama were truly humble, he would recognise the Peace Prize as a manifestation of humility's opposite. He would see it as the arrogance of a foreign elite who rules upon what is and is not "peace", and who then tosses the award to whoever strokes its ego most. If Obama were humble he would reject this thing.

Obama is not humble. What he has done is to render his own psyche, consciously, awestruck at the award he's gotten. Having built up that award in his own mind to the stature of the Victoria Cross, Obama is then in a position to accept it with all his phony humility.

Outside his own mind, to the rest of the world Obama has humiliated himself: he has made himself a grovelling sycophant to his lords in Continental Europe. Insofar he accepts this award for all Americans, he humiliates us too.

Labels: obama

posted by Zimri on 17:34 | link |

Card check

I'm going to run a little thought-experiment. I'm going to see if the public petition process can be improved without making it identity-protected ("hashed"). I'll answer the practicality of "if" by musing how.

Let's pretend that the State defines some issues which require, on principle, that their petitions and elections be non-hashed and public. Those will also demand non-hashed declarations of identity, so that private citizens can know what you stand for. (The non-hashed signature in today's world.) How might it protect the "wrong sort" of people from harassment?

If Alinskyites take from it a database of Conservative activists, then the Conservatives would then set up their own database: of the anti-Conservative harassment-monkeys. Databases can go up for 9/11 truthers - and in a way, they already exist... witness Van Jones.

And where there is a physical disturbance then the State should intervene. When enough Alinskyites on both sides get a taste of the policeman's nightstick, they'll get the picture, and the unrest will die down. California has such a hopelessly monopolised State, though, that it will require a different political regime.

It would need to be a regime where the elected and executive government must answer to a non-elected branch. In my system, any given public petition can be investigated by the Guardian Council for verifiability. "9/11 Truth" - and creationism - petitions get the red flag. Petitions about taxes, guns, and marriage, since they are about opinion only, do not get the red flag. I would forbid the State to discriminate based upon non-flagged topics. I do want the State to discriminate against the irrational, though, and that is why the red flag exists.

Okay, I'm done with the thought experiment.

I'm not, currently, seeing any case where the public petition model is useful and non-redundant. I'm seeing it create chaos, and burden further the "impartial" State, and open myriad opportunities for abuse. I'm beginning to think California's petition process is oppressive, like Mao allowing "flowers to bloom" just so's he can see 'em an' stomp 'em.

Labels: privacy

posted by Zimri on 16:56 | link |

The petition process

In a post below, I laid out some problems with the petition process in many states as it stands now. I have now deleted its conclusion, which had some recommendations on what the State can do; because I've found critiques of its assumptions at Ace of Spades.

I posted my thoughts there but they bear restating here. Ultimately: if you're trying to influence an election by adding to the ballot, the same principle should apply as influencing the election by voting in it. i.e., secret ballot rules.

When the State receives a signed petition, they do need to keep a way to prove that the signatures aren't all from Mickey Mouse and Jive Turkey. Other groups have the right to know how the State proved or disproved that the signatures are real. However this does not necessarily mean that the State and his buddy, Saul Alinsky, have a right to know who all signed it.

We can borrow the principle from computer password protection. The login screen has a right to know that your password is correct. It does not have a right to know what your password is.

This is done through a "hashing algorithm". When you enter your password for the first time, it is turned into a hash before it goes to the database. No-one can get your password then, not even you. But when you log in, the login screen hashes your password, and compares that hash to the hash on the database.

It should be a federal mandate to demand identity hashing on all petitions.

Labels: constitution, privacy

posted by Zimri on 16:36 | link |

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

I Gots A Peace Prize: A Review

I'm hearing a lot of Steve Crowder out in the right-wing circuit. I first heard of him from a shambolic "We Didn't Start The Fire" parody (at FrontPageMag.com, although I don't see it there now). Then I caught him right here at the 3 July Tea Party (his wit n' wisdom - "Obama looks like a photo negative of Alfred E Newman"). Now I find that Mr Crowder has "dropped", as they say, a new video: the rap I Gots A Peace Prize.

It's instructive to compare Crowder's parodies with those of Weird Al Yankovic. Weird Al's "Germs" derived from several Nine Inch Nails songs. One does a style parody of a charged genre for one reason - to compare an example of misbehaviour (in the new lyrics) to the pathologies underlying the original (in the shared tune). When Weird Al did "Germs", he was mocking paranoia in the style of frequently-paranoid Trent Reznor. With "Trigger Happy", he was mocking careless gun owners to the tune of a carefree surfer melody.

Crowder's video was gangsta rap. Weird Al has done gangsta rap too: in all cases, to compare his real target to the urban underclass. "All About The Pentiums" and then "White & Nerdy" both lampooned computer-nerd braggarts. Crowder, then, is saying that Obama's Nobel is ghetto. His video is a similitude like Limbaugh's.

Crowder's video is more violent than Yankovic's nerd parodies. Crowder waves a pistol around; Yankovic, as far as I remember, didn't. This brings up primal emotions of rage and terror in Crowder's audience. Crowder also chooses to rap in a Black rapper cadence; and not in the conversational tones of Vanilla Ice and the Bloodhound Gang, nor in the street-brawler snaps of Eminem and the Beastie Boys.

As a result I'm not sure who is Crowder's target.Crowder is going after the Black community as a whole. If the attempt was to attack Obama as a poser, then he would have done better to rap like a white guy (or to choose another genre entirely). If the attempt was to go after the Obama supporters in the Black community, then the attempt was misguided - surfing around turns up that most Black Obamists on the internet are NOT jumping up and down with pride, but mildly embarrassed by the Prize. But Blacks on blogs are not a representative sample of the average Black person; three quarters of Black population believe that Obama deserved this prize. (h/t, JammieWearingFool.)

Crowder has talent as a satirist and is technically skilled as a musician; but his method is distracting. Rating: 2/54/5

UPDATE 10/27: Having done the research, I find that Crowder had the correct intuition about Black psychology - and I didn't. I apologise to him. I have boosted his video's rating accordingly. Crowder is, like Rush, raising an impolite truth. Satire is not supposed to be polite; it's just supposed to be accurate. That is what Crowder has accomplished here.

Labels: apology, conservatives, race

posted by Zimri on 20:27 | link |

Overheating

I've been battling bit of writer's block lately. Today the gates opened a bit more. But, just my luck, it is too hot here (Gulf Coast) for me to handle a full essay. My brain functions poorly when the temperature runs above about 80 F.

There are other essays I started to write late last Friday but they require research, and THAT requires that my brain works. Of the posts today, two were adapted from comments I left elsewhere when it was cooler; and two others were barely more than link-dumps. I kept all of it to subjects I could handle in short, controlled bursts.

Alastair Reynolds in Redemption Ark, part of a saga I've been remiss in not reading until now, has a character named Skade. Skade has no hair, but her parents genetically engineered a fleshy crest upon her head. The crest distributes heat from her head, much as the Dimetrodon during the Permian had a crest to distribute heat from its spinal cord.

Times like now, I'm envious...

Labels: meta, personal

posted by Zimri on 18:36 | link |

Goldfish update

When you sign a petition, your name is public. When your name is public, people can find out a lot about you. Some of these people may hate that the petition exists and, by extension, may hate you. Your name may then enter a database. It's a goldfish bowl world.

The immediate issue is teh gheys and the anti-marriage Proposition 8 in California. There are a lot of strawmen in the Slashdot discussion. But this isn't one of my "ghey" themed blog posts. This is about the urge to research against the urge to keep private.

Because it's not about homosexuality anymore. The gate is open. All this drama can apply to any other group who signs their names to anything. And the purpose of the database in the first place is to run Alinsky rules and to attack the enemy, physically.

The real fun starts when you deal with the Taxpayer Bills of Rights. That makes Government agencies afraid they won't get paid. They can find out those names and set all manner of traps for those people.

UPDATE: This article was a mess, and the second half was rotten. I'm keeping the first half here. A much better version of the second half is posted above.

Labels: privacy

posted by Zimri on 17:30 | link |

Wikipedia update

A troll through the ol' archives revealed that I've linked to my Wikipedia stuff. Here are some for your perusal:

• Hasan al-Basri. Based on Suleiman Mourad's work, I've got him as a believer in free will.


• Yazid III. Based on contemporary sources, I've got him as a democratic reformer.

Labels: wikipedia

posted by Zimri on 17:25 | link |

And now, boobies

Besides that whole McCain fracas (and I was more interested in the shriveled heart behind its lush façade) it is, also, breast awareness month. A good, long look at the overall topic seems apropos. So, like any normally functional human male... I wandered over to Half Sigma.

According to Elaine Morgan's "Aquatic Ape Hypothesis", human breasts developed fatty tissue for a reason: buoyancy. This kept the nipple above water so that the baby could suckle without drowning. (Capt. Paul Watson, "AGAINST THE CURRENT: The Aquatic Ape", from Ocean Realm, Spring 2001)

But the AAH is in trouble. Jim Moore tells me via email:

Caroline Pond has a book on fat and fats called "The Fats of Life". Good book, and she's the foremost expert on the subject of fat and its evolutionary significance. It seems certain that human female breasts are a sexually selected trait. The aquatic ape idea is probably the least good of the other explanations that had been thought of before Pond started doing her work. For instance, another thought had been that the fat around breasts was helpful in milk production, in the same way that fat near some organs and muscles helps locally. But that falls apart when you look at milk production and see that it doesn't depend on larger breasts, and Pond (in that book) points out that "quite lean women with small breasts are among the most prolific producers of milk, as long as they can eat as much as they want" and that the fat that gets mobilised in human milk production seems to come more from the thighs. I see that book is available at Google books [ed. monster URL going to page 246]

Nobody has a lot to go on with the fossils, and so Pond and Morgan both draw their hypotheses in the gaps: that the advent of the buoyant breast happened millions of years ago. If that's true then Neanderthals probably have the same genes here. GNXP, take it from here?

Labels: HBD

posted by Zimri on 17:13 | link |

Rage Kewpie

What was I doing at the Village Voice? Michelle Malkin sent me, where her detractor cooked up a new sexist nickname for her: "rage kewpie".

Mrs Malkin can defend herself. It's the Liberals who are hurting themselves by belittling her. So I posted this -

Being angry and looking cute are part of her online act. But you'd be underestimating her if that's all you see. She carries a lot of influence among conservatives - far more than does, if we are keeping to the distaff, Ann Coulter. With Coulter it's all about Coulter. With Malkin it's all about politicians and power.

I've met Village Voice readers and they strike me as made of those citizens of the tri-state area pretending to be Lower East Side hipsters. That's an insular bunch. They might not have seen much of the nation's "flyover" interior. Conservative activists there, I can report, take Malkin seriously. You *could* pretend she's not serious but if you do, you might be in for a shock.

Labels: conservatives, liberals

posted by Zimri on 17:06 | link |

Michael Steele's wimpiness

Steele has since "nutted up", as Harrelson might say, but this has been eating at me for months.

Steele once sat with a failed comedian and a failed rapper. The focus was on Limbaugh's "I hope he fails" comment. I'll get into how that works, some other time. For my purpose here: the conversation then drifted, and Steele lost the game.

One of his interlocutors thought that Republican events "looked like a Nazi rally". Steele responded in the affirmative.

As I've shown below, I have no problem with people making valid racial comparisons. I just don't think Liberals ought to be the only ones who do it. Steele should have retorted that his interlocutor looked like Robert Mugabe. He might then have pointed out Obama's redistributionist ethic and support for reparations. In this scenario he would have polished up by pointing out that the Republicans are the more libertarian party and that, if one were looking for a national socialist rally, one might try looking closer to home.

And the failed rapper in question was in Public Enemy, whose members have no standing to throw out the N(azi) word. Steele could have brought that up too.

Steele was more concerned with looking nice than with fighting back. If he had fought back, no moderates would have recoiled at this. They would have seen the whole clip and caught the Left making its despicable analogies. (And yes, Steele should have brought his own camera.) The activist Right would have lapped it up.

Labels: conservatives, liberals

posted by Zimri on 16:50 | link |

A defence of Limbaugh

I believe that I've amply outlined my stance as a Limbaugh detractor who believes that Limbaugh plays to racial stereotypes.

I'm going to defend him anyway.

The analogy between any given group of minorities, and the underclass control-group of their coracial brethren, is valid when the former does in fact behave like the latter. If it offends the athletes to be so compared, perhaps the athletes should not then have so behaved. My advice to the black community: use that embarrassment, and shun those making you look bad.

People not in the offending group, who nod along to this comparison, have no need to be offended on anyone's behalf. We white people have our own embarrassments amongst us, including Rush Limbaugh on occasion - just not over this issue. When "one of us" screws up, believe me, I'll be here to point it out. (Among those screw-up upon whom we'll need to apply the cluebat-smite will be those who harass innocent black bystanders with invalid racial associations.)

People not in the offending group, who are ostentatiously shying away in horror, are phonies. They're not outraged, and I would even assert that they know Rush is right. They see a conservative making a racial remark and in that, they see a weapon.

UPDATE 10/24/2009: linked back to a similar thought.

Labels: conservatives, liberals, race, trolls

posted by Zimri on 16:35 | link |

Pandering to racial stereotypes

I learn from Media Matters (h/t, Village Voice) that Limbaugh hadn't quit the pandering to racial stereotypes as recently as 2007. There, Limbaugh was making a larger point about unsportsmanship conduct in the National Football League. In the course of it he likened the athletics to the underclass gangs, Crips and Bloods.

It's not "out of context". This is the context - he's making it mainstream conservatism to relate this behaviour to underclass thuggery. His closing "there, I said it" comment reveals the process. He had that analogy in the back of his mind all along, and then worked himself up to the point when he could throw it out there. At that point he heard himself say it on the air and, I presume, watched Snerdly's reaction. He rethought his comment, wondered if it needed to be retracted, and when no reason comes immediately to mind he put his stamp on it.

He could just as easily have compared the athletes to any other group of criminals, but he chose the group who just happened to be caste minorities. THAT, dear readers, is what pandering to racial stereotypes looks like. It is time to quit arguing that Limbaugh didn't mean to evoke race.

Labels: conservatives, race

posted by Zimri on 16:17 | link |

Obama's NEA

I was reading over my past articles. It looks like Obama may have read over it too, back when the articles were up, and printed out "For whom does the artist create?". That piece had argued that the National Endowment for the Arts must belong to the Executive. That is currently the elective office which Barack Obama holds.

Under a partisan President like this one, who is Serrano's pipe dream brought to life: the result is predictable.

UPDATE 10/29 - Ave Caesar!

Labels: fascism, obama, propaganda

posted by Zimri on 16:10 | link |

Monday, October 19, 2009

Pascal-completeness

I'm currently seeing a tactic on various comment threads: a (polite) dismissal of findings in modern science, on the grounds that we will all know what the truth is when we die. (There's no point linking to an example; it's easily found.)

Says the person laying out this case - evolutionists (say) have but a "theory". If there's a 90% or even a 99.9% chance that evolution is true, it is still safer for us to be wrong in denying evolution and to deal with that minor bummer, than for us to be be wrong in accepting evolution and... well.

The first step, in any problem, is to find out if the problem fits any known template. In this case we are dealing with a passive-aggressive version of Pascal's Wager, cited here almost five years ago.

A debate develops in much the same way as an automaton, or machine, or running process. Some automata can be grouped into "-complete" classes, which follow principles common across the class. For example, Turing-complete automata: once you know that your machine is Turing-complete, it's just a matter of writing the compiler and then you can run your C program on it. Conversely, the NP-complete problems: once you prove your program is NP-complete, you know you're screwed.

So here, I give you the Pascal-complete argument - once The Wager is laid, the argument has become an argument over the Wager, and the original argument is dead.

There are counters to The Wager but unfortunately, no-one you meet will accept them. Anyone who reacts to an objectively knowable fact about this world, by means of Pascal's Wager (however much Nerf foam s/he wraps it in): that one has shown their hand. They'd have to want to change their outlook and, it's not going to happen. They are not to be reasoned with. evolutionThread.Abort(); if C# is your thing.

In a moderated debate, Pascalian arguments would be slapped out of bounds. If the general population were more rational, then the other observers to the debate would step in.

Real life isn't a debating society; standard-model humans, who aren't up with the literature and have lives outside logic - they judge based on personal feelings. And anyone who puts on their Shatner-face and yells "PASCAAAAL" into the monitor isn't going to win friends.

UPDATE 10/29 - This post assumes that it is intuitive that a debate is like a computer program. I've since written an explanation for that, and linked it here.

Labels: algorithms, misanthropy, religion, science

posted by Zimri on 19:14 | link |

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh is now being accused of racism. I've been on the Limbaugh beat before. As mentioned there, I used to be a fan, and then got tired of him. I was accusing him then of pandering to racial attitudes ("the Bronx" in the context of violence) and anti-Semitism back in the mid-to-late 1990s. It's been over a decade and an addiction since; so I am now willing to allow that he's mellowed. In any case the specific "quotes" latched to him now, are bogus.

On a purely theoretical level I have to support Limbaugh against smears to his character that he doesn't deserve. On a more personal level, I know that running Limbaugh out of the public discourse would be a bad precedent, because if Limbaugh's enemies were to win which private citizen would be safe? However I must repeat that I still don't trust Limbaugh and, I will explain here why not.

Limbaugh is to blame as much as is any other Conservative pundit for making modern Conservatives into the obscurantist sect they are today. I was pointed to these comments back at LGF, which had that fabled "obsession"; but Limbaugh's words speak for themselves, March 18 2008:

Ben Stein has a new movie out. He brought it by my house Friday afternoon to screen it for me. It's called Expelled. It is powerful. It is fabulous. And here's the premise of his movie. The premise is that Darwinism has taken root, taken hold at every major intellectual institution around the world in Western Society, from Great Britain to the United States, you name it. Darwinism, of course, does not permit for the existence of a supreme being, a higher power, or a God. His interviews with some of the professors who espouse Darwinism are literally shocking. The condescension and the arrogance these people have, they will readily admit that Darwinism and evolution do not explain how life began. One of these professors said it might have been that a hyper-intelligence from another planet came here and started our race. This from some professor either in the UK, I forget where it was, but can't be God. These people are so threatened by the existence of God, they will not permit intelligent design to be discussed. Professors have been fired, blackballed, and prevented from working who have deigned to try to combine the whole concept of evolution with intelligent design.

Ben Stein's new movie is going to open to a thousand screens pretty soon, it's not out there yet. It's called Expelled. But the point of it is that these people on the left are just scared to death of God. It threatens everything. We, on the other hand, recognize that our greatness, who we are, our potential, our ambition, our desire, comes from God, and as part of our Creation, this natural yearning to be free and to practice liberty. That is how we think this country came to be great. It is how we think this country will continue to be great and to grow.

This wasn't an aberration. April 8 (after a wholly irrelevant comment about the Higgs boson):

Ben Stein has a movie coming out that I have screened at my house, it's called Expelled, and it is about people, scientists who are being fired and shunned for their belief in intelligent design. These are Darwinists. Just for questioning Darwinism and just for being open to the possibility of intelligent design. These people fear God. These scientists, they fear God because God has the answers, God's smarter than they are. God's judgmental. That's one of the things that liberals and atheists hate about religion anyway is that it's judgmental. But regardless, I think you'll find some scientists, physicists particularly. I can't remember his name, there was one old coot who is close to death, and this goes back a year or two ago, but he'd been a lifelong opponent of the whole notion that anything here was created, that it was just random and miraculous but there was nothing intelligent behind any of this, and he's finally concluded, near his deathbed that an accident can't explain this. He wouldn't go so far as to say that there's a God. In fact, one of these guys in Ben Stein's movie, guy named Hawkins who's over at Oxford I think, Oxford or Cambridge, Ben Stein goes over and interviews him in this movie, Expelled. The movie hits April 12th or the 16th. And he said, "Can you explain the origins of life with Darwinism?" "No, we can't. Well, actually we can, but we don't."

Stein then asks him, "Where did all this come from? The guy actually says, "Perhaps an intelligent race from outer space landed on our planet gazillions of years ago and got all this rolling. But there's no way," says Hawkins, "it could be God, there's just no way. But it might be some people from outer space." And this guy is an elitist theorist and professor at Oxford and Cambridge. It's a fascinating movie. Eighty-two percent of the people in this country believe in God. Forty-one percent are Darwinists. Darwinists are more than just believing in evolution. Darwinists are now a very closed society, they do not allow anybody to disagree with what they think. They shun and fire anybody in their midst that is open to anything other than Darwinism. Darwinism is natural selection, survival of the fittest, actually eugenics. Darwinism seeks to get rid of people who are not up to par. Darwinists are not big tent people. They are not big tent people.

By saying that "Darwinists" are not big tent people, Limbaugh is saying that those who insist on scientific standards for biology are bigots, unworthy of the Conservative brand. Limbaugh wants to run people like me out of the Conservative movement.

I am not saying "good riddance", despite Limbaugh's provocation.

I would be more prone to support Conservatives, and non-Conservatives would be less able to attack them, if Conservatives were more consistently on the side of basic science. The global-warming skeptics are on the side of science; but most scientists won't take them seriously because of the skeptics' association with Conservatives and therefore, evolution deniers. The human-biodiversity crew are also on the side of science; but they can't get the support even of most Conservatives, because most Conservatives (I would say: all Conservatives in the best standing) can't support the basic premise of evolution and, thanks to Ben Stein, think it's Hitler-ish.

I cannot shake the feeling that the obscurantism of the Conservative brain-trust is a big part of what continues to drive Internet pro-Conservatives, like Charles Johnson and his remaining commenters, into becoming vehement anti-Conservatives. It certainly tempts me into becoming yet another "moderate", "independent", comment-board troll.

UPDATE 10/20/2009: Since I misremembered which names Limbaugh cited, I can't say I remember how he said them. That means the charge of antiSemitism is entirely unwarranted. I apologise to Limbaugh and to all his fans for that error. Thank you "lopki" for calling me out on this.

Labels: conservatives

posted by Zimri on 18:50 | link |

Saturday, October 17, 2009

True Love Waits

I posted this a week ago or so at GayPatriot, and was trying to lead into it below, but I got sidetracked. I've come up with a more focused, Poe-based theme on that post and will carry on here.

I don't think that social conservatives need be the enemies of homosexuals. Conservatives (as I've defined them) can't support a so-called "gay agenda". But that's mostly because they can't support any agenda of change. They are inherently reactionary.

Reactionary ideas can help gays though. One such idea is that people have a deep down human nature. If that's true then gays can't be reconfigured any more than an albino can be magically turned into Barack Obama, or an autist into Casanova. This should keep Conservatives from persecuting gays. For the most part you don't see anti-gay slurs on Conservative blogs. (You do see them on neo-Nazi fora, but they're infected by eugenics and other progressive memes.)

The reactionary theme "true love waits" also derives from social conservatives. And it turns out that such a theme would save gays from much the same grief that plagues other sexually-active subgroups like, um, heterosexuals mingling at the local pub.

I would urge social-conservatives not to overplay their hand, such as the variously grim and silly efforts to "convert" gays (perhaps reaching its nadir at Alan Turing); but conservatives do have a few themes which are gay-friendly, and advice that works for gays as well as it does for everyone else.

Labels: conservatives, ghey

posted by Zimri on 15:26 | link |

Friday, October 16, 2009

Life is NP-hard

I was just thinking that the Travelling Squirrel Problem is like life.

Sammy goes from home to a bunch of nodes and back again, on the assumption that the "best" route is the overall shortest. He could plot a journey in which he goes from one node to the nearest node to the nearest node etc. That's the easiest to do in transit. But it's demonstrably not always the fastest route and so, for him, not the best.

Sammy's there-and-back is mathematically equivalent to a journey by which Sammy goes from home through those same nodes to any fixed end-point. Also, Sammy's path only involved time; we could turn that into an array of time and acorns. In this path we would take away certain trees as time goes past. So at the end of one given path, there could be more of a total payout than in another.

Map "home" to birth (or now or tomorrow), "end-point" to death (or any arbitrary stopping point), "node" to the goals you set. There might be any number of additional values to top up with and then an equation to decide on "total happiness". All of this adds more complexity to the problem.

Life is NP-hard at best.

Labels: science

posted by Zimri on 17:09 | link |

Is God autistic?

The autist sits alone and writes rules.

It's not always clear what those rules are. Some say that they are a set group of commandments and prohibitions, others that they are a creed of axiomata, but most assume it's a mix. Everyone does agree that if the rules are not followed then Bad Things will probably happen.

People talk to Him but He doesn't always answer, and rarely in a way that makes much sense. The autist's friends tell people that He loves the world and loves humanity. But this isn't clear to those who don't know Him.

When people come into His presence, He judges them upon those rules. Those who followed, get to stick around. Those who didn't, are shut out. The autist holds grudges and most people agree that when someone is shut out she's probably not getting another chance.

Labels: autism, religion

posted by Zimri on 16:57 | link |

Thursday, October 15, 2009

The Holocaust Museum is not a political football

If the last post seemed familiar to some, it should. Much of it was aired in the comments of... another green-themed blog. (I didn't keep a copy; and I expect the cowardly Stalinist who runs the place "[deleted]" it.)

The original controversy was about one Von Brunn, an 88 year old who shot up a Holocaust Museum. It turned out he was a S@#$%front member and all-around racist nutter. Certainly a cultural Rightist. Case closed... to the history-warping Stalinist.

Since I'm no longer under any man's censorship, I'm free to reopen the case.

When somebody shoots up a shrine sacred to Jews, that's not an expression of the cultural Right. It's not cultural Left, either, pace Goldberg. It's straight-up anti-Semitism.

For that, all anti-Semites have to take responsibility. All those in the media - and not just Von Brunn's old hangout - have added to the climate of Judenhass which led him over the edge.

How many references to "neo-cons" have we borne? How many mournful shots of teddy bears, set up just-so in the ruins of some Hezbollard's ammo dump? In Houston on Westheimer I saw "Free Palestine" bumper-stickers. Along the highway 59, inbound, just inside the I-610: a mammoth "Pray4Gaza" sign. Never mind what Hezbollards would do to Jewish children; never mind the prayers of HAMAS.

AntiSemitism is a major problem in the media today. It's the sewer in which rats like Von Brunn flourish.

It doesn't matter that Von Grunn was in the "far Right". That wasn't the story nor the proximate cause. A real "far Rightist" would have attacked the office of the ACLU. Von Brunn was a Jew-hater first.

(By making this out into some uniquely Rightist problem, LGF devolved into propaganda, and we all should have seen where it would lead, and I should have left that place then.)

Labels: antisemitism, fascism, lgf

posted by Zimri on 19:27 | link |

The cultural Right

Anyone else bored with Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism? It's a decent book, especially when touching on Woodrow Wilson, but it's led to an epidemic of pick-n-choose Conservatives trying to cast the Nazis as belonging to the Left. This is an embarrassment, or should be. I think even Goldberg himself has to be tired of his fans citing that book.

People should put the Nazis, and other political phenomena, in a background of culture. For instance, John Derbyshire in NRO has said this: "Barack Obama was raised in an atmosphere of cultural Marxism". This is not a controversial statement among Conservatives (or Marxists). It shouldn't be controversial to anybody.

But if there is such a thing as cultural Marxism; then one can hardly object when we posit that there is also a cultural far Right...

Say we take a snapshot in time, to Weimar Germany. The most authentic reactionary party there and then was the German Nationalists. They didn't get a lot of votes but they owned the military's ex-officer corp, the landowners, ... the aristocracy basically.

It pleased the Nationalists, in March 1933, to throw their support alongside the Nazis to get Chancellor Hitler his Parliamentary majority. With that, "first they came for the Communists" and, you know the rest. To put it another way, the right-wingers in Germany looked around and they found the most congenial major party to their Weltanschauung to be - the Nazis.

The Nazis were trolling for support among right-wingers as long ago as that Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 - alongside Ludendorff the war hero.

The cultural far Right is not a Liberal myth; it is an inevitability on any bell-curve of political thought. It is, further, susceptible to Nazi arguments. If right-wingers at the time are telling you they're cool with Nazi rule, you should pay attention... not cover your eyes and wish Jonah Goldberg would come hold your hand.

On the far Right's own terms, a Mencius Moldbug might argue the Nationalists should have ignored the Nazis, and taken over the state themselves "to restore order". The Night of the Long Knives would then have taken out Hitler alongside all his SA buddies. Instead the Nationalists decided to follow another path, maybe because they figured it was easier. This path to the Dark Side has a name: Tory democracy. In Moldbug's words, "The basic method of Tory democracy is to appeal to the masses to support a non-democratic, ie reactionary, form of government." Tory democracy is not equivalent to Conservatism, nor to fascism; but Tory democracy can corrupt Conservatives, and lead them to the fascists. (Where did I find that out? From the last chapter of Jonah Goldberg's book.)

Labels: conservatives, fascism

posted by Zimri on 19:11 | link |

Aspie rights? Mek muh laugh

Starless @ zombie's

:

One more thing on this: all adolescents feel marginalized and invisible, and I wonder what it is that makes a gay teen’s feelings of invisibility any more painful than, for example, the straight kid who is socially awkward. I knew people in high school who have subsequently attached themselves to identity politics in one way or another. I’ve seen them make statements about how personally oppressive the culture treated them as adolescents. As far as I could tell, they weren’t treated any worse than anyone else in their peer groups, in fact, some of them were quite popular and considered special for their unique attributes. I also knew people who had every reason in the world, including actual discrimination, who have emphatically not latched onto identity politics.

There's a movement amongst some of my fellow autistic / aspergery people to get onto that victim gravy train. I'm told that a disproportion of the capital H Homeless are autistic. I believe it; we autists and aspies, like paranoid schizophrenics, tend to suck at life.

But the problem sounds overstated. And if these Rain Men are capable of running a website then, life can't suck that hard. These guys want what, exactly? A cure? Aspie rights? Aspie franchise?

If I wasn't the way I am, I wouldn't have the ability to make abstractions for a puzzle, nor the patience to work through it; I wouldn't be able to do computers and then what. Shuffling papers in some office?

Or maybe the whole of society should change to be autistic friendly. Because if there's one thing we need from standard-model humans, it's their pity.

Here's a plan: we could reserve parliament seats for "The Asperger Party". The Party will determine that 98% of the country is "wrong" and "stupid". That can be our party platform!

I got into computers; others get into engineering and the sciences. Getting paid makes life suck a little less hard. I don't need the help. Do others? Being aspie makes understanding that, difficult.

Private institutions, which turned a profit by setting their patients to solve math problems... that might be something to work toward.

Labels: autism

posted by Zimri on 17:52 | link |

Meghan McCain: STFU

By now everyone in the US has been made aware of Meghan McCain's cleavage (h/t Ace). She had enabled comments; I must assume, because she wanted praise. She got some praise but other commenters levied jibes. She then took public offence.

A Devil's Advocate would counter that Sarah Palin played up her sexuality too; referring to lipstick, appearing in heels and hose, throwing out that slogan "drill baby drill" - you'd never see any of that from, say, Hillary Rodham Clinton. But Palin was funny. And when she was complimented, she reacted with wit and panache; when she was derided, she ignored it. This much is independent of whether you think she was a competent governor or a good candidate; this little tramp McCain doesn't rise to Sarah Palin's level, wherever you care to set that level.

In addition to that, McCain took a swipe at AllahPundit at HotAir. Again, you might not think much of AllahPundit - if you're a Leftist, you may think he's a patsy; if a Rightist, you may think he's not on your team; if a Muslim... well. But if there's one thing all should be able to agree upon, AllahPundit supports McCain (and has taken hits for that too). So here's the thanks he got: "pretty much my image of @allahpundit is I am the chick from silence of the lambs and he is screaming at me in a hole 2 put lotion on my skin"

I don't pretend to know why AP bothered with McCain. My theory was that it was a running gag and that AP is too socially inept to know when the joke is over. It didn't matter much to me. But seeing McCain's viciousness makes it matter.

Whether she thinks she was being funny or not, Meghan McCain has acted like spoilt trash. Considering how disdainfully she treated most of the people who voted for her dad, she needs all the support she can get. She thinks family connections, money, and boobs will get you anything. Nothing in her life so far has proven her wrong.

It's not fair.

Labels: misanthropy

posted by Zimri on 17:51 | link |

A brief disconcert of the whole gay company

I hung out at some of the gay events at college. Not that way myself but I wanted to see their side of the world.

I remember one event where they showed a Ralph Reed anti-gay vid alongside a pro-gay vid. I noticed that Reed's video harped on promiscuity as its main talking point: grainy footage of creepy guys sneaking off to the bushes in off-road rest areas, that sort of thing. I suggested to the presenter that the campus gay group could make the next Reed vid a lot shorter, and more boring, and generally moot; if they just told gays: "gays, don't go into the bushes with strangers".

The gay students were sympathetic (I got much less politeness from, for instance, black students concerning affirmative action). Even their group's leader didn't tell me to GTFO. But, he was evasive. I actually had to tell him "you're not answering the question".

Eventually he admitted that he couldn't condemn off-road sporting events or, I suppose, toilet tap dancing because of teh homophobia. He wanted to keep the closet door open in the less-tolerant areas of the country. Which meant he was trapped; he couldn't condemn it in the city either.

Is it possible for straight people to cast judgement on aspect of gay culture? Because if this is gay culture then the religious right may have a point. I suspect that this is the elite view, among those who feel above common decency (read: George Michael, Larry Craig); and that average gays prefer to look for love in bars and online the way the rest of us do. If that's true then gay-dom has a problem, analogous to Louis XVI versus the rest of France.

Labels: ghey

posted by Zimri on 17:50 | link |

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Conservatives and history

Among the "Conservative library" - and not just the Politically Incorrect Guides - there are books on slavery and on American history. (Some of this is being hashed out at the blogmocracy.) Since we've established that the PIGs are works of propaganda, we should look for what the PIGs are squealing about with respect to the Southern Question.

The PIGs (i.e., Conservatives) don't have much of a theme here; but in general, are arguing "we're not as bad as you think".

One point they raise is that slavery didn't start out because of racism. It's often pointed out that slavery was about profit. It isn't as often pointed out (on any side of the debate); but I think it's relevant - in the 1620s while slavery was growing in the American South, it was also growing in Barbados. Labourers had a price tag in the Caribbean - might it not be profitable to carry them further north? So at the root of slavery in Virginia, we might blame greed and bad decisions by courts (like Johnson vs Parker, 1654). The racism came later, to justify what was being done; there was already a racist literature, Goldenberg has shown, from the Arabs, and this could be and, so, was imported.

However Conservatives are still stuck with the racism from 1700 to, well, now. Virginians (and white Bajans) had the opportunity not to indulge in outright Zanji slave-taking. They failed. Going on a nitpicking tear is fun and educational. It doesn't absolve the Colonies, or their State successors, of a damned thing.

Conservatives get themselves in more serious trouble over Abraham Lincoln, who they claim was (among other faults) racist. That's not true; for a start Lincoln is documented as becoming personally more well-disposed to blacks' rights over the 1860s. As a rule if it cites DiLorenzo with a straight face, it's propaganda.

Conservatives have cognitive dissonance over Lincoln. On the one hand he's the one who won the first election for the Republicans, today a generally Conservative party; and he united the nation (although that's arguably more a fascist notion than a Conservative one). On the other hand Lincoln interfered in local governance; which then led to Reconstruction.

Conservatives tarring Lincoln as racist is a mere tactic (tu quoque specifically). Conservatives don't believe it themselves. Liberals and "neo-con" Republicans have always claimed Lincoln's values as their own. Conservatives by contrast want Lincoln to be a "complex" character, which their opponents can't use against them.

What we're dealing with, in both the case of slavery's origins and that of Lincoln's motives, is myth. Conservatives love their country; they want to keep loving her, and they want to defend her against those who don't. They also define "their country" in terms of family and local community; to which country, Lincoln delivered its greatest defeat.

Labels: conservatives, propaganda, race

posted by Zimri on 17:49 | link |

Paging Stephen Cook

If you solved the problem Lazy Sammy Squirrel posed for you below, then congratulations. You've won a Fields Medal in mathematics. More: you've got a million dollars for the Millennium Prize. Your name will go down in history with Galois, Reimann, Perelman. Maybe even Newton.

That is because what Sammy had run into was a form of the NP complete puzzle. Finding a polynomial-time solution, or proving that polynomial-time is impossible, remains open. The NP complete class was defined by Stephen Cook as recently as 1971, and traveling-squirrel is just one member of it.

Anyway I would like to talk, today, about what I think is an equivalent in particle physics.

Particle physicists have a "Standard Model" of quarks, gluons etc which Explains Everything... except for the "Everything" part. Mathematically-minded physicists have attempted to refine the model. I am here picking on a branch of these model refineries: the String Theory. This proposes that underneath the Standard Model is a set of multidimensional vibrating strings.

In order for capital-P Physics to take this theory seriously, and not as a glorified Sudoku puzzle, we demand that String Theorists come up with a means for testing. When String Theorists do, they usually propose something hilarious like a hollow titanium donut the radius of Neptune's orbit. Instead of laughing the String Theorists out of the academy as if they were so many Ptolemaists, though, we're still nowhere decades later, and we're still paying these clowns for playing Sudoku. What's up with that, dawg?

I say, stop their funding cold. Absolute-zero cold. They can shop their theories in listservs and blogs like the rest of us kooks.

We need to be funding Stephen Cook instead. (If he's still alive, that is; if not him, then one of his students.) Physics needs to define a class of intractible problems (let's say it needs >1,000,000,000,000,000 eV to test); and to prove that String Theory belongs in that class.

At that point, we can treat all those String Theory hobbyists like we used to treat the guys who solved traveling-salesman in linear time on UseNet. Or, we can demand that String Theorists come up with their version of "approximation algorithms" = tests that show how likely String Theory is.

Until the Stephen Cook of physics comes along, I'm in agreement that it's intuitively clear that the string-theorists are in Internet kook territory.

Labels: algorithms, bullshit, science

posted by Zimri on 17:43 | link |

The Conservativally Correct Guides

There exists a market for quick-lookup guides for neophytes on a variety of subjects. These guides are prone to following conventional wisdom, and some have been hijacked by propagandists. Those people who dispute, and cannot get their views heard in the mainstream, have struck out on their own.

Hence the Politically Incorrect Guide series, abbreviated "PIG" and decorated with the expected cutesy porcine icon. The PIG series lays out cases for several ideas, which it associates in a bundle. It assumes that the reader who likes one would like the rest. The PIGs survive because their editors were right; there is a market for such a series. The market in question agrees entirely with the market for the Human Events.com Book Service. To sum up: the PIG series represents White American Conservatism, and is propaganda for that sect.

That's not necessarily bad. It's a truism that one can do propaganda for righteous causes, and that it can even be true. Capra's "Why We Fight" series is propaganda. It may as well be history.

Seen that way, some of the PIGs' cases are better than others. Spencer's guide to "Islam and the Crusades", one of the first, remains one of the better ones. Kantor's guide to Western literature was the best.

But as we'd expect in a pig-trough, there's rubbish mixed in with the good stuff. Wells' book on "Darwinism and Intelligent Design", Bethell's on "Science", and Hutchinson's on the Bible are all rotten. I'd argue that Hutchinson goes as far as an assault upon history and is, therefore, the worst of the lot.

If there's a PIG in your library, your library is a pigpen. If you write a book for this series, you're covered in mud.

I also venture that the Conservative library shows us the Conservative mind. It is great on literature, good on Islam... bad on science.

Labels: conservatives, propaganda

posted by Zimri on 17:00 | link |

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The traveling squirrel problem, I

It was autumn, and all the squirrels in the wood felt the winter approaching. The mornings began later, and colder. Chill breezes ruffled through squirrel-fur as the little rodents jumped between the golden, dry branches of the canopy. On the forest floor, large dead leaves crackled under tiny paws.

At tea-time, when the lady squirrels congregated, they sometimes gossiped over which of the menfolk was strongest, or had the fluffiest coat; or which was the most agile, or the quickest. But there was no debate as to which was the laziest. That dubious honour, all agreed, belonged to Sammy.

In his first year outside the nest, Lazy Sammy had nearly starved; luckily, he found a loose board in Old Man Darby's turnip-shed, and using a few twigs was able to lever it open. He didn't like to climb his tree by hand; so he built a dumbwaiter, with a full network of pulleys, out of a cigar-box and some spools of thread he'd lifted from Darby's home. And then there was the time he got tired of pulling acorns out of a certain walnut tree; so he mixed together some saltpetre and sulfur - and how he got it all is a story in itself - and, long story short, he would have blown off his own tail if the other squirrels had not intervened.

On this autumn, Lazy Sammy was up in his tree-house, deep into sheafs of paper (also "donated" by Mr Darby), frantically scribbling away.

Every year around this time, respectable squirrels would travel from tree to tree collecting nuts. The travel could sometimes take a long time. Lazy Sammy didn't much like traveling and he hoped to get it all over with as soon as possible. That meant, once the nut-bearing trees were marked, finding the shortest route between them.

Normally there'd be just a few trees to visit before it was time to go home. There was no point in plotting a route just to one tree; and if there were two trees, it was just a question of choosing which order to run them in:

But a third tree meant doing measuring, and a decision:

The possible routes were as follows -

• 2.2+4.1+6.3+12, or


• 12+6.3+4.1+2.2; 24.6


• 12+10+4.1+6, or


• 6+4.1+10+12; 32.1


• 6+6.3+10+2.2, or


• 2.2+10+6.3+6; 24.5.

So the last route would be the answer. So he thought. All that math was tiring to Sammy's poor little squirrel head, and he wasn't sure... even with the calculator Old Man Darby had "lent" him. And what if there was a fifth tree? or a sixth?

Sammy decided to take another route, so to speak; he wondered if it was even worth bothering to calculate routes. For that, he had to step back and to look at how he had been going about it. Two trees got him two routes (including the reverse route). Three trees got him six. Four trees got him twenty-four. 2 went to 2; 3 went to 2 x 3; 4 to 2 x 3 x 4...

That looked like a pattern to Sammy.

Sammy went over to his makeshift lift, rolled himself down, went back to Old Man Darby and "borrowed" a few of his maths books (improvising a cart to pull them with, out of a few mislaid toy electric trains), brought them back to his tree and - with help from the motor in Darby's toy train - pulled himself and his precious cargo back into his house.

These books told Sammy that the pattern he had run across, just to look at the problem (let alone solve it) was a "Factorial". The function for the factorial of 4 looked like "4!". It had an Exclamation Point! As if it was shouting! at Sammy! And, considering that 4! would always be bigger than, say, the constant "e" to the power of 4, and 5! always bigger than e⁵, and on and on... more trees would mean a! MUCH!! LOUDER!!! PROBLEM!!1!

Even if half the routes were ignored, as being the backwards-route of some other route; it would still not be enough to drown out the screaming gale of the Factorial.

Sammy's whiskers drooped. The problem wasn't hard. It just took too long. He wouldn't mind if an extra tree took an extra few minutes ("linear time"). He might not even mind if an extra tree meant every other tree had to take an extra few minutes ("polynomial time") - maybe Darby could "share" his computer. But how could this problem be solved in linear (or if it had to be done, polynomial) time?

Labels: algorithms

posted by Zimri on 19:52 | link |

Vote against

Via Ace, we're told that the First Amendment is going to be repealed within a military budget request.

If I were of a more mellow constitution, and a poor student of history, I'd just say, pass this thing; the stupid part will never pass Constitutional muster, and the important bit will pass. As an example, Bush signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill...

... And there's your example right there. The Supreme Court refused to obey the Constitution. They proved themselves to be a council of kings. Our system was powerless against it.

That taught the rest of us a lesson: we can't let anti-Constitutional bills slide past. Every legislator has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution. Since the anti-speech bill fails that test, no member of our political system should entertain it.

I call upon every Congressperson of either party to vote against this abomination. It is not a military bill in its present form. Congress should wait until they write a real bill; then they may vote for that. In the world of partisan politics: the Republicans have an issue that should work; that the Democrats are loading illegal provisos into a bill that ought to be about supporting our troops.

UPDATE 10/29: So much for that. It was always a vain hope. Rep. C.W. Bill Young's soul, if you were wondering, is worth $123,800.

Labels: constitution

posted by Zimri on 18:40 | link |

This better not be a hoax

Superconductors are materials which carry a current with resistance of zero (0) ohms. They're made in a lab, and when I was a kid they were made of something with the science-fictiony name "niobium" and they had to be cooled in liquid helium. Then in 1987ish they were catapulted into liquid nitrogen territory, and they became (barely) usable for industrial applications.

Slashdot is linking to some guy in a "1996 style" website, that they're now at freezer temperatures. 254 Kelvin, as the site points out, means -2 Fahrenheit and -19 C. Another way to look at it - room temperature, if your room is dark and has the window open during a north American winter.

It looks suspicious, but then - Perelman solved the Poincare Conjecture just by uploading some stuff into arXiv.

Labels: bullshit, science

posted by Zimri on 13:01 | link |

Monday, October 12, 2009

This blog's political standpoint

This is a pro-conservative blog, written by a non-conservative observer.

Conservatives and this current form of government are diametrically opposed. John Derbyshire is now insisting that Conservatism as a governing philosophy is doomed. Mencius Moldbug thinks that the whole of democracy is doomed, and that only a Reaction can work. I have accepted their premise up to the point that there is a crisis.

Moldbug wants instead some form of autocracy, like the Chinese or Roman Empires. I don't like the track record of autocrats in the long term; they get corrupt. I don't think human nature will change if, when, or because Moldbug's best marijuana contact has been promoted to Emperor Norton II of New America.

My diagnosis of the problem comes from what I have observed of Liberals and Conservatives. Liberals are transnational. Conservatives are local. The sin of Liberals is pride. The sin of Conservatives is sloth (which I keep running into in the form of intellectual sloth, or stupidity). I don't want Liberals running the public fisc. I don't want Conservatives deciding on scientific standards.

But if I say "to hell with both", as I have a propensity to do, then the available population dwindles to a few dozen thousand other Asperger's cases, and you can't build a community on that. Plus there's the problem of what to do with the billions of corpses from all the Liberals and Conservatives that I just killed. And I'll miss some of them.

So I don't want an autocracy and I don't want Stephen King to cook up his superflu. But I don't think leaving well enough alone will work; the likely end point will be anarchy, or fascism.

To stave off the crisis, I want to push Liberals into transnational institutions and to keep them out of local governance; and I want to pen Conservatives out of decisions which involve science.

If this is done, in my opinion, there will be no need for a full Reaction or the other, worse options.

Labels: meta

posted by Zimri on 22:46 | link |

The Protocols of the Elders of France

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is notorious as an anti-Semitic forgery. What's a little less noted is that it isn't structurally anti-Semitic. Here is one fellow who has noted that feature, "Bunk X" from the blogmocracy:

I read the “Protocols” before I knew about the background of the hoax. BUT, while I was reading them, it occurred to me that they could have been written about any other group of people, in any major religious or racial category, and some folks would believe the hyperbole.

In any case, I didn’t buy into it, and I told my respected elderly arab friend, who lent me his copy, why. He was stunned that I’d been able to see through the propaganda.

This feature is a "textual seam" - evidence for an underlying text, anti-elite and probably not anti-Jew. It turns out that we have the original text, Dialogue in Hell by Maurice Joly; and, indeed, it was about ruling elites - in his case, Napoleon III in France. The forgers then rewrote it in Russian and replaced some of the figures.

Other readers of the Protocols have been shocked at how far the Elders' cynical view of the "Christian" commons seems to "ring true" for them. Of course it does! It is simply a caricature of how any elite looks upon any commons it views as separate and contemptible. That is what the Protocols took from Joly, and Joly from Macchivelli. "Christians" would then be the forger's interpolation, and indeed this word is not in the source by Joly.

For the Protocols, it would not be hard to replace the "Elders of Zion" with any ruling elite or other market-dominant minority. One might even be able to dig out this source, and to trace it to Napoleon III; although admittedly, when confronted with such cynicism, one would first think of Macchiavelli and wonder if he had written a secret book.

As an analogy, say that some loser took C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters and replaced Screwtape with "Herschel" and Wormwood with "Irving". Would it be anti-Semitic? Certainly. Structurally? Not really; it would be recognised at once as a crude plagiary, and (I hope) nobody would accuse Lewis of digging into anti-Semitic tropes.

Labels: antisemitism, misanthropy

posted by Zimri on 21:05 | link |

... and then they came for me

I've had to deliver a few apologies over the weeks. (What the hell - decades.)

If theorem T seems objectively true, even if T has been demonstrated to the limit, there sometimes remain people who still won't see the truth of T - to a part of me, these people have ceased to be people. They have become a problem: a mathematical singularity, or at any rate an algorithm gone NP-complete.

I have to remember to step back and to remember that these people are, still, human. More human than me, a humanitarian would argue. I've shared my worries on that, over five years ago. Nothing much changes in human nature.

What might change is how I deal with the buggy software in my own head rather than fantasising about deleting everyone else from my life.

There is, or was, a large-ish sociology experiment on the 'Web, run by liberal jazz musician Charles Johnson. After 9/11/2001, he developed a community called "Little Green Footballs" - and then over the past couple years he placed ever more onerous restrictions upon that community.

One of his little roadblocks he set up in our little lizard maze: he declared for tyrant Zelaya in Honduras. At this point I wrote up an essay proving that L.G.F. was "anti-conservative". I figured I'd be quickly banned, or (much less likely) Charles would post something to the effect "yeah; deal with it".

Nope. First the post lingered around and attracted "down-dings". I picked up 10. And Johnson's final comment to me, announcing that he was terminating my account there, got about 2 or 3 "up-dings".

I'd become a problem to that community, and the problem was solved - to rejoicing all around.

It was about what I deserved.

Labels: apology, lgf, misanthropy, personal

posted by Zimri on 20:29 | link |

How Conservatives can question Obama's patriotism

Birtherism is not to be confused with Conservatives questioning President Barack Obama's American credentials generally.

By my definition of "Conservative", and their definition of "American" - Conservatives are being consistent. They even have a political-scientific point. Other nations have had problems with near-abroad foreigners migrating in and taking over. For two examples, Napoleon was born a Corsican and Hitler an Austrian. The law about natural-born citizenship has until now hindered would-be Napoleons.

But now we have a half-African (and half-moonbat), born in frontier Hawaii, raised in Indonesia, with little contact with Middle America. Noel at Cold Fury has more -

Obama is our first hyphenated-President in a way that even Catholic JFK was not. And not just as an “African-American“. He is the first to go completely through our educational institutions since the Hyphenated-Left has held sway. When academia teaches students to be loyal first to their own pigment or identity group and suspicious of the larger culture, that is the very definition of questioning patriotism.

Indeed, for all the hyperventilating cries of “How dare you question my patriotism!”, the Left has literally questioned the very basis of patriotism, the nation-state. And held up Internationalism as a higher value. He is an International-American.

He was exposed to Muslim cultures through his father and step-father; he’s a Muslim-ish-American. Who lived in Indonesia and traveled to Pakistan–a Third-World-American. He absorbed the vicarious victimhood of McCarthyism from all the socialists in his life. A Victim-of-America-American.

So why are you, as a Wondering-American, still scratching your head as to why he keeps siding against America and freedom, and with foreign governments, the UN, Third-World grifters, mullahs and Socialists?

I'm not wondering; Obama has been running this nation as a Third World province of the "international community". He has benefited from the Liberal loophole: since he's legally allowed to be President, he's playing on the same field as a generations-long patriot like John McCain.

It's annoying, and Conservatives have a serious case that Obama's election represents a failure in the birthright prerequisite for office. If we grant that it's a dangerous folly for anyone to call for Obama's ouster by mutiny as the birthers do, it remains legitimate to question whether the birthright law ought to be restricted further for future candidates. It is even legitimate to call Obama out as a Quisling, foreign in his own heart.

Because that's how he's behaved; and that's at least as equally dangerous a folly as birtherism, for a man of his background especially.

UPDATE 10/24/2009: added ColdFury's paragraphs.

Labels: constitution, fascism, nirthers, obama

posted by Zimri on 17:34 | link |

Birth Certificate skepticism is seditious

Certain of Barack Obama's opponents have been spreading a meme that Obama was not born in the USA. This has implications.

Other opponents, if not buying into "Birtherism" themselves, imagine that "Birthers" are useful; rallying the base to constructive activities, like taking the House for anti-Obama candidates in 2010. Most blow it off as harmless gutter politics. I beg to differ.

If Obama was not born here, then he is not the President. The office of President includes the formal military rank of "Commander in Chief". If Obama is not the President, then he is not the Commander. That would mean that no soldier is allowed to follow the man's orders. The whole chain of command is busted; every soldier becomes a mercenary, in it for the pay. Under such conditions - with which I am not agreeing - a mutiny, with the purpose of installing of Joseph Biden as President, isn't just likely; it's required. As for Obama, he could legally get shot during the mutiny, being the foreign and illegal head of a mercenary force on our soil (i.e., the army itself). The stakes are high; it is not an idle game.

It might help to understand how we got here. I was first introduced to birth-certificate skepticism at the site "Little Green Footballs" last year, during an election campaign against John McCain which was - at the time - close. This meme then spread around various right-wing sites along with other rumours of varying degrees of credibility. LGF then repudiated BC skepticism and turned against those bloggers who were still supporting it - like Pamela Gellar, originator of the typo "nirth certificate". Meanwhile, various drips and drabs have trickled out of the Obama camp, including a version of the BC. Obama then won, and took the Oath of Office.

A few documents remain unreleased (hence the "Long Form" sub-meme planted here and there) but it is no longer reasonable to doubt them. Obama has political reasons to hold onto what is left: it makes opponents look bad, and it also draws fire away from other "documentary hypotheses" like Obama's college records and whether or not Bill Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father. The courts agree; whenever Obama is sued over the BC, Obama wins.

The natural tactical shift is to "we are just asking questions"; such as we find in the realm of Holocaust denial, 9/11 trutherism, and Ben Stein's Expelled. Unfortunately for the Birthers, the tactic isn't new, and its targets know how to counteract it - as in the Dover evolution decision of 2005 (which helped lose the House in 2006). These court cases, coupled with the lost BC cases, have given Obama evidence which he may now use, in lawsuits against his accusers.

The issue is now bigger than Obama. Obama isn't an ordinary citizen going after slanderers, anymore. To the extent that such doubt exists in the military, it undercuts unit cohesion and morale. In short, this talk is - if false - a form of sedition; and since we are engaged in warfare, it must class with Tokyo Rose.

Birther talk is legally false, a deliberate slander, and sedition in a time of war. Obama has the legal right to order "Birthers" rounded up and tried for treason. Whether Obama will have to do it depends upon the Birthers, and upon to which degree the military and its friends buy into Birtherism. Pray that the Birthers remain irrelevant.

Labels: lgf, nirthers, obama

posted by Zimri on 17:15 | link |

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Personal news

Still in good health, so there's that. Need to return to the gym though.

I found out about Asperger's. I haven't bothered taking a diagnosis. (It seems obvious.)

I'm Catholic as of the start of last year. Sort of. I'm baptised but in the Anglican Communion; I'd need years of reprogramming to be Catholic. Not sure that I can go through with it now; I've become more sharply secular of late. Insofar as I'm even capable of supernatural belief it would be Catholic.

New job. As of late 2007. So, not so new...

No major projects on the topics of the Bible or Islam.

Labels: personal

posted by Zimri on 23:00 | link |

The Guardian Council

Here is a political idea I've been tossing around: to institute a Council of Guardians as part of the judicial branch. Like Iran, but atheist.

This council would be tasked with defining the physical assumptions of the State. It would be elected by the universities and civil service. To balance, strip the franchise to elect Senators and the like, from anybody taking a paycheck from USG. An elected official fron the Senate etc receives the right to challenge any given "scientific finding" of the Guardians; but said challenge must itself be falsifiable.

The physical assumptions of the State are then consulted in all policies and jurisprudential decisions. The Council itself, if consulted directly, may say "this will happen if you do / don't do X" or "if you want us to study Q then we need $y million". However the Council may not itself suggest policy, let alone give orders or levy taxes.

This maintains representative government; while keeping the masses from instituting something popular and stupid, like creationism. Civil servants and policy-making humbug-mongers get an outlet for their primate urge for status, but it's channeled into a separate track than the popularity contest of politics. Stupidities beloved of the Left, like carbon credits or race quotas, are subject to challenge from elected officials; but a rule is in place to prevent bogus challenges from a non-scientific background.

Labels: constitution

posted by Zimri on 20:24 | link |

"Affirmative action", in Norwegian

Some are calling Obama's Nobel Peace Prize "affirmative action" - RedState and Sailer come to mind. Over at the blogmocracy I had tried to debunk that, and concluded that this canard was an expression of racial resentment.

I'd forgotten about Rigoberta Menchú.

The Prize committee has, in several occasions, (quoting Sailer) "demonstrate[d] how much white people long to give money, fame, and power to a black guy who meets minimum standards of presentability, regardless of his lack of accomplishments." For Europe, read "someone reminding them of the post-colonial Third World" instead of "black guy"; if Obama was actually Black, like Harold Ford Jr, I doubt he'd have won anything in Norway. But the impulse behind the Nobel here is analogous to American affirmative-action, and I can't rule out that it contributed.

So, belated apologies to Erickson and Sailer.

Labels: apology, obama, race, sailersphere

posted by Zimri on 19:48 | link |

The Nobel Prize

The Nobel committee’s decision is an afterclap of the reconstruction of Norway after 1945.

Norway surrendered to the Nazis in 1940 and, under Vidkun Quisling, their collaboration went beyond that of allied Finland and even occupied Denmark. Not everybody went under, but the resistors needed help. They got it. According to this Norse site, British agents were in deep with the resistance. When the Germans surrendered in Norway, British forces under General Sir Andrew Thorne occupied the place. Under Thorne, and then under the indigenous Labour-Party under Einar Gerhardsen, for 20 years Britain and Britain’s Norwegian allies drove the Nazi-aligned elite of old Norway into extinction. They remade Norway into a Progressive nation.

Norway has a new elite now, which exploits national guilt for its collaboration. This elite has relentlessly (if peacefully) continued its purge of anything remotely right-wing.

Moldbug has the goods on what that meant last week. This elite sees populists in America (I call them, "Conservatives") as the prime enemy now that their own populists are marginal. It has rewarded Obama for being a bulwark against America itself.

By accepting this award, Obama has announced that he is our Quisling: ruling America on behalf of continental European interests.

P.S. I believe that reconstructing Norway was a necessary act, and I’m glad my countrymen helped do it. Unfortunately handing over Scandinavian nations to progressives cost us in the Cold War: Gerhardsen wouldn’t let NATO keep military bases in Norway, for instance.

Labels: europe, obama, progressives

posted by Zimri on 19:37 | link |

Post 1000

Hah. I was at #994 when I took down the old blog...

I had threatened to fill up the remnant with "six posts of naked gymnastics". Aren't you glad I decided to post this other stuff instead?

Labels: meta

posted by Zimri on 19:33 | link |

Can Blacks be conservative?

It may happen that someone from an otherwise-Liberal ethnos will cross over to join a party filled with Conservatives. I have in mind here Blacks but this can equally apply to central Mexicans, Guatemalans, Somalis etc.

Some Conservatives on the Internet treat minority Republican-voters as movement leaders. Other Internet Conservatives, like Steve Sailer, don't talk about "black conservatives" much beyond a few references to Booker T. Washington. Conservatives off the Internet barely know that they exist.

Some Black conversions to the Right side are attributable to Christianity. Others are attributable to idealism. Since these converts will not get much support from their friends and family, they hook into the Conservative movement on the Internet where there is a community.

The idealist is a conservative of the mind, not of the heart. It's questionable as to how far they can speak for the Black community. This contributor to Black & Right grew up in a White neighbourhood in Massachusetts. He might have more in common with me. As such, he is not Conservative in the Romantic, "RS McCain" sense; I would argue, not a Conservative at all, but a Burkean ally to Conservatives at most.

Afrocity strikes me as a true Conservative. She grew up in a community of people like her and, so, has roots. In her case, she is, or was, a voter for Democrats like Hillary Clinton. Voting Republican would be more difficult for her than for intellectuals like Sowell or B&R.

Blacks can certainly be Conservative, but Black Conservatives will probably not vote Republican. The more Afrocity (say) tilts to the Republicans, the less rooted she will become to her own kind; she will become more ideological, and so less Conservative.

Labels: conservatives, race, sailersphere

posted by Zimri on 19:14 | link |

Conservatives in the mist

Robert Stacy McCain is a controversial blogger. He is Southern-born and proud of that. If he filled out a Census, he would write his ancestry "American"; most citizens instead prefer to call themselves German, Black, Irish or (in my case) English. I take him at his word that he speaks for the base Conservative.

In nineteenth-century terms, his Conservatism is a Romantic movement.

For the Conservative, Americanism has a mystical meaning. It is rooted in love of the land and of fellow tribesmen. This is what Europeans will immediately recognise as “blood and soil”, or “nationalism”; but the best word I know of is Ibn Khaldun’s asabiya.

From his standpoint, the Conservative is free to rank his fellow citizens on personal kinship and degree of fealty to America. His "Americanism" is tied to the local community, public ritual, and military service or at least belonging to a family with active duty members. It is not about the founding documents or any other set of abstract beliefs. Thinkers who argue for Conservatism exist - like Edmund Burke - but they are not, themselves, Conservative. (Burke was a Whig.) Even the Constitution is secondary to a Conservative if it conflicts with what he is used to. This sets the Conservative apart from ideological allies, like libertarians and reactionaries - even Mormons.

Conservatives retain the right to discipline members who call into question the common ideals of the community. These days the heretic is usually a Liberal.

Conservatives see no need to discipline members who are following a fundamentalist strain of the local faith. In a dispute in which side A is arguing for something clearly stupid but with a cultural basis in the community (Creationism, or Josh MacDowell), and side B is arguing against: Conservatives will pick side A as it is, at least, their side.

Conservatives join the Democrats if they are Black or central-Mexican; they join the Republicans or the Constitution Party if they are White, north-Mexican, Cuban, or Vietnamese.

Labels: conservatives, religion

posted by Zimri on 17:51 | link |

The liberal conscience

Conservatives and other non-liberals often post an image of capital-L Liberals they have, along the lines of "they just hate freedom". Ideologically, I think Liberals are best detailed at Moldbug's as a breed of Puritan. But the liberal base doesn't know or care about Cromwell and the Whigs. How do they see themselves?

A month back I was involved in RS McCain's "Plot Against America". The discussion started out as a flamewar but got more reasoned as time went on. (I floated a thought-balloon there of my own, which I won't repeat here, because I don't personally believe it, but you can read it there.) In the course of the fracas DougJ pitched a fit on John Cole's site balloonjuice. I went over there to hear them out on their own turf.

Here is what I found: The Liberals are those who believe that being "American" is a contract between the citizen and the state. It follows, for them, that a Marxist academic is just as American as a fourth-generation farm boy in Mississippi - since both were born in America.

A Liberal is concerned, emotionally, with how he rates against other Liberals, which includes Liberals overseas. He still might not want to be called “less American”, though; because being “less American” – to the Liberal – implies that non-Liberals might dismiss him as a traitor. And they may well feel some attachment to “American values” - which he retains the right to define for himself, usually involving buzzwords like “social justice”. The Declaration of Independence, and Thomas Paine, and the Emancipation Proclamation are considered the moral basis of "Americanism" to the Liberal.

The Liberal's “American values” aren’t to be confused with the love of country as it exists that the Conservative holds. The Liberal therefore resents rituals of fealty like, say, the pledge of allegiance.

Lastly, the Liberal is not necessarily a socialist and will rarely espouse socialist ideas in someone's comments. (The Liberal prefers to attack specific Conservatives and Conservative ideas.) But being part of the Brotherhood of Man, if the rest of the Brotherhood goes socialist, he'll go along to get along.

Labels: liberals

posted by Zimri on 17:25 | link |

Jurisprudence v. secularism

Conservatives in the USA claim that they support "strict constructionism" and "original intent" in a reading of the American Constitution. I've found a place where they contradict.

I've posted here and elsewhere a belief that "under God" / "In God We Trust" ceremonial deism amounts to a Congressional establishment of religion at the Federal level. This is a "strict constructionist" standpoint.

However, that standpoint need not have been the "original intent" of even the near-Voltairean Jefferson. No-one in the late 1700s had Clue One about the nature of this 13.7 billion year old universe, of this 4,567 million year old planet, and mankind's 100s-thousand year sojourn upon that. Atheism wasn't intellectually feasible in the 1700s; a strict secularist at the time would have been either a genius with a LOT of faith in the science of his day, or else insane.

Ceremonial Deism, as a 1700s lowest-common-denominator, has safeguards in the form of historical precedent against growing into full-blown Calvinism etc. So, we can agree to disagree on whether Ceremonial Deism must count as a religion.

(Originally posted as an appendix to New Zeal. I still won't tolerate the de minimis argument: "get a grip" etc. But that's out of scope and I've dealt with it elsewhere.)

UPDATE 11/19: "Strict constructionism" is how Western civil law works. I've since written on that here.

However one could counter-argue that the hermeneutic (interpretation-ethic) of Constitutional law is more akin to that of Islam: appropriate to the holy writ delivered to a Prophet. In that analogy original intent is the analogue of Prophetic tafsir. The notion is at least internally consistent and falsifiable by natural means, and for that I won't dismiss it out of hand. I insist only that we are clear about our axioms.

Labels: conservatives, constitution, secularism

posted by Zimri on 17:03 | link |

Layout changes

As you can see, I've reposted my blog under a new template.

• I wasn't sure how much I still believed in any of the political stuff I once believed. I'll start slow. I remain as misanthropic, suspicious, and anti-democratic as I always was. So we'll put Mencius Moldbug on the blogroll. More links can join him "organically".
• We'll keep the greenish-on-black theme I'd inherited from Carlene the "Misanthropic Bitch". (Remember her? No? Get off my lawn!)
• This version should be a little easier on the eyes. The other colours should be less glaring.
• Words are on the left now, links on the right. This is because of smartphones.
• I finally figured out how to use Blogger for archives.

As to why I took down the blog: At first, I was trying to switch jobs and I didn't feel comfortable with people seeing what was here. While that was going on, my own political stance went through the wringer. I contributed to Little Green Footballs, mostly, and you might find some of my stuff there; although I expect my contributions are deleted by now.

As to why I'm restarting this thing: I've been steadily posting more and more substantive comments on other sites, concerning how I understand the world. People are taking offence to these comments. The comments are creating enemies: defined as, people willing to take the time to follow my screenname around the Internet, to dig up past comments, and to discredit me everywhere. Now, I don't have a problem with enemies. (I'm not in control over someone else's emotions; and I'm not important enough in the scale of things - I expect the enemies to find something better to do in the long term.) My problem is that I can't easily clarify a comment that I leave somewhere else. If you think I'm dangerous enough to warrant an expulsion off teh internets: at least make the case based on my comments here, and not on someone else's interpretation of some dashed-off troll-post I dropped weeks ago (or longer) elsewhere.

Labels: enemies, layout, lgf, misanthropy

posted by Zimri on 16:31 | link |

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