How do you bait a trap for the soul?

You bait a trap for a mouse with tasty food. How do you bait a soul-trap for people too smart to fall for conventional religion? With half-truths, of course.

I bailed out of an attempt to induct me into a cult tonight. The cult is called Landmark Forum or Landmark Education, and is descended from est, the Erhard Seminars Training. The induction attempt was mediated by a friend of mine who shall remain nameless. He has attended several Landmark events, praises the program to the skies, and probably does not realize even now that he has begun to exhibit classic cult-follower symptoms (albeit so far only in a quite a mild form – trying as hard as he did to to recruit me is the main one so far).

“But Eric. How did you know it was a cult?”

Oh, I dunno. Maybe it was all the shiny happy Stepford people with the huge smiles and the nameplates and the identical slightly glassy-eyed affect greeting us several times on the way to the auditorium. Maybe it was the folksy presenter with the vaguely Southern accent spewing pseudo-profundities about “living into your future” and “you will get Nothing from this training” (yes, you could hear the capital N). Maybe it was the parade of people telling stories about how broken they were until they found Landmark.

Dear Goddess, hasn’t everybody seen this movie by now? It wasn’t even subtle. They might as well have put up a nine-foot-high neon sign announcing “HI, WE’LL BE YOUR BRAINWASHERS FOR THE EVENING.” The only uncertainty left in my mind is how pathological this particular gang is – whether their cult induction machinery is mainly mechanism for vacuuming money out of wallets or they actually have a core group that gets off on the processing-people-into-compliant-zombies thing.

What makes outfits like this truly dangerous is that they aren’t entirely wrong. That is, their theory of how human beings tick (a jigger of Neuro-Linguistic Programing, a dash of cognitive behavior therapy, a few skooches of transactional analysis, and generally a substratum of Zen-by-any-other-name) actually works well enough that if you do the process you are in fact likely to clean up a bunch of the shit in your life. Even Scientology, the biggest and nastiest of the cult groups traveling as “therapy”, teaches some useful things – Hubbard’s model of the “reactive mind” is pretty shrewd psychology.

The trouble with cults is that they aren’t actually about the parts that are true. They’re about using the true parts to hook you, to condition you into an becoming an eager little propagator of their memetic infection. For that to happen, your ability to think critically about the doctrine has to be pretty much entirely shut down. Fortunately the behavioral signs of this degeneration are quite easy to spot – I would have learned to recognize them back at the dawn of the New Age movement around 1970 even if I hadn’t gone to Catholic schools before that.

I bailed out after about 20 minutes. It was just too drearily obvious where it was all going.

The evening wasn’t done with me yet, though. It was a cold walk from 7th Street to the 15th-Street train station, and my path took me past a Philly cop on the beat and through City Hall. I think the cop spotted the .45 on my hip under my A2 jacket and that could have become unpleasant – carrying concealed is legal in Philly but the police have been known to hassle carriers pretty hard. This one just nodded at me as I walked by. Maybe he’d read the Heller decision.

Pholadelphia’s City Hall is a huge rococo pile of Second French Empire gingerbread with one redeeming feature – four archway entrances lead to a huge central courtyard where, at the exact center of Philadelphia, there’s a big lovely compass rose in the pavement stonework. Well, there used to be. It’s gone. You can see traces of it around the outside. There’s a big rectangular concrete patch where the center was. I mourn – it’s like they ripped the symbolic heart out of my city. By the wear on the concrete it’s been like that for some years, and I didn’t know.

I was still thinking about this when I descended into the 15th-Street station. I was slightly hungry, having not had dinner, and – aha – I spotted an Au Bon Pain, aka “McDonalds for foodies”. So there I am standing at the counter waiting for night-shift guy to make my sandwich. Night shift guy is what you’d expect behind this kind of service counter in this city: black urban dude in his late twenties. Maybe a bit more alert-looking than average but nothing at all remarkable about him.

So I said “I just bailed out of an attempt to induct me into a cult”. He replied – and I will now channel Dave Barry and assure you that I am not making this up:

“The Obama administration?”

Maybe there’s hope for us yet.

933 comments

  1. As many times as I’ve been to Center City Philadelphia, I’ve never actually been into City Hall. I should rectify that.

    But I never thought of you as thinking of Philadelphia as your city, for some reason. You always seemed to be apart from it a bit. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve actually been anywhere with you east of Radnor.

    As for the cop…he might well have sized you up as a sheepdog instead of a wolf, and decided to leave well enough alone. Cops, even (maybe especially) Philadelphia cops, are pretty good at such things.

    And yeah, there may be hope yet.

    1. >You always seemed to be apart from it a bit.

      You didn’t know me when I lived in West Philly.

      >he might well have sized you up as a sheepdog instead of a wolf, and decided to leave well enough alone.

      That possibility occurred to me at the time, especially because he nodded. Older guy, white, looked like he’d seen it all…which improves the odds on that theory.

  2. Jay, Philadelphia is the only municipal entity close enough to us to warrant the name, so of course it’s “our City”. All the more so for Eric, because he actually lived there while he was in college (I only worked there).

  3. > [bits and pieces of useful stuff as bait]
    An interesting project would be to sift through all of these “memetic infections” (great term) and compile the useful bits vs. the payload of the attack. Do you know of any such project?

    >Maybe there’s hope for us yet.
    Wow, just wow.

    I’m still attempting to map what is really going on in this country: massive left-wing slide, libertarian paradise around the corner, diaperhead invasion? What do you look for / ignore?

    — Foo Quuxman

  4. Heh. I never saw the Stepford Wives movie, but I remember Werner Erhard. And Scientology, with which I have both a Slashdot and a personal beef. And Synanon. Oy! Talk about a TRIP.

    And then there was the girl I met who had run away from the Tony And Susan Alamo foundation, which was a Jesus freak cult that didn’t believe in sex. Girl had a lot of sex to catch up on. I helped her the best I could.

    San Francisco had a lot of strange people back then (1970s). Still does.

  5. Good post, great closing story. Maybe the night shift guy recently got his new, smaller, paycheck.

  6. Amusing ending, although I don’t think I’d call Obama a cult. If there is a left-wing cult in the US, Obama himself hasn’t been a Member In Good Standing for years.

    Sure, he won the election, but that’s because all of his `betrayals’ were things the left would expect any Republican president to do anyway.

    In 2012, the only real difference between the two candidates was gay rights (which proved decisive).

    The Republicans blew a big opportunity to mop the floor with Obama:

    http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/20/change-copyright-now/

    If only they’d published it before the election, and not retracted it. Computer types who’d like to abolish copyright are one of the hardest groups for the Republicans to attract at present.

  7. I have been voting straight Cthulhu in for the last twelve years. However, in the 2016 election, I intend to vote Obama for president.

    If Obama runs for president again in 2016, anyone who suggests that it is unconstitutional will be deemed crazy, without, however it being explained whether you are crazy to think he has already been president in 2008, crazy to think that the constitution places a term limit of two terms on presidents, or crazy to think we still have a constitution.

  8. See the Afterword at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/pictures/wotf.html#scientology for Jerry Pornelle’s discussion of how L. Ron Hubbard created Dianetics and why he turned it into Scientology.

    Short version: If you’re getting in legal trouble for practicing medicine without a license when using your pet theories (“Dianetics is easily shown to be a synthesis of Jung and Korzybski[’s General Sematics]”), the First Amendment can protect you if you declare yourself a religion.

  9. Some years ago, a couple of friends of mine attended a Landmark forum and invited my wife and I to a subsequent recruitment evening. Our take on it was pretty much the same: cult-ish, but definitely containing some good material (in fact, the aforementioned friends benefited greatly from their attendance, as did our friendship).

    I think membership in this sort of group can be a ‘less-wrong’ phenomenon. E.g. I’ve known people who were literally destroying their lives (drug abuse (as opposed to use), organised crime, assault, etc. etc.) and then ‘cleaned up’ by joining a religion.

    I’ll grant you all of the epistemological, moral and ethical faults with religion, but: membership in a relatively benign happy-clappy Christian group is less wrong than suicide by drugs or cops.

    Perhaps this partially explains the success of cults (in which group I include religion)? Maybe you get _enough_ of the benefits of a good philosophy to get by, without the hard work that’s involved in a truly rational one?

  10. There’s a diet cult called Isagenix which, surprise surprise, is also an MLM. My sister got involved with this and I was actually able to witness this sort of trap firsthand. The thing about Isagenix is if you follow the program you will lose weight — a lot of it. But not for the reasons stated. (A big hint should be the use of herbal laxatives in their “cleanse” product.) So people see promising results early on and their brains are primed to accept the new-age health-food-nut nonsense — and of course the critical bit of nonsense that says big profits will come your way if you sell, sell, sell. Bam — instant, free sales force.

    It’s actually fairly frustratingly hard to find negative material about Isagenix online, despite ALL of the warning signs being there. Like Scientology tried to do in the late 90s, Isagenix apparently incentivizes its “associates” to google-bomb search terms relating to it (along with certain key words like “scam”) with positive glowing material. And it all sounds the same.

    Meanwhile, I think I might scream if I hear my sister utter another word of Isa-ganda.

  11. I cannot see how the Obama administration can qualify as a cult. From over here in Europe, the Republicans sounded much more cult-like.
    Also, if I remember well, Romney also lost in any demographic that was not “white male non-urban” voters. My impression too was that Romney could have won easily if he had chosen a different vice president, had not alienated women and Hispanic voters, had not expressed his opinion that he hated half the population, and had not hired Microsoft and Accenture to build his Orca system.

    But hey, what do I know? I live on a different continent.

  12. Duncan Bayne: Bingo. Evolutionary mechanisms aren’t always neat and pretty and rational, but those that are still around can be said to have worked.

  13. I think cults are an example of “Any powerful tool is dangerous”.

    The basic power in the religion-cult-gang spectrum seems to be to supply a meaningful social structure to the life of their followers, or any structure at all. And something to fully occupy their time and mind (remember all the group activity, praying, and studying of lectures?). We all know the personality traits of their victims.

    Given the pervasiveness of religious and cult-like elements in society, I would limit the word Cult to organizations that try to isolate their followers. Your Landmark Forum seems to be just a money scam. But I am already very suspicious if an organization is “too well organized”. Any organization that is “extremely well organized” is single minded and working to only a single goal. That goal is only rarely my general benefit.

    Given the mountains of literature and scriptures available on how to insert meaning into a person’s life and mend dysfunctional habits (starting with all the stuff written down in the 5th century BCE), anyone can easily create a cult. And that is indeed done time and again.

  14. @Duncan Bayne
    “Maybe you get _enough_ of the benefits of a good philosophy to get by, without the hard work that’s involved in a truly rational one?”

    We seriously over-estimate our ability to understand the world rationally.

    Not because of some religious mystic force, but because my brain has limited computing power. Luckily, evolution has added some hormonal and emotional shortcuts that keep me alive and steer me to the right people to hang around.

  15. >Computer types who’d like to abolish copyright are one of the hardest groups for the Republicans to attract at present.

    Indeed we are, at least in part because it’s a young demographic. But there are a few of us (like me) who are, though not entirely enthusiastic Republicans, at least staunch enough anti-Democrats to pass for committed Republicans given the two party system, generally by virtue of belonging to some other more traditionally Republican demographic (white evangelicals in my case).

  16. @Winter:
    >I cannot see how the Obama administration can qualify as a cult. From over here in Europe, the Republicans sounded much more cult-like.

    Both are, I think, to some degree, with a heavy dose of “enemy of my enemy” added in. But the Obama campaign in 2008 was very cult-like. An Argentinian friend of mine, who was fairly critical of both parties, remarked at the time that his first reaction to Obama’s campaign speeches and tactics was to start chanting “Pe-rón! Pe-rón!”.

    And quite frankly, the Republicans don’t really have the political capital to be a cult right now. They manage to hang on to their base because the Democratic cult threatens a good portion of that base, because the first-past-the-post nature of American elections creates a two-party system, and, because, for various reasons, the third parties are unsatisfactory to the elements of the Republican base even without the two-party system (and many third parties are downright crazy). So it’s mostly an “enemy of my enemy” thing at the moment.

  17. You went to a Landmark event? Who *doesn’t* know they’re a cult? They’ve been around forever. But your analysis of how they (and others) work is spot-on. I’m glad you walked, but always be aware that it’s easy to get caught up in these things. No one is immune.

  18. > We seriously over-estimate our ability to understand the world rationally.

    Absolutely.

    > Not because of some religious mystic force, but because my brain has limited computing power.

    I think it’s more because we have older, more purely emotional “reptile” and “mammal” brains from which our rationality arises (often imperfectly). Brain scans show that a decision we think is rational may actually start in non-rational parts of our brains, then we rationalize it and think we have made a rational decision.

  19. @ltw
    “No one is immune.”

    I do not think so. Not everyone can become a junkie (studies of morphine administration in hospital have shown that). In the same vein, not everyone can be drawn into a cult. Actually, I suspect the populations sensitive to drug abuse and cults to overlap considerably.

  20. Plenty of things there…..(seen from Europe)

    Obama being a cult : seems fading. Was obviously true in 2008. My perception is that he was reelected by default of a credible opponent(47% of my potential electors ars thieves, ahem…..). Maybe it’s more obvious now in the US because it is fading.

    Republicans being a cult : seems more complex. Tea party is obviously a way of thinking that infuses the brain & makes everyone think the same in that group. Kind of cult. But they are not the whole part of the republicans, it seems to me.

    Religion being useful : I’ve seen it quite a few times. Some people are able of independant thought, some are desperately in need of outside guidance. Whatever it is. Where religion(or secular beliefs) are honest, it can be a great life enhancer. Trouble of course is that it gives the guru a great power. Many abuse this power. They heal drug-addicted, they get bandits to the honest working path, they steal everyone, and they brainwash followers to anything they think good. Or not.

    My own wife is a strong believer, & we sometimes attend baptist church office on sundays. Where we go seems completely harmless. Yet I am always VERY cautious about possible manipulations. As long as the message is to love the lord & respect his children(i.e. everyone on this planet), i see no problem going there. Though if they happen to deal with bible inerrancy or creationist bullcrap, I think I’ll raise a veto to going there : that kind of thoughts definitively rots the mind. Tight now, they just take care of handicapped. In name of the lord, but who cares?

    IMHO, religion is like all kinds of power(political, economical, ideological…). You can do great things with it. You can do horrible things also. The BIG difference is that the very base of it is irrational.

  21. Republicans being a cult : seems more complex. Tea party is obviously a way of thinking that infuses the brain & makes everyone think the same in that group. Kind of cult. But they are not the whole part of the republicans, it seems to me.

    Um I don’t think I agree with your description of the Tea Party. Mind you I’m just a (frequent) visitor to the US and really only visit California and the DC area so quite possibly I’m missing a lot.

    But the tea party people I have met (online and off) seem to have significant variation in beliefs of just about everything except for the basic commonality of “there isn’t any more money, so stop spending it” and, for the most part, its corollary of “shrink government”

    To go back to cults in general. Are the Mormons cultists? I have to say that they certainly seem to exhibit many of the signs but not all by any means. For example, I’ve met a lot of them and they have been without exception “nice”* and (missionaries excepted) not actively pushing others to join.

    *nice – can’t think of a better way to describe it. They are polite, willing to help, (frequently astoundingly) hospitable and stick to agreements. All of which I used to think were just what people did but which my years on this planet have shown to be rarer than they should be.

  22. That must be an advanced cult. I was at a Scientology lecture when I was young and did not know better, and what made me leave early was basically that it was just content-free: optimistic messages, success stories, can-do vibrations, ray-traced horses running free on a large screen (not making it up), spending a good hour on nothing but drilling in how cool they are.

  23. @Shenpen
    I am always fascinated by the tight links between Marketing and Cults. To the extend that I immediately look for a scam if the marketing is smooth.

  24. “In the same vein”

    Nice junkie pun there Winter. Ok, not everyone can be sucked in. I suppose I should have said you can’t tell who is vulnerable. One of the things people commonly believe about cults is that they recruit from down and out losers, and that “they would never fall for that”. Not true.

    I also doubt – don’t know for sure – that substance abuse and susceptibility to brainwashing correlate. Substance abusers tend to exhibit steadily increasing withdrawal from life in general, to the point of isolation. You could argue that so do cultists (in favour of their new friends) but the gregarious nature of a cult – they have to be to maintain their hold on you – would grate very badly on any drunk I’ve ever known, myself included.

    Recovering addicts, perhaps. I’ve long thought that AA and NA are not far off being cults themselves.

  25. I’ve long thought that AA and NA are not far off being cults themselves.

    Whoa… yes. My stepbrother attended AA briefly (but left after a few weeks and quit drinking on his own). I looked at some of the reading material he brought back and got a really creepy vibe from it. Now you’ve made me realize why.

  26. Any group organized enough to assign greeters to welcome people is doing a certain amount of mind control.

    I really wish Herman Cain’s campaign hadn’t imploded. He didn’t have any more skeletons in his closet than Bill Clinton. He was merely in the wrong party, with the wrong message. He would have wiped the floor with Barak Obama.

  27. BobW: Yeah, me too. It would have ended once and for all the meme that conservatives are racists.

    My reaction when Eric told me this story on the phone was “Whoever sent you there didn’t know you very well, did they?” I can’t think of very many people who are more immune to the calling of such a thing than him.

    And if AA/NA are cults, they’re reasonably benign ones, and at least have a genuinely good result. That’s probably because their goal is not to do anything more than get the person to stop using.

    1. >Instead of walking out, why didn’t you participate, until they kicked you out for disrupting their process?

      Better things to do with my time.

  28. Cults rely on a charismatic leader.

    If the charismatic leader dies, and all the people who ever met the charismatic leader die, but the structure has taken on a life of its own and is granting a survival advantage to its adherents rather than destroying the lives of its followers and disintegrating, that means it’s a religion.

    When you get down to it, to deny the validity of religion is to deny the theory of evolution.

  29. @Winter

    @ltw

    “No one is immune.”

    I do not think so. Not everyone can become a junkie (studies of morphine administration in hospital have shown that). In the same vein, not everyone can be drawn into a cult. Actually, I suspect the populations sensitive to drug abuse and cults to overlap considerably.

    ltw is correct, no-one is immune to falling prey to a cult. It’s possible you may be immune to falling prey to specific cults because their message is one you can easily see through due to past experience. That does not mean that you will not have moments of weakness in your life and at that moment find yourself lectured to by a slick salesman speaking on a subject you have little experience in. Humans are all vulnerable because human perception of the universe is terrifically limited, and our lives are full of pain. We *want* to believe there are magic pills that can remove the pain, and we *want* to believe that we know secrets of life that we can share with friends/family/colleagues. That’s basic human nature, we all have that. Since we all have that, we’re all vulnerable to falling prey to a cult. The only question mark is what specific exposure is required for you to want to believe without question.

  30. I’m pretty sure I’m immune. You see, back in 2001, I got hooked up with something called Word of Life Centre. I won’t go as far to say they’re a cult, but interesting things started happening. I felt we had messed up, and in fairly obvious ways, and voiced my opinions to such after almost two years of attendance.

    The resulting break severed my relationship with every member of that organization, including ones that had nothing to do with it, i.e. colleagues at work who were still attending. It was two years later still that I picked up the book I linked earlier, and wow: the book practically describes Word of Life Centre! “Churches That Abuse” is Enroth’s manual for avoiding cults.

    Anyway, I’m going to try to keep this short and simple: There are two published “Stages of Faith” systems that I am aware of, Jeff Fowler’s titular contribution and Scott Peck’s “Further Along The Road Less Traveled” (which mentions the first.)

    http://www.amazon.com/Stages-Faith-Psychology-Development-Meaning/dp/0060628669
    http://www.amazon.com/Further-Along-Road-Less-Traveled/dp/068484723X

    If you are in or past Stage 4 of the former, in or past Stage 3 of the latter, you are immune to cults. I suspect that this is true of less than 3% of the human population.

  31. @Jay Maynard:

    BobW: Yeah, me too. It would have ended once and for all the meme that conservatives are racists.

    Not only that, I think he might have made a good president. He had charisma coming out his ears. He was a math major. He was a restaurant chain turnaround artist. He could talk to anybody. He had his priorities straight.

    He was weak on foreign policy, but so is the current occupant of the White House. Biden isn’t helping.

    He was black, successful, and didn’t toe the Liberal/Progressive/Socialist party line. He had to go, before he embarassed the wrong people.

  32. I really wish Herman Cain’s campaign hadn’t imploded. He didn’t have any more skeletons in his closet than Bill Clinton. He was merely in the wrong party, with the wrong message. He would have wiped the floor with Barak Obama.

    If you’re going to shag women on the side, it’s political suicide to do it as a Republican because you risk alienating your Christian, conservative, sexually prudish party base.

    Democrats don’t always get a free pass in this regard (see: John Edwards) but as the more liberal (and libertine) party they tend to get off easier on average — no pun intended.

  33. IRC, Bill Clinton (the only president ever to actually get impeached) was a Democrat.

    This is incorrect multiple levels. First, there was Andrew Johnson, who, like Clinton, was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate. Second, Clinton’s political career survived numerous sex scandals. He was impeached for Perjury and Obstruction of Justice, incidentally pertaining to a sex scandal that was no worse than previous ones.

  34. Terry,

    Bill Clinton was not the only President to be impeached; Andrew Johnson was also impeached (and acquitted by a margin of one vote).

    Clinton’s impeachment was an attempted political assassination against an extremely popular, twice-elected President. It didn’t work: his voting base wasn’t fooled, he left office with the highest approval rating of any President since WWII after serving out his second term in full, and his VP won the popular vote in 2000.

  35. Actually, we are all paying the price for Clinton’s acquittal: the Left in the Senate demanded, and won, a promise he’d back off from any further entitlement reform in exchange for their votes.

    But for what he did – and what he admitted doing – any regular person would have gone to prison. Arguing to not hold him accountable for the perjury he committed is arguing that men should be able to get off scot-free for lying about sexual harassment. I’m still amazed at how many feminists signed up for that one.

  36. LOL…did you hear the joke that moderate Republicans should be happy because we’re going to have one as President for the next four years?

    Even if the Tea Party isn’t the largest component of the Republican party they’ve certainly driven the moderate republicans onto the endangered species list.

    Herman Cain? Meh. The guy got into bed with the Tea Party/Social Conservatives and had affairs. That’s poor judgement on par with Gary Hart. What? He didn’t think it was going to come out? And then he didn’t think he was going to get thrown under the bus?

    Tell me where all the Rockefeller Republicans have gone? Extinct. Gerrymandered out of existence or surviving in the Democratic Party. There’s no space in the GOP for a fiscally conservative but socially liberal member.

  37. This reminds me of my own experience with attempted induction.

    In fall 1999, I did the post-graduation-backpacking-through-Europe thing. One day in Zurich I was waiting for a reasonable hour to call my then-girlfriend back in the U.S. I was approached by a local man who said he was conducting a survey and asked if I would like to participate. It was a nice day, and Zurich is a nice town, and I had time to spare, so I said, “Sure.” He led me to a nearby storefront, handed me a paper with some questions on it, and I sat down and filled it out.

    I grew a little suspicious when I started reading the questions. They were more like psychological profiling questions than “survey” questions, asking things about my mood, impulses, etc. But like I said, I had time, so I finished it. When I was done, the guy looked over it for less than a minute and told me I was depressed. He then launched into a spiel about how I was in danger of killing myself if I didn’t turn my life around and start making better decisions. Fortunately, he could help!

    I told him, “You know what, you’re right. I do need to make better decisions. The first decision I’m going to make is to get up and walk out of here.”

    On my way out I saw a display full of copies of “Dianetics.” I can still vividly hear the big “ahhhhh…” that went through my brain when I saw that.

  38. @Jay Maynard
    “Arguing to not hold him accountable for the perjury he committed is arguing that men should be able to get off scot-free for lying about sexual harassment.”

    I do not think that woman should be persecuted for sexual harassment of the president. As I understood, the president consented.

  39. Cult leaders are never members, functionally speaking.

    Obama as cult: oh man. Some Americans still remember footage of Obama Girl, of schoolkids being taught to sing songs about him…

    This post raises an interesting question: if you wanted to create a cult even an Eric couldn’t detect, how would you build it?

  40. As I am certain that Eric is cult-immune beyond all reasonable doubt, I would start my Eric-proof cult by trying to make sure he never finds out about it. Similar concerns were probably a minor factor in the relocation of the Peoples Temple (minor probably because 2013 Eric would almost certainly have predicted its fate, even if 1978 Eric didn’t.)

    As for inducting Eric into a cult… Well, as defeated Looney Toons recommend, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Spill the $135 to get my name legally changed, join the ECSL, and probably get only one coolness point for my expense ;)

  41. Winter:> I cannot see how the Obama administration can qualify as a cult. From over here in Europe, the Republicans sounded much more cult-like.

    Republicans worship at a variety of altars, and they don’t worship any of the political leaders, are in fact uniformly disgusted with them.

    Obamanites worship Obama as the light bringer. Only a minority of Democrats worship Obama as a supernatural godlike being, but it is a disturbingly large minority.

    Check your spam box. A remarkable large amount of spam says “Respond to this spam to get in on the latest miracle by Obama.”

  42. el_slapper on Wednesday, January 9 2013 at 5:34 am said:
    > he was reelected by default of a credible opponent(“47% of my potential electors ars thieves, ahem…..”)

    What is a gaffe?

    A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.

    Observing the British politicians after the recent British riots, I noticed the right wing politicians trying to attract the moderate looter and arsonist, while the left wing politicians went after the more radical looters and arsonists.

  43. @Jeff Read

    As I understood it, Andrew Johnson’s impeachment was a not very veiled part of the policy fight over the nature of Reconstruction. Whatever the merits of the dispute, the president was on one side and a majority of Congress was on the other.

    The Paula Jones lawsuit was an attempt to politically hamstring the president. Whatever I thought of President Clinton’s policies I disapproved of the lawsuit.

  44. There are a sizeable number of people who voted for Obama in 2008 who expressed disappointment with him over the next four years, particularly because he wasn’t liberal enough. Whether they tended to vote for him again in 2012 is hard to determine – everyone I know who openly voted Obama in 2012 did not express this type of disappointment (or claimed he was ineffectively only because the Bush boogeyman dragged him down – sorta like “the sun got in my eyes”).

    More hope: there’s the tale my friend tells of a cab driver he met here, who’d immigrated from Trinidad & Tobago, and was disgusted by how Keynesian the current administration was.

  45. Paul Brinkley :> This post raises an interesting question: if you wanted to create a cult even an Eric couldn’t detect, how would you build it?

    NRA?

    1. >if you wanted to create a cult even an Eric couldn’t detect, how would you build it?

      I don’t think that can be done. I know what cult induction methods are like, and I know why they have to be like that – because there are only a limited number of ways to program the meatware. When you know how to analyze on that level, the specific content of the cultic belief system is nearly irrelevant.

      >NRA?

      Ironically, I rather dislike the NRA for being far too squishy about soi-disant “reasonable” firearms restrictions. But a cult it is not – it doesn’t use cultic induction methods, and doesn’t have the characteristically pathologized leader/follower relationships. A comparison with AA (which someone upthread correctly described as cult-like) is very instructive

  46. ” I’ve long thought that AA and NA are not far off being cults themselves.

    Whoa… yes. My stepbrother attended AA briefly (but left after a few weeks and quit drinking on his own). I looked at some of the reading material he brought back and got a really creepy vibe from it. Now you’ve made me realize why.

    Yes, that might be the case. One of the things I was reading when studying mind control and brainwashing techniques (the most random things can turn interesting) – I forget what it was I was reading, but I think the gist of it was that guilt was something that made people uniquely vulnerable to these sort of organizations – whether the guilt is justified or manufactured somehow, the cults get you by

    1) Offering you a way out, through acceptance of their program. Usually something that requires your attention to be directed where they decide it needs to go.
    2) Ensuring that you distrust your own decisionmaking ability – this is where the guilt comes in, You are broken after all, you need them to fix you and make you whole, someone more loyal/indoctrinated in the group needs to be your guide.
    3) Drawing you in to where you don’t have much time or attention leftover of your own. Ensuring you are always jumping through their hoops.

    Anyway, I’m having trouble recalling it all. But if an organization like AA were to become cult-like (don’t know if they are, it would be a shame) the guilt would be there to work with.

  47. Ah, yes,

    3) Drawing you in to where you don’t have much time or attention leftover of your own. Ensuring you are always jumping through their hoops.

    3b) – the mechanics of this have to do with making you used to following orders to earn your absolution from the guilt. By jumping through their hoops, you are being a better person. If you balk at jumping through the hoops you are backsliding, and they can threaten you with being who you were before and being shunned and excommunicated if you don’t continue.

  48. 4) Also, the mechanics of earning your absolution from the cult leaders is that it makes you used to thinking of them as the judges of your actions. Did I do it right? Check with the cult leaders. Did I do well? Check with the cult leaders. Am I a good person? Check with the cult leaders.

  49. I remember seeing some newsweek cover depicting Obama deified. The magazine being what it was, and the title was something appropriately worshipful and slavish, it seemed like they were being straight.

    But the artist chose an interesting deity to represent Obama as – Shiva.

    I burst out laughing when I saw it. I don’t think anyone else in the airport bookstore got the joke.

  50. @ Terry

    If you are in or past Stage 4 of the former, in or past Stage 3 of the latter, you are immune to cults. I suspect that this is true of less than 3% of the human population.

    I had to look those up. There doesn’t seem to be any stage of simply abandoning all faith except that in entropy. That’s about where I would be. I have faith that disorder will continue to increase, but only faith.

  51. @Re: my prior thought
    “I burst out laughing when I saw it. I don’t think anyone else in the airport bookstore got the joke.”

    Though, on second thought, if they are being serious, that just adds another level to their derangement.

    @nigel
    “Even if the Tea Party isn’t the largest component of the Republican party they’ve certainly driven the moderate republicans onto the endangered species list. .. There’s no space in the GOP for a fiscally conservative but socially liberal member. ”

    My understanding of the Tea Party is that it stands for Taxed Enough Already. They are fiscally conservative first and foremost, I didn’t think they did social-con stuff, and I thought they were mostly the segment of the party that was disillusioned with neo-con adventures.

    They are hated because they actually want to end the wild spending, shrink the government to manageable levels, and ensure that the old-guard of the party doesn’t push any turncoats, empire builders, or other appeasers on them. YMMV as to whether or not you think they’ll be successful. Moderate Republicans are republicans that don’t threaten anyone’s tax-eating empire in Washington – their ambition is to occupy office, grease palms, and retire well thought of by their peers in the permanent political class – that’s why people like them: They don’t plan on actually fixing the problem our country has with its government.

  52. Paul Brinkley on Wednesday, January 9 2013 at 4:31 pm said:
    > There are a sizeable number of people who voted for Obama in 2008 who expressed disappointment with him over the next four years, particularly because he wasn’t liberal enough.

    They expected him to immanentize the eschaton.

  53. @Jeremy. “There doesn’t seem to be any stage of simply abandoning all faith except that in entropy.”

    Actually, if you really read it, there is almost always such a phase associated with Fowler 4 / Peck 3, and Scott Peck describes this in his own testimony while James Fowler describes a few case studies. I have this as well, but I’ll get to it later. The Fowler 3 / Peck 2 phase (I call Ritualist) involves the individual growing out of chaos with a system of rule, which is almost always imposed from the outside, usually by parents, sometimes by school, police, jail, church, AA, depending on when and why the individual finally decides to ascend out of chaos. The reason why I say “almost always” is because it is theoretically possible for a person to impose his own system of rule or get it from a book or otherwise self-directed learning, or from the human conscience (I don’t hear a lot from Evolutionists regarding conscience because a natural origin for conscience doesn’t make any sense- any Evolutionists here feel free to chip in. Some Christians believe it is the Holy Spirit, guardian angels, written on the heart by the finger of God, but my belief is rather unusual: I think we ate it from a certain tree in the Garden of Eden: the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil.) It appears to be the case in the lives of James Shaw (who entered Freemasonry of his own free will in Fowler 4 / Peck 3 of his own growth and thus fully met the Mason’s own definition of a Mason – his book is “The Deadly Deception”), and myself (when my memory starts to become somewhat continuous at around age 8, I’m already in Fowler 4 / Peck 3; my study of these faith growth systems finally started to explain why so much of humanity baffles me with their poor decisions and apparent inability to think straight: I have no recollection of my experience in the phases of faith and decision-making ability that the vast majority of humanity is in. Also, I have no recollection of my childhood house and school settings ever imposing rule that I perceived in a ritualist manner, or that made much sense at all, even though the stuff they were teaching me did in many cases (exceptions tending to be in English/Language Arts and Social Studies))

    “That’s about where I would be. I have faith that disorder will continue to increase, but only faith.”

    I believe that if you really think about it, the faith of disorder increasing is really more of a realization that is supported by observation more than an actual faith. You might have realized that disorder doesn’t /have/ to continue increasing if only people would smarten up and start thinking about the big picture. This is a natural effect of growing out of Fowler 4 / Peck 3 and into the next stage. Fowler 5 (Conjunctivitis… brb while checking my notes… “Conjunctive Faith”) describes “the sacrament of defeat”, which is part cynicism and part forgiving oneself and others for the roles that they play in the entropy of human existence. Hopefully, this is sounding familiar to you because it is this problem that Jesus Christ died for. If you don’t grok the increasing disorder of human civilization and the individual causes of it (especially your own contributions), Jesus Christ as the Saviour of Man is not going to make even the slightest bit of sense to you. He knew this:

    http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+2:16-17&version=KJV

    Fowler wrote: “Unusual before mid-life, Stage 5 knows the sacrament of defeat and the reality of irrevocable commitments and acts. … It generates and maintains vulnerability to the strange truths of those who are ‘other.’ … this stage’s commitment to justice is freed from the confines of tribe, class, religious community or nation. And with the seriousness that can arise when life is more than half over, this stage is ready to spend and be spent for the cause of conserving and cultivating the possibility of other’s generating identity and meaning.”

    When I was fourteen, I had a certain favorite SNES game, and one day, long after I could finish it successfully, I decided to let Arc Nova crash just because I wanted to see the fireworks. After that, I finished the game with a missed objective for the first time:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AxzkRmrU_o

    While I find it hard to believe that I had an actual mid-life crisis in my teenage years, the seriousness this video game lit under my butt is the same seriousness that Fowler described, no doubt about it, and it has affected my irl behaviour an awful lot.

  54. @ams I cannot think of a single socially liberal Tea Party candidate. Doesn’t mean there isn’t one but if they is he or she is assiduously hiding that fact.

    I believe that there is maybe one pro-choice Republican left in the house…Hanna from NY.

    Whatever you believe TEA stands for the religious conservatives have IMHO completely hijacked the Tea Party and the GOP.

    The Tea Party are hated because of the company they keep. Fiscal responsibility is well and good but a fiscally responsible theocracy isn’t an improvement over what we have but a huge negative. And if the Tea Party ever won big time, like the Old Bolsheviks, they’d get purged by Religious Right.

  55. >classic cult-follower symptoms
    >behavioral signs of this degeneration

    What are these? (I want to examine my own behavior, which makes these signs harder to spot)

    1. >What are these? (I want to examine my own behavior, which makes these signs harder to spot)

      It’s easier to point them out in specimens than to describe them, because a lot of them are subtle and kinesic. But I’ll try.

      One is that the cult follower is always recruiting, and displays a vulture-like instinct for homing in on the psychologically vulnerable.

      Another is a sort of induced hypomania – a relentless but rather brittle and hollow cheerfulness. That’s what the shiny happy Stepford greeters I noted in the OP were exhibiting. I think it’s a sort of internally generated drug high – the dopamine-release reward circuitry in the brain, which is wired to go off when we think we’ve gained status in our social group, gets superstimulated by the cult.

  56. > They’re about using the true parts to hook you, to condition you into an becoming an eager little propagator of their memetic infection.

    And, notably, to get you to give your money to them.

    I have no personal connection to Scientology whatsoever, but I happened to read “A Piece of Blue Sky” by John Atack over ten years ago. The book is a pretty detailed history of Scientology up to about 1990. At the time, I was amazed at the things the cult could get people to do. In the case of Scientology, that includes a fair number of quite brutal manslaughters, if not murders, and the largest known infiltration of and document theft from the FBI, among other things. Even after all that, they famously managed to intimidate the IRS into giving them tax-exempt status in extended negotiations, at a time when everyone who cared to look knew that Scientology was cult that bled its members dry.

    I’ve been following the slow-motion implosion the Church of Scientology since 2008, when Anonymous got on their case, with some interest. The situation at the so-called Gold Base in Hemet, California is pretty mind-boggling. A good part of the staff, including some of the formally highest-ranking in the church, are held there as prisoners, and in many cases, have been for years. Apparently this has included up to several hundred people at times, all living in a cramped office and sleeping under their desks. Several people who have fled the place have talked and written about it. In case the church collapses completely, the worst case scenario for that place might be Waco-like.

    Re: Stepford people, I recently saw an interview with Nicole Kidman, filmed in 2004 or so. She talked about taking on the role in the Stepford Wives remake and explicitly said that it was a post-divorce comment on her life as Mrs. Tom Cruise. She used the expression “you’ve got to take the piss out of yourself”. I hadn’t known that she was publicly that open about it. I saw the film when it was new and her performance certainly seemed informed.

    Since the cycle for remakes in Hollywood keeps getting shorter, they could soon do another Stepford Wives film with Katie Holmes.

  57. >> Instead of walking out, why didn’t you participate, until they kicked you out for disrupting their process?

    > Better things to do with my time.

    No shit! Crashing a cult meeting would be about as useful as arguing with granny about the existence of .

    Landmark Education sure has been busy launching defamation lawsuits against anyone calling them a cult.

    Landmark Education litigation
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landmark_Education_litigation

    ESR, was there more to the chat with “night shift guy”?

    1. >ESR, was there more to the chat with “night shift guy”?

      Not much, really. I described Landmark a bit and he said “Some people never learn…”

  58. I don’t think there’s an Obama cult in the sense of people handing their lives over– there was a push for people to do a lot of volunteering during the campaign, but I don’t think that’s especially unusual and it’s time-limited.

    However, this might be interesting.

  59. > Another is a sort of induced hypomania – a relentless but rather brittle and hollow cheerfulness.

    For an example, see a Tom Cruise interview. Then there’s the full-mania version in the videos he’s done for the Church of Scientology, and, infamously, in the couch-jumping session on Oprah.

  60. >Crashing a cult meeting would be about as useful as arguing with granny about the existence of .

    That should’ve read “existence of “. I didn’t think the comment form would read my pseudo tag as an attempt to insert actual HTML tags (which I wasn’t, of course).

    @Nancy Lebovitz, the article you linked was a very interesting read. Some segments of both the left and the right can be equally cult-like and hypocritical about their respective leaders. Patriotism != blindly defending the party line.

  61. It ate it again. Does it have anything to do with a three letter word that is not a number, clothing article, baseball team, or musical instrument, begins with s and ends with x and has nothing to do with vacuum cleaners or Robocop? (Boy, that turned out to be longer than I expected, lol.)

  62. > (I don’t hear a lot from Evolutionists regarding conscience because a natural origin for conscience doesn’t make any sense- any Evolutionists here feel free to chip in.

    We evolved morality to enable us to work together without killing each other too often. Morality is primarily about judging other people, to see if they are safe to cooperate with, and is applied to oneself to the extent that one wants to be a person other people will cooperate with. See “Constant on Good and Evil from self interest

  63. “Sympathy exists because it serves the self.” (and the whole thing on it being about image)

    This is the whole stilt of his argument, that any show of sympathy would need to be public to be of value to the self. Unfortunately, what’s in the Bible could not possibly have evolved on that basis:

    “1 Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. 2 Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 3 But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: 4 That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.” – Matthew 4, KJV

    Any argument of contrived self-interest in a purely atheistic light (i.e.: that our brains evolved a conscience that tricks us into giving alms out of a self-interest or species-interest) falls apart because the alms-giving needs to be public or you get such little return in image (especially when giving anonymously) that it makes absolutely no sense to do so. Also, public alms giving often does not produce such a result, and this was probably true before Jesus spoke the above.

    Evolution does not keep things that don’t make sense (why fish that never see the light of day soon evolve away their eyes.) I’m not sure why Evolutionists stopped talking about human vestigial organs when medicine exposed their purposes: the functions of the tailbone, gall bladder, spleen, appendix, adenoids and tonsils explain why evolution has kept them around. If they didn’t give us an advantage, they would be gone in just a few hundred to a few thousand years.

    Note that I have used “Evolution” and “evolution” together. Evolution with a small e is evolution which has been observed to occur by direct human observation, including the speciation of equine animals (Zebra, donkey, mule, horse) the variation of finches in the Galapagos Islands into their various dietary niches, strains of disease organisms to find vulnerabilities in immune systems, and last, but not least, the explosion of variation in particular species (cats, dogs, goldfish, parakeets, tomatoes, cabbages, corn, etc.) as the result of artificial selection, which has obviously caused a couple orders of magnitude more evolution than natural selection has since we started doing it.

    Evolution, Capital E, is the faith of atheists that the entire natural world could have come about of its own accord without any intervention by a God. This involves believing that random mutations can self-organize and create new information, a belief at odds with “I have faith that disorder will continue to increase, but only faith.” The whole Evolution vs. Creation mess can be distilled to whether randomness and physics can generate new information distinct enough from the gobbledegook around it to be able to reproduce itself and evolve, and it needs to do so consistently with an elaborate cookbook of biological means which have a lot of difficulty finding friendly environments in the universe in which to do so … or rather, whether it can do so without divine intervention (the Bible says that God can intervene in such processes: “The lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing thereof is of the LORD.” – Proverbs 16:31)

    An article on the infinite monkey theorem:

    http://patterico.com/2003/05/09/monkey-typing-experiment-a-bunch/

    I’ve had somewhat better experience with pigeons:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pScmvyzNQE

    1. >Evolution, Capital E, is the faith of atheists that the entire natural world could have come about of its own accord without any intervention by a God.

      You are confused, and projecting your own religious insanity on others. No “faith” is involved.

  64. > > > (I don’t hear a lot from Evolutionists regarding conscience because a natural origin for conscience doesn’t make any sense- any Evolutionists here feel free to chip in.

    > > See “Constant on Good and Evil from self interest

    > Unfortunately, what’s in the Bible could not possibly have evolved on that basis:

    So much the worse for what is in the Bible. The morality expressed by Xenophon is more appealing: (Pursue glory, be loyal to friends and allies, just to those who are peaceable to you, and destroy your enemies.)

  65. > Evolution, Capital E, is the faith of atheists that the entire natural world could have come about of its own accord without any intervention by a God. This involves believing that random mutations can self-organize and create new information

    Chance and necessity

    Mutations do not “self organize”, but are brutally winnowed by natural selection in the struggle for existence.

    Wherever there is a ecological niche, a way of living, that is not yet been occupied, it will be filled by creatures escaping from the struggle in similar and nearby niches that have already been occupied. Thus niches requiring greater organismal complexity and more complex cooperation get filled from niches requiring slightly less organismal complexity or slightly less complex cooperation, creating, for organisms on the edge of the unoccupied niches, a direction of evolution, a direction towards intelligence and cooperation.

    Of course the morality that follows from Darwinism differs from both the morality of Christianity, and even more from the morality of Christianity’s heretical apostate offspring, progressivism, in that rex talonis was sound. Compared to the morality of Xenophon, even the old testament is a bit lefty, and our host, though wise in many respects, is nonetheless a raving commie.

  66. “You are confused, and projecting your own religious insanity on others. No “faith” is involved.”

    Holy crap! Did I just make the mighty Eric flinch in reflexive denial?

    I usually don’t respond to stuff like this when I come across it (“like this” meaning on the topic, as the sort of balanced and considered perspective I have is extremely rare) because I usually can say something like that, whoever’s side it happens to be on, Creation or Evolution. When a Creationist speaks up, they usually get more wrong than they do right, and as often as not, get eaten alive by Evolutionists. Also, both sides often fail to recognize where fact ends and faith (i.e. assumption) begins. It helps to know an awful lot about the universe, because the more you know, the further out faith can begin and the more likely that faith is going to be somewhere resembling the truth.

    Religious insanity ensues where fact exceeds faith and faith fails to explain the realm of fact known to the religious person. The religiously insane have a tendency to dismiss the fact, rather than adjust their faith, and I’ve found Creationists tend to do this more than Evolutionists, and so I enjoy conversing with the latter more, with the exception of certain close friends who are not religiously insane. Knowing a lot also helps one spot where the religious insanity or ignorance is mild:

    http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08jan_sunclimate/

    If you don’t know about the research relating galactic cosmic rays with low level cloud formation, the research pioneered by Svensmark and Calder:

    http://www.amazon.com/Chilling-Stars-Cosmic-Climate-Change/dp/1840468661

    it doesn’t seem like the NASA article is missing anything. Thus, one might somehow remain unaware that global warming is more the result of a political agenda than a real-world phenomenon. Of course, those more familiar with politics and legal matters than science aren’t looking at the science, but the memos, the press releases, etc. and the ones who have their heads screwed on straight agree with my assessment of global warming. The change of nomenclature to “climate change” acknowledges how vacuous the real world evidence for global warming is, but without shelving the political agenda. You have to know an awful lot to sort this out, and the vast majority of those willing to offer information on the political agenda are… well… confused and insane (listen to Alex Jones for about five minutes.)

    I would like to have a conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson, actually. I think we agree on many important points:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afGkv0IT4dU
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_RWT3w_qPU

    One of the most depressing things that I have seen is the Christian who believes in Creation, but has not experienced God. God is a gentleman; you won’t experience Him unless you’re actually looking for it. That I think is the big point of “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness” – Matthew 6:33. If you’re experiencing your conscience, it’s fairly easy to explain it away like Constant did. To me, it is quite lamentable when you have a person who believes in Young Earth Creation who doesn’t seek righteousness and the face of God. I’ve found that righteousness and God tend to go together because, in my experience and in the testimony of others whose claims of a personal God are similar to my own, He points out your unrighteousness in a way that makes you very uncomfortable. To be righteous and not have a personal relationship with God, no biggie. People can be comfortable with their own righteousness, and I think Neil deGrasse Tyson is a fine example. To be unrighteous and not have a relationship with God is the most common condition. To be unrighteous and have a relationship with God gets uncomfortable quickly. Say your wife finds your porn stash and kindly asks you to dispose of it, but that’s all she says. Now make her an shameless mind reader who knows how to bat an eyelash at you in just that way that reminds you that she knows, but she’ll never hate you for it. If you don’t get rid of that porn stash, the relationship gets real awkward, real fast. That is what being close to God is like.

    Now, Eric, could you please elaborate on how I’m confused and religiously insane?

    1. >Holy crap! Did I just make the mighty Eric flinch in reflexive denial?

      No, you just sounded like a typical babbling religious idiot.

      >Now, Eric, could you please elaborate on how I’m confused and religiously insane?

      Yes, you projected “faith” on people who don’t have it and don’t need it. This doesn’t reveal any problem in their world-view, merely your need to believe that science and religion are epistemically equivalent at some level. They are not. To the faith-holding mind, evidence is ultimately irrelevant in the face of the need and desire to believe – a scientist cannot be like that, and if he is he fails as a scientist. When you describe “Evolutionism” as “faith”, you impute your own insanity to people who do not have that disease.

  67. “‘This involves believing that random mutations can self-organize and create new information’

    Chance and necessity

    Mutations do not ‘self organize’, but are brutally winnowed by natural selection in the struggle for existence.”

    Actually, as near as I can tell, the vast majority of genetic mutations are fixed by DNA repair mechanisms in the cell, and the vast majority of genetic mutations that remain cause cancer, microcephaly, or some other nastiness. The real clincher is “new information”, adaptations that have never been seen before. How do chance and necessity bring that about?

  68. Eric, I think the hypomania is also a recruiting tool– “look at how happy the cult makes people”.

    James A. Donald, you’re overestimating how efficient evolution is. Niches get moved into if there happens to be variations which can move into them. Terry, you’re overestimating the efficiency, too.

    I’d bet pretty strongly on the evolution being a natural process on this one planet, but I’d be comprehensively and amused and delighted if there was alien intervention, just so that people who were so sure they were right without detailed information (and I mean both the Creationists and the scientists who were emphatic about a best guess) turned out to be outflanked by weird contingencies.

    And to sidetrack the sidetrack, what do folks here think about the possibility that we’re living in a simulation?

  69. @JAD
    “So much the worse for what is in the Bible. The morality expressed by Xenophon is more appealing: (Pursue glory, be loyal to friends and allies, just to those who are peaceable to you, and destroy your enemies.)”

    You just revealed the reason why the Romans, who originated the biblical morality, had an empire with 120 million people, and the Greek never were able to rise above warring city states. Note how easy the Greek city states were mopped up by the fledgling Roman empire.

    @terry
    Btw, giving alms in “secret” is bound to get out and gives you way more credit than bragging about them. Moreover, to be effective as self-interested image building, altruism must be internalized. Moreover E/evolution is quite capable of generating traits that overshoot their target if that helps get it right more often.

    This whole Evolution/evolution crap is just a lack of imagination about what an all powerful deity could achieve with enough time and room.

    That is what irritates me most about religious fundamentalists. They make up an all powerful, omnipotent deity that created a marvelous universe. But He (always he) has the imagination. morals, and behavioral problems of a 13 old boy from a dysfunctional family. I tend to despair that He will ever grow up.

  70. “You just revealed the reason why the Romans, who originated the biblical morality,”

    Ahem… the Bible is a thoroughly Jewish document. Not only that, but the vast majority of it (especially the in/famous Ten Commandments) predate the existence of Rome by hundreds of years. There is probably more in the Bible about how the Babylonians mopped up Israel and how the Medo-Persians subsequently mopped up the Babylonians than the sum total of Roman-related material. Even the New Testament is Jewish, although the Jews seem to be the last people who want to be reminded of that.

    “Btw, giving alms in “secret” is bound to get out and gives you way more credit than bragging about them.”

    The counterargument that I formed is somewhat more detailed than that: it is better to have a few good friends than many shallow ones and secret alms giving is better suited at forming that situation. It doesn’t do anything good to my argument that morality couldn’t have Evolved (shucks).

    “But He (always he)”

    This is where I’ve pissed off quite a few Christians (and my best friend, who takes the concept seriously as near as I can tell, has warned me not to bring this up unless I absolutely have to, especially with other Christians.) I have met Her:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBaO5wxD9SM

    This is just one of the numerous videos on Youtube to arrange the God-is-a-Girl anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya with the titular song by Groove Coverage:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH49Vx84AU0

    I don’t think very many people, religious fundamentalist or otherwise, would burst into tears at this little bit of fiction because they have a relationship with the real God.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wePAht0NaV4

    After writing Featherwing Love and the FHD Remix trilogy at this God’s guidance, and then bumping into all the prior (and in a few cases, future) art that was so unwittingly related to these stories (and there’s more since I watched this scene.) Is knowing God – the real, unexpected, unpredictable, and exciting God, complete with the flip side implications of Genesis 1:26 – fun?

    I don’t know of a single religious fundamentalist anywhere who has even heard of Haruhi Suzumiya, and any that I’ve introduced her to mark me as nuts. The few Christians who haven’t are not what I call fundamentalist: they are open to an idea if it can be supported with evidence and logic.

    Certainly, Haruhi isn’t a particularly good likeness of the God I know, so why do I ever bring her up? Why did I ever watch Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu in the first place knowing this was probably going to be true? Simply because I’m curious about what people imagine about God. I wonder if the guys behind the scenes thought that anyone could take Kyon’s question about God so personally?

  71. @Terry
    “Ahem… the Bible is a thoroughly Jewish document.”

    Most of the New Testament is (Eastern-) Roman empire. That has the “turn the other cheek”, “Good Samaritan”, and “All men are god’s children” stuff.

    The original Jewish Old Testament is about exterminating your enemies, slaughter their men and boys (and babies), take their women and daughters. In short, Xenophon’s morals. The Ten Commandments handles how you treat your neighbor, not the guy from the other village/tribe. The universal application of the Ten Commandments is from later (Roman) times. But then, the Old Testament is not a single work written at a single time. Morals did evolve, even in the Old Testament.

  72. >>>>>What is a gaffe? A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.

    But there are different ways to tell the truth. For people without a job, the french way : “it’s a drama for them”. The german way : “it’s a drama for the economy, as we lack those people’s contribution”. The Romney way : “it’s a drama for others, as they are a burden”.

    Being a republican, he could obviously not use the french phrasing. Yet, the much more neutral german phrasing would have pointed towards the same direction(we lack productive work from those people) without insulting them.

    >>>>> Evolution, Capital E, is the faith of atheists that the entire natural world could have come about of its own accord without any intervention by a God. This involves believing that random mutations can self-organize and create new information

    now the question is, if god created everything, who created god?

    more seriously, Evolutionism or Creationism are not realities : they are just theories used to understand the world. Their worth is linked to their usefulness. Let’s compare :

    Creationism teaches us that an undefined entity did use a magic wand to create us. Usefulness : we are not afraid as SOMEONE ELSE is in charge

    Evolutionism teaches us that a lot of things about who we are, how the world really works, how our body works, how to heal it, how to improve crops yield, etc….. usefulness : we are not afraid as WE are in charge.

    I don’t believe in Evolutionism as a grand absolute truth. I just believe it is a better, more useful, more accurate theory than Creationism. Until we find even better. Same for other scientific theories : Newtonian mechanics is outdated, yet was a huge leap forwards. Maybe we’ll find better than relativity one day. For now, let’s use it. It is the best we have.

  73. @Nancy Lebovitz
    “And to sidetrack the sidetrack, what do folks here think about the possibility that we’re living in a simulation?”

    That simulation would have to run on a “computer” as complex as the current universe is. If it works in a universe where Turing’s Undecidable theorem holds, then the simulator could not predict our future without running it on yet another simulator. So, the simulator could not predict what would happen if it intervened in the simulation itself.

    Which is a roundabout way to say that that would not make a difference at all to us. The universe would look the same, and miracles would still be miracles.

  74. @esr
    ‘When you describe “Evolutionism” as “faith”, you impute your own insanity to people who do not have that disease.’

    True. I am a materialist to the bone. I am one of those Terry claims to have the “faith” of “Evolutionism”.

    And as you (esr) say, I have no faith at all. I could not even describe what this Evolutionism would have as it’s foundation. There are observations and a theory that integrates them into a more or less uniform description. This theory about the working of the changes in living things (ie, the dynamics of life) is in fluid, we learn new things every day. I am happy with every new piece of the puzzle. I do not fight reality, I embraze it.

    Then, there is the history of life on earth. As every history, the details are vague and uncertain: What happened when exactly and how did it happen. This is no difference from trying to determine what was said by whom and why, when the constitution of the USA was drawn up.

    This all is completely independent from whether or not there is some god outside the universe. The laws of the universe are the same whether or not $DEITY exists.

  75. @terry

    To be unrighteous and have a relationship with God gets uncomfortable quickly.

    Alas, there are a large number of people that do evil and sleep soundly at night resolute in their belief that they have a good relationship with their God.

  76. “When you describe “Evolutionism” as “faith”, you impute your own insanity to people who do not have that disease.”

    Actually, I wonder if the problem could be nailed down to unfortunately not-so-rare failures of scientists to articulate their arguments clearly. Pure falsification of humans coming from apes (though I don’t really understand the fixation about it on either side) is unlikely to happen, so you need something more than pure Popperism to articulate why it’s better to believe it happened via evolution than via deus ex machina. And not too many expositions of science go beyond falsification.

  77. Eric, not that I believe you’re necessarily wrong here, but I took Terry’s allusion to “big ‘E’ Evolution” as his attempt to illuminate a distinction between those who believe in evolution in the way a scientist believes a line on a graph has a certain slope, and those who believe in it in the sense a fanatic believes in a religion. (The reason I believe you’re not necessarily wrong here is that, while Terry appears aware of this distinction, it’s not clear to me which bucket he intends to place you or other evolutionists in.)

    I’ve seen some microjihads in the name of evolution, so I believe they exist. …but then, I’ve seen people successfully avoid leaping from a Christian frying pan and into an Evolutionist fire, particularly in this crowd, so – Terry, who I do not remember seeing here that much – you’d do well to clarify.

  78. Consider what Nancy says about evolution above. Strikes me as a sensible guarded understanding of how evolution would occur. Evolution does not brutally weed out the weak and unsuccessful. It’s often not even clear in its direction. An alpha wolf can be struck by lightning; an entire population of strong, healthy, virile lifeforms can be drowned by a freak flood.

    It’s tempting to say evolution is not a just deity, but rather a drunken master, but it’s not even that. There’s no mind there, and no sense (on some level) in speaking of “survival of the fittest” as if some universal supercomputer is busily calculating probabilities that this organism or that should live long enough to make babies and then arranging events to make those probabilities fact. It’s as if the language itself gets in our way, presses us into describing evolution as if it’s a thing. (Above, I first wrote “how evolution would occur” as “how evolution would behave”, and considered leaving that in and pouring on even more language later just to illustrate the point.)

    Most of the crowd here probably prefers evolution as a useful model. Which is to say, they like it. But as I said before, I’ve seen people mistakenly speak of evolution not just with affinity, but with reverence. As if we can point to this population or that, in terms of its behavior patterns and responses to violence, famine, wealth, etc., and rest in some certainty that because population A reacts this way and population B reacts that way, population B will prevail thanks to Almighty Evolution. I’ve also seen people (like Nancy) appear to successfully avoid that reverence. In a society steeped in not only God, but a pantheon of symbols of justice, it is no doubt easier than it should be to project that quest for justice onto people who say they “believe in evolution”.

    Beware of upholding evolution as a better god, but also beware of projecting a search for justice onto what is mere affinity for the model.

  79. @Paul Brinkley
    Actually, evolution is “things happen”. Looking back in time, some organisms were luckier than others and left some descendants. Darwinism is the realization that luck comes to those who are “prepared”.

    After that, there is mathematics that tells us, that over a looooooong time and an awful many dead individuals, what is left is better prepared to be lucky than what there was before.

    That mechanism is even used as a search algorithm: Genetic Programming
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming

    But it is all a random walk in a very large, and mostly empty, space of genetic possibilities.

    But this is all immaterial to the Creationists. They are not against Evolutionism per se. They are against Science as a way to learn about the world.

    Their beef with Science is that it consistently contradicts their pet interpretation of some old scriptures. Their goal is to destroy the credibility of the scientific method. Evolution is just a “credible” target now. But anything scientific, from Cosmology to Sociology and Anthropology, is on their hit list.

  80. That’s just it. Not all people labeled “Creationist” seek to destroy the scientific method. Some of them are merely reacting defensively to a push to offer evolution as a better god. They aren’t bothered by the people doing actual science way in the back. It’s counterproductive to conflate the players into only two sides this way.

    “some organisms were luckier than others and left some descendants” is technically true, but again, is all too often either put forth as all there is to evolution and leaving it open to some bad inferences, or worse, is actively combined with wrongful assumptions that we know everything there is to know about what should make a lifeform successful or not. That eventually leads to one group of people or another taking it on itself to try to help evolution along.

    1. >Some of them are merely reacting defensively to a push to offer evolution as a better god.

      Sorry, I don’t believe this. I hear it claimed, but I think the people claiming it are either deliberately deceiving others or indvertently deceiving themselves.

      The reason I don’t believe this is that every time I’ve actually pushed one of these allegedly defensive skeptics into trying to justify their anti-evolutionist position, they’ve fallen back into faith-holder insane gibbering within minutes. There isn’t any there there – these people are superficially emulating the forms and language of skepticism, but superficial emulation is all it is. It has no actual connection to the generative structure of their beliefs.

      It may be, as you say, that there are “evolutionist” faith-holders – I’ve never met one, but humans are observably so prone to the insanity of faith that they’ll fixate on even the most unlikely targets. The existence of such people wouldn’t make religious anti-evolutionists any more credible or justified, just mean there are two groups of frothing lunatics in the dispute rather than one.

  81. @esr

    Yes, you projected “faith” on people who don’t have it and don’t need it. This doesn’t reveal any problem in their world-view, merely your need to believe that science and religion are epistemically equivalent at some level. They are not. To the faith-holding mind, evidence is ultimately irrelevant in the face of the need and desire to believe – a scientist cannot be like that, and if he is he fails as a scientist. When you describe “Evolutionism” as “faith”, you impute your own insanity to people who do not have that disease.

    Mmm…so pray tell when you guys are so vehement in the ridicule of God (and believers of God) as insane what hard evidence do you have that he/she/whatever doesn’t actually exist?

    /shrug

    To me the question is philosophical rather than scientific one. At some point in the discussion the ardent believers on both sides end up with “it’s turtles all the way down”. For the religious it happens a heck of a lot sooner but they accept faith as a component of their philosophy.

    I like Hawking’s quote:

    “When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our universe,and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.”

    I believe that rational Christians believe something similar. Looking for God (or absolute proof of God) in the context of this universe is a futile exercise. Before the big bang not even time existed. We have this life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that we should be extremely grateful…regardless of whether you believe the simplest explanation or a different one.

    If we can discuss multi-verse theories without thinking the proponents are all insane crackpots perhaps we can do the same with religion. That some scientists have advanced the Anthropic principle (weak, strong, whatever) to explain some observations of our universe indicates to me we simply push the “turtles all the way down” thinking to cosmologists rather than priests and philosophers…if you presume an infinite number of Turtles then at least one of these Turtles will be fine-tuned to support intelligent life due to statistical selection effect…

    The explanation of origin of life in this universe (and of the universe itself) is currently a philosophical one. Not one of strict science. As science uncovers more understanding of the universe the philosophy of the origins shall evolve with it. Whether as part of cosmology or part of religious apologetics or classic philosophy.

    That crackpots exist in religion/philosophy does not invalidate the value of religion/philosophy any more than crackpots in science invalidates the value of science.

    Many scientists, historical and present, believe(d) in a deity of some kind. I do not believe that they are either insane nor particularly hindered as scientists. Certainly it did not hinder William Phillips, Francis Collins or many other nobel laureates in science that are religious. Many of the scientists I personally know or have met went to church.

    1. >Mmm…so pray tell when you guys are so vehement in the ridicule of God (and believers of God) as insane what hard evidence do you have that he/she/whatever doesn’t actually exist?

      The existence of God as theists imagine it is impossible. You might as well ask me what evidence I have for the nonexistence of square circles.

      First, give up one of omnibenevolence, omnipotence, or omniscience. Then we could talk contingent existence.

  82. @Nigel
    “As science uncovers more understanding of the universe the philosophy of the origins shall evolve with it.”

    There are powerful political movements to ban the teaching of science. Bad education might be good for faith, but it is bad for everything else. Very bad.

  83. @esr
    “The existence of God as theists imagine it is impossible.”

    Sorry, but that was a battle of medieval times. The theist world has progressed much since then.

    Indeed, those medieval monks were so primitive that they really concluded God could not create a stone so heavy he could not lift it.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnipotence_paradox

    Modern theists in the USA have gone beyond these primitive believes and do not consider God to be bound by mere logic. So, indeed, His Omnipotence knows no bounds, not even in logic.

  84. Nb. I have had Creationism, in the form of so called Intelligent Design, described as “God in the Gaps” fallacy, which is bad theology… by a catholic priest.

  85. @Jakub Narebski
    “described as “God in the Gaps” fallacy, which is bad theology… by a catholic priest.”

    The Vatican has stopped fighting reality half a century ago. They accept science. Also, they are rather good a theology.

  86. At one time it was common to post the Ten Commandments and verses from the Bible in public spaces. There is even a bible verse on the CIA headquarters.

    “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
    https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/ohb-50th-anniversary.html

    There has been a push in recent decades to remove these and other expressions of religion that have been part of our culture for centuries. A minority has gained the power to force this through the courts, in the name of equal rights.

    The framers of the constitution were wary of “tyrannical majorities” who would oppress others, but how far must we go before the shoe is on the other foot?

  87. >Sorry, I don’t believe this. I hear it claimed, but I think the people claiming it are either deliberately deceiving others or inadvertently deceiving themselves.

    Fair enough – if I come across what I see as definite examples, I’ll try to point them out here.

    For now, I’m reminded of an interview on – CNN, I think, since the interviewer was Wolf Blitzer. He was asking then-Congressional contender Christine O’Donnell whether she believed in evolution. I’ll cheerfully admit in the name of science that I could have been reading too much into this, but the way he pushed the question indicated that he felt that if she answered directly the way he believed she would, that it would settle the matter of her legitimacy. Say “yes” and keep treading water. Say “no” and sink forever. Never mind what circumstances would cause you to change that belief; whether it’s just a factoid to you or something by which you live your life; whether you’ve killed that Buddha in the road and come back to it; for him, and in his eyes, for everyone in his tribe, all things came down to a Yes or a No.

    Again – maybe I’m reading too much into that. But that’s not the only time I’ve seen questions pushed that way. And that’s generally the type I’m referring to; not much more to it than that.

    It’s also possible that we’re thinking of two different groups of people on the “creationist” side. I tend to think of people I grew up with, who were devout enough Christians that they’d go to church every Sunday, and for whom God might come up in normal conversation during the week, but who also mow the lawn, raise the cattle, sell insurance, and build electronics. They never struck me as needing to explain everything in terms of God all the time, but they also never struck me as applauding pushy anti-creationists, either. In other words, I don’t mean these defensive skeptics you refer to; just the ones who quietly vote and then return home.

  88. The Catholic church has accepted science for centuries. Doctrine states that when doctrine is demonstrated to conflict with nature the doctrine must be changed.

  89. >“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

    It’s also engraved in the front of the Main Building at the University of Texas at Austin. (FYI.)

  90. >>if you wanted to create a cult even an Eric couldn’t detect, how would you build it?

    >I don’t think that can be done.

    Well certain subsets of US libertarianism are quite cultish (the Rothbard-Rockwell subset, the staunch anti-empiricists) and that is a mighty attractive bait for you, so…

    1. >Well certain subsets of US libertarianism are quite cultish (the Rothbard-Rockwell subset, the staunch anti-empiricists) and that is a mighty attractive bait for you, so…

      If you think so, you don’t understand me as well as you think you do. You could have chosen a more obvious example – the organized Randites are quite cultish. The thing is, cultism revolts me so deeply that it basically doesn’t matter how attractive I might find some aspects of any given cult’s doctrine – the moment I see the religious hypomania and the shutdown of critical thinking I know I’m in the presence of the enemy and must either fight or flee.

      You’ve actually confused a couple of issues here. The subthread question was whether anyone could construct a cult Eric couldn’t detect, and I said I thought this couldn’t be done because cult behavior is too obvious. Pointing at hypothetical cultish libertarians as attractive to me doesn’t serve any purpose in the discussion unless you think I might detect the obvious cult behavior there but not care because I like their doctrine. That’s not going to ever happen either.

  91. ams: Taxed Enough Already is a retcon. The original meaning was as a modern-day Boston Tea Party.

    Nigel: I came away from A Brief History of Time an atheist. If there is no need for a Creator, then there is not one, by Occam’s Razor, unless and until someone proves that one actually exist{s,ed}.

  92. “I’ve seen people mistakenly speak of evolution not just with affinity, but with reverence.”

    You can have such feelings without any religious connection. Darwin’s theory explains so much, and it doesn’t even require any complex math. It seems so simple, yet no one thought of it in the thousand years of written history until Darwin and Wallace. Now it underlies all of modern biology.

    Maybe ‘awe’ would be a better word than ‘reverence’? The same sort of awe that physicists feel when contemplating General Relativity….

  93. Creationsm is a nice litmus test. If you adhere to it, you are refusing to accept reasonable arguments based in empirical and verifyable facts. In other words, if you are a Creationist you will hold dogma over empirical reality.

    Seems important to know before you enter into a discussion.

  94. Wrt the eternal evolution debates:

    Since this is a hacker blog, I expect a large number of you have some familiarity with programming. You don’t have to “believe” or “disbelieve” evolution – you can actually use it to solve your own design and optimization problems.

    Here’s how:

    1. First define a data structure – the “genome” of a given trial solution. This structure contains information that maps to a given solution to your problem. It doesn’t have to map in any particular way, just so long as there is a correspondance, though later details as to mutation may make one representation more efficient than another.

    2. Create a set of “fitness functions” – these functions evaluate a given trial solution for the characteristics that you want. Given a trial aircraft, return the lift to drag ratio in straight and level flight. Given a trial aircraft, return the expected range, etc.

    3. Initialize a vector of random trial solutions.

    4. Evaluate them all in terms of each fitness function. Keep some fraction of the ones that are better than the rest in terms of each fitness function in turn. Eliminate those that are dominated by some other solution in *all* categories. (This is the algorithm behind non-dominated multi-objective optimization)

    5. Perform some variation on the trail solutions to produce the next generation vector of trial solutions. Apply random variation to a trial solution. Swap pieces of some trial solutions with others.

    6. Redo step 4. Loop.

    This is essentially a hill-climbing algorithm. It isn’t a very efficient one, compared to more straightforward algorithms that do line-searches or simple gradient ascent, but it has some important properties which make it useful in some cases. If your fitness terrain isn’t a nice smooth functional, but something that has a lot of sudden sharp variations and discontinuities, the random-variation aspect adds noise which fuzzes that away and allows the algorithm to proceed without getting hung up as easily on small local maxima. It also produces a population of trial solutions arranged along a pareto-front in terms of each of your evaluation criteria.

    Like most other areas of science, “belief” in some given fact doesn’t get you anything. *Understanding* gets you *everything*.

    Many grade-schoolers are taught to believe that the Earth goes around the Sun. But *understanding* what that implies, allows you to figure out your lattitude from the time of year and the arc of the sun in the sky. *Understanding* the why and how of gravity allows you to navigate space-probes on interplanetary trajectories.

    Belief in evolution doesn’t get you anything. *Understanding* evolution allows you to form expectations about phylogeny, and also, with computers, allows you to use it in your own design problems.

    Belief is generally useless, even if it is of something ‘true’. If you don’t *understand*, what are you believing? Don’t believe X, understand X.

  95. Well nevertheless, I think Shenpen took my question in the spirit offered. ;-)

    In hindsight, I probably needed to put much more care into framing the question to arrive at the desired gedankenexperimente. I was envisioning some group that could somehow break past the guards of “an Eric” – ostensibly by offering attractive things, like boardgaming or simulated combat, combined with scrupulous avoidance of the common callsigns of cults – to the point that he “drinks the koolaid”. The trouble was that I couldn’t figure out a way to define “drinks the koolaid” without the CULT! klaxon blaring in my brain.

    Kinda how Eric said – all too possible to just be innately too sensitive to that sort of thing. (Sorta like how I now associate oblong rectangles with safely ignorable content.) Oh well.

  96. The existence of God as theists imagine it is impossible. You might as well ask me what evidence I have for the nonexistence of square circles.

    First, give up one of omnibenevolence, omnipotence, or omniscience. Then we could talk contingent existence.

    The existence of God as imagined is as impossible as squaring a circle until you realize that what theists imagine is simply an approximation of what God might be.

    Yes, I twisted your statement a little to rebut.

    Debating the problem of evil is to me like playing with around with other amusing logical fallacies…which like most such problems the disagreement exist in the premise/assumptions rather than the logic. My understanding is that this philosophical ground is so well covered that discussion go along the lines of:

    Epicurus’ “problem of evil”!
    HAHA! Plantigna’s “free will”!
    BAH! Probability!
    Bonetti’s defense!
    Capo Ferro attack!
    Thibault!
    Agrippa!
    I am not left handed!
    …and so forth…

    There’s no need for the participants to go into the details but simply state the name of the counterpoint until somewhere late mid-game which, to be honest, my knowledge of philosophy isn’t really up for.

    Even so…simply stating the opening move does not normally grant you the game…

  97. ams: not bad, and I think you know where I’m generally coming from since you knew to compare understanding with belief.

    So now the question that comes to my mind, as before, is: how many people who profess agreement with “evolution is superior to creationism” would be able to come up with something like that hill-climbing algorithm on their own? I don’t mean they have to describe it using computing jargon such as “algorithm”. Just the process – say, in whatever jargon is appropriate to their current occupation – in a way that shows they could apply it to at least two different problem types. In other words, they understand it, not merely believe it.

  98. And to sidetrack the sidetrack, what do folks here think about the possibility that we’re living in a simulation?

    Talk to the mice – they are performing very complex and subtle experiments on scientists.

    (which all literate folks will recognize as being from the great work of Douglas Adams – may he rest in pieces.)

  99. > Modern theists in the USA have gone beyond these primitive believes and do not consider God to be bound by mere logic. So, indeed, His Omnipotence knows no bounds, not even in logic.

    That is indeed a great leap of progress. Do these theists expect that to make God more plausible?

    > Doctrine states that when doctrine is demonstrated to conflict with nature the doctrine must be changed.

    …and sometimes the Catholic Church can even do the doctrine-changing in less than four hundred years.

  100. The thing is, cultism revolts me so deeply that it basically doesn’t matter how attractive I might find some aspects of any given cult’s doctrine – the moment I see the religious hypomania and the shutdown of critical thinking I know I’m in the presence of the enemy and must either fight or flee.

    Mmmm…and the FSF? Are there cultish aspects there?

    1. >Mmmm…and the FSF? Are there cultish aspects there?

      Duh. Of course there are. This is not breaking news, and hasn’t been since 1991 at the latest.

      Is this some feeble attempt at a trick question? I don’t buy the FSF’s doctrine. And never have – I’m, er, notorious for that.

      To be scrupulously fair, the FSF is not very cultish – certainly it’s much less so than Landmark. Barely registers on the cultometer.

  101. >First, give up one of omnibenevolence, omnipotence, or omniscience. Then we could talk contingent existence.

    And, while we are at it, one of omnibenevolence and the idea of “worship me or I will arrange for you to be tortured for all eternity” (although this is a doctrine thing than an existence of god thing).

  102. Mmmm…and the FSF? Are there cultish aspects there?

    Dude. Do you know who you’re even talking to? :)

  103. @Jay Maynard:

    > Nigel: I came away from “A Brief History of Time” an atheist. If there is no need for a Creator, […]

    What you mean here is (I think) that there is no gap in perceived knowledge of beginning of the Universe, hence no gap for God to hide in, isn’t it?

    Unfortunately it is quite easy to fall in “God in the gaps” fallacy in the name of Occam razor… (I’d like to point you to for example works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.)

  104. Personally, I like the ontological argument for the existence of God, which I believe can be (very crudely) expressed by the idea that existence is better/truer/more-powerful than non-existence so [hand-waving> god must exist</hand-waving].

    I think the best answer to this argument is "Man, you need a better grade of drugs".

  105. >First, give up one of omnibenevolence, omnipotence, or omniscience.

    It saddens me to see how many “Christians” who can quote chapter and verse to you all day long yet still believe in omnibenevolence. Could the bible possibly be any clearer on the matter?

    One should not avoid an idea for no other reason than that it is distasteful.

    — Foo Quuxman

  106. @esr:

    To be scrupulously fair, the FSF is not very cultish – certainly it’s much less so than Landmark. Barely registers on the cultometer.

    Except that many of its most fervent adherents have and use their web soapboxes on a regular basis, which makes it a bit more in-your-face to the average tech guy than a lot of cults.

  107. The best answer I have read to the problem of omnibenevolence is:

    “God, in his official capacity, must at times do things which he, in his private capacity, deplores.”

    I probably wrote that badly.

  108. @jay
    Nigel: I came away from A Brief History of Time an atheist. If there is no need for a Creator, then there is not one, by Occam’s Razor, unless and until someone proves that one actually exist{s,ed}.

    Well, there’s no need for Fruit Loops either and they exist. Occam’s Razor strikes me as another opening move and not a finishing one.

    If you accept the premise of a finely tuned universe then there’s a need to explain the observation. Multi-verse works for me but there’s no conclusive proof of that either. If someone wants to claim turtles that’s cool with me too but the evidence is even scantier. Science here strikes me as a bit out of its element.

    Now what’s within the capabilities of science is whether the universe is really all that finely tuned to determine if the premise itself holds water.

    The funny thing is that some of the things we might accept to be future human potential would appear godlike…even to us. Will mankind ever command sufficient knowledge of physics and power to create their own bubble universes that can support intelligent life?

    HA! Gardner’s Biocosm Hypothesis! Your move.

    If I seem glib about it, it would be because however profound it might be it doesn’t seem to be worth the bandwidth to insult someone over their beliefs if they are willing to be reasonable about it.

    “Being reasonable about it” means allowing that other people believe differently and not creating laws against them. Something the religious right isn’t reasonable about at all.

    This is one thing that puzzles me here. Why do you guys believe the belief in a deity is a sign of insanity and yet seem to accept the most virulent of these as political bedfellows because they agree on your particular wedge issue whether that is guns or finance?

    To echo Eric my instinct is to fight or flee when these folks show up. If they ever truly win we’re in a world of hurt…and atheists are going to be some of the first people lined up against the wall and shot…hopefully metaphorically speaking.

    As for politicians that willingly associate with/court the religious right I don’t care what their position on fiscal policies, big government or gun control are. I’m voting against them.

    1. >Why do you guys believe the belief in a deity is a sign of insanity and yet seem to accept the most virulent of these as political bedfellows because they agree on your particular wedge issue whether that is guns or finance?

      I don’t know whether “you guys” is supposed to include me or not. What is your evidence that any of the anti-religious types here “accept the most virulent of these as political bedfellows”? What do you suppose we would have to do to not “accept” them?

  109. @esr

    Is this some feeble attempt at a trick question?

    If I were to offer you a trick question I would not insult you with one quite so transparent.

    My opinion is that you are a bit too much tolerant of their intolerance is all.

  110. To be scrupulously fair, the FSF is not very cultish – certainly it’s much less so than Landmark. Barely registers on the cultometer.

    A critical gut check: how do members in the cult feel about the proliferation of the true bits of the cult outside the cult framework? The FSF believes that anything which increases the use of free software is a good thing, albeit less good than the FSF and GNU project. (Stallman himself has expressed admiration for the BSD community, and sadness that he couldn’t work with them more, (doubtless because they aren’t as extreme as he is.))

    Contrast that with, say, Scientology, which is ruthless in its suppression of “squirrels”, people who apply Scientology- or Dianetics-derived psychological principles outside of Scientology. (This is a key topic in Keeping Scientology Working, the “KSW” paper Cruise mentions in his epic rant.) The idea is to convince outsiders that the cult is the only source of all good bits; if the good bits can be had outside the cult, the cult risks losing all its membership.

    If open source wins without the FSF’s help (as it is largely doing today), there’d be a bit of butthurt and whining from Stallman’s general direction concerning who gets the credit. But the Goal will have been achieved and I don’t think Stallman would bemoan that. That’s one of the things that separates his breed of crazy from Hubbard’s.

  111. Why do you guys believe the belief in a deity is a sign of insanity…

    Perhaps if we rephrase the question as:
    “Why do you guys believe that faith in the existence a deity is a sign of insanity…

    The answer is that “faith”, as in “belief in something for no rational reason at all” is insane.

  112. > The answer is that “faith”, as in “belief in something for no rational reason at all” is insane.

    That is no definition of “faith”.

    Also from psychological point of view faith can be useful.

  113. > I believe that there is maybe one pro-choice Republican left in the house…Hanna from NY.

    > Whatever you believe TEA stands for the religious conservatives have IMHO completely hijacked the Tea Party and the GOP.

    > The Tea Party are hated because of the company they keep. Fiscal responsibility is well and good but a fiscally responsible theocracy isn’t an improvement over what we have but a huge negative.

    I believe the better question is why so few non-(religious conservatives) are interested in fiscal responsibility. Also, the US of say the 1950’s wasn’t exactly a religious theocracy, which is the “worst” case scenario in terms of social conservatives getting power.

  114. To echo Eric my instinct is to fight or flee when these folks show up. If they ever truly win we’re in a world of hurt…and atheists are going to be some of the first people lined up against the wall and shot…hopefully metaphorically speaking.

    Eric is of the belief that those folks are far less dangerous than the eeevil leftists. Since libertarians are too small in number to effect much change on their own, they, like any minority political contingent, have to form a coalition with other contingents with vaguely aligning goals. The religious right are a broad match for libertarians on the gun, tax, and “leave us the hell alone” issues.

    However, I believe that Eric’s sense of the religious right has for more to do with his extensively refined ability to do what is called “passing” in the LGBTQ community than any benign quality of the religious right themselves.

    Meanwhile, the eeevil leftists (actually a rightist in sheep’s clothing as Altemeyer pointedly observed) did manage to kill millions; meanwhile, more moderate and sane leftist policies supplied superior health care, education, work conditions, public order, and infrastructure for millions more. More and more, the libertarian argument sounds like the “What have the Romans ever done for us?” bit from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which may explain why they’re too small in number to actually do anything.

  115. One thing I got from Political Science class (well, it was not the exact name) was that left right is defined in many dimensions (like e.g. government interventionism unregulated free market, internationalism nationalism (this was Europe version, US would be federal state probably)), and on many issues.

    I do wonder why political faction cluster so strongly, and why they feel that they have to define on all those dimensions (instead of for e.g. only few most important ones).

  116. @ Jakub Narebski

    > The answer is that “faith”, as in “belief in something for no rational reason at all” is insane.

    That is no definition of “faith”.

    Also from psychological point of view faith can be useful.

    It isn’t the definition of “faith”, but it is pretty much what “religious faith” means, although of course religious people don’t say it that way. In my experience, they say “You just have to have faith.”

    @ Paul Brinkley

    That just raises the question of what a “rational reason” is, though.

    Rational thought is thought based on reason.

    So you say “That just raises…”

    And I say: Reason (in this context) is using knowledge or the best approximations, theories and hypotheses that we have, along with logic, to try to determine what is true.

  117. Winter, you haven’t actually read the Bible, have you? It’s all there at http://www.biblegateway.com.

    “Most of the New Testament is (Eastern-) Roman empire.”

    What part of it? Eh?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judea_%28Roman_province%29

    And the Romans wrote which part? Romans is short for “Paul’s Letter to the Romans”; Paul was a staunch Pharisee, both religiously _and_ ethnically Jewish before Christ introduced Himself (quite rudely) on the road to Damascus (and after which Paul remained ethnically a Jew.)

    “The original Jewish Old Testament is about…”

    You really don’t have any idea what the Old Testament is “about”. Yes, it does contain all that, and yes, a lot of that is at God’s express command. Pigeons and eagles both have wings, feathers, two eyes, can fly and normally nest on cliffs, but are they both about the same thing?

    Winter, I am prepared to accept the idea that you were joking.

    @el_slapper. I like your take on Evolution vs. Creation. I do find it ironic that while your Creation “SOMEONE ELSE is in charge” comforts people, the vast majority of people that I’ve met who seem to believe in Evolution (or seem to believe in nothing at all) take comfort in the same thing. However, the things you claim Evolution teaches is merely science. When it comes to Evolution/Creation, the method is, or at least should be, independent from the madness.

    @Eric…

    “Yes, you projected ‘faith’ on people who don’t have it and don’t need it.”

    If I’m reading this right, and I’m pretty sure I am, what you mean is that somehow, I believe that the people around here believe in God; that I’m prejudiced to believe that everyone around me believes in God, or believes in some sort of supernatural. I do believe it is true that to be an Evolutionist, you need faith, otherwise you’re blind to all the questions and objections regarding Evolution and the fossil record, just a the fundamentally religious are blind to all the questions and objections regarding God.

    “To the faith-holding mind, evidence is ultimately irrelevant in the face of the need and desire to believe – a scientist cannot be like that, and if he is he fails as a scientist.”

    Eric, I know what it’s like to be like that, and I know what it’s like to break out of that. Now, I hate to talk to you like a child, but you know science is about the art of disproving. If you assume, or “believe” something in science, you’re a scientist if you set about trying to “break” that belief with an experiment. That is science. Evolution is broken in several different places, and Evolutionists have a tendency to sweep it all under the rug. A smart Creationist (i.e.: me if I’m trying to break Evolution, which I’ll do if I have to if I need to prove that it is a faith and not a fact) will bring up those objections. As for Creation, the main objection is obviously that most people have not experienced God, and this includes a heck of a lot of people who believe in God. Here’s an example:

    https://www.youtube.com/user/GraceAboundedMore

    It was pretty clear to me through a rather lengthy conversation, that she doesn’t have an experience of God that she recognizes as such. I find this true of almost all “religious fundamentalists”. The best a typical Creationist can therefore do is raise the objections to Evolution and present the even more rickety seminary theologian’s perspective, but you really don’t have anything without experiencing God at some sort of human level. Without that experience, I’d find it easier to believe in Evolution than Creation simply because having no experience of a Creator is disproof enough.

    IMHO, if you have an experience of God and you don’t think it is an experience of God, I’m not going to even try to change your mind. If you have an an experience of God and you’re not sure and ask me, I’m probably not going to say yes, but give you of my own experience and knowledge to help you make up your own mind. Who am I to interfere with your relationship (or lack thereof) with God?

    So Eric, do you want to continue to diagnose my insanity? Or, do you actually want to read and answer the whole post this time?

    1. >If I’m reading this right, and I’m pretty sure I am, what you mean is that somehow, I believe that the people around here believe in God; that I’m prejudiced to believe that everyone around me believes in God, or believes in some sort of supernatural.

      No, you read that wrong. Your projection is expressed by this claim:

      >to be an Evolutionist, you need faith, otherwise you’re blind to all the questions and objections regarding Evolution and the fossil record,

      This claim is false on several levels. You are projecting your insane religious mode of ignoring or suppressing explanatory gaps on people who don’t need it or use it.

      >Evolution is broken in several different places, and Evolutionists have a tendency to sweep it all under the rug.

      This is tendentious nonsense. Evolution is no more broken than physics, unless you have a theory of quantum gravity handy. So…am I exhibiting “faith” when I model electrical currents with electrons? No…I am “believing” physics, despite legitimate questions and objections about the theory, because it is (a) predictive, and (b) consilient. This is exactly the same reason I believe evolution, because it is (a) predictive, and (b) consilient. There are very few perfect theories (no “questions or objections”), but there are many that pass the predictive-and-consilient test and therefore justify rational belief.

      You, like every other anti-evolutionist I’ve ever met, insist that imperfect theories require “faith”. This claim is false, and even if it were true you don’t apply it consistently. You only brandish it like a club against theories that threaten your delusional system.

      >It was pretty clear to me through a rather lengthy conversation, that she doesn’t have an experience of God that she recognizes as such.

      Sad for her, but irrelevant. I have experienced multiple theophanies that I recognized as such myself, and think everyone should at least once, but I’m not stupid or naive enough to think they had any bearing on what I should believe about evolution or science in general.

  118. I love this post, and A&D is one of the few places on the internet where this sort of elucidated wisdom can be found and appreciated. Thank you Eric.

  119. Jeff Read on Thursday, January 10 2013 at 3:50 pm said:
    > moderate and sane leftist policies supplied superior health care, education, work conditions, public order, and infrastructure for millions more.

    To see whether it is capitalism or moderate leftism that has provided these good things, compare Greece and Hong Kong.

    Economic growth provided these conditions, not leftist policies, and, as leftist policies have steadily increased, economic growth has slowed and halted.

    It is the dose that makes the poison: Compare Taiwan and Communist China. Compare China before the reforms with China after reforms: You agree that radical leftism is slavery, mass murder, and artificial famine.

    OK, then let us look at moderate leftism: Compare Hong Kong and Taiwan. Moderate leftism does less damage than radical leftism, but it does the same sort of damage. In radical leftism your speech is constrained because you will be tortured and murdered for politically incorrect thoughts. In moderate leftism your career will be destroyed and your company sued for racism and sexism, on the basis of words allegedly heard whispered behind locked doors by someone with his ear at the keyhole.

    In radical leftism, millions are murdered in artificial famine. In moderate leftism, millions are unemployed and stagnate in hellish public housing. Moderate leftism shows all the same symptoms as radical leftism in milder form.

    Further, “moderate” leftism is inherently immoderate. It moves ever leftwards, at an ever increasing pace, heading for a date with mass murder and artificial famine. Obama is left of Bush, Bush left of Clinton, and so on and so forth all the way back to Lincoln.

  120. You’re not.

    This is over-generalizing a bit, but pretty much the only part of your long comment that I really accept is:

    after which Paul remained ethnically a Jew.

    I have a good link for you:
    Skeptic’s Annotated Bible

    It has sections on Absurdity, Injustice, Cruelty and Violence, Intolerance, Good Stuff, Contradictions, Science and History,Family Values, etc.

    You can also do searches. If you want to see many of the places where the Bible instructs you to beat your children, try doing a search on the word “rod”.

  121. @Terry
    The three gospels that blame the Jews for Jesus’ death were written by Roman citizens at a time when most converts were not former Jews.

    Most of Paul’s letters were not written by Paul. Authorship had a different meanig then.

  122. @esr Maybe it’s just been the whole Obama as the anti-christ meme. The guy isn’t that far left of center and in Europe my impression is they think we’re nuts to consider him very left at all.

    That and the criticism here is almost always leveled at “liberals” and the democrats. Where, if there are any moderates left at all in partisan national politics, is where any remaining moderates survive.

    Between Obama and any religious right supported candidate Obama is, to me, the lesser of two evils.

  123. @Nigel: “If we can discuss multi-verse theories without thinking the proponents are all insane crackpots perhaps we can do the same with religion.”

    If religion had an actual *theory*, i.e., a set of ideas that could be used to generate testable predictions, this would work. But nobody who believes in a religion actually uses it to generate testable predictions about things that haven’t happened yet (at least, they don’t whenever the predictions actually have consequences that they care about). They only use it to explain, after the fact, things that have already happened.

  124. @Nigel

    “Alas, there are a large number of people that do evil and sleep soundly at night resolute in their belief that they have a good relationship with their God.”

    I know. To an extent, I am one of them, making promises I can’t quite keep and lying, even if it is the result of an honest mistake, I still see it as such. As a result of this, there is always a level of discomfort in my relationship with God (that’s another of Jesus’ purposes, assuring us that we are still in that relationship despite ongoing sin.)

    The thing is, there are other Gods than the one I serve, and their desires are often evil by any objective measure. Were it not so, what is the context of the first commandment? “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” – Exodus 20:3. This isn’t just demons, but other things as well: addictions, unhealthy thought patterns (that often turn into mental illnesses), and oneself (anyone here ever met a megalomaniac?)

  125. @Paul Brinkley: “They don’t, however, appear to use religion to explain *everything*.”

    Oh, agreed; but the fact that, by hypothesis, they are “believers in religion” presumes, I think, that they use religion to explain *some* things.

  126. “Eric, not that I believe you’re necessarily wrong here, but I took Terry’s allusion to “big ‘E’ Evolution” as his attempt to illuminate a distinction between those who believe in evolution in the way a scientist believes a line on a graph has a certain slope, and those who believe in it in the sense a fanatic believes in a religion.”

    Paul, that’s exactly what I mean, thank you. As for placing people into buckets, I don’t do that. They do a very good job of placing themselves into these buckets. Neil deGrasse Tyson is the most interesting because, so far as what I’ve heard from him, he is definitely big-E Evolutionist … but, in some of his very eloquent and touching descriptions of his views of how the universe works, I’ve yet to hear him use the word “evolution”! Shortly, I’m going to “ask” him what evolution is, and if he has a take on big-E vs. little-e E/evolution, whether there is such a thing as Evolution fundamentalists in the same way are there are religious fundamentalists. I’m expecting him to depart into a definition of science, but I hope not. The reason I put “ask” in quotes is because I’m certain he has been asked before, on camera, and for me it is simply a matter of finding the recording.

  127. “Talk to the mice – they are performing very complex and subtle experiments on scientists. (which all literate folks will recognize as being from the great work of Douglas Adams – may he rest in pieces.)”

    This idea goes back much farther. Take a look at the Murray Leinster story “Keyhole”.

  128. Jay Maynard on Wednesday, January 9 2013 at 10:30 am said: -Snipped-

    “And if AA/NA are cults, they’re reasonably benign ones, and at least have a genuinely good result. That’s probably because their goal is not to do anything more than get the person to stop using.”
    Yep. Stop using and be happy.
    I don’t know about NA, but some AA meetings can get cultish to a minor degree with charismatic leaders, and certainly Bill Wilson generated some controversy (there are a couple of big web sites devoted to demonizing him), but on the whole AA actually is the biggest functional anarchy on the planet. There sure are a lot of drunks.
    One of its traditions states that “AA ought never be organized”. Another states “the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking”, no-one ever gets kicked out, and at $1/meeting suggested donation, no-one is getting rich. Newly sober members can show the fanatic’s grin, but they usually get over it. Belief in “a higher power” is suggested but not required, and there are even atheists with long-term sobriety, though they’re often a bit argumentative. Theophanies are encouraged but not required.

  129. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faith
    2.b complete trust ; firm belief in something for which there is no proof

    …an excellent definition that fits atheists well. They tend to be as cultish as anyone else, with the added annoyance that they tend to believe that their lack of religious beliefs makes them smarter than all those believers out there. As Glenn Reynolds commented, “Atheism would be a lot more popular if so many atheists weren’t such schmucks.”

  130. > Between Obama and any religious right supported candidate Obama is, to me, the lesser of two evils.

    Who is the religious rightist active in Republican politics, who proposes to go back to the 1950s, or even the 1960s – which were not exactly periods of rampant right wing theocracy.

  131. @Paul “as if some universal supercomputer is busily calculating probabilities that this organism or that should live long enough to make babies and then arranging events to make those probabilities fact.”

    Lols after Proverbs 16:31. Of course, while I believe God /can/ intervene in any probability phenomenon (such as making a TV pop out of a black hole via Hawking radiation), I think it is extremely rare for Him to actually do so. I.e.: If you put a thousand monkeys in a room full of typewriters and in a few hours they had produced the collected works of Shakespeare, I’d be singing Hallelujah (and probably cacking my pants in amazement anyway!)

    @ Winter “But this is all immaterial to the Creationists. They are not against Evolutionism per se. They are against Science as a way to learn about the world. ”

    Perhaps then I and a small number of others should maybe be “creationists” as this is analogous to my E/evolution distinction. I believe in understanding the mind of God through science, and even mathematics. I think God might have a sense of humour in the form of, say, how old is She? Answer: e^pi – pi

    One of my favorite recreational activities is to fly around in Orbiter. You need to know a thing or two about physics though. If you want a simple universe viewer, I recommend Celestia or Space Engine. If you want to feed your wisdom teeth to your cat, I recommend Kerbal Space Program as a less destructive alternative.

  132. @ esr
    > What do you suppose we would have to do to not “accept” them?

    Exhibit 1: http://catchthefire.com.au/2012/12/rise-up-australia-party-national-launch-on-11th-feb-2013-at-national-press-club-in-canberra/

    Pseudo-skeptic the pseudo-Lord Monckton certainly seems to “accept” the nutters at “Catch the Fire Ministries”, a group of particularly distateful right-wing religious nutters who are hosting the Lordship in Australia …

    Surely you climate contrarians understand that this sort of wingbattery damages the credibility of your experts?

  133. “The guy isn’t that far left of center”

    It is unfortunately true that these days stating the “1%” needs to have their property apportioned in the name of “fairness” and “social justice” is not that far from the center. But do consider the possibility that this doesn’t make the underlying ideas any more valid.

  134. > Of course, while I believe God /can/ intervene in any probability phenomenon (such as making a TV pop out of a black hole via Hawking radiation), I think it is extremely rare for Him to actually do so. I.e.: If you put a thousand monkeys in a room full of typewriters and in a few hours they had produced the collected works of Shakespeare, I’d be singing Hallelujah (and probably cacking my pants in amazement anyway!)

    Given the nature of probabilities, I would infer a number of things, with high enough certainty that I would bet $10000 US (pre-default) on each:

    1. No television set has ever popped out of a black hole via Hawking radiation
    2. No monkeys have ever produced Shakespeare
    3. If 1 or 2 were to become true some day, the cardinality of either event would remain at one until the heat death of the universe
    4. Because of 3, the existence of such a higher power wouldn’t matter enough for me to rely on it in any way.

    And that’s only because $10k is all I could cover, since no bank would honor a higher loan.

  135. “The reason I don’t believe this is that every time I’ve actually pushed one of these allegedly defensive skeptics into trying to justify their anti-evolutionist position, they’ve fallen back into faith-holder insane gibbering within minutes.”

    Eric, I think your stopwatch is busted. When I get into these conversations (and I push both ways), the gibberish usually emerges within seconds. If you want to hear both sides of the gibberish, you can watch this- naw, skip the video and look at the comments.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9BfsHsVGNg

  136. > Surely you climate contrarians understand that this sort of wingbattery damages the credibility of your experts?

    I see. Supposedly “Catch the fire ministry” are not only crazies, but so crazy that merely speaking to them is proof of evil and madness, whereas Obama is moderate centrist mainstream.

    I cannot prove that god does not exist, because I cannot see things failing to exist, only things existing, but I can surely prove that all men were not created equal. Who then is crazier?

  137. It is unfortunately true that these days stating the “1%” needs to have their property apportioned in the name of “fairness” and “social justice” is not that far from the center. But do consider the possibility that this doesn’t make the underlying ideas any more valid.

    My heart doesn’t bleed for the 1% that exploit American workers and puts them on welfare, food stamps and medicaid to make ends meet. Six members of the Walton family have the same net worth of the bottom 30% of American families combined.

    The Waltons and Wal-Mart are parasites on the american economy gaming the system so the US taxpayers subsidize their business.

    Nor does my heart bleed for the 1% wall street bankers that drove the country to the brink of economic collapse. The same folks that are now attempting to sue the US government for bailing out AIG because the terms were too onerous. I wouldn’t have bailed out AIG but what’s done is done.

    If the choice is tax policy where these bloodsuckers decide to move to Russia or a social policy that outlaws abortion, gay marriage and sex ed while adding Creationism into the school science curriculum then there’s no choice at all.

  138. @Eric “First, give up one of omnibenevolence, omnipotence, or omniscience. Then we could talk contingent existence.”

    Well, since I’ve seen Him get Right Pissed Off, I’ll drop the first one.

    @ams “Belief is generally useless, even if it is of something ‘true’. If you don’t *understand*, what are you believing? Don’t believe X, understand X.”

    I absolutely agree. I enjoy getting into conversations about how I understand God. Unfortunately, they remind me of a clip from Star Trek IV:

    Bones: “You really have gone where no man has gone before. Can’t you at least tell us what it was like?”

    Spock: “It would be impossible to discuss without a common frame of reference.”

    Bones: “You mean I have to /die/ to discuss your insights on death?”

    Also, the evidence that I have that God exists is a) highly subjective, and b) not repeatable in a lab experiment. The reason why it is not repeatable is the “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” effect. The stack of unlikely coincidences that I have experienced that convince me of the reality of God and my relationship with Him are each only available once. Even so, almost every time I bring them up, there’s some troll who is absolutely convinced that I’m making them up out of repressed memories or some balderdash like that even if the material involved is brand new.

    In science, it often occurs that several different individuals start discovering or inventing the same thing at the same time out of contact with each other. Many can be traced to context generating an environment where the new discovery or invention is pretty much inevitable (i.e.: the first person who points a telescope at Jupiter is going to see the big moons; had Lippershey done so before Galileo…) Those that can’t seem to be like we as humanity are just plain ready to trip over the principles and knowledge, but why a bunch at the same time, and not before or after? Whatever makes it possible, the only thing a true atheist can believe is dumb luck (remember, for cases where context has been ruled out.)

    One of the big frustrations of evangelism is actually not that people don’t believe me when I share of my experience of God, it’s that if you choose to believe in God because of my experience, that does sweet tweet regarding your own experience of God. Because I experience God, it doesn’t guarantee that anyone else will (even though the God I know wants to know everyone, otherwise I wouldn’t be bringing Him up.) Fortunately, I have yet to meet the person who struggles to believe in God and He never shows up in any way. That said, there are a bunch who don’t really struggle, but the same aren’t stubborn enough to stick with science or reason either.

    “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” – Galileo (At moments he seems like the Neil deGrasse Tyson of theology, but Jesus was even more so.)

  139. Eric’s reference to the synthetic greeters that accosted him upon entering the auditorium brought to mind a funny encounter that I had at fancy ski resort a few years ago. Management had hired a bunch of attractive college-age coeds to act as greeters and welcome the out-of-state guests who were paying upwards of $120 for a day pass. These young ladies were relentlessly cheerful and earnest in asking if there was anything they could do to make the ski day more enjoyable. My buddy, who had been drinking (of course), took the offer at face value and said that yes there was something that she could do if she really meant it. He said that he had a dingleberry that he couldn’t quite reach and wondered if she would mind plucking it off for him. He took her speechlessness as a no, and ever since then we’ve joked about this being the ultimate litmus test for true believers. Are you willing to pluck the dingleberry?

  140. Nigel, if I wanted to read New York Times, I would read New York Times, so please spare the propaganda. I’m still curious, though, do you admit the possibility that you might be wrong about the reasons for certain problems US has (and no, the fact that rich people have more money than poor people is not a problem)? And that what currently is called political “center” would have been called radical leftism some time ago?

  141. @ Shenpen
    >Well certain subsets of US libertarianism are quite cultish (the Rothbard-Rockwell subset, the >staunch anti-empiricists) and that is a mighty attractive bait for you, so…

    Nah, US libertarians aren’t cultish. If they were, they’d be *far* more successful in recruiting new followers.

  142. @Eric “the moment I see the religious hypomania and the shutdown of critical thinking I know I’m in the presence of the enemy and must either fight or flee.”

    I think I’ve said almost the exact same thing before with “see Ephesians 6:12” tacked onto the end. The Bible (and my own observations and experience) are remarkably consistent with the idea that there is a really evil spiritual force out to destroy our humanity. In non-theist terms, our reason, intellect, ability to think, make new discoveries, show compassion to one another, have children, etc. and that cults are a big part of that. In theist terms, we are made in the image of God, and that is what the enemy hates, so he destroys everything about us that is God-like.

    Paul: “How many people who profess agreement with ‘evolution is superior to creationism’ would be able to come up with something like that hill-climbing algorithm on their own? … in a way that shows they could apply it to at least two different problem types. In other words, they understand it, not merely believe it.”

    There are a few different ways to find your way around in the Orbiter Spaceflight Simulator. I’m most familiar with two:

    TransX MFD: http://www.orbitermars.co.uk/TransXV310.zip (about 700kB)
    Trajectory Optimization Tool: http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=5418 (192.7MB, 22.2MB if you already have MATLAB)

    In the first, it shows you your course in stages and lets you plan the maneuvers yourself to get to where you’re going, including such things as Voyager 2’s Grand Tour.

    The second does it for you using a genetic algorithm.

    Guess which one I’ve had better luck with? TransX. It might be that this particular genetic algorithm isn’t particularly good (and I believe that to be the case), but it is part of my experience that, unless the problem is quite simple, genetic algorithms just don’t cut the mustard as well as intelligent design (both my words and lack of capitalization on them is deliberate.) I was not successful in finding a simple coloured-moth type applet which was made specifically for an Evolution-vs-Creation argument that failed to come even close to demonstrating as much evolution as science observes. I thought it was linked to this one:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAq9bmCeR0

    So, IMHO, evolutionary hill-climbers are no match for smart human designers, and while I’m not going to tack a “therefore” on it, I will say it doesn’t exactly support the idea that Darwin-esque natural selection would work as well as Dawkins and deGrasse Tyson seem to believe it does.

  143. @Terry “Evolution is broken in several different places, and Evolutionists have a tendency to sweep it all under the rug.”

    @Eric “This claim is false on several levels. You are projecting your insane religious mode of ignoring or suppressing explanatory gaps on people who don’t need it or use it.”

    Okay, back it up. Has the objection regarding Evolution being able to generate new information from scratch ever been properly answered?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaKryi3605g

    “No…I am “believing” physics, despite legitimate questions and objections about the theory, because it is (a) predictive, and (b) consilient. This is exactly the same reason I believe evolution, because it is (a) predictive, and (b) consilient.”

    I haven’t found that to be exactly true. Michael Cremo’s “Forbidden Archaeology” (with Richard Thompson) has shown that a double standard is applied to evidence of evolution, so it is not as consilient as you think (he is Hindu in faith and subscribes to Vedic creationist theory; his book “Human Devolution” gets a bit kooky, IMHO.)

    http://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Archeology-Hidden-History-Human/dp/0892132949

    Is it predictive at all? What has Evolution predicted that has come to pass? Now, I’m not talking about selective breeding because that is not Evolution, just little-e evolution.

    “You, like every other anti-evolutionist I’ve ever met, insist that imperfect theories require ‘faith’. This claim is false, and even if it were true you don’t apply it consistently. You only brandish it like a club against theories that threaten your delusional system.”

    Eric, get off the damn line if you’re going to talk like that. You’re beating me over the head with reckless abandon using words like “insanity” and “delusional”. You hypocrite!

    1. >Eric, get off the damn line if you’re going to talk like that. You’re beating me over the head with reckless abandon using words like “insanity” and “delusional”. You hypocrite!

      I call them like I see them. You, like every other faith-holder, are insane and delusional. The insanity consists precisely in an inability to adjust your predictive models to conform to evidence when that evidence would conflict with the emotional fixations of your faith. I use these words because the world won’t ever be less full of crazy if the sane people keep pretending the nutters are not nutters.

  144. @Peter: “But nobody who believes in a religion actually uses it to generate testable predictions about things that haven’t happened yet (at least, they don’t whenever the predictions actually have consequences that they care about). They only use it to explain, after the fact, things that have already happened.”

    I believe that the Biblical predictions (i.e.: the prophecies) predicted events which are already in our past from the 21st century context (so the most coherent analysts of prophecy are the historicists.) That said, it does appear that some of the Reformers in the 1750 era predicted that the fulfillment of certain prophecies in advance, and consistent with the modern historicist interpretation. Would you like the details?

    @Glen Reynolds “Atheism would be a lot more popular if so many atheists weren’t such schmucks.”

    (sigh) The Christian corollary is an entire book:

    http://www.amazon.com/unChristian-Generation-Really-Christianity-Matters/dp/0801072719

    Not only that, but the authors blew it by preaching biblical inerrancy. I still find myself wondering how anybody can believe that every thought of God can fit into a volume dwarfed by any issue of Jane’s All The World’s- er… anything, and The CRC Handbook of Physics and Chemistry.

  145. @ James A Donald
    > so crazy that merely speaking to them is evidence of evil and madness

    Well, I was more referring to His Viscountness accepting the invitation of a nutty fringe religious group to be the keynote speaker at the launch of their even nuttier political party. Evidence of sound judgement it certainly ain’t.

  146. @Terry
    “Has the objection regarding Evolution being able to generate new information from scratch ever been properly answered?”

    Yes.

    Summary:
    Darwinian selection is a filter that extract information from the environment. In CS terms, it is a search algorithm.

    Long answer:
    First, lets get the terminology right. Creationists have a way messing up concepts to make their point.

    “Evolution” is the combination of “Selection” (=differential breeding success) working on “Mutations” (=Inheritable Variation). This leads to changes in the traits of a population over time (=adaptation&drift). These are probabilistic processes, so they are basically biased random walks. There is really no controversy in any way that these mechanism work. It is impossible for them not to work. If there is differential breeding success and inheritable variation you get adaptation over time.

    Now, as Creationists cannot attack the above mechanism, they confound it with the history of the earth. They call the history of life on earth “Evolution”. As with any history, it is impossible to prove that something really happened a long time ago. You can repeat experiments in writing a new Constitution of the USA as often as you want. So you can prove easily that people can write down a Constitution. However, you can never prove that the original Constitution was written by specific persons in a specific manner as you can never again observe that. Even worse when talking about things happening millions of years ago.

    Now back to your question: “Evolution being able to generate new information from scratch”

    This is a deliberate mis-formulation. The process of evolution (=adaptation) is a search algorithm. Search algorithms do not generate new information from scratch, they filter information.

    As written above, adaptation is searching a local optimum in a vast space of possible configurations. It is the most efficient algorithm known in cases where a combinatorial explosion makes it too expensive to check a sizable fraction of the possibility space. See the work on Genetic Programming.

    This is all well known. Actually, this is standard curriculum material for under-graduates in Biology and Computer Science. The fact that Creationists keep coming up with these non-sequiturs is proof that they are not seriously interested in “Science”. They only go through the moves to satisfy their scientific illiterate followers, using some interesting sounding words. Simply as a debating technique to bamboozle an audience. In short, Creationists are lying to hide truths they cannot face.

    Btw, I do know honest Creationist scientists. These are not biologists. These are tortured souls who all eventually have to face reality and get their idea of God out of the gaps (eg, Cees Dekker). Over-here there was a well know TV presenter from an evangelical station who was honest enough to admit in the end that the proof was in favor of the biologists. However, this was too distressing for the viewers so his bosses silenced him on this point.
    (Dutch link: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andries_Knevel )

  147. @Terry
    “What has Evolution predicted that has come to pass? Now, I’m not talking about selective breeding because that is not Evolution, just little-e evolution.”

    This is a testament of the inadequacy of USA education. Biology education must be still in the 19th century.

    The DNA profiles (and all the rest of the biochemistry) of every single living organism fits a tree of common descent. That is, the DNA of Chimps is closer to mine that that of Howler monkeys, which again is closer than that of mice, opossums, birds, oak trees, the Yersinii pestis bacteria, in that order.

    There are a few different mechanisms for photosynthesis and oxygen respiration known in living organisms. Only one of each dominates all the others and is used exclusively by multi-cellular organisms (plants, fungi, and animals). Even better. The two species of bacteria that “invented” photosynthesis and respiration have been taken up as a symbiont by every multi-cellular organism that uses light or oxygen. A similar story, with twists, holds for the ability to digest cellulose.

    Just by looking at the flower of an unknown plant, a botanist can tell you most of what you want to know about the anatomy and physiology of the complete plant. Because, by looking at the flower, she can determine the next-of-kin species. Because they share a common ancestor, most of the chemistry and anatomy of the plant can be derived. Even if the plant lives in a completely different environment and has a completely different life-history.

    You have obviously no idea how huge the fact of these simple connections are. Because, under Creationism, there is no connection between species other than that the same God created them all at the same time. But due to Darwin’s work, each of these facts (and many, many more) was anticipated.

  148. @Terry
    “So, IMHO, evolutionary hill-climbers are no match for smart human designers, and while I’m not going to tack a “therefore” on it, I will say it doesn’t exactly support the idea that Darwin-esque natural selection would work as well as Dawkins and deGrasse Tyson seem to believe it does.”

    This goes in with my earlier response. This is simply a very stupid remark. “Evolutionary hill-climbing” is the most efficient strategy in very complex search spaces. No other design strategy has been found that beats it. As for the “Intelligent” in “Intelligent Design”, Darwin himself described hundreds of examples of stupid designs of nature in his works. All understandable as results of the histories of the species.

    Try to find a better search algorithm in N dimensional space (N>1000) with interacting factors (F[i,j] is exponentially bigger/smaller than F[i]*F[j]). You will get every price and reward there is to win in CS and some other fields.

  149. Terry on Friday, January 11 2013 at 1:28 am said:
    > I believe that the Biblical predictions (i.e.: the prophecies) predicted events which are already in our past from the 21st century context (so the most coherent analysts of prophecy are the historicists.)

    People interpret biblical prophecies to have accurately predicted events in the interpreters past. They are markedly less successful at interpreting biblical prophecies to predict events in the interpreter’s future.

    Of course Jesus, famously, did predict the destruction of the temple.

    Jesus: There will be wars and rumors of wars. Kingdom shall rise against Kingdom, and Nation against Nation

    Heckler: And bears shall shit in the woods.

    Jesus: there shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down’

    Heckler: Doubtless true of any building. Could you tell us when the temple is going to get thrown down and who shall throw it down?

  150. Maybe a little Catholic theology would do the USA evangelicals etc some good. Here are some points (outdated points, as I am not current on Catholic dogma)

    – The bible is a book about the relation between man and God and is written for all human beings. It is not a book about science, geography, history, or natural history

    – Nature is the “second book” of God. “Read” it to better understand God, do not fight reality

    – God is in the real world, not lurking in the dark shadows of human knowledge

  151. Re “faith” vs “reason”.

    Rational reasoning has its limitations; we live and have to live with incomplete information.
    (I’ll stop here on that issue).

  152. @esr
    “You, like every other faith-holder, are insane and delusional.”

    I can understand the objections to these words.

    Their actual meaning would be “pathological and requiring institutionalized care” and “a state of psychosis”, respectively. It can certainly be argued that most faith-holders are not suffering from a dangerous pathology which requires institutionalized care. Even that “faith” is one of the natural states of the human mind, as part of the big five personality traits.

    Maybe we must accept the reality that a large fraction of healthy human beings can sincerely believe mutually exclusive facts at the same time, and keep faith in magic feats while repeatedly observing their utter failure, never having experienced them working in first place (or vice versa, things work every time but are never believed).

    That is not limited to religion though. I just have to mention “vaccination” somewhere to get loads of anti-science and magical thinking and severe logical delusions thrown at me. (no, I won’t go into the topic)

    1. >It can certainly be argued that most faith-holders are not suffering from a dangerous pathology

      But they are. We can never know on any given day that the voices in their heads aren’t going to trigger an episode of religious mass murder. Historically this is both a frequent and a recent phenomenon. Monotheisms are particularly prone to it.

  153. @esr
    “We can never know on any given day that the voices in their heads aren’t going to trigger an episode of religious mass murder.”

    I know. It is very uncommon, and I would not limit it to monotheism. There are Hindus massacring Muslims in Gujarat once every decade. And Sinhalese Buddhists know how to do it too. South Park had a nice episode of fictional Atheist’ wars.

    But you are probably right, we should keep a watchful eye on people with delusional tendencies.

  154. “The Bible (and my own observations and experience) are remarkably consistent with the idea that there is a really evil spiritual force out to destroy our humanity.”

    No it isn’t. The Jews, who wrote the Book, do not believe that there is any spiritual force in the universe except God. It’s monotheism with a capital ‘M’. Don’t go looking for conspiracies when plain old ignorance and stupidity explain things well enough.

  155. @w23 I’m still curious, though, do you admit the possibility that you might be wrong about the reasons for certain problems US has (and no, the fact that rich people have more money than poor people is not a problem)?

    Nope, I don’t admit the possibility because I haven’t yet espoused any reasons for problems. I have simply stated that in my view, regardless of the reasons or problems, that thus far nothing the liberals has proposed on anything is as dangerous as what the religious right want.

    You wanna hear what I think the problem is? Here goes: the problem in US politics for me is that as a moderate that is fiscally conservative, socially liberal, pro-strong military I am faced with choosing between liberals and anti-science religious conservatism.

    At least Romney believed in evolution and picked Ryan instead of someone like Jindal. But good lord, last go around we had Palin.

    And yet, all I hear around here is Obama this and Obama that while also that creationists (or more accurately, anyone that believes in God) are insane. If creationists are insane and the US conservatives and libertarians pander to creationists…why the hell are you guys picking on Obama? Do you really believe a bit of socialist medicine is more dangerous than teaching creationism in school as science?

    Obama as a cultist? The biggest anti-science cult in the US has conservative politics by the balls and folks here seem to think liberals are the problem? Where 46% percent of the country seems to believe in young earth creationism according to polls?

    Ron Paul rejected evolution and Rand Paul dodges the question on how old the earth is…because that’s a hard question.

    Gary Johnson wasn’t bad in general, believes in Evolution but dodged the issue of teaching Creationism and ID as Science as something to be determined at the local level. Really? As a SCIENCE?

  156. Faith and religion are traits of cultural evolution, and both originated and persist because they “work” in the sense that they enhance cultural survival and growth. A few thousand years ago, our ancestors evolved this memetic methodology as a means of conveying wisdom from generation to generation. At some point, these traits may prove to be unnecessary, and will then become the cultural equivalent of a epiploic appendix.

  157. So massive is the vote fraud in minority precincts – especially in Pennsylvania – that we honestly can never know how black voters actually voted in the past few elections. The pervasive assumption that blacks always vote Democrat makes it far easier to stuff the ballot boxes and get away with it. After all, who is going to be able to prove that the vote should have been 60/40 Dem instead of 90/10?

  158. @nigel
    “Nope, I don’t admit the possibility because I haven’t yet espoused any reasons for problems. ”

    Top 1% Got 93% of Income Growth as Rich-Poor Gap Widened
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-02/top-1-got-93-of-income-growth-as-rich-poor-gap-widened.html

    I am not acquainted with the political affiliation of this Bloomberg outfit, but if all growth ends up in the hands of only a few people, I would indeed expect economic problems. As I understand it, economics is all about incentives and efficient allocation.

    If all growth ends up in the hands of 1% of the population (the richest part), I see no way how the other 99% get the incentives for growth and the 1% will be efficient in allocating resources.

    Not seeing problems in such a state of affairs sounds rather like you are wearing a political blind-fold.

  159. You don’t see where the blindfold actually is when you’re the one wearing it.

    Poor incomes grow slowly because income growth corresponds very closely to current income. In other words, income doesn’t grow by X dollars for everybody, but rather by X% for everybody (roughly speaking). If someone’s income is so low that they’re spending more than they’re actually making, then their growth is naturally going to be low. If someone’s income is so high that their first-level needs are met, additional income will more easily be channeled into endeavors that create even more income. Not only that, but current wealth not tied up in capital investments such as a car, a house, etc. can be invested as well, adding further to the wealth.

    And even that’s not all. Many people who have low incomes, have them not because they’re destitute or homeless, but simply because they’re young and have just started working. Others have low incomes because they’re retired, and have practically zero income, but sizable wealth. There’s an enormous amount of mobility in the American income ladder which income inequality prophets fail to see through their blindfolds, at the expense of my blood pressure.

  160. @Paul Brinkley
    “In other words, income doesn’t grow by X dollars for everybody, but rather by X% for everybody (roughly speaking). ”

    With such reasoning and reading ability, you do not need a blindfold, I agree.

  161. And even that’s not all. Many people who have low incomes, have them not because they’re destitute or homeless, but simply because they’re young and have just started working. Others have low incomes because they’re retired, and have practically zero income, but sizable wealth. There’s an enormous amount of mobility in the American income ladder which income inequality prophets fail to see through their blindfolds, at the expense of my blood pressure.

    Social mobility is higher in Europe than in the U.S. now.

    Libertarians are being driven to fits by the unpleasant fact that equality of outcome is much more important than equality of opportunity when determining the health (physical, mental, and social) of a society. The gap between rich and poor is a real problem and should be narrowed through economic policy. This is spelled out — and backed up with peer-reviewed research — in The Spirit Level by Wilkinson and Pickett.

  162. Went to the Landmark Forum’s website…… Looks pretty soul-less.
    Heaven’s Gate…. Now there was a cult who knew a thing or two about web design!

  163. @winter

    I’m not sure where you get the idea that I’m for widening the rich/poor gap given what I wrote…

    @paul

    The trends shown in that chart are not healthy. The most of the middle class lives in that 3rd 20% which isn’t doing well. A lot of the middle class that lives in that 2nd 20% live in areas where the cost of living are very high.

    A strong middle class is politically and financially stable. They make money, they spend money and don’t make a lot of waves. Consumer spending is 2/3rds of the economy. Consumers with little money don’t spend.

    Is it a significant problem? To me the percentages don’t matter as much as whether or not we have a sizable middle class making a good living. That doesn’t appear to be the case.

  164. Winter on Friday, January 11 2013 at 11:09 am said:
    > Top 1% Got 93% of Income Growth as Rich-Poor Gap Widened

    US policies have become radically more left wing and redistributionist, and, lo and behold, surprise surprise, wealth has become more unequal.

    Funny thing that.

    When I visited Hong Kong, the planes flew on schedule, like buses to move the multitude. When I visited Cuba, the planes flew like taxis, to suit the whims of the elite. Similarly Cuba had socialist health care for the masses, consisting of hard bed to die on, and special hospitals for the elite. As our politics becomes more like that of Cuba, our wealth distribution becomes more like that of Cuba.

    Leftists are theoretically in favor of poor people, but in practice treat them as mascots.

    In the US, food and clothing is privately provided, and everyone is well clothed and well fed. Education and protection is provided by the state, and most are neither educated or protected. Housing is an intermediate case.

  165. >Monotheisms are particularly prone to it.

    Which makes perfect sense: the more deities in your head, the more likely there’ll be moderating voices.

    One could think of Polytheism sort of like a layer of anthropomorphism which gilds competing desires. A polytheist can act in a more-or-less rational manner, able to justify any action as a deference to one of many gods. But once you go monotheistic, you begin acting with a dangerous single-mindedness.

    Myself, I believe Dionysus is the one true god, which is why I’m having a portrait commissioned.

  166. Winter on Friday, January 11 2013 at 11:09 am said:
    > Top 1% Got 93% of Income Growth as Rich-Poor Gap Widened

    Observe: Leftism always results in massive inequality, and no where is this more obvious than in Cuba.

  167. “We can never know on any given day that the voices in their heads aren’t going to trigger an episode of religious mass murder.”

    Is nationalism at least as much of a hazard? It seems to me that serving one’s nation is also apt to take the brakes off of people’s aggressiveness.

    1. >Is nationalism at least as much of a hazard?

      Historically, nationalism seems to rank about third on the mass-murder threat scale, a good distance behind variants of Marxism (#1) and monotheistic religions (#2). (This judgment is not off the top of my head; I’ve actually studied this question intentionally and considered casualty figures.)

  168. OK – today I promise to be more careful with my HTML tags.

    I hope that I haven’t already described this here before…

    @ Winter

    Try to find a better search algorithm in N dimensional space (N>1000) with interacting factors (F[i,j] is exponentially bigger/smaller than F[i]*F[j]). You will get every price and reward there is to win in CS and some other fields.

    Many problems in everyday life are of this sort (although many of them are not as large as you specified) – from a mouse trying to find a path through stepping stones to get across the creek to a person trying to decide how to drive to the airport.

    One of my quirks is that if I am trying to do something really new, I don’t look at the existing state of the art much – I don’t want to lay down a way of looking at problems. In any case…

    I started working on this in about 1999 and I had published the idea on my website by 2000 (thank you Way Back Machine) and worked on it at times for a several years.

    I rejected the idea of trying to start a software company, although I guess now that I am effectively retired, I could throw it at the Travelling Salesman problem ;)

    I never got any comments on this but the work does have 923 external links to it at:
    http://www.agt.net/public/bmarshal/aiparts

    Google has loved my home page and anything I choose to hang off it ever since.

    I have a theory that emotions evolved to make decisions. The basic idea is that it is a lot easier to write various bits of code to add to a deer’s fear than it is to write a piece of code to decide when the deer should run away.

    In the early days, the few folks at comp.ai that commented basically sneered at it and I never found anything like it on the web (although, I never tried that hard), but I believe that now the approach is more commonly accepted (ditto).

    (As approximately and metaphorically as it takes for you not to laugh at this:)

    Herbivores need fear (desire to avoid bad results). Carnivores (which, temporarily, at least acquire wealth) like wolves and bond traders, need greed (desire to do take advantage of what is known or what is “owned”). Scavengers like crows and humans need curiosity (desire to try something new).

    So, in a nutshell:
    for a bunch of tries (physically or by consideration):
    for the most urgent or the most obvious unmade decision:
    pick the option with the most hope = fear + greed + curiosity
    adjust the emotions of options based on this try

    One interesting aspect is that bad aspect are much more important than good aspects, so from poorish to extremely bad, the “goodness: goes like -2, -4, -8, -16, -32 etc. while okish to extremely good goes: +2, +4, +6, +8, etc.

  169. As Bayesian evidence, religion is only weak evidence that someone will go nuts and commit mass murder – much as it’s foolish to claim that being Muslim strongly implies being a terrorist or that being religious strongly implies being a criminal. Most religious people don’t go nuts and kill lots of people because most people don’t go nuts and kill lots of people.

  170. Something about Eric’s assertion bothers me, too, actually. I understand where he’s coming from, but when I consider the likely processes going on in the brain, it’s hard for me to conclude that religion (or “faith-holding”, to adhere closely to the quote’s context) is the determining factor.

    To put it more precisely, if I’m faced with a faith-holder, I’m not so much put at unease by the faith, as I am by whatever unseen mechanism within the brain made holding that faith possible in the first place.

    There are some caveats to this. First, if faith isn’t possible without that mechanism, then it’s reasonable to observe faith-holding and infer the problem of note (and this might be all Eric is suggesting here). Second, it’s still the case that many people hold a faith and end up never hurting anyone – possibly more than the other way around, depending on how you count them. Third, and to me, most importantly, if I’m right about the existence of this hidden mechanism, then it’s essentially a zero-day exploit into the human hindbrain, we all have it, and the only way we have to guard it is by laboriously constructing safeguards in the forebrain, a process often known as “critical thinking” – and it’ll still be lurking in there as long as there’s a hindbrain.

    Not that that’s really that depressing. All it means is that logic training manages the risk, which remains non-zero, but could be so small that the time required for the expected occurrence of a snap is many times longer than the maximum human lifespan.

    But I’m still left wondering exactly *how* much of a security hole religion is. Put it this way: if you took a self-proclaimed monotheist and tried to persuade him to go on a murder spree by convincing him his religion requires it, how likely would it work, and how likely is it that he would end up giving up the religion, or just collapse into uselessness? Considering those latter cases are what make me sometimes wonder whether people who profess a faith are really just rationalizing even deeper innate tendencies.

  171. Republicans being a cult : seems more complex. Tea party is obviously a way of thinking that infuses the brain & makes everyone think the same in that group. Kind of cult. But they are not the whole part of the republicans, it seems to me.

    Tea Party is not a cult, although it may be considered part of one, in that it is a functioning portion of the mechanism on which cults function.

    The true purpose of the Tea Party is to distract a large section of the American lower-middle classes, so they do not develop class consciousness, and consequently support policies favored by the financial elite.

    I’m amusedly reminded of John Steinbeck’s succinct summary of Gramscian theory: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

  172. As Bayesian evidence, religion is only weak evidence that someone will go nuts and commit mass murder – much as it’s foolish to claim that being Muslim strongly implies being a terrorist or that being religious strongly implies being a criminal.

    This may be true, but it’s like the problem of male child care workers. Most men are not paedophiles, but a male child care worker is far more likely to sexually take advantage of a child than a female one. Hence, men working in, say, a day care context are viewed with considerable distrust.

    Likewise, most religious people are not insane killers, but a religious person is more likely to go on a killing spree than an irreligious one.

    There’s also the less likely but more disastrous danger that someone will start hearing voices and, through religion, induce others — perhaps by the thousands — to kill in the name of god.

    1. >There’s also the less likely but more disastrous danger that someone will start hearing voices and, through religion, induce others — perhaps by the thousands — to kill in the name of god.

      Yes, that’s exactly the danger – not sporadic individual flipouts but collective delusional mania, building on the individual insanity of religion, intensified and directed by charismatics.

      One reason this possibility is more emotionally real and frightening to me than to most people is that I’m pretty sure I could do it – that is, be the crusade-leading charismatic myself. I’ve had theophanies. I know how to channel. I’ve led mass movements. If I were stuck in a supernaturalist/religious belief system and a zealot by personality rather than a rationalist…well, it could add up to a lot of blood and ugliness.

  173. Jeff – it’s still effectively security theatre, though. Imagine Bruce Schneier doing the numbers on the TSA. The numbers here are of the same order.

  174. Let me tell you something which might at first glance look unrelated: there was observed in a few cases a peculiar type of brain damage which removed emotional responses and left only rational logical thinking to control behavior (unfortunately I cannot offer references). Scientists puts those people against various psychological tests. As it turns out those people have had large problems with tasks which involved incomplete information. Something that we don’t have any problems with. (But probably also those kind of soft problems that AI still has problems with).

    So it turns out that emotional hindbrain responses are very useful (if sometimes misleading and must be controlled and checked by logical thinking).

    Now put science in place of “logical reasoning”, and “faith” in place of emotions…

    1. >Now put science in place of “logical reasoning”, and “faith” in place of emotions…

      That’s an unjustified leap. Faith is not merely emotion, it’s the (wilful) substitution of emotional fixation for reasoning.

  175. @Jakub Narebski

    Let me tell you something which might at first glance look unrelated… brain damage which removed emotional responses…large problems with tasks which involved incomplete information

    It may be a step removed from the religion/violence topic but it is a beauty in relation to my (OT) post.

  176. Eric, _you_ are insane:

    esr on Thursday, January 10 2013 at 5:26 pm said
    “I have experienced multiple theophanies that I recognized as such myself, and think everyone should at least once, but I’m not stupid or naive enough to think they had any bearing on what I should believe about evolution or science in general.”

    esr on Friday, January 11 2013 at 6:03 am said:
    “The insanity consists precisely in an inability to adjust your predictive models to conform to evidence when that evidence would conflict with the emotional fixations of your faith.”

    I conclude from this that you believe a person who has experiences of God (theophanies) who actually believes in God because of those experiences is insane.

    -or-

    Let’s go with your more general definition, “an inability to adjust [when] evidence would conflict”… You claim to have had experiences of God yet do not believe in God. You think I’m insane for a perfectly sane reason, and you are insane by your own definition. Who’s the nutter?

    esr on Thursday, January 10 2013 at 7:59 am said:

    “Yes, you projected ‘faith’ on people who don’t have it and don’t need it. This doesn’t reveal any problem in their world-view, merely your need to believe that science and religion are epistemically equivalent at some level.”

    Here, you have imputed upon me several assumptions that I don’t actually hold, Eric, in the same sort of rhetoric that:

    a) You have experienced and absolutely hate (if I’m reading between the lines correctly on what you have to say about “allegedly defensive skeptics into trying to justify their anti-evolutionist position, they’ve fallen back into faith-holder insane gibbering within minutes” – esr on Thursday, January 10 2013 at 11:00 am)

    -and-

    b) I haven’t used in a direct sense upon anyone here. The reason I haven’t is because I want to trigger the neurons firing that get people to consciously ask themselves:

    “Am I an evolutionist or an Evolutionist? If the evidence in paleontology or archaeology painted a different picture than the one I believe in, would I change that picture or would I dogmatically persist that Evolution is correct and there can’t possibly be any other way?”

    One thing I’ve noticed, Eric, is that you haven’t asked me any questions. Why don’t you? Instead of behaving in this insane hypocritical ranting outlash against me, why don’t you try to get me to prove it myself?

    “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.” – God, Job 38:2-3 KJV

    Finally, (I’d have to double check to make sure), Eric, you and I are behaving in the most immature manner on this entire thread as the only two people calling each other names.

    1. >I conclude from this that you believe a person who has experiences of God (theophanies) who actually believes in God because of those experiences is insane.

      Correct. Or, more precisely: A person who has theophany and proceeds from it to a faith-holding worldview is driving himself insane. The insanity inheres in the faith-holding stance, not the theophany. We fail to recognize this because our cultural matrix is heavily poisoned by religious and supernaturalist assumptions about what theophanies mean.

      The sane person, upon having a theophany, withholds judgement about whether the experience tells him anything about objective reality – he understands that it may be nothing more than a storm in his neurons, albeit a rather transforming one. The sane theophanist seeks a model of the experience that is consilient with rationally-acquired knowledge. The sane post-theophanic personality does not fixate on the first religious system to wander by.

      The wise post-theophanist becomes more skeptical about religion, not less – for he has experienced its ur-source directly and has less need for the external forms and inductive methods. If he draws from religion at all it is mainly from quietist mystics – the Sixth Patriarch, George Fox, Meister Eckhart – or from anti-dogmatic groups like the ultimatists in Buddhism, the non-theistic wing of the Quakers, and the “magical” tendency in neopaganism. He understands in his marrow Buddha’s deathbed words to his favorite disciple:

      “Have no fixed beliefs, and find your own light.”

  177. And if AA/NA are cults, they’re reasonably benign ones, and at least have a genuinely good result. That’s probably because their goal is not to do anything more than get the person to stop using.

    Having opened this particular can of worms, I should respond. Firstly, yes, they are very effective. Astoundingly so, given how hard addiction is to treat. I wasn’t really being pejorative. I don’t like them very much but I don’t discount their good intentions.

    They’re not really cults, but they use cult-like methods. One of the key things successful cults do is to isolate you from your life, family, friends, etc, so you depend on them totally. In the AA context this translates into “giving you something to do other than go to the bar”, i.e. go to meetings. With lots of positive reinforcement (peer pressure) for being able to get up and say you’re still dry.

    They provide a replacement for your old life. Then tell you you’ll never be cured – in their view, you’re always an alcoholic, just one that’s recovering. To tell the truth, that’s not 100% wrong.

    So yeah, benign, and they do good stuff, but they’ve borrowed heavily from cult methods to do it.

  178. Off topic, but an example of a problem Winter brought up…

    AND >> an Opportunity to spell google starting with a lower case “g”…

    I started the project that turned into AI Parts to write staff-scheduling software, which I believe is an NP hard problem. I don’t know how to prove that, so I called the target problems Dirty Hard Problems – dirty in the sense that they have arbitrary constraints (Jane can’t work past 9:00 pm, Bill can’t work Tuesday, etc.) and every decision affects subsequent decisions.

    In any case, staff-scheduling is a freak’n big problem…

    If you have 10 shift-slots that have to be filled 7 days a week by, say, 15 people (some part-time), the solution-space is:
    15 ** (7*10) = about 2.12e81 ways of filling in the schedule.

    (15 options for the first shift-slot on Monday x 15 options for the second…)

    Brute force ain’t going to do it… If you have a billion super-computers that can each evaluate a billion solutions per second (and there are about 31557600 seconds per year), it would take about 6.7e47 billion years to explore the solution space.

    And that’s not a large staff-scheduling problem. 20 employees for 80 shift-slots is just over 1e104 – 10,000 googles! And that is still just a medium sized staff schedule. My spell checker thinks that google has to start with a capital letter!

    The problem with writing such software where it is needed most – nurses in a hospital is a good one – is:

    1. it takes a lot of work to set up all the constraints and how good/bad various things are (in some hospitals, there are two unions for different kinds of nurses).

    2. I refuse to write software for Windows and I haven’t written GUI software since the 1990s.

    I will, however, help someone else write such software.

  179. I conclude from this that you believe a person who has experiences of God (theophanies) who actually believes in God because of those experiences is insane.

    Wesley Willis had experiences of a trio of demons pursuing them, actually believed in his demons because of those experiences, and was indeed insane.

  180. @TomM “Surely you climate contrarians understand that this sort of wingbattery damages the credibility of your experts?”

    Ugh (eyes rolling around on floor), quit reminding me of those. Unfortunately every camp has its nutters, some far more than others. I think there are camps where the nuttiness is inherent in the concept they believe in, such as Apollo-was-a-hoax and NASA-covers-up-aliens, and thus if you got rid of all the bugs, the camp would no longer exist because there is no one else there (except me occasionally checking out the event horizon of the fringe for purposes analogous to those of military intelligence, and sometimes to attempt a rescue… come to think of it, one of those rescue attempts resulted in the only detailed Orbiter/Delta Glider entry tutorial online at the time.)

    Among the sane camps, such as science, there are the truly nuts, who have somehow been deceived into believing ideals that depart from the mainstream of that camp, and sometimes do so without even realizing it (i.e.: the doctor I had prescribe the most expensive thing she could find that could treat the condition, GSK’s lapdog whether she knows it or not.) And there seem to be people planted, wolves in sheep’s clothing (should I look up verse and chapter?) specifically to appear nuts and discredit the sane within the field. How many different groups have thus hijacked Jesus Christ? (Of course, it doesn’t help that part of having that relationship with God is setting aside your sanity, see Matthew 16:35/Mark 8:35/Luke 9:24/Luke 17:33, 1 Corinthians 1:19-20, and Romans 12:1-2. This appears to be related to Fowler 5/Peck 4 spiritual growth.)

    w23: “But do consider the possibility that this doesn’t make the underlying ideas any more valid.”

    Theft is still theft, Robin Hood. I absolutely agree.

    Nigel: “My heart doesn’t bleed for the 1% that exploit American workers and puts them on welfare, food stamps and medicaid to make ends meet. Six members of the Walton family have the same net worth of the bottom 30% of American families combined.”

    Theft is still theft, Prince John…

    And, before I get to Winter… Ima leave you with a vid on how to keep your head on straight ;);););)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dPlkFPowCc

  181. I conclude from this that you believe a person who has experiences of God (theophanies) who actually believes in God because of those experiences is insane.

    Gods and channeling in paganism don’t require anything supernatural. The gods in this case can rationally be interpreted as being or coming from stuff deep down below consciousness in the human brain. The practices of paganism involves assuming these gods have objective existence, but this is only a tool to bring out what is buried deep in the mind/brain.

    1. >The practices of paganism involves assuming these gods have objective existence, but this is only a tool to bring out what is buried deep in the mind/brain.

      I wouldn’t even go that far. Modern neopagans, at least the kind I hang out with, don’t have any need to assume the gods are anything more than features of human depth psychoplogy. Objective correlatives not required.

  182. @ Terry

    I’ve noticed, Eric, is that you haven’t asked me any questions. Why don’t you?

    Can you suggest any sort of question ESR might ask you?

    (For some reason, this sentence by P.J. O’Rourke pops into my head…
    “It’s like doing real-estate deals with your dog.”)

  183. esr on Friday, January 11 2013 at 5:45 pm said:
    > A person who has theophany and proceeds from it to a faith-holding worldview is driving himself insane. The insanity inheres in the faith-holding stance, not the theophany.

    So someone who believes in things unseen is dangerously insane, yet someone who unbelieves in things seen is perfectly sane?

    Surely this should be the other way around.

    Particularly as those who unbelieve in human biodiversity have murdered a hundred and fifty million or so.

    Most respectable well established religions cannot be proven to be untrue, since one cannot see god not existing, whereas one can see that not all men were created equal.

    Progressivism transliterates the standard christian beliefs about the next world, where they might well be true for all that anyone can prove, to this world, where they are evidently false. There is nothing inherently crazy about believing these things about the next world, whereas there it is inherently crazy to believe these things about this world.

    People who believe the standard progressive beliefs about this world are apt to do dangerously insane things, such as war, artificial famine, and mass murder, whereas people who believe the standard Christian beliefs about the next world, do not.

    Mainstream Christianity cannot be disproven. Mainstream progressivism can be disproven, all the way back to the progressivism of the late eighteenth century. Who then is crazier?

  184. Winter,

    Thanks for trying to answer my question. First, I take exception to selection being a “random walk” (remember, Ima still a small-e evolutionist, as I think anyone with serviceable grey matter should be.) Natural, or artificial, selection is the part of the process that isn`t random (please forgive my wacky apostrophes, my keyboard has somehow “randomly” switched into Francais mode; if anyone can tell me the key combination for that, please do.)

    Search engines don`t make new information; they only index what is already there. Since the genetic alleles that tend to have the more interesting variations (especially in artificial selection) tend to be recessive, if selection is too strong or events cause the breeding population to drop very low, dominant (and other) alleles can be lost, leading to a loss of information, not new information. As for new information, random mutations would need to form something that is:

    a) coherent: If it doesn`t make sense in the language of DNA, it will be lost. This might require the sort of mutation that would fool the DNA equivalent of the MD5 checksum.
    b) added: It can`t replace existing information, for if it does, the existing information is lost and the mutation`s “newness” is seriously blunted. If DNA has the equivalent of flie-size checking, this could be difficult.
    c) useful: It isn`t going to stick around if it doesn`t get selected. This is why irreducible complexity is a problem.

    “Now, as Creationists cannot attack the above mechanism, they confound it with the history of the earth. They call the history of life on earth “Evolution”.”

    Oh, so Creationists came up with the story of Evolution, now? That`s as crazy as saying Genesis, as it is in the Bible, was written by Orey on the basis of his lightning bulb experiment! So, the Evolutionists can`t support the history of the Earth they have postulated from their theory, so they throw it out and blame it on the enemy. How ingenious!

    In truth, the story of Genesis is far older. The applicable scriptures were written roughly three thousand years ago. The history of Earth as postulated by Evolution (and with very good theory at the time) was penned in about 1950. (Looking it up now, the 4.5bln year number seems to be related to Wegener and continental drift info published in 1960, but I had a 1959 Oxford Atlas as a child and remember most of the geological stratum and Evolutionary history from that. I`m assuming that the astrophysics and math for solar fusion work out on the basis of the successful H-R diagram and main sequence, and that the Sun really is 4.5 billion years old. I`m quite certain that the classical Big Bang theory and red shift really does work out and the universe appears to be 13.7 billion years old, but negative energy has thrown a wrench in it.)

    “This is a deliberate mis-formulation.”

    No, it`s a question. An objection. How does evolution produce new information such that the complexity of life can increase with the passage of time and the action of mutation and natural selection?

    “It is the most efficient algorithm known in cases where a combinatorial explosion makes it too expensive to check a sizable fraction of the possibility space.”

    And I have found such algorithms tend to break down when more dimensions are added. It is really frustrating, actually, because if I could use such algorithms, it would save my own brain quite a bit of work. I`d like to have a conversation with God about whether He had similar frustrations. (/Thinking)(Thinking like a smart Creationist) Since God must have been able to postulate all the disasters that would befall His creation, and provided evolution as a means (not the only one) of adapting to changing conditions, He would need to provide each “kind” (the word in Genesis apparently for species as they existed at that time) with all the information they would need for their course of evolution. If any “new” information arises, it would result from something akin to fractal decryption or procedural generation. This is nearly certain if evolutionary algorithms are as effective in the biological world as I have observed in computer applications. (/Thinking)(Thinking normally)

    “…In short, Creationists are lying to hide truths they cannot face.”

    Not convinced. Evolutionists (big-E) do the exact same thing, and these accusations fly both ways. Trench warfare.

    `”These are tortured souls who all eventually have to face reality and get their idea of God out of the gaps”

    LOL! Why then do the vast majority of evangelical Creationists that I`ve heard of have tales of being tortured by the objections to Evolution before coming to believe in Creation. In the opposite direction of the tale you describe, Professer Walter Veith. Again, trench warfare, only this time my guns have more and better ammunition.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlJH7A5NHT8

  185. @ Terry

    Ok. I have read your last post and I have a (somewhat odd) question to ask you:

    Do you think that any (significant amount) of what you said has anything to do with what you are talking about?

  186. @Brian Marshall:

    I started the project that turned into AI Parts to write staff-scheduling software, which I believe is an NP hard problem.

    Of course it is, in the general case.

    I don’t know how to prove that,

    But it’s an interesting enough (in both the academic and economic senses) that you don’t have to. See, for example:

    http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~rxq/files/EJOR10.pdf

  187. “Historically, nationalism seems to rank about third on the mass-murder threat scale, a good distance behind variants of Marxism (#1) and monotheistic religions (#2). (This judgment is not off the top of my head; I’ve actually studied this question intentionally and considered casualty figures.)”

    IIRC, the big religious wars are historically pretty distant. Should modern religions be considered to be relatively subordinated by nationalism?

    Are you just counting mass murder within nations? I’d count the world wars as basically driven by nationalism.

    As AA, I’ve read a book called _Sober for Life_ which at least seemed to have some research behind it, and it claimed that AA worked well for many people, but what it claims as universal truths about getting over drinking problems simply aren’t true.

    There are people who can eventually drink in moderation, people who do it alone, people who make the decision once and for all, people who don’t have a higher power.

    The author only found two universal factors– at least a year of abstinence, and attention to the ways that not having a drinking problem makes life better.

    1. >Should modern religions be considered to be relatively subordinated by nationalism?

      Before the most recent phase of the long war of Islam against the West went hot, I might have agreed with that claim, Today…no.

  188. Still Winter…

    “This is a testament of the inadequacy of USA education. Biology education must be still in the 19th century.”

    Kent Hovind said pretty much the exact same thing for the opposite camp. Charles Sykes believes that education in the US has actually gotten worse since the 19th century. Have we found something to agree on?

    The bulk of your message.

    I believe God could have used design thought that would resemble macro-evolution to Evolutionists. There is an inherent similarity in the best laid designs made for a similar purpose, both in nature and in technology. They can appear to have a common ancestor, even if they don`t. Despite many similarities, including common “symbiont” engines, the Airbus A330 and the Boeing 767 do not have a common ancestor.

    Similarly, in 1962, General Electric proposed a spacecraft called Apollo D-2, which I shall dub “Union”. The basic idea was to produce a minimum mass three-crew single-sortie spacecraft. They did this by shrinking the descent module by putting all systems not essential for the survival of the Union`s crew through entry, descent, and touchdown outside of it. This way, Union only needed to carry a heatshield, parachute, and impact protection for the smallest part of the spacecraft. Living space and the flight avionics were placed in a mission module forward of the descent module, while propulsion and electrical systems (other than the entry batteries) were placed in a service module behind the descent module. These two modules were jettisoned prior to entry and thus burned up in the atmosphere. The descent module was made the most volumetrically efficient shape compatible with lunar entry requirements, a flat-bottomed seven degree sphere-cone resembling a headlight, generating a roughly 0.30 ratio of lift:drag, enough to soften the g-force of a lunar entry and allow a nearly pinpoint landing on Earth. The mass of the Union spacecraft came to 7470kg.

    Remember, I (and not GE) dubbed it Union, the English word for Soyuz (which came to 6600-7200kg depending on how you loaded it out), a nearly identical spacecraft developed on the other side of the Arctic Ocean. Analysts have pondered whether the Soviet design was copied from the D-2, and concluded that this was extremely unlikely. These two sophisticated human designs apparently have nothing whatever to do with each other, save their design goals, and yet are are almost identical.

    My favorite evolutionist video regarding clocks, featuring After Columbia Project`s theophany song:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAq9bmCeR0

    The following has the Featherwing Love Project`s theophany music video named after it. Can cdk`s little program possibly come up with anything even close to it?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqhuAnySPZ0

    So, the basic idea is that nature`s designs are so complex and so highly engineered, that evolution, while it obviously played a part in producing the huge variety currently observed, is not good enough at this sort of engineering to be able to pull it off… without Help.

  189. @Terry: “I believe that the Biblical predictions (i.e.: the prophecies) predicted events which are already in our past from the 21st century context”

    James Donald has already responded to this, but I wanted to make it clear, for the record, that I agree with his response. “Predictions” that are only identified retrospectively as predictions don’t count. Every time a religion has been used to make a specific prediction that was identifiable as such in advance, the prediction has not come true. Last December 21st was an example–not a Christian one, true, but Christians have predicted dates for the end of the world plenty of times based on the Bible, and we’re all still here.

    “Search engines don`t make new information; they only index what is already there. Since the genetic alleles that tend to have the more interesting variations (especially in artificial selection) tend to be recessive, if selection is too strong or events cause the breeding population to drop very low, dominant (and other) alleles can be lost, leading to a loss of information, not new information. “

    You’re missing something important: the information that is filtered by evolution isn’t just in the genes. It’s also in the environment. Over time, evolution by natural selection can transfer information from the environment to the genes; so the information in the genes, which is the only information you are looking at, *can* actually increase–new information *can* appear in the genome, and if the genome is all you look at, it will appear that that information comes “from nowhere”.

  190. Last December 21st was an example–not a Christian one, true, but Christians have predicted dates for the end of the world plenty of times based on the Bible, and we’re all still here.

    Oh plenty of millenarian end-of-the-world prophecies have come true — in much the same manner as for the parrot described by Lincoln in the 2012 film. (I have no idea if the historical Lincoln ever told such an account, but it sounds like a chestnut he’d use.)

  191. “Do you really believe a bit of socialist medicine is more dangerous than teaching creationism in school as science?”

    I honestly don’t understand why creationism in schools matters that much, given for example the number of nonscientific subjects at universities.

    “Libertarians are being driven to fits by the unpleasant fact that equality of outcome is much more important than equality of opportunity when determining the health (physical, mental, and social) of a society. The gap between rich and poor is a real problem and should be narrowed through economic policy. ”

    Sure, sure, until we close it completely and reach the level of USSR where the “health” of “society” was in a splendid shape.

    “To me the percentages don’t matter as much as whether or not we have a sizable middle class making a good living. That doesn’t appear to be the case.”

    Now, that’s something we could talk about. What makes you think the number of people living in US making a good living is particularly small? You mention areas with high cost of living, what do you think, for example, the reasons for housing prices in NYC are?

  192. I want to start a RationalWiki article on Isagenix. Mind if I start by adapting the text of your comment?

    Sure, and while you’re at it you can adapt the contents of my fun rants:

    If You’re a Big Believer in the Power of Isagenix, I Have a Bridge in Brooklyn to Sell You

    and its followup:

    No, Isagenix, a Trivial Study from Your Pet Scientist Doesn’t Make You Not a Scam. Get the Hell Off My Planet.

    They’ll need cleanup of course; most notably you’ll have to pick the swearwords out. Like removing the spines from a fugu fish. Anyway, I hope they give you a starting point.

    I’m proud to say that I’ve already lost several pounds and even fit into my old jeans thanks to Stop-Eating-So-Much-Fucking-Food-A-Genix!

  193. I spent all day before coming here shoveling snow; I can never escape Winter ;)

    “As for the “Intelligent” in “Intelligent Design”, Darwin himself described hundreds of examples of stupid designs of nature in his works. All understandable as results of the histories of the species.”

    A big part of the reason we have such designs in nature is because the optimal designs for the niches they occupy have died out. The largest number of phyla (basic body plans) was largest during the Cambrian Explosion, at 100. It has since dropped to 33. SimEarth makes at least one of the extinct phyla, a three-limbed something or other I can`t remember the name of, available for evolution into intelligent life (it came out for the SNES, and I don`t remember a whole lot about it. It is much simpler than SimCity.)

    Terry: “I believe that the Biblical predictions (i.e.: the prophecies) predicted events which are already in our past from the 21st century context (so the most coherent analysts of prophecy are the historicists.) ”

    Ouch! I make it sound as though the most coherent prophecy analyses result from my belief in phrophetic historicism. Actually, it is the other way around, I believe in historicism because those analyses (including my own) are the most coherent. Sorry for any misunderstanding (esp. Eric, who seems quite prone to misunderstanding me in this way.)

    James, the interesting thing about the destruction of Herod`s temple is why not one stone was left upon another. The gold from the furnishings were melted in a fire and seeped into the cracks, so the only way to get it out was to pull the stones apart. Also, there are some Bible prophecies to which dates are attached. The most significant is in Daniel 9, which allows you to calculate when the Messiah dies, right on schedule in 32AD.

  194. @ Patrick Maupin

    Yeah… I sorta read the paper – other than the actual math parts which are totally beyond me.

    I briefly thought “Ah, now with Wikipedia, I can finally figure out what NP-hard problem means.” But… that also continues to be beyond me, or at least I don’t care enough about it to try to understand it. My brain just does not like that stuff.

    I find it wild that I can talk about a solution-space of 10,000 googles when the size numbers are 80 shift-slots and 20 employees.

    I realize that there are Staff Scheduling (SS) problems where mathematical models and algorithms can be applied. Some SS problems can be reduced to (rotating) rosters and are not hard to deal with.

    But, as I believe the paper concluded, the general problem, optimizing with all kinds of arbitrary restrictions, is still a bitch.

    But, do you know what is really wild about SS problems? Stupid people can do them! A stupid person can solve a problem where a formal approach by a computer just doesn’t cut it.

    I tried to write software that would approach the problem like a person would. The emotion stuff just sort of fell out as I was thinking of names for the basic aspects that affect how good an options looks.

  195. LS: “No it isn’t. The Jews, who wrote the Book, do not believe that there is any spiritual force in the universe except God.”

    Do you think that modern Judaism resembles ancient Judaism, or that those who wrote the New Testament were parties to the ancient Jewish theology at the time they wrote their work, which we now regard as scripture? I don`t.

    As for Eric`s ongoing string of poop: “But they are. We can never know on any given day that the voices in their heads aren’t going to trigger an episode of religious mass murder.”

    Actually, in a lot of cases, these episodes of religious mass murder are predictable, and not only that, but non-religious mass murders are all to common. Alas, the worst known mass-murder was perpetuated by non-religious people against religious people starting with reasoning disturbingly similar to yours, Eric. Who should we be keeping a close eye on?

    If you want to hear me say “poo” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYjLxS3YWaE&t=47m07s

  196. “The sane person, upon having a theophany, withholds judgement about whether the experience tells him anything about objective reality – he understands that it may be nothing more than a storm in his neurons, albeit a rather transforming one. The sane theophanist seeks a model of the experience that is consilient with rationally-acquired knowledge. The sane post-theophanic personality does not fixate on the first religious system to wander by. ”

    So, what if I have done exactly what you have suggested with these theophanies (I call them “flags”) and I have several thousand of them logged? A couple hundred of them have been the subject of unpredicted coincidences in songs and other material that I have encountered after having them. It is these coincidences that have left me completely unafraid to say that I have experienced God. Here`s an outdated, abridged list of involved songs:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8Q7BCB1kSc&t=3m50s

    Now, Eric, it appears that you don`t want to believe there is such a thing as a sane theophanist. Is that true?

    Brian: “Can you suggest any sort of question ESR might ask you?”

    Reading comprehension fail. Read the rest of the post please.

    Brian: “Do you think that any (significant amount) of what you said has anything to do with what you are talking about?”

    Silly question. I counter with “Do you use your keyboard when you type?”

    Peter: “Over time, evolution by natural selection can transfer information from the environment to the genes; so the information in the genes, which is the only information you are looking at, *can* actually increase–new information *can* appear in the genome, and if the genome is all you look at, it will appear that that information comes “from nowhere”.”

    How does it do that transfer? Where does the information in the environment come from?

    1. >Now, Eric, it appears that you don`t want to believe there is such a thing as a sane theophanist. Is that true?

      No. I think I’m still sane. I’m pretty sure the Buddha was sane. Theophanists can be sane; faith holders can’t be.

  197. @Terry:
    “Do you think that modern Judaism resembles ancient Judaism(?)”
    Why yes, it does. Judaism has certainly changed in the past 2000 years, but the basics remain in place. God is not human. The concept of Original Sin is evil, and not to be entertained. God does not die, and thoughts of His resurrection are silly. That’s why Jews in Jesus’ time rejected the Christian beliefs, and that’s why we do so today.

    ” or that those who wrote the New Testament were parties to the ancient Jewish theology at the time they wrote their work, which we now regard as scripture? I don`t.”
    Nor should you. They were Christians writing decades after Jesus’ death. The new religion had already separated from its parent.

  198. @Terry: How does it do that transfer? Where does the information in the environment come from?

    Natural selection: the information in the environment determines which genes make more copies of themselves. Over time, more and more information about which genes are better at making copies of themselves, and why, gets encoded in those genes.

  199. @ ESR

    > I wouldn’t even go that far. Modern neopagans, at least the kind I hang out with, don’t have any need to assume the gods are anything more than features of human depth psychoplogy. Objective correlatives not required.

    That’s good.

    I was actually trying to say that rational neopagans don’t believe in objective existence of supernatural gods but (not knowing much about this) the rituals involve acting (as in action, not pretending, but almost..) (damn, this is hard to say) as if the gods are real.

    I lost my copy of Illuminatus but (my memory is playing tricks on me again) the owner of the sub says at one point something like “It is all very well to consider the gods to be aspects of the mind when you are sitting in an arm chair discussing the matter, but if you are going to invoke one, you damn well better treat it like it is real.”

    Do you have any comments on invoking a god (invoke/evoke – the one where you actually call the god to, uh… come and be present)?

    You use some interesting words, but in a quick search, I can’t seem to find any uses of the word “psychoplogy” that aren’t just misspellings of “psychology”. If this isn’t a misspelling, what does it mean?

    1. >If this isn’t a misspelling, what does it mean?

      It was just a typo. :-)

      >I was actually trying to say that rational neopagans don’t believe in objective existence of supernatural gods but (not knowing much about this) the rituals involve acting (as in action, not pretending, but almost..) (damn, this is hard to say) as if the gods are real.

      That’s true enough. You analyze outside the ritual circle, you act within it.

      >Do you have any comments on invoking a god (invoke/evoke – the one where you actually call the god to, uh… come and be present)?

      Yes. It’s not really very complicated; essentially it’s method acting plus a bit of autohypnosis. You don’t necessarily get the one you expected, though, and the surprises can be entertaining. A very common sign of successful evocation is spontaneous poetry or musical expression – I actually learned to play hand drums while channeling one night. You feel different while in the altered state, sort of vast and vibrating and hyperacute. The people I know don’t lose continuity of consciousness or memory, but that is known to happen in forms like Vodoun or Candomble that go for very deep states of possession. The hardest thing to describe about it is that you get insight – your whole angle of perspective on the world changes, you often notice connections that you didn’t before or facts change their relative prominence.

  200. I posit that Eric is smart enough to recognize his mistake. Eric, you are conflating the mathematical duality of the inductive construction of the universe with the coinductive construction of infinity.

    > First, give up one of omnibenevolence, omnipotence, or omniscience.
    > Then we could talk contingent existence.

    Indeed it would be impossible to construct an INSTANCE that is simultaneously all good, all powerful, and all knowing, because nothing imperfect could be constructed. Perfection would require infinite degrees-of-freedom, thus a dynamic, competitive world could not exist– the Second Law of Thermodynamics could not exist.

    In type theory, top is the inductive bound and bottom is the coinductive bound. Top is the intersection of all types and bottom is the union of all types. Thus bottom can never be constructed as an instance, yet it exists as type bound.

    Shift your frame-of-reference into the type of types domain of the universe to find the existence you claim is impossible.

    Note that the operations (e.g. methods of a class) of an inductive type are a coinductive type and dually vice versa, e.g. the top class type contains the union of all methods of all types in the universe, thus can not be constructed. And dually, the bottom class type contains the intersection of all methods of all types, thus can be constructed.

    1. >Shift your frame-of-reference into the type of types domain of the universe to find the existence you claim is impossible.

      You’re uttering nonsense. The relationship between mathematical theory and observed reality is not even nearly that simple.

  201. Peter Donis, I’ve just realized an area of ignorance, and I’m hoping other people have done my homework for me– I have no idea whether the prophets in the Jewish bible are known to have made their prophecies (so far as I know, mostly of the form “clean up your act or you’re gonna get conquered!) before the fact.

    This segues nicely into further thoughts about nationalism, threat or menace?. The thing about nationalism is that being conquered will probably make you worse off, which means there are prisoner’s dilemma issues. When nations start posturing at each other, it would be best for everyone if they’d just pull back. But maybe one of them sees an advantage from grabbing some territory, and this becomes symbolically important– it isn’t just about the specific territory, it’s about the risk caused by the loss of respect. At least one side of some wars are about self-defense.

    On the other hand, it can be like that for religions, too. If religion is sufficiently entangled with government, then not being the dominant religion is something like being conquered.

    When I said things are better in re religion, I meant that there are large chunks of the world which have dominant Abrahamic religions and yet show no risk of religious war. Protestants vs. Catholics shows no signs of starting up again, and I wouldn’t expect religious vs. atheist, either.

    I admit I’m not going more than twenty or thirty years out on this.

  202. The primary qualification that makes an organization a cult is “is it destructive”? Landmark is a border line case because some people go in, spend some money and leave. Some don’t exit and end up emptying their wallets into it. Destructive for some, not others. Great story though. It has a bit of everything in it. Escaping the controlling group, walking free in public, encountering the law, engaging in free market commerce, and finally, discovering that pigeon holes and stereotypes breakdown the minute you encounter reality. There’s a little something for every libertarian in this anecdote. Brilliant!

  203. >> Now put science in place of “logical reasoning”, and “faith” in place of emotions…

    > That’s an unjustified leap. Faith is not merely emotion, it’s the (wilful) substitution of emotional fixation for reasoning.

    That isn’t what I wanted to say; I’m sorry for being not taking time to explain my idea more clearly.
    What I meant is that “science” is to “rational reasoning” like “faith” to “emotion”. We thought that emotions in decisions are always hindrance…

  204. @Terry
    “Search engines don`t make new information; they only index what is already there.”

    No. See literature on data mining and machine learning.

    @Terry
    “How does evolution produce new information such that the complexity of life can increase with the passage of time and the action of mutation and natural selection?”

    Quantifying complexity is a challenge. Machine learning tells you how to extract information from the environment. Genetic programming is such a machine learning algorithm. Every simulation of “evolution” showed that it increases complexity without bounds in a random walk way. (random walk is a technical term).

    @Terry
    “I believe God could have used design thought that would resemble macro-evolution to Evolutionists.”

    No. Either Macro-Evolution is the method used by God or not. DNA has too much redundancy to make functionally equivalent stretches look like homology. If two stretches of DNA look alike, they have a common ancestor.

  205. @terry Theft is still theft, Prince John…

    A 30% minimum tax on folks with more than $1M income (the Buffett Rule) to close loopholes isn’t theft especially given I pay about as much on income tax and will get hit with the same increase in cap gain tax. Cap gains tax was 29% in Clinton’s first term and I didn’t shy away from investment any more than today.

    Removing tax breaks on folks making more than $400K isn’t theft either.

    I make a pretty good living so I don’t mind paying in the higher brackets but if they have an effective tax rate less than mine then my feeling is that they aren’t paying their fair share given I’m not rich. That those less fortunate than me pay less isn’t much of a concern to me.

  206. @Terry
    “How does evolution produce new information such that the complexity of life can increase with the passage of time and the action of mutation and natural selection?”

    And here is a model:
    Every mutation either increases or decreases complexity, say, with probability 0.5. Complexity cannot become zero, because then there is no life anymore. So every generation we randomly add or subtract 1, with a hard bottom of 1. What is the maximum that can be reached in a reasonable time?

    How many generations would it take for complexity to go from 1 to hit 1,000? 5,000?
    A run of 1000 plusses would have a probability of 1/2^1000. Cannot happen?

    Turns out to be extremely variable, but around a million generations for 1,000, and about 30 million generations for hitting 5,000. However you measure complexity, it can grow randomly.

    Here is the Perl one-liner (MIT license, if anyone cares ;-) ):

    perl -e ‘$Pdown=0.5;while($m < 5000){++$i;$c += rand()<=$Pdown ? -1 : +1;$c=1 if $c $m){print “$i: $c\n” unless $c % 1000;$m = $c};};’

    Here is output for three runs:
    Generations: Complexity
    1,138,949: 1000
    1,598,591: 2000
    3,416,119: 3000
    3,717,017: 4000
    39,054,748: 5000

    217,698: 1000
    820,022: 2000
    5,036,596: 3000
    6,176,190: 4000
    29,425,777: 5000

    1,728,849: 1000
    3,628,679: 2000
    4,160,173: 3000
    8,165,033: 4000
    8,613,231: 5000

  207. Nancy Lebovitz on Saturday, January 12 2013 at 9:43 am said:
    > If religion is sufficiently entangled with government, then not being the dominant religion is something like being conquered.

    Progressivism is suppressing Christianity, replacing it with an progressive animatronic imitation of Christianity which rejects the Pauline rules on sex and marriage, and has Jesus as chief community organizer rather than Christ as the redeemer of mankind. It is attempting to do something very similar to Islam, though with markedly less success, and Muslims are, rationally enough, fighting back. This tends to select for the most theocratic religions. Christianity, not being all that theocratic, fades, while progressivism and Islam fight it out, Islam seeking to suppress all alternative belief systems, especially Judaism, progressivism to co-opt all alternative belief systems, especially judaism.

    Observe the marked resemblance between progressive Jews, and conversos. Progressive Jews, like conversos, tend to be anti semitic.

  208. I honestly don’t understand why creationism in schools matters that much, given for example the number of nonscientific subjects at universities.

    Because it’s not science. It’s fantasy. Creationism in philosophy or comparative religion class is fine. Creationism in any science class is complete and utter idiocy.

    I am both surprised and not surprised that ESR has not weighed in on the sanity of calling anyone of faith insane while tolerating politicians that pander to people he considers not just crazy but dangerously crazy and on the brink of religious mass murder.

    1. >I am both surprised and not surprised that ESR has not weighed in on the sanity of calling anyone of faith insane while tolerating politicians that pander to people he considers not just crazy but dangerously crazy and on the brink of religious mass murder.

      I’ve made my detestation of and contempt for the religious right quite clear and quite public. I’m not a conservative and don’t travel in conservative circles, so there’s not a lot I can do about the willingness of conservatives to use (and be used by) religious nutters.

  209. Attempting to post one more time.

    “Do you really believe a bit of socialist medicine is more dangerous than teaching creationism in school as science?”

    I don’t understand all that fuss about creationism in schools. As if schools/universities didn’t teach plenty of nonscientific subjects anyhow.

    “The gap between rich and poor is a real problem and should be narrowed through economic policy. ”

    By all means, all the way to the USSR levels, where the health of society was much better.

    ” To me the percentages don’t matter as much as whether or not we have a sizable middle class making a good living. That doesn’t appear to be the case.”

    Now that’s something we can actually talk reasonably about. What makes you think people are not making a good living in US?

  210. If I’m multiple-posting, sorry, something’s weird with the UI for me.

    “Because it’s not science. It’s fantasy. Creationism in philosophy or comparative religion class is fine. Creationism in any science class is complete and utter idiocy.”

    So you object just to the fact it is being taught in the class with a “science” in its official name? Why? Because it would spoil the notion of what science is in susceptible young minds?

  211. > The relationship between mathematical theory and observed reality is not even nearly that simple.

    I understood your tripartite impossibility claim to be that a good God would not be powerless to make good all that is in the universe.

    The claim is illogical in several orthogonal ways.

    1. Good does not exist without evil. Perception requires contrast.
    2. Good is evil, and vice versa, from different perspectives.
    3. Some cases of global or greater good require local or lesser evil.

    Essentially by implication you claimed that infinity (infinite degrees-of-freedom to attain good at all possible perspectives) must be observable, else it is impossible. Or by implication you claimed that we can prove the universe is finite, thus the necessary degrees-of-freedom would be observed and achieved by such a God.

    Some theories of the universe posit that infinity exists as an unreachable bound in some domain, e.g. entropy, space, time, or precision. True or not, we can not prove that infinity does not exist as unreachable bound. Your claim of impossibility is too strong. Such a God can not provably exist, because we can’t observe for infinite time, precision, etc..

    A possible interpretation of your linked essay on math, is that an infinite universe can not be completely described by any finite set of theories or axioms.

    Infinity can not constructed inductively from a starting point, because infinity (final unreachable bound) can not be observed.

    Whether it exists or not, infinity or the finite bound is decomposed co-inductively as observations directed towards its final unreachable or finite bound that we can not prove is final.

    How sad a finite universe would be, where the scientific method could be shelved and knowledge would cease to expand at some finite bound. The scientific method requires that we never trust a bound (e.g. Planck’s constant precision) as final and continue searching and testing forever.

  212. @Eric: “No. I think I’m still sane. I’m pretty sure the Buddha was sane. Theophanists can be sane; faith holders can’t be.”

    Oh, so someone who has an experience of God and uses that experience to conclude, scientific-like, that God is real and thus build a relationship (faith), is insane. But someone who has an experience of God and pushes it aside as irrelevant while persisting in the believe that there is no God is perfectly alright. Eric, that sounds pretty silly!

    After reading a comment further along, I’m pretty sure I understand why you experience theophanies, don’t believe in God, and call me, whose theophanies are dominated by “spontaneous poetry or musical expression” (except that my writing usually isn’t poetry) insane for believing in God. I am also absolutely certain you won’t like it.

    @Peter: “Natural selection: the information in the environment determines which genes make more copies of themselves. Over time, more and more information about which genes are better at making copies of themselves, and why, gets encoded in those genes.”

    That doesn’t answer my question. How does information from the environment get into the genes? Natural selection only selects from what is already there, it does not produce new information. It can’t be the way information gets from the environment into the genes. How does this “and why” get encoded into genes that are only getting “better at making copies of themselves”?

    @Winter: “No. See literature on data mining and machine learning.”

    Can you advocate for the concept that data mining and machine learning is how an evolutionary algorithm produces new information?

    “Every simulation of ‘evolution’ showed that it increases complexity without bounds in a random walk way. (random walk is a technical term).”

    Certainly not the ones that I’ve run. I haven’t had any produce “new” information, merely search the selection space that I have set, and I have never seen an increase in complexity result. I might counter my own argument with fractals, but I believe the complexity-apparent being the result of the existing information’s inherent complexity, not the result of new information (i.e.: M-prime was discovered, not invented. I would also say the same of each unique Minecraft world, and is a part of the reason why I find it so entertaining.)

    Your Perl one-liner doesn’t convince me. Every time it would hit 1, it means that all the information that was there before was lost and it is starting over again completely from scratch. If this were happening, there wouldn’t be much complexity for mutation to work on, and very little information for natural selection to work on. How many times does it hit 1? What would an actual graph of the complexity value look like and would it resemble any Evolutionist gradually increasing chart?

    @Winter: “No. Either Macro-Evolution is the method used by God or not.”

    It is not. Please don’t fabricate my beliefs like Eric, I know them quite well enough, thank you. Once again, I believe God could have used design thought that would resemble macro-evolution to Evolutionists. I think that if you bonked a staunch Evolutionist on the head just the right way that he forgot that airliners were made by man, he would conclude that the Airbus A380 and Boeing 777 evolved from a common ancestor, especially if the examples he saw both carried Rolls-Royce Trent 972 engines.

    1. >Oh, so someone who has an experience of God and uses that experience to conclude, scientific-like, that God is real and thus build a relationship (faith), is insane.

      Faith is not a relationship. I know this because I am intimately related to my patron deity, but there is no “faith” involved – only my experience of what I am like when I channel him, and the effect that has on others. It doesn’t matter whether the Horned Lord is a merely a storm in my neurons or an externally existing entity; what matters is what happens when I evoke him.

      Faith consists in emotionally fixating on propositions which are unprovable or contrary to evidence. If I believed the theory that the Horned Lord exists objectively as some kind of numinous spook, that would not in itself be crazy – almost certainly wrong, but not crazy. Faith, and insanity, would enter if I emotionally fixated on that theory, and began distorting my reasoning to maintain it against contrary evidence.

      The Horned Lord doesn’t want my faith. He’s not like the vicious, soul-eating totalitarian parasite-God that inhabits Christian and Islamic brains. He wants me (I’m deliberately shifting to mystical language here) to manifest his divine energy in the world. He wants me to make beautiful music and beautiful sex and create things, and he lends me his power so I can do these things better and in so doing glorify and magnify him.

      The Horned Lord may be (in fact almost certainly is) just a sort of semi-autonomous complex in my unconscious mind, like the personality fragments of someone with MPD. That doesn’t matter. What matters is consequences, not ontology. I don’t need to construct nutty supernaturalist theories about him; my experience of his sacred power flowing through me – and the way other human beings respond to that – is “relationship” enough.

      “Faith” is not a relationship with the divine, it’s the perversion of one. Like the difference between love and obsessive stalking.

  213. Yes, it’s a shame about Aaron. Unmade my day.

    @Terry:

    Natural selection only selects from what is already there, it does not produce new information.

    The mutation is the new information. You are probably right that most mutations at a cellular level that we notice are bad, and that most mutations probably aren’t even noticed. But why do you appear to assume this precludes a beneficial mutation from happening and being propagated?

  214. “Faith consists in emotionally fixating on propositions which are unprovable or contrary to evidence. (…) Faith, and insanity, would enter if I emotionally fixated on that theory, and began distorting my reasoning to maintain it against contrary evidence.”

    Nice definitions. But there can be no contrary evidence if the proposition is independent of reality (which is BTW why the entire evolution debate strikes me as bizarre. Say we live in the world with no evolution theory, how does it make religious dogmas more true?) and one doesn’t observe too many falsifiable statements coming from modern religions these days. So is the emotional fixation enough? How many people invested in political issues would qualify? The divisive issues (abortion, statism) hardly have convincing evidence either way (at least as far I know; I’d love to find out being wrong), unless you start from some axioms you need to believe in anyhow.

    1. >Say we live in the world with no evolution theory, how does it make religious dogmas more true?)

      The connection seems to be that evolution steals Nobodaddy’s mojo. It makes a theistic causal account seem less necessary, so it erodes belief.

  215. @Terry: How does information from the environment get into the genes? Natural selection only selects from what is already there, it does not produce new information.

    Patrick Maupin already gave part of the answer to this (mutations are new information), but it’s also not true that selecting from what’s already there does not produce new information. The gene pool after selection is different from the gene pool before selection (but after mutation): that difference is new information. What makes the gene pool different? The information from the environment (selection) that determined which genes reproduced more.

  216. “Once again, I believe God could have used design thought that would resemble macro-evolution to Evolutionists.”

    @Terry:
    Then why are so many designs so wrong? You should know that all the vertebrates have eyes where the nerves that carry their sensory data start at the front surface of the retina. Not only do they block some of the light that way, but they have to go through the retina, making for a ‘blind spot’ that the brain has to compensate for in its software.

    You might object that there’s some factor that I’m overlooking here, that forces the inefficient design above, but no…the octopus has eyes that are designed ‘right’. So God had the right design thought when He created the mollusks, but slacked off when it came time to make the vertebrates? Or maybe there are *two* Intelligent Designers – one of them a bit more intelligent than the other?

  217. @ ESR

    I read JustSaying’s comment and maybe I don’t know enough math to appreciate what he is saying, but to me it reads like someone trying to apply science to religion; I guessed that he was responding to something Terry said. But then I found that he was replying to something you said.

    I read “The Utility of Mathematics” and really liked it. My brain may not like a lot of math, but I really like that essay.

    One point (ooh, odd pun there)… I have indicated many ways that I like humor… I am not sure whether you were deliberately being funny in a profound way…

    …we’ve slain half the dragon

    I don’t believe that real numbers are the appropriate formalism for dragon slaying.

  218. You want profound humor? I guess that it is a subjective thing, but the sentence by Douglas Adams that I like the most is…

    He had the expression of a man who, after believing he has been totally blind for the last five years, discovers that he has merely been wearing too large a hat.

  219. Good $DEITY… I only had four hours of sleep last night, but I can’t believe that I wrote “that I like the most is”.

    Actually, taking a look at a couple of forums addressing this phrase, it does seem to be common in…uh, common usage – considered awkward but not definitely wrong. Actually, I may be wrong about that, but in English… It is an example of usage that may be considered wrong when written but common when spoken.

  220. @Peter Donis:

    The gene pool after selection is different from the gene pool before selection (but after mutation): that difference is new information. What makes the gene pool different? The information from the environment (selection) that determined which genes reproduced more.

    Personally, I agree with this, and would even take it one step farther — selection actually changes the environment both for the species in question and also for other species. That’s new information in the feedback loop as well, that will get picked up in the next round of selection. But IMO, any great programmer should find the distinction between code and data to be quite arbitrary, so I’d just like to start with the really basic stuff. To wit: if an alpha particle alters DNA in a sperm cell that subsequently mates with an egg and reproduces, and that DNA encodes a never-before-expressed protein, is or is that not new information in the ecosystem under discussion?

    I’d like the answer to that first, because if the answer is just that “God already knew all possible proteins and all the ways to encode them through DNA so there was no new information” then I’ll just back away slowly and let the rest of you feed the troll or not as you see fit.

  221. Actually, my last comment didn’t make a lot of sense – if religion is the topic… but arguing about evolution with someone who believes that “God did it” doesn’t work either… I think maybe sleep may be the answer.

  222. @Brian Marshall:

    Yes, that was a bit rude, but it was also intended to be qualified — if the answer takes a particular form, it originates from a troll; if not, perhaps it doesn’t. Or perhaps it still does, but speciously appears not to, but then again, that’s always a possibility, given that my faith insists that we each have at least one inner troll.

  223. Remember Aaron:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg

    (btw, the code for that video is “Fgh2dFngFsg”, which seems to be some sort of summary.)

    @Patrick “The mutation is the new information. You are probably right that most mutations at a cellular level that we notice are bad, and that most mutations probably aren’t even noticed. But why do you appear to assume this precludes a beneficial mutation from happening and being propagated?”

    A couple of reasons:

    a) My own experience with evolutionary algorithms and reading of news regarding the same has met with somewhat limited success. My own experience with TOT shows its particular flavour of evolution is easily fooled into thinking that sungrazing and retrograde trajectories are the best way to get to other planets and that I find myself restarting it and tweaking it to guide it towards finding the true Hohmann Transfer “hill”; it’s just easier to design the transfer myself than struggle with it. I read an article about an evolutionary algorithm for teaching a stick man how to walk. The researchers struggled with it getting lost on cartwheels and somersaults.

    b) No one has yet produced a beneficial mutation in a lab. Ever. If we as humans can’t do it deliberately trying even once in twenty years of trying, how can we expect nature to do it at least several billion times, even in a comparable number of years. We also have never observed a natural beneficial mutation outside the realm of single-celled life that we or our immune systems have to fight, and even there, I’m not sure if its true mutation or just HGT.

    @Eric: “Faith is not a relationship. I know this because I am intimately related to my patron deity, but there is no ‘faith’ involved”

    Glad you cleared that up. The thing is, when people bring up a relationship with God, “faith” is almost always the word that gets associated with it, even more often than “religion”. If you aren’t prepared to encounter the word on that level, you’ll probably have a tough time communicating, and I think this thread bears that out.

    I could say the same thing about my relationship with God, but er…

    “It doesn’t matter whether the Horned Lord is a merely a storm in my neurons or an externally existing entity; what matters is what happens when I evoke him.”

    We’re obviously not interacting with the same one. Incidentally, if God introduced Himself like that, I’d really want to believe He wasn’t real.

    I hope you don’t mind if I introduce you to my God. The current form first showed on 2009 February 1 when I got my first vision of the featherwings while listening to the Cascada song “Everytime We Touch”. This began an explosion in my writing and drawing abilities, and what I at first thought was an angel really wanted me to write this story. Concepts flowed into words through my hands. It wasn’t like automatic writing (which I looked up later), in that I had full control over the process. I could start, stop, take breaks, etc. although for a while I went almost constantly. I have, and still get, dreams and waking visions, some of such astonishing detail and resolution that I have trouble describing them. They also get emotional (one was of a guy just flash-fried by a nuclear explosion, something that I hope I don’t get to see in real life.) The thing was, I had no way of proving that this spirit was outside my being until after I had confirmed that it really was the same God that I always knew. Not only had it (I started to think she) affirmed Jesus Christ as the Saviour (See 1 John 4:1-6 in a Textus Receptus translation for those details.) The thing is, this experience was very much at odds with the Evangelical, Alliance, and Pentacostal orthodoxy I had been “brought up on”. So, I wasn’t about to bring it up with _anyone_ until I had some sort of proof that it was an external being and not just storms in my neurons or some stuff like that.

    Shortly after I concluded that this spirit wasn’t just some angel (or demon) but an aspect of Yahweh, the One God on 2009 April 26, I started bumping into the songs (and other materials) _after_ the story. It instantly became proven to me that the stories weren’t coming out of my head with music as an inspirational aid, that the two were coming from a common inspiration that could not possibly exist only in my own being.

    I had, on a whim (that obviously turned out not to be my own), to use Featherwing Love to explore a pet peeve of mine about the world of the famous shooter franchise Doom, more specifically Doom 3. It was a minor frustration of mine that you had thousands of demons and to fight them, one Marine uniquely (in the original games, nearly so in Doom 3) immune to the effects of the ghostly skulls that turned people into zombies. This Marine, dubbed Doomguy only by fans, was so nondescript and unknown as to deliberately force the player to assume the role as themselves. Perfect for fan fiction. On 2009 April 23, I realized I had the perfect counter to this pet peeve of mine… thousands of demons, not one angel. Enter the featherwings from Featherwing Love.

    How I found out it was the idea of Storyvoice and not my own was my encounter with Haibane Renmei on 2009 May 10. Initially, the blog posts were “Featherwing Love vs. Haibane Renmei vs. Doom 3 Remix” which I refined to “FHD Remix: Three Worlds In One” sometime in 2009 September. I was working a night shift and so on the “morning” of 2009 May 10 (just after 12:00 noon actually) I woke up from a very disturbing dream, something rather specific and detailed about featherwing beings. A new member was in so much pain that when, later that day, I saw the Haibane Renmei scene of Rakka’s relatively small ashfeather wings bursting from her back in the first episode, I became one of the few fans known to have felt no sympathetic pain in his own back.

    FHD Remix: Three Worlds In One and Featherwing Love both experienced several coincidences where songs showing the common inspiration of Storyvoice, who finally appeared to me in a vision, as female, on 2009 August 4 (I’d have to check my logs to be sure on the exact day, but my memory has it narrowed down to August 1 to August 7) have appeared after I have written the related story. FHD Remix developed over the summer and fall of 2009, until it was ready for online publishing at the beginning of December. I was not ready for what happened during the uploading process…

    FHD Remix has Doom 3, which has this mysterious Soul Cube, while Haibane Renmei has this mysterious Wall that protects the quaint city of Glie and hides the anime series’ entire context. The arcane Wall and Temple hint at a highly advanced city that was lost, and of course with Haibane Renmei now in the distant future of Doom 3, you’d probably think this Wall, Temple, lost city, and the Soul Cube had something to do with each other. The Hero’s Antechamber in Doom 3 has these hastily added wall ornaments that resemble Haibane Renmei’s Washi mask, an interesting coincidence already. That and all the songs, well… I still wasn’t expecting anything like this. While uploading FHD Remix: Three Worlds In One to http://www.bookrix.com, I search out Doom 3 music videos just to have something to listen to (It’s gone, alas; I still have the dead link.) Someone had arranged their really sweet run of Recycling 2 to BT’s The Antikythera Mechanism, a song and artist I had never heard of before. Two days later, on 2009 December 8 (and if you’re familiar with the video, you should have absolutely no trouble seeing where Storyvoice is going with this), I search out the original song:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDGwlEJTjc4

    Of course, FHD Remix has characters, and one of the big supporting characters is Yaiba, the healer. I gasped when I saw a spitting image of her at 0:54. When she later picks up the glass cube, I burst into tears, and it took me an hour to stop crying (I know because I played the video six times.) This was in the Calgary Public Library, the guy next to me was wondering if I was okay. Well, aside from watching an unwitting, yet astonishingly accurate video depiction of the story event just revealed at the end of FHD Remix, I was perfectly fine. While still the single most profound of these coincidences, the runner up has been bumped since then, and I have logged about three dozen of them.

  224. > I read JustSaying’s comment and maybe I don’t know enough math to appreciate what he is saying

    Induction is the construction of expressible structure, e.g. defining the natural numbers with an iterative function. Co-induction is the decomposition into parts from a structure that is unknown a priori and not until all parts have been enumerated, e.g. reading a stream:

    http://tunes.org/wiki/algebra_20and_20coalgebra.html

    > to me it reads like someone trying to apply science to religion

    I reasoned that the tripartite attributes god that Eric proposed could not provably exist, yet it also can not be logically impossible. This is congruent with the following.

    > Faith consists in emotionally fixating on propositions which are unprovable
    > or contrary to evidence.

    > Faith, and insanity, would enter if I emotionally fixated on that theory,
    > and began distorting my reasoning to maintain it against contrary evidence.

    > The Horned Lord doesn’t want my faith. He’s not like the vicious, soul-eating
    > totalitarian parasite-God that inhabits Christian and Islamic brains.

    > “Faith” is not a relationship with the divine, it’s the perversion of one.
    > Like the difference between love and obsessive stalking.

    Agreed. I understand your sanity now. Faith that squelches free will (degrees-of-freedom), reason and evidence is insanity. The suppression of free will destroys degrees-of-freedom, resiliency and fitness. Sane and prosperous faith channels hope, love, and positive creativity without binding free will.

    The Christian bible mentions this.

    1 Corinthians 13:13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

    Matthew 6:5 Jesus said “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

    Unfortunately religion degenerates to indoctrination, control, emotional manipulation and thus the subordination of free will, creativity, love, etc.. This phenomenon appears to be driven by emotional insecurity and the need to validate via social power the faith which can not be provably observed.

    Jesus instructs to not be worried about the future, to live in the reality of the day. Scriptures warn against destroying freedom with surety, governance, and attempting to construct a perfect society. One way of interpreting the bible is that we are free to sin, yet we become slave to the repercussions of our actions. Unfortunately the bible also contains scriptures that seem to encourage rebuking unbelievers.

  225. @Patrick Maupin: selection actually changes the environment both for the species in question and also for other species

    Great point, yes, I should have included this as well.

    if an alpha particle alters DNA in a sperm cell that subsequently mates with an egg and reproduces, and that DNA encodes a never-before-expressed protein, is or is that not new information in the ecosystem under discussion?

    My answer would be yes, but of course you’re not really looking for an answer from me. :-)

  226. @Terry
    “How does information from the environment get into the genes?”

    Others have answered that question. Mutations introduce noise. By definition, noise introduces new information in the technical sense.

    @Terry:
    “@Winter: “No. Either Macro-Evolution is the method used by God or not.”
    Once again, I believe God could have used design thought that would resemble macro-evolution to Evolutionists.”

    I thought you knew the discussion around the 19th century Omphalus hypothesis:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis

    It has two fatal defects: 1) It introduces a lying God (you do not want to go there) 2) If God created the universe like Macro Evolution took place, and he is perfect and honest, then scientists will learn how the universe was created by assuming Macro-Evolution took place.

    @Terry
    “Can you advocate for the concept that data mining and machine learning is how an evolutionary algorithm produces new information?”

    In an abstract sense, Yes. Genetic algorithms are really used in data mining and machine learning.

    @Terry
    “Certainly not the ones that I’ve run. I haven’t had any produce “new” information, merely search the selection space that I have set, and I have never seen an increase in complexity result.”

    Complexity takes room to store the information. Most simulations simply fix the storage size for the individuals. That way, complexity can not grow by design. Furthermore, to get a good simulation, the input data from the environment must be open ended. For instance, use “real” data like stock prices or weather readings or let individuals interact. Toy environments tend to deliver toy evolution.

    A good example are studies of language origins using interacting model systems:
    http://ai.vub.ac.be/sites/default/files/steels-11d.pdf

    @Terry
    “Your Perl one-liner doesn’t convince me. Every time it would hit 1, it means that all the information that was there before was lost and it is starting over again completely from scratch.”

    Yes, because I was demonstrating that complexity can increase in completely random systems. I had not added selection. It runs in time $m ~ SQRT($i), eg, $m=100 in ten thousand generations, 1000 in a million, 5000 in 25 million generations.

    Here is a Perl one liner that adds a 1% upward bias ratchet for ever 100th complexity level ($c % 100 == 0). It now runs much faster and almost never revisits 1 when complexity goes over 1000. (license again MIT, for anyone who cares)

    perl -e ‘$Pdown=0.5;$sweet=0.99;while($m < 10000){++$i;$p=$c % 100 ? $Pdown : $Pdown*$sweet; $c += rand()<=$p ? -1 : +1;$c=1 if $c $m){print “$i: $c\n” unless $c % 1000;$m = $c};};’

    Example run
    Generations: Max complexity
    671,353: 1000
    3,414,109: 2000
    3,872,335: 3000
    5,138,709: 4000
    5,374,609: 5000
    5,789,105: 6000
    5,950,137: 7000
    7,393,139: 8000
    8,825,459: 9000
    19,249,627: 10000

    1. >Mutations introduce noise. By definition, noise introduces new information in the technical sense.

      That’s only a partial answer. A better one, I think, is that the combination of mutation and selection incorporates information about the environment into the genomes of the surivor population.

  227. @esr “The connection seems to be that evolution steals Nobodaddy’s mojo. It makes a theistic causal account seem less necessary, so it erodes belief.”

    Come to think of it, if you believe in literal truth of the Bible, evolution does contradict the Genesis account quite a bit. But then there’s a whole bunch of other inconsistencies you are subjecting yourself to. So perhaps a better definition would involve emotional involvement in ill-defined/contradictory notions.

  228. “No one has yet produced a beneficial mutation in a lab. Ever. If we as humans can’t do it deliberately trying even once in twenty years of trying, how can we expect nature to do it at least several billion times, even in a comparable number of years. We also have never observed a natural beneficial mutation outside the realm of single-celled life that we or our immune systems have to fight, and even there, I’m not sure if its true mutation or just HGT.”

    @Terry:
    Breeders have been doing this successfully for thousands of years. Darwin pointed this out when he published in 1859.

  229. @esr: the combination of mutation and selection incorporates information about the environment into the genomes of the surivor population.

    Plus, as Patrick Maupin pointed out in response to a similar comment from me, the change in the survivor population also changes the effective environment for the next round of mutation and selection.

  230. @Terry: My own experience with TOT shows its particular flavour of evolution is easily fooled into thinking that sungrazing and retrograde trajectories are the best way to get to other planets and that I find myself restarting it and tweaking it to guide it towards finding the true Hohmann Transfer “hill”

    This doesn’t mean that the “mutations” that led the algorithm to sungrazing and retrogate trajectories weren’t beneficial: those trajectories are still better than the ones the algorithm started from. They are only locally optimal, not globally optimal, but they are still improvements over the starting point, which is all that is required for a “beneficial mutation”.

    The same sort of thing happens in biological evolution. For example, the vertebrate eye was mentioned in a earlier post: it has the light sensing cells of the retina *behind* the nerve fibers that carry the signals to the optic nerve. The mollusc eye does not; so the vertebrate eye is “worse” than the octopus eye; it’s only a local optimum, not a global optimum (assuming for the sake of argument that the mollusc eye is a global optimum, which is by no means certain; insect eyes are different from both, and could quite possibly be even “better” by various criteria). But the vertebrate eye is still better than the eye-like structures it evolved from, so the mutations that led to it were beneficial.

  231. Game theory modeling has already produced a fairly detailed estimation of how faith originated as a cultural trait and how it operates in society.

    It evolves primarily as a vehicle for conveying wisdom from generation to generation, as essentially operates as a psychological (and habitual) override on perception and acute reasoning. It order for a precept to evolve into a faith-based admonition, its implementation must (most generally) reinforce survival and promote social growth. The fact that most religions employ an unchallengeable deity meme to justify and enable faith is evidence that this memetic device has been more effective than cultural selection alternatives. Occam’s razor applies and it is unnecessarily distracting to argue about the existence of a supernatural God.

  232. @James A Donald:

    We should therefore be unsurprised by failure to demonstrate the evolution of genuinely new capabilities and significantly different life forms in smaller experiments.

    Absolutely. OTOH, the real world is a much larger experiment that has been running for a very long time frame (much longer than a few thousand years, despite the vehement protestations of some).

    The description of the e-coli experiment, along with the post-processing done to figure out what actually happened, reminded me of something I used to do back when I was doing modem DSP code. On the one hand, the debugging facilities I had were minimal. On the other hand, time invested in writing debugging facilities would often have been wasted, in that if it didn’t happen in real-time, it pretty much didn’t happen. So I had a few unit tests, but those often didn’t tell you what would really happen in-system.

    One technique I used a lot was an optimistic coding of new functionality. I would code it carefully and cleanly, and if it worked, great! But if it didn’t work, I then would incrementally modify and test the original code until it was near-enough identical to my non-functional new code. Somewhere along the way, a very small change between working and non-working code would reveal the elusive bug.

    We are rapidly approaching the point (DNA sequencing, raw computing power, massive database stores, better physical protein modelling) where similar incremental techniques could be used to develop possible transition paths between species. Even now, this is rapidly becoming almost trivial (certainly easily envisioned) for closely related asexually reproducing species, as the e-coli experimenters have shown.

    The interesting thing is what happens when you apply the technique to sexually reproducing species. What is the first minimal change on the path from species A to species B, where the resultant genome results in a viable organism that can still reproduce (typically by still intermating with species A)? Let that genetic variant out in the wild and soon enough you have two members of sub-species A’ mating. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

    Sure, you will often be stuck in local minima in this approach (just like with regular software). You will occasionally need to think outside the box, and introduce a gene that you later remove; that might be necessary to allow some other final gene to be introduced. (Dare I say that you might even use genetic algorithms in the code for this?)

    But with good enough modelling combined with Occam’s Razor, physical evidence of historical climate conditions, and the rapidly expanding genetic record we have of species both extant and extinct, you could eventually come up with a plausible genetic roadmap for a lot of the branches of the tree.

    Not that those who will show this more detailed version of a plausible way that we and other primates could have evolved from a common ancestor will be any less denigrated than those who came before them, of course.

  233. TomA on Sunday, January 13 2013 at 3:39 pm said:
    > a vehicle for conveying wisdom from generation to generation, as essentially operates as a psychological (and habitual) override on perception and acute reasoning.

    This works for official religions, which the tribe uses to inculcate wisdom and prosocial behavior. It tends to fail when applied on the large scale of modern states. An insider elite faction is apt to use the officially inculcated and endorsed belief system to pursue power and wealth at the expense of outsider elite factions, so the official approved system of morality and belief becomes more and more corrupt, oppressive, and detached from reality, eventually manifesting as the left singularity.

    On a smaller scale, religion provides prosocial benefits by facilitating business deals and enforcing contracts. You cannot trust the courts, and regulators will just shake you down, so you do business primarily with fellow members of your congregation, knowing that should they behave badly, they will meet social disapproval, and should they persist in behaving badly, be excluded from the congregation, and thereby suffer eternal damnation, and, worse than that, social embarrassment and impaired business opportunities.

  234. Game theory modelling … how faith originated as a cultural trait and how it operates in society.

    … primarily as a vehicle for conveying wisdom from generation to generation, as essentially operates as a psychological (and habitual) override on perception and acute reasoning.

    Another aspect (maybe suggested by the Blood in the Streets guys: James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg – the title is an allusion to a quote by one of the Rothschilds – “The time to buy is when blood is running the streets”) – is that religion and other cultural factors strongly discourage experimentation in relation to growing food and other critical activities. We are so accustomed to the idea that change and progress is good. However, in small, primitive, sustenance-level societies, a change in how food is grown and acquired can result in starvation.

    This is sort of a game-theory thing (if I understand that correctly) – good change is good, but when the penalty for bad change is catastrophic, it is generally best to kill anyone who tries to change the way things are done. Very slowly, some changes are accepted and progress occurs.

    It just occurred to me that in a collectivist tribal society where the penalty for bad change can wipe out the whole tribe, change will occur very slowly (as it does). However, if the penalty only affects the person making the change, desperate people will try new things. Some die regardless, some die from bad changes but some discover new, better ways of doing things, some of which may be accepted by others. An “Invisible Hand” thing?

  235. Another game-theory aspect of religion is Pascal’s Wager.

    A somewhat looser expression of the idea is that, for folks that are not entirely committed to atheism and have a lingering fear of hell, incorrectly deciding that God does not exist will have catastrophic results. This is colloquially know as “fire insurance”.

    1. >Eric, how do you distinguish between cult hypomania and happiness?

      Flatness of affect. Cult hypomania has an unnatural evenness to it.

      >Does cult hypomania look different from non-cult bipolar hypomania?

      I don’t know. I don’t have enough experience with the latter.

  236. In my experience, the most indelible lessons are learned first hand, and for most of life’s experiences, that works out pretty well. Nevertheless, if I tried to ascertain my natural flying skill by jumping off a 10 foot wall, I would likely become bruised and wiser. Conversely, if my test occurred on a 1,000 foot cliff (more time to get the arms flapping), my wisdom would improve marginally but my learning days would be over. This leads to the following admonition . . .

    “Take it on faith kid, jumping off that cliff ain’t gonna work.”

  237. @LS “Breeders have been doing this successfully for thousands of years. Darwin pointed this out when he published in 1859.”

    You’re claiming that breeders have been deliberately introducing genetic mutations for thousands of years and that Darwin published the details in his 1859 book. Try finding “genetic mutation” in On The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races In The Struggle For Life.

    Oh, by the way, the latest attempt to create a beneficial mutation in the nematode failed. It was discovered that “In contrast to previous estimates, we find that, in these multigeneration population assays, the majority of genes affect fitness, and this suggests that genetic networks are not robust to mutation.” – Arun Ramani et. al., https://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674%2812%2900084-0

    @Winter “I thought you knew the discussion around the 19th century Omphalus [Omphalos] hypothesis: … It has two fatal defects: 1) It introduces a lying God (you do not want to go there) 2) If God created the universe like Macro Evolution took place, and he is perfect and honest, then scientists will learn how the universe was created by assuming Macro-Evolution took place.”

    If it is really that young, I’d be surprised. Me and friends started discussing such things from scratch, and for lay observers, it sums up basically like this: “Did Adam and Eve have belly buttons?” (Omphalos is the Greek word for navel.)

    Winter, you keep misunderstanding me. It’s getting to the point where responding to you is pointless.

    1) Especially with regards to living entities, God would not populate a planet with nothing but babies. The navel is a feature of any born placental mammal, and so it would not be unreasonable to put them on Adam and Eve. Trees are constructed in grown layers, and so rings are essential to their structure. (Incidentally, Maunder Minimum wood and its narrow rings proved essential to the resonance of the Stradivarius violin and is why it has been such a pain in the neck to match its original qualities.)

    As for everything else, if you look closely enough, it actually doesn’t seem that old. Radioisotope dating has all kinds of problems, and so it is rarely used (among the Egyptian kings, which could be dated by documentation, the mummy of a son appeared to be older than his father based on radiocarbon dating.) Earlier this year, galaxy formation science was upset by the discovery of an out-sized black hole 12.8 billion light years away, only 900 million light years from the redshift event horizon. There are a lot of other signs that the universe doesn’t appear to be any younger way out there than it is right next door, except for the frustratingly uniform cosmic background. There is also the difficult-to-explain water planet GJ1214b. How can such a planet be billions of years old?

    http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2012/13/full/

    The Omphalos Hypothesis, as problematic as it may seem to you, is only as problematic as each of the many contrivances Evolutionists use to fit the evidence to theories compatible with pure naturalism/atheism. It is also unnecessary.

    2) Once last time, I believe God could have used design thought that would resemble macro-evolution to Evolutionists. This does not mean that macro-evolution actually took place in God’s mind. Considering how wide across various classifications of life certain protein genes occur (analogous to Philips screws being used in everything from cell phones to battleships), it certainly doesn’t look like macro-evolution now that we have easy DNA sequencing. Oh, I’m sure they’ll find a way around that little problem to maintain their belief that macro-evolution took place and that God doesn’t really exist.

    I do agree with your point: if God actually designed things in a way consistent with macro-evolution, than assuming it had taken place would help us discover the mind of God. Unfortunately, the main reason for believing in macro-evolution is to write God out of His creation.

  238. “Take it on faith kid, jumping off that cliff ain’t gonna work.”

    I don’t want to be a pain about this, but that isn’t what “faith” means in the context of this disscussion. How about…

    “Take it on from me kid, jumping off that cliff ain’t gonna work.”

    or

    “Watch what happens to this [something] when I drop it off that cliff.”

  239. @ Brian Marshall – “Take it on faith kid – if you don’t give me your money, you will burn in hell for all eternity.”

    The faith trait likely evolved thousands of years ago, before there was money and a Hell meme, and the selected wisdom was often existential. The modern practice of faith may well be an anachronism.

  240. @TomA Is that a friendly reminder that 90% of parachute developers have died testing their inventions?

    “Watch what happens to this [something] when I drop it off that cliff.”

    Does it meow?

  241. @ TomA

    The faith trait likely evolved thousands of years ago, before there was money and a Hell meme, and the selected wisdom was often existential. The modern practice of faith may well be an anachronism.

    Yeah – actually, I think that you are right, except that faith is still alive and kicking. See Terry.

    I agree that faith evolved thousands, probably tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago in an non-explicit way, as per my comments on game theory and experimental farmers – (I am again going to use modern day language to express something that wasn’t likely expressed in language at all): “Do it the way we do it or die.”

  242. @ TomA

    I think that the example you chose wasn’t the best. As you said, people learn by doing, and if the kid tries jumping three feet down and then 6 feet down, he will get the idea. Actually, dogs know not to jump off cliffs – my brother and I were at the top of about an 80 foot water fall. Our German shepherds would get down on their bellies and inch towards the drop – they knew.

  243. We are discussing an opposition between Religion and Science that has never existed before the 17th century. In all of human history, tribes and other communities had a shared believe system that covered everything from rituals of passage to how to grow food and cure illness.

    Many religions (actually, people) have/had no problems integrating new findings of fact into their general believe system.

    The clash only appeared in Europe when the dominant church got competition from protestants and both sides dug in their heels in the sacred scriptures. It was not the fact that the earth circles the sun that was objectionable. It was that this fact was used to point out that the Vatican was not the center of the Universe.

    Again, the whole evolution debate is not about our descent. Creationists are utterly ignorant about biology and could not care less about living things they cannot eat or monetize. But this is about who is RIGHT (all capitals) and therefore, who is allowed to tell the population what to do and what not. This is just a part in the larger drive from different sects to establish a local theocracy.

    1. >It was not the fact that the earth circles the sun that was objectionable. It was that this fact was used to point out that the Vatican was not the center of the Universe.

      Yes. The “science vs. religion” clash only happens to religions in which the authority of the religion is tied to truth claims about phenomenal reality. This is actually not a common situation, speaking historically and world-wide – creationism looks just as silly as it is to any Taoist, animist, or Buddhist.

  244. I have a friend here in Chicago (long time SF fan) who was deeply into Landmark for several years. I don’t know that they bled him for money; I do know that they bled him for lots of time.

    On the general subject of “cults”: there are two meanings.

    The recent meaning is: an organization which manipulates members into complete dependency on the organization and subjection to its leadership.

    But there is also the old meaning: a religious or quasi-religious movement characterized by sudden enthusiasm and esoteric doctrines, usually centered around a charismatic leader.

    The modern cult is basically a replication of old-style cults by artificial means. Old-style cults tended to arise and die out, as the exciting ideas became old hat or the charismatic leader lost his mojo or died. Modern cults institutionalize the methods for recruiting new members and conditioning them; thus they can persist indefinitely.

  245. About 5 years ago, I was working at a three person company which was slowly going down the drain. My boss and the other employee went to Landmark and that changed everything. When my boss should have been making an all out last ditch effort to turn the company around, he was spending too much time and money on Landmark. The company probably would have failed anyway, but Landmark was a huge waste of time when we couldn’t afford it.

    Eric, you have my sincere thanks for confirming my suspicions that Landmark Education is a cult.

  246. @ Brian Marshall – “Our German shepherds would get down on their bellies and inch towards the drop – they knew.”

    An interesting insight.

    Because we cannot fully communicate with animals, we tend to ascribe their memetic programming to hereditary instinct rather than something like acquired faith. Perhaps having a faith-like reprogramming capability makes humans more adaptable and robust.

  247. @TomA
    As a first approximation, you do well to assume mammalsans birds are like humans. Maybe somewhat limited, but with comparable faculties.

    Don’t believe for a moment that anything more complex than a fly is driven fully by instinct (inherited fixed action patterns in jargon).

  248. “Do most religions include a belief in hell? Most successful religions?”

    Around 100 BCE, Rabbi Hillel (all those campus Jewish centers are named after him) observed:

    “Surely God is too merciful to punish a soul forever and ever because of what they did as a result of their all-too-human weakness.”

    OTOH, there are lots of Jewish legends about Gehenna and its boiling pots…

    In Judaism, a belief in a world after this one is an optional extra. The question is not important. The religion exists to teach you how to behave in this one. If you have any questions in the next one, you should be able to put them to God directly. Personally, I’m with Hillel on this.

  249. @ Winter

    We are discussing an opposition between Religion and Science that has never existed before the 17th century. In all of human history, tribes and other communities had a shared believe system that covered everything from rituals of passage to how to grow food and cure illness.

    Is this comment directed at TomA and me? If so, I would like to point out that we are/have also been discussing whether (religious-style) faith is insane. I think the believe systems of tribes that control how much deviation is allowed is pretty much a religion backed by faith for the matter at hand.

    @ TomA

    Because we cannot fully communicate with animals, we tend to ascribe their memetic programming to hereditary instinct rather than something like acquired faith. Perhaps having a faith-like reprogramming capability makes humans more adaptable and robust.

    I have always (decades) thought that the mind, however much it seems to be a coherent thing, is actually the total of a lot of parts of the brain interacting. I like the following ideas:

    If you and a dog are both trying to decide (based mostly on gut feel) whether you can jump over to that rock, you and the dog are mostly using the same parts of your brains and there is little distinction between what you are doing it (other than you have a part of you brain that provides a running comentary while other parts of your brain works).

    I have an amazon parrot, They are so smart that it is scary. He knows what “Hello” and “Bye-Bye” mean by context (exactly like a kid learns to talk). I say “Bye-bye Merlin”. For the first half dozen years that I had him, I didn’t use my name, but then I told him “You are Merlin [using hand gestures], I am Brian. He seemed to understand this immediately. In any case, when I am leaving, he usually says “Bye-bye Brian (or Byan – he is often lazy with his pronunciation even though he can say Brian perfectly). I have never, ever said this to him. He sometimes says Bye-Bye-Bye. I imagine he first said “Bye-bye Brian” more or less accidentally, but then recognized the meaning.

    In any case, if I say “hello” or “bye-bye” and Merlin does the same thng (he starts the “bye-bye” as soon as he sees me getting ready to go outside and have a smoke) – I am using language. I suggest that when Merlin says “bye-bye”, he is using language just as much as I am in that particular case.

  250. esr> Barely registers on the cultometer.

    On a tangent, has anybody defined a unit of measurement for the cultometer yet? Millimanson? Hectorand?

  251. @ Winter

    As a first approximation, you do well to assume mammalsans birds are like humans. Maybe somewhat limited, but with comparable faculties.

    The parrot family, corvids (crows, ravens, jays) and Passeriformes (which includes chickadees (aka tits) are considered to be the smartest birds.

    When my son and I went to a local park, we found that chickadees would land on our fingers if we held our hands palm-up with the fingers curved up to be vertical (because people feed them). If we had (unsalted) sunflower seed kernels in our palms, they would land on our fingers and grab the a seed.

    A week after discovering this, we tried it without the seeds. The birds would land and then immediately fly off.

    A week after that, we tried again and the chickadees would fly down and hover; if we didn’t have seeds, they wouldn’t land on our fingers.

    The next week, they would fly down and, if we did have the seeds, they would land and take one.

    This is all pretty wild, considering that the entire bird weighs about 20 or 30 grams – their brains can’t be more than a gram.

    Re: intelligence for decision making:
    one reason that parrots are such great pets (for the tiny proportion of the population for which they are appropriate pets), is that parrots are one of the most emotional animals around. Our brains are very different, but emotions (so easy to program) are almost identical.

    Something I really like is that the (vast?) majority of paleontologist-biologists consider birds to be dinosaurs; not evolved from or related to, but actual feak’n dinosaurs. They are in the same family as the two-legged meat-eating dinosaurs – T-Rex was more closely related to modern birds than to the four-legged herbivores (stegosaurus, triceratops, etc.).

    (This is much more obvious looking at a parrot (or particularly a parrot skeleton) than looking at a sparrow or robin. They look just like dinosaurs (which, of course, doesn’t mean much scientifically but is interesting to see).

    This is from Encyclopedia Britannica (as well as Wikipedia). When I first heard about this, I checked out Encyclopedia Britannica, and the little topic of the day on the main page said “Have you ever eaten a dinosaur? I bet you have!”.

    Birds are simply the only dinosaurs that didn’t die at the end of the Cretaceous (if the asteroid theory is correct, it was probably meat-eating and carrion eating birds that, like aligators, managed to survive the couple of years of very-low sunlight by eating the dead animals.

  252. Terry> How does information from the environment get into the genes?

    You probably want to search the web for the term “gene duplication”. If this term sounds new to you, you probably need some more context before you can understand what it means and how it works. You can this context from Richard Dawkins’s article The Information Challenge, which also answers your question in detail.

  253. @Brian Marshall
    The joke is to tell boys dinosaurs did not go extinct snd offer to.show them some. I assume by now the joke is stale.

  254. I’m inclined to think that if the cop spotted your concealed carry weapon, you’re not doing it right. Especially in winter, under a jacket.

    Except, you being you, I expect that you’ve given much thought to weapon choice and the tradeoffs between caliber, firepower and ease of carry, and have opted for a large .45 because, well, they don’t make a .46.

    I’ve compromised down to a subcompact .40 here in Texas. It’s too hot to dress around a large gun all the time, and I carry the smaller-but-sucks-to-shoot-at-the-range pistol in circumstances when I’d leave a 1911 at home. And that makes it a more effective choice for me.

    1. >I’m inclined to think that if the cop spotted your concealed carry weapon, you’re not doing it right. Especially in winter, under a jacket.

      It’s a short A-2 jacket, Navy pilot leather. A lovely, classic design just like the .45ACP – but the bottom end of a hip holster does tend to get exposed. Most people don’t know what they’re seeing; an experienced cop would, though.

      Yes, I could opt for more concealment; I have some favored techniques for that which I won’t discuss. But in Pennsylvania outside Philly there isn’t any trouble I can get into for being spotted carrying that worries me at all, so I don’t mind letting it hang out a little. Might be a good thing, helping otherwise ignorant people get used to the notion that armed citizens are benign.

      >Except, you being you, I expect that you’ve given much thought to weapon choice and the tradeoffs between caliber, firepower and ease of carry, and have opted for a large .45 because, well, they don’t make a .46.

      Actually, it’s a small-frame .45 – 3.5″ barrel. I’m a big fan of this form factor – just as accurate as the 5″ at self-defence ranges but easier to conceal.

      Some gunfolks choose their caliber like they think they’re advertising their penis size. I’m not one of them; I consider the really big handguns like 44 Magnum and Desert Eagles impractical and rude. There’s no point in all that noise and recoil unless your threat profile includes grizzly bears. Unless you train constantly you’ll be so shocked by your own first discharge that you’re not likely to put another round properly on target.

      In my opinion the sweet spot is around .45 and .40 – I fully endorse the U.S. Marines folkore that abjures us ‘Do not attend a gunfight with a handgun, the caliber of which does not start with a “4.”‘ That’s where the best tradeoff between shooter-friendliness and target destruction is. If I didn’t love 1911-pattern 45s I’d probably shoot a Glock 40 like the one I gave my wife.

  255. Re: intelligence for decision making:
    one reason that parrots are such great pets (for the tiny proportion of the population for which they are appropriate pets), is that parrots are one of the most emotional animals around. Our brains are very different, but emotions (so easy to program) are almost identical.

    The emotional center of a cat’s brain is much closer to a human’s than a dog’s is. This probably goes a long way to explaining why cats, and not dogs, are pretty much the official animal of the internet.

    A completely unscientific heuristic that I’ve found more or less to be the case is that dog people value subordinates whereas cat people value equals.

  256. @Jeff Read:

    A completely unscientific heuristic that I’ve found more or less to be the case is that dog people value subordinates whereas cat people value equals.

    I think dog people are happier to be subordinates, as well. In my experience, this somewhat weak correlation is more about wanting/needing to be inside or outside a hierarchy, which itself is correlated weakly with gregariousness/sociability.

  257. @ Jeff Read

    A completely unscientific heuristic that I’ve found more or less to be the case is that dog people value subordinates whereas cat people value equals.

    And Amazon parrot people like ‘tude – they are bad-asses to the core, like tiny Hell’s Angels. If Merlin is in a biting mood (y’know, about 10 times a day), I don’t hurt him, so if I was to try to calm things down by exerting my dominance, he will go into a mode where he would rather die than admit I am tougher than he is.

  258. re: dogs and parrots

    I was just reading a story in which the narrator is describing a police detective’s feeling about dogs – they are so unlike the scum he deals with – they have no cunning – they don’t conspire against you.

    When I lived in an apartment, Merlin would be just fine with me going to work for 10 hours, but if I tried to go down to change the laundry for 5 minutes, he would scream the entire time. I got the idea of putting him in the bathroom – with sound bouncing off walls, his screaming was too loud even for him – he would be quiet and generally just sit up on the shower curtain rail.

    On day I was taking him down off the rail – I noticed that he was unusually relaxed – not holding my finger as much as just standing on it. As soon as I got him down to face level – BAM he lunged out and bit my bottom lip with his top and bottom beak almost meeting in the middle. (I grabbed him, without hurting him, tossed him into his house and seriosly hosed him down with a spray bottle.)

    He deliberately set me up to hurt me – he has cunning. I love that.

    The same sort of situation played out about a year later. I don’t like it and make it know to him, but it is the price I pay for having a companion that weighs ~700 grams and thinks he is at least as tough as I am, probably more. (He is a White Fronted amazon – much smaller than regular amazons – about the size of the wrens folks around here call robins except on steroids.)

  259. @ESR – “Do not attend a gunfight with a handgun, the caliber of which does not start with a 4”

    I occasionally carry a Ruger LCP in 380 auto hollow points. I can retrieve and palm the entire pistol, and you would never know its there until just before it fires. My self defense strategy is as follows.

    First, situational awareness and stay out of trouble if at all possible.

    Second, if trouble shows up, make every reasonable effort to escape safely.

    Third, if an existential confrontation is unavoidable; attack, shoot first, and empty clip #1.

  260. @Thomas Thanks for the link, I somehow got messed up thinking that a base pair was four bits (which is like “Duh, I’m familiar with BCD, how could I get that dumb?”) There are few surprises in the information theory part, but in the latter parts, the article starts showing its age. More modern research has shown that genomes tend to have a lot of redundancy, but not junk. Supposedly non-functioning pseudo-genes often have a regulating function, and I’m expecting the globin bunch that he specifically hangs on to function as an elaborate array to respond to various oxygen partial pressures, and metabolic toxins like cyanide and carbon monoxide (the former messes with mitochondrial aerobic metabolism while the latter binds to hemoglobin’s oxygen site and ruins it. I’ve noticed that when someone survives CN or CO poisoning, the resulting illness is relatively brief considering how catastrophic the damage mechanisms are.)

  261. On a tangent, has anybody defined a unit of measurement for the cultometer yet? Millimanson? Hectorand?

    The Hubbard. Has to be. And like the Farad, usually measured in picos, nanos, and micros.

  262. Eric Raymond made a brief reference to the official Objectivist movement of Ayn Rand as a sort of “cult”. There is an element of truth to this, although a lot less than used to be the case, in my view. The evolutionist writer Michael Shermer and the late Murray Rothbard attacked her on that basis, which is kind of ironic as there sometimes appear to be mildly cult-like behaviours from the Rothbardians at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama (They all seem to be ultra-conservative Catholics).

    James Peron, a US-based libertarian, penned an article some years ago defending Rand against the “cult” charge and he made some interesting points. Worth a read:
    http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/essays/obj_cult1.html

    Best regards,

  263. This discussion does give rise to the question (at least in me) whether some “cultures” or “countries” are more prone to cults than others. To be meaningful, we should limit cults to easy to quantify and observe behavior.

    I would suggest as a definition:
    Movements where members spend the majority of their non-working non-sleeping time together. Bonus points when members spend their working time together too.

    Tribes are equivalent to cults by definition as they spend all their time together, with the expected strong mutual control we have learned to expect from cults.

    India might score high, eg, ashrams. China maybe low, eg, family obligations. But the question is, how many of the people actually participate?

  264. @Terry:

    “No one has yet produced a beneficial mutation in a lab. Ever.”

    I’m waiting for your response to David Gerard’s link to the contrary.

    “We also have never observed a natural beneficial mutation outside the realm of single-celled life …”

    So, do you classify mutation breeding as a lab or natural activity?

  265. @ESR:
    The difference between a 9mm, a .40 and a .45 are miniscule. The most important feature of a handgun is (a) it must go off *EVERY* time and (b) you must be able to make the hits you need to get the effect you need.

    I spent 4 years in the Marines during or right after they transitioned from the 1911 to the 9mm. There were no complaints then, and I’ve not heard them from a serving marine yet who had the experience to tell the difference.

    You pick the gun that fits you hand, your lifestyle and your threat model. Then you get it in a caliber you can afford to shoot a lot so when you can’t afford to miss you do not.

    I long ago stopped trying to compensate for my penis size. I’ll carry a .380 as happily as a 10mm, or if the situation dictates a .44 magnum (I have a 629 with a 5.5 inch barrel. It speaks Ex Cathedra.).

    If there’s anything Combat Marines would say about a handgun would be “fuck that, where’s my REAL weapon”.

    If you know a fight’s coming you take a rifle. If you can, you take a spare rifle. The pistol is for when the rifle breaks and you want to die fighting rather than sitting on the ground fixing a broken rifle.

  266. @Eric: “No. I think I’m still sane. I’m pretty sure the Buddha was sane. Theophanists can be sane; faith holders can’t be.”

    ?????????

    • The Buddha had (and taught) Absolute Faith in Karma, rebirth/reincarnation, and The Deathless.
    • The Buddha famously lectured angels and spirits on the Dhamma.

    1. >The Buddha had (and taught) Absolute Faith in Karma, rebirth/reincarnation, and The Deathless.

      Clearly you’ve been listening to way too much Mahayana. :-)

  267. “Clearly you’ve been listening to way too much Mahayana. :-)”

    But am I sane?
    (And do I want to be? Maybe I should be more ‘choosy.’)

  268. Being sane is a rough bitch sometimes.

    I think it was Aaron Swartz’s unflagging sanity that, ultimately, caused him to take his own life.

  269. re: sympathy

    Evolution is an observed fact, unless the Devil planted fossils in the ground to fool mankind. The cause of evolution is a separate question. And the belief in a physical evolutionary process not mediated by God doesn’t require every human thought or action to be in the interests of the organism’s genes. The general idea is that by elimination characteristics beneficial to the genes’ survival *tend* to prevail over time, not that every characteristic or expression of a characteristic is beneficial to the genes’ survival. For example, the upright, tool-using body can evolve over time (being generally useful) and then be used by a person to kill their family and commit suicide. Further to Terry’s point, the brain can contain any manner of random garbage so long as the brain is generally useful.

  270. “No one has yet produced a beneficial mutation in a lab. Ever.”

    Winter: “I would like to add some:”

    Thank you very much for the links, I’ll certainly check them out. From the abstracts, though, both of these articles are about nematode populations recovering from “deleterious mutations” rather than producing beneficial mutations. So I’m pretty sure I’m still correct.

  271. “Further to Terry’s point, the brain can contain any manner of random garbage so long as the brain is generally useful.”

    On 1956 April 14, Ampex and 3M engineers were in a desperate situation. Ampex had just invented the Quadruplex VTR and demonstrated it to CBS officials privately. They were impressed, but it wasn’t quite up to the standards they required for broadcast television. Ampex had traced it to the tape. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a lot of time to correct the problem because the presentation at the National Association of Broadcasters (its name had “Radio and Television” in front of “Broadcasters at the time IIRC.) 3M engineers had a machine of their own (thanks to one of their engineers having the pluck to figure out what Ampex was doing), and tested sample after sample until one worked, they managed to produce a five minute reel, rush it out to the airport, stop the plane that had the Ampex engineer doing the presentation from taking off, pass the reel through the pilots window on a pole, and save the day. (The pilot interpreted the word “emergency” to mean that the elderly Ampex engineer had forgotten his meds.)

    And I can’t remember any of their names, argh (I remember Ampex got started with the help of Mike Mullin about eight years earlier with funding from Bing Crosby and captured Nazi Magnetophone audio recorders, brb… actually John T. Mullin (NSFW!!))

  272. @William, Your talk about rifles and the ol’ 629 (“Do you feel lucky?”) had me thinking of some Marine using it to back up a P90, one of those times where I just can’t help but think of something absolutely retarded.

  273. 2 questions for ESR.
    Why did you attend to the Landmark Forum event?
    Are martial arts organizations cultish?

    1. >Why did you attend to the Landmark Forum event?

      Because a friend asked me to, and I was anthropologically curious.

      >Are martial arts organizations cultish?

      Occasionally. I have not encountered the phenomenon myself, but I’ve heard stories…I think it’s a rarer pathology now than it used to be, and rarer in the U.S. than in Asia.

  274. Roger Phillips on Tuesday, January 15 2013 at 10:12 pm said:
    > Evolution is an observed fact, unless the Devil planted fossils in the ground to fool mankind. The cause of evolution is a separate question

    Not really. The fossil record is, as Darwin and Gould observed, fragmentary. I would say that the evolution of horses from forest dwelling omnivores is an observed fact, and similarly for a handful of other, less charismatic kinds. The rest of it is theory laden interpolation. We put the data together using Darwin’s theory, we don’t find Darwin’s theory in the data. The data decisively demonstrates that old testament and Koranic accounts are untrue, because the world is vastly more ancient than that, and the data conclusively demonstrates that the Hindu account is untrue, because modern kinds did not exist in ancient times. The data is compatible with the Darwinian account, and perhaps in a few cases, is evidence supporting the Darwinian account.

    Gould’s anti Darwinian, anti evolutionary account is compatible with the fossil record, because the fossil record is so fragmentary that lots of things are compatible with the fossil record, however it is incompatible with what we observe today, because today we observe no sharp boundaries between a species difference and a race difference, with endless arguments as to whether some family of canids are grey wolves or coyotes, and whether barred owls and spotted owls are two races of the same species, or genuinely two separate species. (Female spotted owls seem to be of the opinion that they are one species.) These blurred lines are what Darwin predicted and claimed to observe, and what we do in fact observe today.

  275. I wrote:
    > These blurred lines are what Darwin predicted and claimed to observe, and what we do in fact observe today.

    (Since Darwin’s theory is horribly politically incorrect, few readers know of it, so many readers will not understand what I said above)

    Darwin’s theory is that races are the origin of species, that differential selection causes races, and that over vast immensities of time, differential selection causes races to drift further and further apart, gradually and imperceptibly becoming separate species, one successful species becoming many species, as a branch has many twigs, thus there can be no objective standard as to whether two kinds are two races of the same species, or have become two species, any more than there is an objective standard distinguishing between a large hill and a small mountain. Since we are looking at one moment in an endless smooth continuous flux, most differences between closely related kinds will be hard to categorize as to whether they are species differences or merely race differences.

  276. @Terry
    “both of these articles are about nematode populations recovering from “deleterious mutations” rather than producing beneficial mutations.”

    Sounds like an excuse. These mutations are beneficial, and C. elegans is multi-cellular. The propagation of C. elegans leads to the accumulation of deleterious mutations which have to be cleared.

    But instead of debating this point, here are new links to drug resistance in C elegans. If you now point out that these are the result of man made chance in their petri disks, my answer will be that you asked for lab examples.

    Levamisole resistance resolved at the single-channel level in Caenorhabditis elegans
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2518249/

    Mitochondrial dysfunction confers resistance to multiple drugs in Caenorhabditis elegans.
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20089839

    Caenorhabditis elegans Mutants Resistant to Inhibitors of Acetylcholinesterase
    http://www.genetics.org/content/140/2/527.full.pdf

    Titles without links:
    The genetics of ivermectin resistance in Caenorhabditis elegans

    Glutamate-Gated Chloride Channels of Haemonchus contortus Restore Drug Sensitivity to Ivermectin Resistant Caenorhabditis elegans

    Caenorhabditis elegans: A versatile platform for drug discovery

    A genetic selection for Caenorhabditis elegans synaptic transmission mutants

    Caenorhabditis elegans: An Emerging Model in Biomedical and Environmental Toxicology

  277. @JAD
    ” thus there can be no objective standard as to whether two kinds are two races of the same species, or have become two species, any more than there is an objective standard distinguishing between a large hill and a small mountain.”

    http://animals.about.com/od/s/g/species.htm

    The definition is objective:
    The term species can be defined as a group of individual organisms that are capable of interbreeding to produce fertile offspring in nature. A species is, according to this definition, the largest gene pool that exists under natural conditions.

    The definition is not always practical. Non-interbreeding can be caused by geographical barriers. These are seen as “accidental” and ignored. When species are not interbreeding in nature when they are physical intermingle, but could produce fertile offspring in captivity things get complicated. However, to biologists only the flow of genes is important. They do not much care for where the exact boundaries of the “species” definition are in theory.

    But your “political correctness” point is obviously human “races”.

    All human populations will interbreed and produce very fertile offspring when given even half a chance. If you want, the exception might, just might, be certain San and Pygmy people in Africa. Human “races” are nothing but color variants combined with some random genetic drift.

    Your current president is a perfect example of this.

  278. Winter on Wednesday, January 16 2013 at 1:54 am said:
    > The definition is objective:
    > The term species can be defined as a group of individual organisms that are capable of interbreeding to produce fertile offspring in nature. A species is, according to this definition, the largest gene pool that exists under natural conditions.

    Species and speciation are political, and like global warming result in official science, which is incompatible with genuine science.

    Spotted owls and barred owls interbreed extensively and produce fertile offspring in nature, yet are classified as two separate species.

    Coyotes and grey wolves used to interbreed extensively and produce fertile offspring in nature, a cline used to exist between them, resulting in extensive gene flow between these populations, like the cline across the sahara between blacks and whites. This cline was eradicated by a government policy of killing off intermediate kinds and adjacent populations, I suppose if the nazis had been victorious they would have done something similar for the Saharan cline.

    Speciation is best studied in three spined sticklebacks, because you are less likely to get into political trouble, the more distant the species is from human beings. Also, the further from human the species, the more scientific and less political the paper. Among three spined sticklebacks the benthic and limphetic kinds are clearly separate species, despite massive and total failure to comply with the biological species concept, despite five or ten percent interbreeding in each generation, while the river or origin kinds are seldom genuinely different kinds, despite complete compliance with the biological species concept.

    The further you get from humans the more biologists are inclined to notice that species observed in nature seldom correspond to the biological species concept. Conversely, the closer to humans the more papers on speciation are politics rather than science.

  279. @JAD
    “Species and speciation are political, and like global warming result in official science, which is incompatible with genuine science.

    Spotted owls and barred owls interbreed extensively and produce fertile offspring in nature, yet are classified as two separate species.”

    Still, this is the definition used even in botany. That Americans cannot get their act together when trying to protect or exterminate wild animal populations is of no concern for taxonomy. It is USA activists like you who are constantly trying to corrupt science with your incessant political haggling.

    @JAD
    “Conversely, the closer to humans the more papers on speciation are politics rather than science.”

    However you splice and dice it, trying to formulate a species definition that will put Obama’s parents in different species and him in a twilight zone is simply utter nonsense. The Americas are currently populated by people who have ancestors in four continents. And in most cases, it is the same person who has ancestors in all four continents. And they are all simply human.

    Your attempts to divide humanity into separate species is ideology driven. Not the biologist’s attempt to understand nature.

    1. >“Conversely, the closer to humans the more papers on speciation are politics rather than science.”

      Sadly, JAD is right about this. It’s yet another case of the fear of accusations of racism muting discourse and leaving certain actual truths to be spoken only by racists.

      In the 1970s, my anthropology textbooks admitted that Bushmen have enough morphological differences from and a low enough interfertility rate with other varieties of human to qualify as a different species. I remember that one even included side-by-side drawings illustrating the lower density of cortical folding on a typical Bushman’s brain. A textbook writer who tried to include that fact today would find it a career-ending mistake. This is not progress.

      Not that the truth justifies the sort of inference racists want to draw, of course. “Ethically human” is a different predicate from “biologically human”; interfertility rates tell us nothing about who we can form a community of trust with. Differing structures of instinct might, but there is no evidence that Bushmen differ psychologically from other humans. They do have a mean IQ lower than the world average (predictable from the cortical folding) but it’s well within the normal range of variation.

      I have more in common in every ethically relevant way with Bushmen who are biologically a different species from me than I do with a sociopath who happens to share my skin color. Racists, blinded by prejudice, will never understand why this is so. We should stop giving them power by being unwilling to speak and engage the truth.

  280. Winter on Wednesday, January 16 2013 at 5:21 am said:
    > Still, this is the definition used even in botany.

    No it is not. It is an extremist left wing political definition of species that is dangerous to openly doubt, but is quietly ignored in actual practice. When Mayr proposed the biological species concept in 1942, the debate was not at first political, but has become politicized since 1972, with state power being applied to science to force ideology, Lysenko style.

    Mayr did not claim that it was used, but that it should be used, but in practice, it has not been used. Since 1972, however, we have seen a fair bit of Lysenko like pretense that it is used.

    But In actual practice there is very little agreement on what constitutes a species, and some scientists are not shy about saying so.

    “The species problem is the long-standing failure of biologists to agree on how we should identify species and how we should define the word ‘species’.

  281. @JAD
    “The species problem is the long-standing failure of biologists to agree on how we should identify species and how we should define the word ‘species’.”

    Your problem is that you want an “existentialist” (biblical?) definition of species. Species as something engraved in the individual. But it is not. Species tells us something about the relation(s) between individuals, populations, and gene pools.

    Biologists discuss different species concepts just as lexicographers discuss word definitions. Because the concept of a species can help understand population dynamics.

    Mayr’s definition is the one universally accepted as making sense. In boundary and edge cases, it does not make sense. Like, in bacteria and viruses and certain plant clades. Your case of genetic clines where the end-points cannot interbreed anymore has been the staple of genetic teaching for decades.

    But there is no ambiguity in the species concept for the great Apes. And most certainly not in Humans. All humans populations interbreed freely and all their offspring is fertile. Exceptions can be helped in clinics. (and I know about the San and Pygmies)

    I repeat, your attempt to define a species concept that designates Obama’s parents to different species is futile and ridiculous.

  282. @esr
    “n the 1970s, my anthropology textbooks admitted that Bushmen have enough morphological differences from and a low enough interfertility rate with other varieties of human to qualify as a different species.”

    Maybe. I would not even contest that. Whatever the biology, we would all grant San etc human rights.

    But that is not where JAD is after. Not some marginal populations of hunter gatherers. Nor some elusive arguments about the species concept in hybrid plant cultivars or E. coli genetics.

    JAD is literally aiming to designate Obama’s parents to different species. And there is no sensible definition of species that warrants such a conclusion.

    1. >And there is no sensible definition of species that warrants such a conclusion.

      No, there is not. As usual, JAD begins with Damned Facts and careers off into crazy, hateful prejudice.

  283. An A2 jacket can be rather short for hip carry unless you use a high ride type holster. If your .45 is not a full size 1911 check out Mitch Rosen’s Upper Limit as a suitable option.

    1. >If your .45 is not a full size 1911 check out Mitch Rosen’s Upper Limit as a suitable option.

      Thanks, that looks pretty interesting. I’ve set them email asking if the High Ride will fit a Kimber Ultra II.

  284. @ ESR – “Racists, blinded by prejudice, will never understand why this is so.”

    Is this not also true of cultists? They tend to be blinded by memetic programming that produces a faith-like belief system which automatically overrides objective reasoning.

  285. @esr
    > Yes. The “science vs. religion” clash only happens to religions in which the authority of the religion is tied to truth claims about phenomenal reality. This is actually not a common situation, speaking historically

    This is exactly right. And it is not only true of organizations, it is true of individuals too. For example, some embarrassingly high percentage of Americans believe that God created the earth in six days six thousand years ago, despite the overwhelming evidence that that is not true.

    How can they live with such dramatic error? Well because it doesn’t matter a damn in their day to day lives. The can still benefit from all the modernity science gives them without actually accepting the underlying premises of science. It kind of reminds me of the Taliban railing on the evil Western Satan, while using the very technology that the Evil Satan developed against itself.

    However, there are times when reality bites, and you have to actually face the fakeness of religion and religious explanations. I had one of those moments recently when some nut job massacred two dozen kids and adults in a school in CT.

    One wonders at the contrast between an Omnipresent, omnipotent God who stood in the classroom and did nothing while those kids were killed in contrast to Victoria Soto an ordinary, certainly not omnipotent young girl, who used her soft, non bulletproof body to try to shield the children. Richard Dawkins recently asked his Twitter followers to give reasons why they didn’t believe in God. One person said: “I stopped believing in God when I realized that I was a better person than the God of the Bible”, which seems particularly apt in this context. By any reasonable judgement Victoria Soto was a better person than God, and the fact is that, although I honor her bravery and sacrifice, it is unusual only in the infrequency of the situation rather than the ubiquity the of courage. After all, I suspect that pretty much every reader of this blog would have done the same (Eric’s Glock, notwithstanding.)

    However, after the massacre I saw some Bishop or other religious authority interviewed and asked about this very same contrast. He babbled on with the usual stuff, but at the end he pointed out that, regardless of the philosophical answer, these disasters tend to draw people closer to god, not push them away. And in that he is right, scary right, disturbingly self aware-edly right. It just seems to show two things — how people would much rather deny the truth than have their religion challenged even when the error the contrast is so immense.

    But there is another thing too, and it was my immediate response to Eric’s OP. Basically, it is that the delusion is seductive because often it is way better than the truth by many measures. To believe your babies are with Jesus, and that this inexplicable thing is inexplicable, but God is still in control is so much more comforting than what atheism has to offer.

    Atheism: no miracles, no omnipotent God waiting your prayers to do your beck and call, no community indoctrinated to the forgiveness of your errors, no consequences for your sins long term, and always the Devil to blame for all that goes wrong in your life. No certainty of meaning, no questioning about the meaning of morality — what is right and wrong, someone to comfort you when things go wrong, and mostly tell you that you are a good person, and that it isn’t your fault.

    Sure, atheism, or more specifically science does give us all the miracles of the modern world, but the religious guys get them for free, along with the pleasure of burning the heretics at the stake.

    1. >Basically, it is that the delusion is seductive because often it is way better than the truth by many measures.

      No, it isn’t. Not if you include the sporadic flipouts into mass murder as one of the costs.

      It’s not the insanity of religious believers that’s intolerable per se; if they merely had private delusions, or the delusions only affected other believers, it wouldn’t be a problem. The problem is that we can never know when the next baraka is going to happen along, grab them by their insanity, and mobilize them into a blood-crazed mob.

  286. esr:
    > Not that the truth justifies the sort of inference racists want to draw, of course. “Ethically human” is a different predicate from “biologically human”; interfertility rates tell us nothing about who we can form a community of trust with.

    This is, of course, a classic science versus religion clash.

    Observed behavior is that it is difficult to form communities of trust between different kinds, resulting in high levels of anti social behavior and stress related diseases in mixed communities, resulting in major increases of death rate from stress related diseases in mixed communities. Not only do whites suffer from the presence of blacks, blacks, though safer from crime in the presence of whites, suffer from the presence of whites in that they become more inclined to crime, self destructive behavior, and stress related diseases.

    As I wrote elsewhere:

    In order to get the conclusion that statistical differences in outcomes, such as more of group X graduating, or more of group X doing a highly desirable job, are the result of racial discrimination, which must be punished and suppressed, in order to get the conclusion that statistical outcomes are proof of personal wrongdoing which needs to be punished, you have to suppose that evolution in humans came to a dead stop one hundred thousand years or so ago – which requires a biological theory that evolution only happens in short bursts, and for any given species is usually at a dead stop – a theory that is in such flagrant and spectacular contradiction to the evidence that only the power of blind faith backed by political intimidation can sustain it.

    If kinds are prone to drift far apart despite massive gene flow, as sticklebacks do, isolation mechanisms do not matter much, are not causal, do not explain things, in which case the biological species concept does not explain or describe speciation in the real world.. We still get just as huge differences between stickleback species even when ten percent of matings are interspecies, as often enough they are. That stickleback females evolve to avoid such matings is a consequence of the gross difference in lifestyles, not a cause.

    Species drift apart in ways that do not have any close relation to gene flow, so the definitions of isolation do not matter much, and gene flow continues in ways that make the precise definitions of isolation impossible to apply, because species just are not all that isolated. The biological species concept turns into slippery mud when applied to closely related species, and collapses entirely when applied to chronospecies.

    In practice, we don’t get well defined isolation events, rather, as kinds drift apart, gene flow gradually diminishes, but substantial gene flow continues long after kinds have separated into what are very clearly different species, for example wolves and coyotes. Because we get speciation despite substantial gene flow, and frequently fail to get speciation when gene flow is stopped by merely geographical barriers, the biological species concept cannot be applied to the real world, except by political lies and political intimidation.

    Instead, natural selection explains things. Isolation does not explain things.

    If isolation is not causal, and natural selection is causal, if natural selection explains things, then evolutionary change is happening everywhere all the time, rather than only happening when we get the abrupt, sharp, total, well defined isolation events, the events which the biological species concept requires and presupposes exists.

    If evolution is happening everywhere all the time, all sorts of unpleasant political consequences flow: that humans are fiercer than most creatures, and men fiercer than women; that affirmative action is morally wrong; that Ashkenazi Jews are, on average, substantially smarter than Sephardic Jews; and so on and so forth, from which no end of political trouble ensues – and those deemed responsible for such dangerous ideas are apt to suffer punishment.

  287. I wrote:
    > Observed behavior is that it is difficult to form communities of trust between different kinds

    Not impossible, the army manages it, but it requires drastic measures that appear to be impractical to apply in a free society – or even a totalitarian society. Observe what happened to Yugoslavia.

  288. @esr
    > No, it isn’t. Not if you include the sporadic flipouts into mass murder as one of the costs.

    That is why I said “by many measures”. However, for little Susie taking her husband and family to church, it is often a net benefit. As to whether religion has been beneficial to the world as a whole — I am not sure about that answer. I could be convinced either way.

    But, as you surely know, I am not an advocate of it at all. And I think that in the modern age it is mostly deleterious to society as a whole, despite the individual benefits mentioned above.

    Maybe this sounds arrogant, but in truth, I don’t think most people are either smart enough, or self aware enough to be successful atheists. Which isn’t to say that religious people are not smart of self aware, it is just that being a successful atheist needs those qualities in much larger measure.

  289. @esr
    > No, it isn’t. Not if you include the sporadic flipouts into mass murder as one of the costs.

    As I said earlier, I’m still not convinced that I can include that as a cost of religion. It may be the case that if religion were not present, the sporadic flipout would still occur. (“To put it more precisely, if I’m faced with a faith-holder, I’m not so much put at unease by the faith, as I am by whatever unseen mechanism within the brain made holding that faith possible in the first place.”)

    And much as I’d prefer it to be false, my suspicion is consistent with Jessica’s suggestion that “most people [aren’t] smart enough, or self aware enough to be successful atheists”. I take heart in that I don’t know just how much potential is inherent in people who initially test as not-smart, and I’m not in a position to research it, and so my belief could be incorrect.

  290. Night shift guy at Au Bon Pain is not alone.

    Just in the past couple of days I heard of two black icons — rapper Big Boi and actor Jimmie Walker — who were disillusioned with Barack O-Face. (Big Boi is a libertarian and voted for Gary Johnson in 2012.)

    To be quite honest it’s not surprising: the whole Obama shtik is based on the assumption that color of skin will substitute for content of character — the very textbook definition of racism. That the dupe worked so very well on white voters means racism isn’t over in this country, not by a long shot. In terms of actual deeds while President Obama is, to a first approximation, Bush II. More wars, more domestic surveillance, more big business bailouts.

    I don’t know if the Obama campaign qualifies as a cult, but it certainly has as a core component the sort of mendacious bait-n-switch cults rely on to fill their ranks.

  291. esr:esr on Wednesday, January 16 2013 at 2:35 pm said:
    > we can never know when the next baraka is going to happen along, grab them by their insanity, and mobilize them into a blood-crazed mob.

    As you mentioned before, religion, narrowly defined, has not been the biggest killer.

    Of course, we can reasonably define communism and so forth as something substantially similar to religion, the same sort of thing, in which case it has been the biggest killer in recent times.

    On the other hand, there are frequently entirely rational reasons to massacre one’s neighbors, take their stuff, and abduct their women, and religion may merely be a handy organizing principle to facilitate doing it. It seems to me that an entirely rational this worldly doctrine is apt to resemble that of Xenophon, which is probably not going to reduce the death rate, and might well increase it.

    1. >On the other hand, there are frequently entirely rational reasons to massacre one’s neighbors, take their stuff, and abduct their women, and religion may merely be a handy organizing principle to facilitate doing it.

      I hear this from apologists for religious ideology (and Communist ideology) a lot. None of these ideologists ever goes on to explain why, when tango X says he nail-bombed a schoolbus for Allah or Communism, we shouldn’t take him at his word and regard Allah and Communism as being causative. Especially since there are other wide-spread ideologies, such as free-market capitalism or Theravada Buddhism, to which no tango ever attributes his bombings.

      If ideology didn’t matter, nail-bombings of school buses (and other kinds of terrorism and mass murder up to and including planned genocide) would be uncorrelated with it and we would hear of murderous terror performed by people who waved capitalism or Buddhism as a banner. In the real world this never happens. It’s a weird kind of self-willed blindness to ignore (a) what terrorists tell you about their motivation, (b) the ways terror historically correlates with ideology, and (c) the fact that the terrorists’ accounts of motivation and the historical correlations match up perfectly.

      It may be a near-universal trait of humans that they can be talked into committing atrocities in mobs, but that does not mean that all talk is morally equivalent. Ideas matter; some are a short road to blood madness, some lead away from it. Ideology can kill.

  292. Winter on Wednesday, January 16 2013 at 8:19 am said:
    > JAD is literally aiming to designate Obama’s parents to different species. And there is no sensible definition of species that warrants such a conclusion.

    As I, and Darwin, observed, species have no objective definition, species differences and race differences are the same sort of difference.

    To debate whether Obama’s parents are of the same species or two different species is like debating whether something is a large hill or a small mountain.

    The problem is that a species definition that ensures that Obama’s parents must be of the same species, that makes this is a scientific truth rather than merely a terminological convention, has absurd consequences when applied to other sexually reproducing kinds.

    If one also wants one’s species definition to guarantee that evolutionary psychology is false, that men are equal to women, and that all human races are equal to each other, that affirmative action is morally right, this ever more heavily loaded definition has extremely drastic consequences, re-writing all of biology.

    In practice, biologists quietly ignore this heavily loaded species definition, more openly for species far from human, more furtively for species close to human. When studying three spined sticklebacks, a scientist is required to use delicate phrasing, but is otherwise free to say what he thinks.

  293. Of course, we can reasonably define communism and so forth as something substantially similar to religion, the same sort of thing, in which case it has been the biggest killer in recent times.

    Marxism has been able to deliver something that conventional religion can’t: something like accurate prophecy. In the wake of bank bailouts, the Goldman-Sachs-engineered 2008 financial crisis, and automation eroding the labor market and with it the middle class, even financial elites like Jeremy Grantham are giving Marx a second look.

    The stridently anticommunist British historian Robert Conquest is said to have considered titling his revised edition of The Great Terror, I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. One wonders if the stridently communist British historian Eric Hobsbawm should have instead given his recent bookHow to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism the title Now Who’s Laughing, You Old Fascist Bastard?.

  294. I don’t believe Obama ever appeared to me as something greater than a career politician.
    The cult-leader image of him just seems a little silly in the same way that it is silly to imagine a 2d term president on the fast-track to becoming a king.

  295. Not that I bring this up as a counterexample, but Eric’s argument quickly reminds me of ecoterrorists and assortments of people who commit crime (for this purpose, I’m counting even relatively minor infractions such as vandalism) in the name of environmentalism. (I suspect you consider that to be another case of ideology; if so, we agree.)

    If I cast the net wider, I’m led to consider incidents of violence in which the perpetrators cite a variety of political causes. I can’t help but feel like I’m assymptotically approaching a definition of terrorism (with the difference that terrorism is commonly construed as being more organized and sanctioned – religious nutjobs are sometimes promptly shunned by their organizations).

    Fine distinctions aside, what I’m seeing here is a possible commonality between violent religious people, violent political people, and in general, violent ideological people, which I simultaneously fail to see in others who espouse an ideology but will never be significantly violent.

    Eric cites free-market capitalism and Theravada Buddhism as two ideologies that never produced mass bombers. I don’t know Theravada Buddhism, so I’ll concede that one; maybe it’s bomber-proof. I know capitalism, though, and… I’m conflicted. While I know of no actual incidents of capitalism-motivated bombings, I don’t have much trouble constructing a narrative that appears plausible to me. (Something vaguely reminiscent of Wyatt’s Torch.) One could easily respond that such an act would be in defiance of true capitalism (“he damaged someone else’s property!”), but one could make the same arguments on a religion’s account (even more easily, in fact, given how religious ideologies tend to be logically inconsistent).

    So what’s the true difference? I agree that ideas matter, but I’m less sure that it’s as simply put as that. Ideology can kill, but Eric also claims the existence of at least two ideologies which don’t. For me, my strongest theory still stands: that there’s some currently hidden mechanism that causes the mind to misinterpret an ideology, that would make that error no matter what ideology you put there, with the exceptions of (presumably) Theravada Buddhism and the axioms of logic, and in even those cases, all it does is reduce the rate of error. But I admit I could be holding too much faith in that.

    1. >While I know of no actual incidents of capitalism-motivated bombings, I don’t have much trouble constructing a narrative that appears plausible to me.

      Construct all the narratives you like. The relevant fact is that this has never actually happened. I’m talking about observed reality, not fictional cloud-cuckoo land.

      >For me, my strongest theory still stands: that there’s some currently hidden mechanism that causes the mind to misinterpret an ideology, that would make that error no matter what ideology you put there, with the exceptions of (presumably) Theravada Buddhism and the axioms of logic, and in even those cases, all it does is reduce the rate of error.

      I am irresistibly reminded of Molière’s play The Imaginary Invalid. In it, he lampoons a group of physicians explaining the sleep-inducing properties of opium as deriving from its “virtus dormitiva” – bad Latin for “sleep-inducing virtue”. Your “currently hidden mechanism” is exactly as silly as that, and in exactly the same way; it’s a non-explanation masquerading as an explanation and does nothing to make the question go away.

      Instead, it simply leads to a reformulation of the question: “What is it about Theravada and capitalism that makes them apparently invulnerable to being turned into rationalizations for mass murder? (Or, effectively equivalently, with statistical vulnerability indistinguishable from zero by observations to present time?) At which point your “virtuus dormtiva” vanishes and we’re right back to ideas mattering and ideology killing.

      Hint: I have some serious differences with Ayn Rand, but I think she called this one exactly right.

  296. esr on Wednesday, January 16 2013 at 10:23 am said:
    > No, there is not. As usual, JAD begins with Damned Facts and careers off into crazy, hateful prejudice.

    As usual, you are lying about me, perhaps in fear that you might be punished for my ideas.

    I have nowhere suggested that humans are several species – merely pointed out that religious doctrines that make the very question impossible lead to absurd conclusions in the rest of biology, that your ideology, not mine, is veering into madness and deny reality for religious reasons. You fear facts about three spined sticklebacks because they could be used to make arguments about humans, arguments that I have not made, arguments that I have repeatedly denigrated as pointless.

  297. @ Jessica Boxer – “As to whether religion has been beneficial to the world as a whole — I am not sure about that answer.”

    When trying to analyze organization religions in the present cultural environment, it is helpful to remember that the faith trait and religious social structure originally evolved thousands of years ago when our ancestors were small tribes of primitive peoples. In that context, both faith and social-religious belief systems were generally very useful as a means of conveying wisdom to each seceding generation. The proclivity toward this habit is still with us, but in modern society it has become more of a vulnerability than a survival asset.

  298. One thing that has always surprised me is how people, like Richard Dawkins and Jessica, constantly speak of the evidence as though it is for Evolution and against Creation, when that is really not true. If you were to knock yourself on the head in just the right way to eliminate from your mind all Evolution vs. Creation bias either way, and all prior knowledge of the evidence and leave the scientific principles and Occam’s Razor as your only remaining bias, Creation should win because it has fewer objections and contrivances. Plus, it is easier for the Creator to justify the evidence leading to objections than it is for Evolution to contrive justifications around the objections, often only to have other evidence come along and cause objections to the contrivances. Evolution as it is today is a kitbash of small, somewhat isolated theories like irregular masonry stones that don’t fit together properly, held together by a mortar that I would call “faith”.

    The Fossil Record: The fossil stratum records how the creatures of Earth die, not how they live. There are also a lot of pieces of evidence that only make sense in the Biblical scenario, such as long creatures and trees cutting vertical through multiple strata periods, the occasional advanced creature or man-made article vastly out of place in the strata, and frequently places where the multiple layers of strata (say, Permian to Cretaceous) are bent as though they were all wet at the same time and hydrated minerals did not yet have a chance to set. One of the most compelling problems is a salt mine in Pakistan where the entire Cambrian-Tertiary geological stratum was found on top of a huge salt deposit which contained flowering plants and conifers.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khewra_Salt_Mines

    There is the thought that the first vertebrates were fish and other sea creatures in that the Cambrian layer, the lowest, consists almost entirely of sea creatures, and we don’t see land animals until quite a bit higher. Is this likely with the Biblical scenario of Noah’s Flood?

    “In [analyzed as BC 2344 April 14] were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” – Genesis 7:11

    Underwater volcanoes are obviously implicated as a source of death for the creatures of the sea, and they would have been dying at the same time as the creatures on the land. The now-dead creatures of the land, however, would be washed into the sea and thus lie on top of the creatures of the sea, which are already dead on the sea floor. It is easy to explain the strata that we see from the Biblical account. Tectonic lifting later during this catastrophe explains both why we find these strata on land, and why they are bent together as though they were still wet.

    There is also little accounting for processes of decay, erosion, and solvent transport processes happening far faster than it appears to in fossils. We have dinosaur bones, and even some soft tissue specimens, with no way to explain how they could have lasted the sixty-five million years without becoming completely mineralized or destroyed.

    Astronomy: As we peer deeper and deeper into space with ever-increasing spectral and spatial resolution, it is looking more and more like the galaxies 12.8 billion light-years distant (i.e.: hypothetically just 900 million years after the Big Bang) are just as old as our own galaxy and galaxies right next door, with flat disks, spiral arms, star-forming nebulae, and enormous black holes in their cores. Creationist contrivances to explain how light that seems to be billions of years old (i.e.: it is a major problem that this light is obviously older than than the YEC’s universe) isn’t are even more atrocious than Evolutionary contrivances around fossil record and genetics problems, but the problem remains that the universe doesn’t seem to be getting any younger the further out we look.

    We’ve also found a whole bunch of extrasolar planets that are very inconsistent with our knowledge of astrodynamics and theories of star system formation; planets that could not have been in their current positions for more than a few thousand years, hot jupiters and the strange GJ1214b, a ball of water with a surface temperature of 505K because of a tight orbit around its host star. Astrodynamicists speak of them migrating from the snowball regions of a star system inward as though they have somehow overlooked how difficult it is to move such huge objects when there isn’t anything nearby large enough to trade momentum with (i.e. gravitational slingshots and Belbruno’s weak stability highways count on trading momentum with planets.) Also, momentum-trading gravitational encounters tend to place planets and other objects on eccentric orbits, and doesn’t form a sufficient explanation of how a hot jupiter or other such implausible (yet found to exist) world could move to a tight circular orbit around a star without having formed there to begin with. Of course, I’m just as much at a loss as to why God would make such worlds, which are unapproachable to intelligent beings that might want to visit or live on them.

    Biology: As we’ve already discussed, molecular biology Evolutionists are figuring out how life survives damaging mutations, not how they benefit from the useful ones. Natural selection obviously has a heck of a lot more damaging mutations to weed out than beneficial mutations to select for evolution. Also, since fossils are the dead creatures, we should expect to see the losers in it. This would make the tracking of beneficial mutations more difficult. As a child (before I’d give a Creationist the time of day), I was expecting a lot of progress in molecular biology along the lines of genetic modification, vaccines, cancer and other mutation treatments, and laboratory abiogenesis than has actually occurred since then. Not so much progress in computers and cell phones though!

    Deep Time: Evolutionists everywhere, especially Dawkins, would have you believe that the typical evangelical Christian is so lunatic as to be frothing at the mouth (some are, I know.) One of his analogies is to compare the Evolution timeline to continent size and say it’s like believing North America is eighty yards across from sea to sea to believe in a young universe. Unfortunately, this analogy can be countered by a similar analogy explaining the human condition in time: Say some temporal anomaly whisks you into the distant past, standing exactly where you are, but around you are no maps, no guide, and no clue. Can you figure out where you are without walking more than eighty yards in the process? Like it or not, we’ve only been recording history since about 3500BC and have anything approaching a contiguous record since about 1500BC. We can’t measure millions and billions of years in that sort of time.Now, I’m not setting out to prove Biblical Creation by any stretch of the imagination. What I hope you can take home from this is the idea that Creation isn’t an idea as maniacal as things like the Apollo Hoax, Flat Earth, Hollow Earth and stuff like this:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kL7qDeI05U

  299. Eric
    > if ideology didn’t matter, nail-bombings of school buses (and other kinds of terrorism and mass murder up to and including planned genocide) would be uncorrelated with it and we would hear of murderous terror performed by people who waved capitalism or Buddhism as a banner.

    Well, as a matter of fact, we do hear of murderous terror performed by people who wave Buddhism as a banner, for example in Burma and Ceylon. Buddhism, though less inclined to terror and mass murder than most major religions, is arguably more inclined to terror and mass murder than Christianity, and is clearly more inclined to terror and mass murder than modern Christianity.

    Obviously the inclination to terror depends on the ideology, with communism being number one by far, but it looks to me that some religions, such as Christianity, reduce terror below the natural non ideological level.

    I must reluctantly concede that progressivism has not done a lot of mass murder, but it has done, and continues to do, quite a lot of war and artificial famine, and some of those wars, for example the war by progessivism in the Congo against the supposed racism of the Tutsi related people of the Congo, have employed quite extraordinarily brutal terror, for example killing women of Tutsi and allegedly Tutsi related races by vaginally impaling them with large objects. Similarly the war against whites in Rhodesia.

    (Of course, since Tutsi are the superior race, there is supposedly nothing racist about impaling Tutsi women with large objects. Supposedly only members of superior races can be racist. According to progressives, nothing members of inferior races do to superior races is racist, even impaling women with large objects while calling them by racial epithets.)

    And, I predict, Eric will have profound difficulty speaking truth about war in the Congo, although it would seem highly relevant to the discussion of the relationship of ideologies and belief systems to terror. Rather than addressing the issue, he will probably blame me for encouraging the thoughts that regrettably make it unfortunately necessary to impale Tutsi women with large objects.

    1. >Well, as a matter of fact, we do hear of murderous terror performed by people who wave Buddhism as a banner, for example in Burma and Ceylon.

      The Tamil Tigers were Marxist atheists – as lethal a combination as non-Marxist atheism is benign. I have investigated the matter and I know of zero evidence that their Sinhalese enemies invoked Buddhism. Knowing what I do about Theravada I cannot see how this would be even possible. Citation needed. Likewise for Burma: citation needed. If you knew anything about Theravada, which is one of the purest forms of quietist mysticism humans have ever invented, you would understand that the implied claim is bizarre and requires very strong confirming evidence.

      Historical note: Atrocities with Buddhist religious sanction are not actually completely unknown, but have been quite rare and confined to sects that are (a) Mahayana rather than Theravada and (b) rather aberrant within Mahayana. The closest analogies to the routine bloodletting of Christianity and Islam are the history of the two Japanese Pure Land sects, Jodo-sho and Jodo Shinshu. These have the dubious distinction of having been the only religions outside the Zoroastrian family to have practiced conversion by the sword.

  300. @ ESR

    I certainly agree that ideology can kill. I have a couple of points on which I would value your comments.

    The US seems to have more or less defined terrorism as violence intended to cause terror by brown people or people from Idaho ([weaseling> as opposed to “shock” and “awe” </weaseling]) that is inherently evil. However, it worth considering the cases of:

    – the fire bombing of Dresden and Tokyo
    – the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
    – the deliberate use of napalm against individuals

    Fighting ideology can also require killing, but is terrorism, per se, moral if there is any reasonable alternative? The US certainly got into it when it suited their purposes.

    Profound humor from Dave Barry:
    "It was Truman who made the difficult decision to drop the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the rationale being that only such a devastating, horrendous display of destructive power would convince Japan that it had to surrender. Truman also made the decision to drop the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the rationale being that, hey, we had another bomb."

    The
    – Brussels Declaration (1874)
    – Hague Conference (1900)
    – Washington Arms Conference Treaty (1922)
    – the Geneva Protocol (1929)
    all prohibited the use of [poison gas]. (I may be simplifying this a bit, but still).

    I realize that sovereignty involves the concept that laws are for inside nations; between nations, we get "deals". In any case, I am surprised that the use of napalm against individuals is considered acceptable (except perhaps as a last resort).

    1. >Fighting ideology can also require killing, but is terrorism, per se, moral if there is any reasonable alternative? The US certainly got into it when it suited their purposes.

      There are several good arguments against equating city-killing fire-bombs or A-bombs with terrorism. You’ve touched on a rather legalistic one that, wearing my anarchist hat, I actually reject. More sound, I think, is the distinction between terror aims and war aims. I’d prefer not to wander off into that, though, as it would rathole the thread.

      I will observe that there is a customary law of war – I’m not referring here to the Geneva Convention, which is a late and formalized development from it, but of an evolved tradition going back to Hugo Grotius and medieval European just-war doctrines. One significant distinction in World War II is that the Germans, with sporadic exceptions, honored it; the Japanese did not. They could have chosen to; they had Europeanized their military enough in other respects.

      The customary law of war makes distinctions among regular warfare, irregular warfare, terrorism, and piracy which are…remarkably coherent, even to one as scathingly critical of state action as I am. Learning this was one of my larger surprises from studying history; I had expected it all to be a tissue of sleazy rationalizations and victors’ justice. Instead I found quite a few genuine Schelling points.

  301. @ Terry

    Not that the rest of your comment isn’t nuts, but this was really special…

    Plus, it is easier for the Creator to justify the evidence leading to…

  302. @ ESR

    First, give up one of omnibenevolence, omnipotence, or omniscience. Then we could talk contingent existence.

    Omnibenevolence certainly provides some interesting talking points, but is it tied into the inherent contradiction between omnipotence and omniscience (ie. does dropping omnibenevolence change anything logically?)

  303. While I have heard Ayn Rand’s followers described as a cult I am not even sure that I would
    agree. Something that I would infer from the current thread ( of which I’ve read perhaps a
    3d ) is that cults have proliferated in the society. Capitalism, as an ideology and as a policy, may be unrelated to proliferation of cults. A person may join a cult without having many opinions about socialism.

  304. >>Eric, how do you distinguish between cult hypomania and happiness?
    >Flatness of affect. Cult hypomania has an unnatural evenness to it.

    Sounds strikingly similar to the flatline brainscan from people “tinkered” with by the Second Foundation.

    — Foo Quuxman

  305. FWIW: my personal definition of a cult is a very slight modification of the Admiral’s:

    Any religious group more than half of whose members joined it as an adult.

  306. >- the fire bombing of Dresden and Tokyo
    >- the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

    Ironically the A-bombs could be considered “better” than the fire bombing, one boom and the raid is over. Of course then a few days later a bunch of otherwise ok people die, but still…….

    >Truman also made the decision to drop the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the rationale being that, hey, we had another bomb.

    My understanding of the matter is that we had 3 bombs ready to go; the first one got their attention, the second proved that it wasn’t a one-off.

    — Foo Quuxman

    1. >My understanding of the matter is that we had 3 bombs ready to go; the first one got their attention, the second proved that it wasn’t a one-off.

      Correct. The most important ethical fact may have been that the U.S. chose not to drop the third one.

      People thinking about this a half-century later tend to miss another important point – Stalin had troops on Sakhalin and within a shout of Berlin. Arguably the second bomb wasn’t aimed at the changing the mental state of the Japanese as much as it was at changing Stalin’s…

  307. @ Foo

    My understanding of the matter is that we had 3 bombs ready to go; the first one got their attention, the second proved that it wasn’t a one-off.

    Without bothering to research this, I thought that there was only enough U-235 for one “gun-style” bomb, but no matter…

    It is worth noting that the same effect could have been achieved by detonating one or both bombs in places other than civilian population centers…. although the Japanese were convinced that even civilians with bamboo spears could repel an invasion by the Allies. Certainly, the second A-bomb didn’t have to be over a city.

    The real point I was trying to make was that the US is pushing the idea that “terrorism” is evil per se… unless they want to do it.

  308. @Brian “Plus, it is easier for the Creator to justify the evidence leading to…”

    To leave that out would have been dishonest. I prayed about GJ1214b because it makes no sense to me to put a planet in such a position as God because it’ll be gone before we could possibly reach it. No answer so far. So, you see, Creation does have some rather gnarly objections that I am uncomfortable about.

  309. @Eric: “non-Marxist atheism is benign.”

    I dunno (*scratches head*) Nietzschean and Nazi atheism didn’t seem particularly benign IMHO.

    Re atomic bombs: The three atomic bombs referred to by Foo were actually Trinity, Little Boy, and Fat Man (test program designators Trinity, Alberta/Hiroshima and Alberta/Nagasaki.) If the Japanese didn’t surrender immediately after Nagasaki, the next one would have been ready in about December or January. I’m more familiar with the atomic program than most laymen (I don’t have anything unpublished, though.) I found out that fifteen people experienced both war shots in “The Last Train From Hiroshima” by Charles Pellegrino. The interesting thing about Nagasaki is that it missed. Instead of going off over the military/industrial downtown area intended, it was dropped five miles northwest over the suburb of Urakami, which is why the death toll is lower than Hiroshima despite a much higher yield.

    1. >I dunno (*scratches head*) Nietzschean and Nazi atheism didn’t seem particularly benign IMHO.

      It’s not atheism when you replace god-worship with state-worship. Besides, on what grounds are you supposing the Nazis weren’t Marxists? Heretic Marxists that partially substituted racialism for class warfare, to be sure – but the notion that Naziism was some sort of polar opposite of Marxism is an invention of Soviet propaganda.

  310. @ Terry

    I prayed about GJ1214b because it makes no sense to me to put a planet in such a position as God because it’ll be gone before we could possibly reach it. No answer so far.

    Perhaps this is the location where multiple angels dance on the point of a needle.

  311. @ ESR

    Thanks. That was interesting and conceptually addressed my question (and I can imagine that the details would drag us far from the topic(s) at hand).

    Of course, part of the purpose of my comment was to express an opinion about “The War Against Terror”, which someone on Slashdot yesterday proposed that we should refer to by its initials.

  312. @Terry: If you were to knock yourself on the head in just the right way to eliminate from your mind all Evolution vs. Creation bias either way, and all prior knowledge of the evidence and leave the scientific principles and Occam’s Razor as your only remaining bias, Creation should win because it has fewer objections and contrivances.

    You forgot to include the complexity of the Creator in your accounting. When you do, Creation becomes much more complex than Evolution, and correspondingly disfavored by Occam’s Razor. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s post about Occam’s Razor nailed this one:

    http://lesswrong.com/lw/jp/occams_razor/

  313. > > Well, as a matter of fact, we do hear of murderous terror performed by people who wave Buddhism as a banner, for example in Burma and Ceylon.

    Esr:
    > I have investigated the matter and I know of zero evidence that their Sinhalese enemies invoked Buddhism.

    Investigated Burmese Buddhism also did you?

    And, I also mentioned progressivism as responsible for the Rwandan genocide and the quite extraordinary atrocities now under way in the Congo. Progressives are reluctant to genocide all over again in the Congo, since it did not work out last time around, but are trying every other form of vile disgusting horror.

    It frequently happens in the streets of America that a flash mob of “youths” will suddenly attack some other “youths”, hurling racial epithets, and reminding each other of what they were taught in school about all the sins that one race supposedly did to another. The mainstream press, and you, are strangely reluctant to mention the race of the attackers, the race of the attacked, and the loudly proclaimed motivation of the attack.

    Even more so, when crimes are committed in Africa for similar reasons based on similar rhetoric, the New York Times will not mention the incident at all, and those media that do mention the incident will refrain from mentioning who were committing the crimes, who were the victims of the crimes, and why the crime were committed.

    And, so will you refrain.

    > Knowing what I do about Theravada I cannot see how this would be even possible.

    And what do you know about Christianity?

    1. >The mainstream press, and you, are strangely reluctant to mention the race of the attackers, the race of the attacked, and the loudly proclaimed motivation of the attack.

      The mainstream press is; I’m not. Yes, we have a persistent problem with violent flash mobs of young black thugs attacking whites for reasons which combine ordinary criminality with explicit racism. This is reality and I do not shrink from calling it what it is. Nor do I avert my eyes from the fact that these thugs are being enabled by the willingness of much of our political class to ignore them, excuse them, and largely suppress press coverage of the phenomenon.

      Nor do I have any issue with describing the nightmare in the Congo as at least in part a genocidal race war that happens to be black-on-black. In part – it’s more complicated than that. A lot of it is straight-up old-fashioned warlordism.

      I don’t know what misfire in your mind caused you to imagine I would ignore such plain facts or refuse to speak them.

      However, I am also not going to buy any theory about there being a stable genetic distinction between “superior” Tutsi vs. “inferior” Hutu. That is nothing but racist fantasy – they’ve been cohabiting and interbreeding too long for it to be anything else.

  314. >> Are martial arts organizations cultish?
    > Occasionally[…] I think it’s a less common pathology now than it used to be, and less common in the U.S. than in Asia.

    Or is it? ;-) Whatever the case, there’s no shortage of charlatans on either continent.

    George Dillman’s “no-touch KO” debunked on National Geographic
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsSzSflkns8
    The poor boy in the video probably tried to hadoken a bully in school and got his ass beat as a result.

    The Power of Kiai
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl1KEDMCQw8
    Hilarious comment bonus: “I tried it and it worked!! My imaginary? enemies went flying!”

    It’d be great to see ESR try his latest stick fighting moves on either of the above “masters”.

    1. >Whatever the case, there’s no shortage of charlatans on either continent

      Granted, but cultism is a much more specific thing than mere charlatanism.

      >It’d be great to see ESR try his latest stick fighting moves on either of the above “masters”.

      Not likely to end well for either of them, no. Especially not if I’m carrying the almost ludicrously oversized pair I’ve dubbed the Trauma Twins – Massive and Blunt. (Sifu calls them my “treetrunks”.)

      I will however note that the kiai stuff is only about 99% bogus rather than 100%. I have thrown opponents off their game with posture and kiai and expect to do so again. You don’t get slumping to the ground, but you can get the crucial 200ms of whatthefuck you need to get in and score a disabler.

  315. >I don’t know what misfire in your mind caused you to imagine I would ignore such plain facts or refuse to speak them.

    He like many (hell, most) people is apparently incapable of making the cognitive shift into someone else’s worldview.

    — Foo Quuxman

  316. @Eric Notwithstanding the fact that I was told so in high school, I do not believe that Nazi or Nietschzean (did I spell that right?) philosophy is the polar opposite of Marxist philosophy, and that yes, they do have a lot in common, probably more than you and Richard. I still dispute the notion you seem to hold: that they are synonymous.

    @Peter The link is a bunch of gibberish, but I do see your point. God is quite complex. The thing is, God is allowed to be complex, while Evolution is not. What God is _not_ allowed to be is deceitful, and that is the point on which Rickard Dawkins hangs his hat. This is why a Creationist needs to pick a certain creation story and stick to it at least until he is satisfied that it has been scientifically refuted.

    Genesis is an excellent choice because it is part of the single most authenticated and supported collection of ancient documents in the world (second place is Homer’s Iliad while most other sacred texts are not ancient.) The Genesis Creationist then has to figure out if and how astronomical, geological, and biological evidence fits into it. There are several web sites devoted to this topic, and I do wish some of them would bring up and acknowledge the objections, as I do. This would set them apart not only from the kooks, but also the Evolutionists, the only other group which looks at the objections to their theory, but not very consistently.

    There is a story that I have been thus far unable to verify, that a guy named George Washington Carver was having a bad day and walked out in nature, uttered a prayer during that walk, “God, why did you create the universe?”

    God answered, “That is too much knowledge for you.”

    George, encouraged at hearing anything at all from God, glanced about and spotted a common weed, to the best of human knowledge at the time (my best guess is 1910), utterly useless to cultivate. “God, why did you invent the peanut.”

    God answered, “I’ll meet you in your lab in half an hour.” He was about half an hour’s walk from his lab, but apparently they met there, and God told him literally everything there was to know about the peanut.

    While I haven’t been able to verify this story, I have been able to verify that there was a man named George Washington Carver, that he was a strong Christian, and that he apparently did know everything there was to know about the peanut!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_washington_carver

    1. >I still dispute the notion you seem to hold: that they are synonymous.

      Naziism and Communism are not synonymous, but the differences between them are minor – and irrelevent to this thread.

  317. @Terry: The link is a bunch of gibberish

    I disagree, but there’s not much point in arguing about it. One comment, though: it will be difficult to follow that post (like many of Yudkowsky’s posts on LessWrong) if you haven’t read the previous posts that it builds on. That’s why the “followup to” links at the top are there.

    God is allowed to be complex, while Evolution is not.

    That’s not what Occam’s Razor says. Occam’s Razor says that nothing is “allowed” to be complex unless nothing simpler will suffice to explain the data.

  318. @Peter Of course, you’re right, but you might be mistaken about Evolution’s simplicity. Due to all the contrivances needed to get around the evidence that refuses to fit politely to Evolution’s model, it has actually gotten far more complex than Genesis Creationism. I’m a fan of Air Crash Investigations, and so far as I’ve been able to tell, the NTSB has never entertained the thought that when they come across a tangle of shredded aluminum, wiring, and upholstery, it somehow grew out of the ground without human intervention.

    As for Yudkowski’s article, I did get the impression that it was meant to be jibberish, at least to a certain degree. To me, it made about this much sense:

    http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TranslationTrainWreck

  319. Brian Marshall on Wednesday, January 16 2013 at 8:07 pm said:
    > It is worth noting that the same effect could have been achieved by detonating one or both bombs in places other than civilian population centers

    No it would not have.

    After Hiroshima, the Japanese government held a cabinet meeting and unanimously agreed to fight to the last man.

    After the Nagasaki, the Japanese government held another cabinet meeting. During the meeting they were given false information that the Americans had hundreds of bombs rolling off the assembly lines, and were preparing to use them all. They were evenly split on whether to surrender, or whether to fight to the last man.

    The emperor then ordered surrender, and informed the cabinet he was going to broadcast the order generally – and shortly thereafter faced a coup attempt as elements of the army attempted to seize the emperor and the palace to prevent the order from being broadcast. The emperor put down the coup, and most of Japan’s military leaders “committed suicide”. After the “suicides”, the emperor was then able to order surrender.

    So with two nukes on population centers, and false information of a holocaust coming, it was still a very near thing.

    1. >So with two nukes on population centers, and false information of a holocaust coming, it was still a very near thing.

      I can certify that JAD’s facts are in this instance correct and well known to historians. The coup attept is remembered as the “Kyujo Incident”; the plotters actually tried to put the Emperor under house arrest.

      American military planners believed that the contemplated invasion of Japan, “Operation Olympic”, would cost somewhere around four million casualties, many of them Japanese civilians. Thus, the Nagasaki bomb was justifed under both the customary and formal law of war as the lesser use of force required to compel Japanese surrender. Which is further into this issue than I really wanted the thread to go.

      Dave Barry is a very funny man, but comedy is not ethical analysis.

  320. Omnibeneviolence
    didn’t seem like a word.
    I was going to say that I have heard Ayn Rand’s followers described as a cult, but
    I am not even sure that I would
    agree. Something that I would infer from the current thread ( of which
    I’ve read perhaps a
    3d ) is that cults have proliferated in the society. Capitalism, as an
    ideology and as a policy, may be unrelated to proliferation of cults. A
    person may join a cult without having many opinions about socialism.

  321. @Terry: You seem to believe the story of Noah and the Flood. Laying aside the fact that the Hebrews copied it from the Babylonians, who copied it from the Assyrians, who copied it from the Akkadians, who copied it from the Sumerians, please answer one question:

    After being saved in the Ark, and let out on the mountains of Ararat, how were all the egg-laying monotremes able to swim the Indian Ocean and end up in Australia? Wouldn’t that have been worse than the Flood itself?

  322. @ James A. Donald

    Re: both a-bombs needed to make a BIG point

    OK – learn something new every day. (I did know about the army attempting to prevent the Emperor from surrendering.)

  323. @Terry: Due to all the contrivances needed to get around the evidence that refuses to fit politely to Evolution’s model, it has actually gotten far more complex than Genesis Creationism.

    You obviously have a very different definition of “complexity” than I do, not to mention “contrivances needed to get around the evidence”.

    As for Yudkowski’s article, I did get the impression that it was meant to be jibberish, at least to a certain degree.

    I think that’s an extremely mistaken impression, but again, there’s not much point in arguing about it.

  324. lesser use of force

    I knew about that, but not why two were bombs were used.

    Dave Barry is a very funny man, but comedy is not ethical analysis.

    No, of course not. But I didn’t know why two bombs were used, so I used the quote to shake things up enough to be pretty sure my (implied) question was addressed (a sort of golden apple thing?) and to insert a little humor – one of my purposes in life.

  325. I find arguments about the justification of using the atomic weapons on Japan to be very much the sort of arguments I dislike. People who want to apply their arbitrary moralistic viewpoints without any reference to the pragmatic reality of the situation. In fact, pretty much my main criticism of religion.

    The plain fact is that we had a foretaste of an invasion of Japan at Okinawa where at least 10% and possibly 30% of the population of that tiny, tiny island were killed. There is no reason to think that it would have been any less brutal when the main islands were invaded, in fact there is good reason to believe it would have been worse. Regardless of American and Allied casualties, the number killed in that battle would undoubtedly have been two orders of magnitude more that were killed with the two bombings.

    As fate would have it, a storm at exactly the wrong time would also have made the invasion plans a disaster, and would have made things a lot worse.

    Which is to say America did Japan a HUGE favor by dropping the A bomb on them.

  326. esr on Wednesday, January 16 2013 at 9:19 pm said:
    > Nor do I have any issue with describing the nightmare in the Congo as at least in part a genocidal race war that happens to be black-on-black. In part – it’s more complicated than that. A lot of it is straight-up old-fashioned warlordism.

    That is like as saying that the terrorism against white Rhodesians was warlordism. You deny the obvious.

    The war in the Congo is not black on black warlordism, but progressivism against certain blacks.

    And why do progressives hate and demonize certain blacks? Well that is no secret at all: If you read any mainstream source on the genocide of the Jews in Germany it will say, plausibly enough, that the genocide the Jews was caused by Nazi racism, imperialism, etc, but if you read any mainstream source on the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, it will say, quite implausibly, that the genocide of the Tutsi was caused by Tutsi racism imperialism etc.

    The Tutsi government gets internationally condemned for failure to promote reconciliation with Hutus sufficiently vigorously, while somehow no one ever worries about promoting reconciliation with Tutsis.

    Similarly, when crimes are committed in the Congo by members of non Tutsi races, armed, organized, and funded by the international community against members of Tutsi races, these crimes are supposedly never evidence of non Tutsi racism, always evidence of Tutsi racism. Mainstream sources delicately refrain from mentioning who is committing these crimes, and who is funding and arming those who commit these crimes.

    And so do you. Joseph Kabila. is not a “warlord”. He is not a warlord because his army and government is armed and funded by the international community. When you call him a warlord, you excuse the crimes of those that you fear to criticize, and when you call it black on black war, as if it had nothing to do with us and neither side supported by the people here that you fear, you condemn the victims of those you fear to criticize.

    When you say “warlord” that is a pious evasive lie, like saying that “youths” committed an attack. A government funded and armed by progressives committed these crimes for progressive reasons, committed these crimes to suppress Tutsi “racism” in pretty much the same way that progressives set about suppressing Rhodesian “racism”.

    You even handedly condemn both sides, as on American streets the person getting the boot to his head gets even handedly condemned with the person putting the boot in, without mentioning the race of the one applying the boot, or the race of the one receiving the boot.

    > However, I am also not going to buy any theory about there being a stable genetic distinction between “superior” Tutsi vs. “inferior” Hutu. That is nothing but racist fantasy – they’ve been cohabiting and interbreeding too long for it to be anything else.

    Gould’s rationale: You would rather believe left wing ideology than your lying eyes. Even a white can see that Hutu and Tutsi are physically rather different. Does this mingling homogenize their insides, while somehow strangely failing to affect their outsides?

    As we saw with three spined sticklebacks, a high rate of interbreeding does not prevent two kinds from drifting further and further apart, and, in the case of three spined sticklebacks, we have two kinds that over the last several thousand years have drifted so far apart that they are obviously very different species, despite a high rate of interbreeding.

    If moderate levels of interbreeding prevented racial differentiation, if moderate levels of interbreeding could overcome differential selection, speciation would seldom happen.

    The fact that the “international community” is determined to erase Tutsi superiority by drastic means admits the superiority that is denied.

    Much as the fact that Madame Curie got two Nobel prizes for something that no one would remember if a man did it shows that women really are less capable of science, the fact that the international community has spent so much money and blood to bring Tutsis down to equality with other blacks shows that they really are superior to other blacks.

    1. > When you call him a warlord, you excuse the crimes of those that you fear to criticize, and when you call it black on black war, as if it had nothing to do with us and neither side supported by the people here that you fear, you condemn the victims of those you fear to criticize.

      I don’t fear to criticize anybody – something only a blithering idiot could fail to notice since 2009. Next to the Iranian mullahs I willingly cheesed off back then, Joseph “I’m the baddest baboon on the block” Kabila is small fry.

      But I didn’t name Kabila for a different and better reason; I was thinking more of the several and frequently-replaced half-bandit/half-chieftain faction leaders in the interior. They largely don’t give a crap about the Hutu-Tutsi war, which is mainly Rwanda-Burundi’s problem with some spillover into the eastern margins of the Congo. What they want is mostly to collect rent from mining operations, with a side order of rape and pillage as a hobby.

      I’ll give your fantasy about an international conspiracy to crush the Tutsis credit for at least being entertaining in a sort of perverse if-you-thought-the-Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion-were-funny mode. Dimwit, the transnational progressives don’t care enough about random clumps of black Africans to make that kind of effort; they only pretend to in order to guilt-trip useful idiots in the G8. And they never will care – unless maybe they could contrive a way for some outcome to injure the U.S., which fortunately has no strategic stakes there at all.

  327. Dave Barry is a very funny man, but comedy is not ethical analysis.

    Actually, as in this case, even though it seems that Dave Barry also didn’t know why two bombs were used, humor is either based on, or strikes at the heart of, ethical analysis. He didn’t analyze the ethics but he sure raised the subject in a way that I and many other people will never forget.

  328. > [JAD’s post]

    Meh, I need to go read the Illuminatus trilogy

    I strongly recommend the Illuminatus trilogy – I found it very inspiring.

    But why in relation to JAD’s post?

    1. >But why in relation to JAD’s post?

      Probably to wash out that taste. If you want wacko conspiracy theories, Shea & Wilson wrote a better grade of them forty years ago than JAD will ever manage.

  329. >I am irresistibly reminded of Molière’s play The Imaginary Invalid. In it, he lampoons a group of physicians explaining the sleep-inducing properties of opium as deriving from its “virtus dormitiva” – bad Latin for “sleep-inducing virtue”. Your “currently hidden mechanism” is exactly as silly as that, and in exactly the same way; it’s a non-explanation masquerading as an explanation and does nothing to make the question go away.

    I appreciate the response, but I didn’t intend my “hidden mechanism” to be an end-all explanation, since it leaves obvious unanswered questions. (I’m sorry for inadvertently presenting it that way.) It’s just that it’s the best explanation I have access to for the existence of people who kill while waving an ideological banner and also people who don’t.

    That latter case is exactly what continues to give me problems with the “ideology kills” notion – that, and the existence of capitalism and Theravada Buddhism (unless you somehow don’t consider those ideologies). I’ve *observed* people – many people – who waved such a banner, and never bombed anything. I can’t imagine you haven’t, and you’ve apparently thought about this enough to avoid the obvious errors, so the most reasonable explanation I have left on *that* front is that (a particular type of) ideology is necessary (in this context) to produce mass murderers, but not sufficient – which is as unsatisfying to me as my “hidden mechanism” apparently is to you. That someone espouses an ideology is only enough to put me at “yellow”, so to speak – I’m compelled to ask what else is enough to send me to “red”.

    (I’m inclined to bet this isn’t that far from you. After all, I’ve never seen you advocate disarming everyone who isn’t a capitalist Buddhist, to put it overly generally.)

    1. >It’s just that it’s the best explanation I have access to for the existence of people who kill while waving an ideological banner and also people who don’t.

      But it’s not an explanation. Not in any way at all. It merely replace the question “Why do some ideologies kill?” with the question “Why are some ideologies vulnerable to the hidden mechanism?”.

      Remember, I didn’t claim that all ideology kills. My whole point – which you resisted – is that the content matters. It’s not just humans being humans; some ideologies are predictably causative of violence, others are not. Specifically, collectivist ideologies cause violence – especially, chiliastic collectivisms like Communism, Naziism, Islam, Christianity – and, since it came up in another subthtread, Pure-Land Buddhism.

  330. @Eric “Naziism and Communism are not synonymous, but the differences between them are minor – and irrelevent to this thread.”

    I can live with that… minor – maybe. Irrelevent – heck no (lol). Irrelevant, yes ;)

    @LS ” Laying aside the fact that the Hebrews copied it from the Babylonians, who copied it from the Assyrians, who copied it from the Akkadians, who copied it from the Sumerians…”

    Hmm… time travel has been invented, it seems. It must have gone back in time at least twice in this sequence.

    @LS “how were all the egg-laying monotremes able to swim the Indian Ocean and end up in Australia?”

    No one has any trouble believing there was a land bridge between Alaska and Asia. Why should it be such a problem for Australia?

    @Peter “You obviously have a very different definition of ‘complexity’ than I do, not to mention ‘contrivances needed to get around the evidence’.”

    To each his own, I guess. I don’t have much of a retort on the contrivances bit obviously, except that the ones for Creation are less numerous and easier to swallow if you believe in a complex God.

    @Jessica “Which is to say America did Japan a HUGE favor by dropping the A bomb on them.”

    Be that as it may, I, and I’m sure a seven or eight figure of Japanese would stand with me, am rather offended that a large motivation for the use in anger of the first nuclear explosives was as the test series “Alberta” to subject about half a million largely innocent civilians to treatment as radiation guinea pigs, especially by the ABCC/RERF after the war.

  331. @esr: The most important ethical fact may have been that the U.S. chose not to drop the third one.

    According to the Wikipedia page on the Manhattan Project, there were actually several more expected:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project

    “Groves expected to have another atomic bomb ready for use on 19 August, with three more in September and a further three in October.”

    This reference is footnoted:

    http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/72.pdf

  332. Re: Illuminatus trilogy

    If you want wacko conspiracy theories, Shea & Wilson wrote a better grade of them forty years ago than JAD will ever manage.

    So true. Plus, a great hilariously discordant introduction to neopagan magic for rational people.

  333. esr on Thursday, January 17 2013 at 12:01 am said:
    > I don’t fear to criticize anybody
    >
    > I’ll give your fantasy about an international conspiracy to crush the Tutsis credit for at least being entertaining

    If you don’t fear to criticize anybody, here is are some questions you should easily be able to answer:

    What organization is terrorizing people by vaginally impaling women with large objects?

    Who is paying and arming that organization?

    Which people are being terrorized by seeing their women vaginally impaled with large objects?

    After those questions are answered, it should be perfectly obvious why women are being vaginally impaled

    If, strangely, you don’t know the answers to those questions you should wonder why you do not know. After all, when the Serbs were raping the Kosovars, everyone in the entire world knew who was raping, who was being raped, and why they were being raped, but with vaginal impalement, it is all a big mystery, just as the race and motive of the groups of “youths” that keep attacking other groups of “youths” is supposedly a big mystery.

  334. Oops, I forgot about the Daghlian incident and that they did have a fourth gadget. After that, though, the schedule was a bit sketchy according to more modern references. Apparently, this was due to issues in the plutonium production reactors at Hanford.

  335. @Terry
    “Due to all the contrivances needed to get around the evidence that refuses to fit politely to Evolution’s model, it has actually gotten far more complex than Genesis Creationism.”

    Sorry, evolution is simple, but the history of the earth is not. History never is simple.

    The surface of what happened in WWII has hardly been touched in this thread about why two A-bombs were dropped on Japan.

    Creationism is a “Just so story”.

    Why are there marsupials in Australia, and a single one in South America, and non elsewhere? Just so. Why do the great apes only live in Africa? Just so. Why do we have a wisdom tooth? Just so. Why look my mitochondria the same as those from an oak tree and like a member of the Rickettsiales bacterial family? Just so. Why is a squids eye build different than a whale’s eye? Just so.

    History is complex, but it explains something. Creationism is simple, but explains nothing at all.

  336. @JAD
    “After those questions are answered, it should be perfectly obvious why women are being vaginally impaled ”

    Remember why Dracula was called Vlad Tepes? Impaling is quite old. Gang raping women is older than war itself.

  337. Re: Burma, Theravada Buddhism, and mass slaughter

    I won’t claim a deep knowledge of Burmese history – but I’ve read (in Paul Johnson’s Birth of the Modern) that this ruler (I believe Johnson spelled it “Bhodawpaya”) was savage – and built “atonement pagodas” after slaughtering people, as the Europeans used to build chantries.

  338. > Much as the fact that Madame Curie got two Nobel prizes for something that no one would remember if a man did it shows that women really are less capable of science, the fact that the international community has spent so much money and blood to bring Tutsis down to equality with other blacks shows that they really are superior to other blacks.

    http://xkcd.com/896/

    Also, the first Nobel prize of Marie Curie was shared with two men, all things aside.

  339. A question. If religion stimulates mass murders, why have the Netherlands not seen ideologically driven mass murders since the 17th century?

    We do have our own bible belt.
    I am really curious about the answer.

  340. > > Much as the fact that Madame Curie got two Nobel prizes for something that no one would remember if a man did it

    Jakub Narebski on Thursday, January 17 2013 at 3:32 am said:
    > http://xkcd.com/896/

    The story of Lise Meitner is of course a lie, and the fact that they have to tell such lies is further proof that women are incapable of science:

    Fortunately we have the correspondence between Hahn and Meitner:

    Hahn did the experiment showing nuclear fission, Meitner did not, Hahn drew the correct conclusion from his experiment, Meitner did not, Hahn published the results, Meitner did not, and, surprise surprise, Hahn got the Nobel and Meitner did not.

    The lie is that Meitner had the brilliant idea that Hahn’s results were indicative of nuclear fission – that Hahn got the bright idea of nuclear fission from Meitner.

    “The historical development of quantum theory”
    By Jagdish Mehra, Helmut Rechenberg, page 1001

    You can find it in google books:

    On Page 1001, we find direct quotes from the letters between Meitner and Hahn.

    Hahn writes to Meitner that his results are strange because “it should not break up”, implying that what he observes is uranium atoms breaking up when hit by a neutron.

    Meitner responds that Hahn’s results must be experimental error. “The assumption of far reaching smashing appears to me to be rather problematic.

    Hahn disagrees, and tells Meitner he is going to publish that uranium atoms are breaking up.

    He sends a paper to Naturwissenshaften reporting atom smashing – what we now call nuclear fission.

    He sends a copy of that paper to Meitner.

    After receiving that paper, and only after receiving that paper, then Meitner “discovers” nuclear fission.

    Gee, if he had sent me a copy, I could have “discovered” it also.

    It is obvious that women cannot do this stuff, everyone knows it. Observe how in practice all the politically correct quietly act as if women in science all got there by affirmative action, just as all the politically correct quietly follow John Derbyshire’s advice. and just as Esr does not want to know who is doing the sexual mutilations in the Congo.

    Everyone is lying about what they believe, because they fear punishment were they to speak their true beliefs. Only women are allowed to say what everyone thinks about women bosses.

  341. @JAD
    “Everyone is lying about what they believe,…”

    The mark of insanity.

    Actually, you were not there, you have not visited these labs, not spoken to the people. When given an example of achievement of people you do not know from places you have never visited, you just make up some story to fit your preconceptions. And you never believe a scientist when she writes something you do not want to believe.

    So, what makes you different from a random Creationist, biblical or Muslim fundamentalist? I cannot find much.

  342. @JAD
    > > “After those questions are answered, it should be perfectly obvious why women are being vaginally impaled ”

    Winter on Thursday, January 17 2013 at 1:58 am said:
    > Remember why Dracula was called Vlad Tepes? Impaling is quite old. Gang raping women is older than war itself.

    The military purpose of sexually degrading the enemy is, of course, to lower the self esteem of the enemy population, and raise the self esteem of another group.

    In our schools, the progressives seek to lower the self esteem of males and raise the self esteem of females, to lower the self esteem of whites and raise the self esteem of blacks. They have long been working on a similar project with Tutsis and related races, using similarly non violent means, means piously called democracy, justice, and so forth, but lately the Tutsis have declined to play ball, with the result that things have escalated from politics to war, from the normal progressive politics of supposedly being nice while loudly and nastily accusing your opponents are not being nice, to politics by other means.

    Seems that telling the Tutsis they were not being nice stopped working, so firmer measures were needed.

  343. @JAD
    “In our schools, the progressives seek to lower the self esteem of males and raise the self esteem of females, to lower the self esteem of whites and raise the self esteem of blacks.”

    More likely you are projecting your own school traumas onto other people. I doubt it very much whether you actually know much about school systems outside of the USA.

    As usual, you yell louder the less you understand the topic.

  344. @JAD
    > > “Everyone is lying about what they believe,…”

    Winter on Thursday, January 17 2013 at 5:11 am said:
    > Actually, you were not there, you have not visited these labs, not spoken to the people.

    I have been to some labs and spoken to enough people. No one believes what they claim to believe. Their words are discrepant with their deeds, and their words, like esr’s, are internally inconsistent. It is like the latter days of the Soviet Union. Only fear holds things together.

  345. @JAD
    “I have been to some labs and spoken to enough people. No one believes what they claim to believe. Their words are discrepant with their deeds, and their words, like esr’s, are internally inconsistent. It is like the latter days of the Soviet Union. Only fear holds things together.”

    I am pretty sure I spoke to more top scientists and visited more labs than you.

    And the scientists I spoke believed what they claimed. Their papers were in line with their experiments. And they had no fear for anything related to their field of study. And many of the top scientists were women who had made top achievements in their field. Before your start, I witnessed in person that they earned their statue.

    So, why should I even start to believe your rants? Or believe anything else you write is not equally deluded?

    An advice for innocent readers passing by. If you doubt about my words, try for yourself. Just visit any scientific gathering or lab and talk to the scientists. If there is anything they like, it is talking about their studies. Just do not insult their intelligence with conspiracy theories.

  346. > And many of the top scientists were women who had made top achievements in their field

    They are top bureaucrats, not top scientists. That your poster girls are Lise Meitner and Marie Curie shows you have not got any genuine poster girls.

    Everyone knows it, and no one dares say it.

  347. @JAD
    “They are top bureaucrats, not top scientists.”

    Nope, hard-core experimentalists. You simply do not want to know.

    But hey, that is my experience against your prejudice. When someone comes up with and example, say Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, you simply fabricate some stupid story.

    And your claims of affirmative action in the 1920 towards women scientists is simply ludicrous.

  348. >But why in relation to JAD’s post?

    His raving sounds just like a conspiracy theorist who has driven himself insane* with the subject, they *always* have that 60 cycle hum.

    I actually haven’t read illuminatus, I only know of it by reputation.

    * Does anyone know what causes conspiracy theorists to go insane?

  349. @Foo
    “Does anyone know what causes conspiracy theorists to go insane?”

    The question is actually, can you acquire paranoia pathology by harboring paranoid believes?

    Sounds like a chicken egg problem.

  350. @Winter: Creationism is simple

    Not really. It *looks* simple because, as I pointed out to Terry, all the complexity is hidden inside the Creator. That’s where the “just so” ultimately comes from: “the Creator wanted it that way.”

  351. @Peter Donis
    That was the way I understood it.

    The “Simple” part is that a Creationist does not have to explain or understand anything:
    “His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts”

    Q: Why is it so that X?
    A: Because He made it so

    No need to actually walk into the field and look what happens. Just read some old commentaries.

  352. >Remember, I didn’t claim that all ideology kills. My whole point – which you resisted – is that the content matters. It’s not just humans being humans; some ideologies are predictably causative of violence, others are not. Specifically, collectivist ideologies cause violence – especially, chiliastic collectivisms like Communism, Naziism, Islam, Christianity – and, since it came up in another subthtread, Pure-Land Buddhism.

    Maybe I’m not saying it right…

    If you’re saying such ideologies will predictably cause mass violence by someone in the set of people following that ideology, I have little problem with that claim (even if it’s strengthened to claim multiple members); I’m trying to claim merely that there also exist members of that set who will never embark on mass violence, and that that’s evident to me from empirical observation. You can point out flaws in my “explanations” all you like, but yours doesn’t agree with my damn data! Am I not supposed to trust my own senses now? This is getting genuinely frustrating. What’s the missing information?

  353. @Paul Brinkley
    ” I’m trying to claim merely that there also exist members of that set who will never embark on mass violence, and that that’s evident to me from empirical observation.”

    I agree. I can point to a few centuries of no mass violence by Christian fundamentalists in the Netherlands.

    That is even more remarkable as we had a bloody religious civil war before in the 16-17th century. During the same period, our compatriots were abusing and murdering lots of people in our colonies for economic reasons. Actions that would now be squarely under the headings of “war crimes” and “genocide”.

    1. >I can point to a few centuries of no mass violence by Christian fundamentalists in the Netherlands.

      Give it time. The acute form of the mass insanity can go dormant for long periods. Even Islam has had quiet centuries.

  354. >Give it time. The acute form of the mass insanity can go dormant for long periods of time. Even Islam has quiet periods.

    “There will at some time be an explosion of mass murderousness” isn’t a very powerful prediction.

  355. @Winter: The “Simple” part is that a Creationist does not have to explain or understand anything

    I definitely agree, I just wanted to clarify.

  356. @JAD
    >Much as the fact that Madame Curie got two Nobel prizes for something that no one would remember if a man did it shows that women really are less capable of science,

    JAD, you seriously can’t see the logical flaws just dripping out of this stupid statement?

  357. @Winter
    > A question. If religion stimulates mass murders, why have the Netherlands not seen ideologically driven mass murders since the 17th century?

    Because there isn’t enough room in Holland to store a cache of weapons? Because it rains so much, that raging in the streets isn’t as much fun when you are drenched to the skin? Perhaps running through the streets raping, pillaging is tricky in those weird shoes? Perhaps burning heritics at the stake is more dangerous when your footwear is made of wood?

    Or perhaps that religion is not the only thing that affects memetics. There is a national culture as well which has been very pro tolerance in The Netherlands for a long time. Perhaps when one is tiny, and surrounded by adversaries who could readily squash you like a bug it seems wise to advocate a philosophy of live and let live? Perhaps also because the Netherlands has always been crossroads of Europe, and consequently always a pretty eclectic mix.

  358. “Creationism is simple, but explains nothing at all.”

    @Winter:
    No, it’s not simple. Look at the complicated bullsh*t stories that Terry has had to make up in order to save appearances. A land bridge between the Middle East and Australia?

  359. @LS ” Laying aside the fact that the Hebrews copied it from the Babylonians, who copied it from the Assyrians, who copied it from the Akkadians, who copied it from the Sumerians…”

    “Hmm… time travel has been invented, it seems. It must have gone back in time at least twice in this sequence.”

    @Terry:
    Sumer started ca. 4000BC
    Akkad ca. 2200BC
    Assyria ca. 1200BC
    Babylon ca. 800BC

    Look it up. No time travel needed.

  360. @JAD
    >The military purpose of sexually degrading the enemy is, of course, to lower the self esteem of the enemy population, and raise the self esteem of another group.

    “Of course” is not generally speaking considered sufficient proof of a claim like this. I think it is extremely unlikely to be true in general. Sex, including rape is just the prize of domination. The biological urges of humans aren’t much different than of other animals, especially in the unconstrained pathos of war, and in the animal kingdom the victor in the fight, the alpha male, gets to do all the fucking.

    Which isn’t to say rape isn’t used as a terror weapon. It is. But I doubt it is even a tiny fraction of the purpose of rape during war.

    > In our schools, the progressives seek to lower the self esteem of males and raise the self esteem of females, to lower the self esteem of whites and raise the self esteem of blacks.

    That is also nonsense. The schools are screwed up for sure, but I don’t think anyone (or hardly anyone) is actually consciously trying to degrade the self esteem of anyone. You might think that that is the result, but I know of no reason to believe that the lowering of anyone’s self esteem is on any serious agenda.

  361. I had another question. Is there a story about what happened to the compass rose from
    Philadelphia’s city hall. I wondered if it might have been appropriated by a private citizen.

  362. @Paul Brinkley
    > [@esr]
    >>Remember, I didn’t claim that all ideology kills. My whole point – which you resisted –
    >>is that the content matters. It’s not just humans being humans; some ideologies are
    >>predictably causative of violence, others are not. Specifically, collectivist ideologies cause
    >>violence – especially, chiliastic collectivisms like Communism, Naziism, Islam,
    >>Christianity – and, since it came up in another subthtread, Pure-Land Buddhism.

    >Maybe I’m not saying it right…

    >If you’re saying such ideologies will predictably cause mass violence by someone in
    >the set of people following that ideology, I have little problem with that claim (even if it’s
    >strengthened to claim multiple members); I’m trying to claim merely that there also exist
    >members of that set who will never embark on mass violence, and that that’s evident to
    >me from empirical observation. You can point out flaws in my “explanations” all you like,
    >but yours doesn’t agree with my damn data! Am I not supposed to trust my own
    >senses now? This is getting genuinely frustrating. What’s the missing information?

    May I paraphrase each of you? I think Eris is essentially saying that belief in certain ideologies is a necessary precursor to mass violence; Paul is essentially agreeing, but also saying that it is not a sufficient precursor, and is wondering what also has to be added (or already present) for violence to erupt.

    Did I get each of you right?

    If so, I, like Paul, wonder if Eric has any insight into that “other piece”. Not every sincere ideologue becomes another Pol Pot* – what makes the ones that do go that way do so?

    (* not using the traditional example to avoid Godwin’s Law)

    1. >If so, I, like Paul, wonder if Eric has any insight into that “other piece”.

      I wouldn’t say that chiliastic collectivism is either necessary or sufficient in a logical sense. Think Bayesian conditional probability, not Aristotelian binary logic: if a population is saturated with chiliastic collectivist ideology, then the conditional probability of acute mass insanity and atrocities becomes extremely high. The fact that some individuals have personalities that immunize them from the insanity is irrelevant. If I’m a kulak in the Ukraine in 1930 the fact that 5% or 10% of my neighbors aren’t infected is not going to save me – in fact, they’re my most likely co-victims.

      My original point was that these outbreaks of mass insanity are not just humans being randomly vile. In each and every case about which we know enough to speak of motives, the reports of the people who survived the violence and the reports of the aggressors are clear. These massacres happen because the pogromists believe insane things that they have been taught by an insane ideology. Humans being randomly vile produces only sporadic low-level violence; it takes a diseased belief system to produce mass atrocities.

      The kind of belief system that generates atrocities is consistent. It is faith-holding (that is, emotionally fixated on unprovable or false claims to the exclusion of evidence). It is collectivist (that is, elevates groups or abstractions above individual liberty). It is chiliastic (that is, promises millenial bliss providing certain corrupting or blocking elements are removed). It is reliably associated with either monotheistic religion or a secular ideology such as Marxism (or its minor variant, Fascism) that produces a psychology of belief identical to that of monotheistic religion.

      The Netherlands is an example of a place where history and hard-won social capital have successfully prevented such outbreaks, because the chiliastic faith-holder percentage of the population has been low. The Netherlands is now doing its best to destroy that fragile peace by encouraging the unrestricted immigration of Muslims and failing to assimilate them to Western norms of religious tolerance. The murder of Theo van Gogh was the merest foretaste of the consequences.

  363. @John D. Bell
    ” Not every sincere ideologue becomes another Pol Pot* – what makes the ones that do go that way do so?”

    Absolute power?

    “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
    Lord Acton (1887)

  364. @ myself at 1:22 PM –

    … that would be Eric, not Eris …

    although She might have a word or two to say about ideologies and crazy, come to think of it.

  365. Yes, John, I think you see my points, and what my unanswered question is as well. Just as you said: not every true believer turns into a dictator (although he might make one more likely). And you got what *I* think Eric is saying, now – hopefully he will return and confirm or refute.

    (I’m a bit surprised I’ve had this much trouble – I usually find Eric’s points clear. Maybe I’m low on coffee.)

    I keep wondering if maybe I chose words poorly by referring to a “hidden mechanism”. It’s not like I think it’s secret Raelians or anything like that. Just brain chemistry I don’t understand yet. I don’t think it’s that controversial (pre-determinism issues aside – those *do* give me concern).

  366. Jessica Boxer on Thursday, January 17 2013 at 12:13 pm said:
    > “Of course” is not generally speaking considered sufficient proof of a claim like this. I think it is extremely unlikely to be true in general. Sex, including rape is just the prize of domination

    Sure, it is standard procedure to pay one’s soldiers in women when the cash is running low, or has been embezzled, as in Africa it frequently is, but impaling women with large objects is primarily intimidation and degradation, not a reward for troops.

    One the whole it appears more common to use rape as an instrument to subdue enemy populations, than to use it in lieu of pay. Extraordinary practices, such as impalement, are clearly intended to subdue enemy populations, rather than intended in lieu of pay.

  367. @JAD
    The common practice in the region has always been jacking pieces from people. A practice introduced by the Belgiums and French it seems.

    I can see soldiers got bored hacking off arms and legs. Impaling seems to be a new fashion.

    As far as I know, the Tutsi government of Ruanda is supporting a collection of war groups in Eastern Congo. Not really the good guys.

  368. Jessica Boxer on Thursday, January 17 2013 at 12:13 pm said:
    > I don’t think anyone (or hardly anyone) is actually consciously trying to degrade the self esteem of anyone

    If members of group A typically think they are better than members of group B, the response is to attack those qualities in which they are better, and officially attribute to individual members of group A faults analogous to or closely related to virtues characteristic of group A – for example shut down physical activities at recess, and indeed shut down recess, because the boys tend to be better at it than girls.

    Observe, for example, that boys, on average, score slightly better on any objective test of learned material. To correct this, subjective academic rankings always favor girls. The teacher ostentatiously nominates certain students as the best, and the supposedly top five or so are typically girls, even though it is highly improbable that this quite startlingly one sided ratio reflects academic genuine merit. This manifests as the SAT saying one thing, and the GPA saying a different thing, even though these days the SAT is intended to measure the same material as the GPA.

    If the supposedly top five people in the class are girls, it is pretty obvious that male academic achievement is being ignored, that boys are being marked down for being male. One might suppose that boys are just naturally stupid and nasty, and whenever the discrepancy in GPA is discussed, that is pretty much the official line, but SAT and LSAT shows it is not true.

    Stereotypically male activities are denigrated and de-emphasized, collectively lowering male status, while individual males have their individual performance ignored, individually lowering male status case by case. Boys are punished, girls are not punished for similar or equivalent behavior. It is not plausible that the supposed top of the class should be so disproportionately female, nor that those needing punishment be so disproportionately male.

    One might suppose that testosterone predisposes to bad behavior, and likely that is true of bad behavior that consists of physically fighting, but direct tests on this show that testosterone predisposes to manly behavior, such as speaking the truth, and not cheating, honorable behavior, that when some university students were given testosterone and other students a placebo, and then given a task on which there was an opportunity to misbehave, the they behaved better on testosterone than on placebo.

    It is common sense and casual observation that females behave worse than males in non violent forms of misconduct, and testosterone has been shown to improve conduct, at least where it is honor related rather than peace related, so again, it is improbable that the disproportion in punishment reflects real male misconduct. Boys are being punished to show that they are inferior to girls.

    In school, case by case, girls are encouraged, boys are discouraged. Physical activity is deemed bad behavior in boys and athletics in girls. Academic achievement in boys is unacknowledged. The discrepancy between SAT and GPA confirms what should be obvious to your eyes.

  369. esr on Thursday, January 17 2013 at 10:12 am said:
    > The acute form of the mass insanity can go dormant for long periods. Even Islam has had quiet centuries.

    The only quiet century of which I am aware was 1830 to 1960, when the colonialists quieted Islam by extraordinarily drastic means. Do you have some other period that I have missed?

    1. >The only quiet century of which I am aware was 1830 to 1960, when the colonialists quieted Islam by extraordinarily drastic means. Do you have some other period that I have missed?

      Yes. There was a quiet period of about a century around the year 1000. The Mu’utazilite (rationalist) school was at its height. The veil and strict purdah had not yet been imported from Persia. These were the years of Haroun al-Rashid and the Thousand and One Nights; Islamic art and science achieved heights they would never again attain. It was all ended by the occasionalist theology of Abu Hamed al-Ghazali, the second most effective civilization-wrecker in history after Karl Marx.

  370. Winter:
    > And your claims of affirmative action in the 1920 towards women scientists is simply ludicrous.

    People were saying that something must be done about the under representation of women in science and engineering all the way back to 1865, which inclines me to believe that they were doing something.

    It is often said that we had affirmative action as soon as we ended segregation, but this is not true. Segregation in substantial part was affirmative action. There were black universities, and graduates got jobs as black judges and black lawyers to administer the law in black communities. Segregation protected the white working class from black competition, but it also protected the black business class from white competition. In the nineteenth century as today, black intellectuals were made into poster boys, for example John Jacob Thomas, the originator of what we would now call ebonics.

  371. @ John D. Bell

    Godwin’s Law, as in “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” is fine.

    The idea that any analogy involving Nazis should be avoided and/or kill the tread is ridiculous if the (somewhat mutated) subject of the tread is nut cases rising to power and causing mass violence involving killing many (, MANY) people, and the Nazis are the best example to make a point. (Just don’t use it when talking about burglars or a handful of rape cases or spotted owls.)

    I think Eris is essentially saying that belief in certain ideologies is a necessary precursor to mass violence;…

    …that would be Eric, not Eris…

    [;-)> I think that you are basically right about Eris as well – thus the need for discord to shake up and disrupt the bad guys and shake up everyone else so that hopefully more will start using their brains. <;-)]

  372. @ Jessica

    Because there isn’t enough room in Holland to store a cache of weapons? Because it rains so much, that raging in the streets isn’t as much fun when you are drenched to the skin? Perhaps running through the streets raping, pillaging is tricky in those weird shoes? Perhaps burning heritics at the stake is more dangerous when your footwear is made of wood?

    Wonderful… There is nothing like ridiculous humor to get people to pay attention to a serious point.

    Or perhaps that religion is not the only thing that affects memetics. There is a national culture as well which has been very pro tolerance in The Netherlands for a long time. Perhaps when one is tiny, and surrounded by adversaries who could readily squash you like a bug it seems wise to advocate a philosophy of live and let live?

    Ditto for Canada.

  373. @JAD
    > > Much as the fact that Madame Curie got two Nobel prizes for something that no one would remember if a man did it shows that women really are less capable of science,

    Jessica Boxer on Thursday, January 17 2013 at 11:07 am said:
    > JAD, you seriously can’t see the logical flaws just dripping out of this stupid statement?

    If people make a big fuss over a dancing bear, this implies that they believe that bears cannot dance. By showering Marie Curie with honors, they sought to draw attention to her real and imaginary accomplishments, but by showering her with honors they drew attention to the fact that they had far lower expectations of a woman than of a man. Her achievement was only remarkable in that a woman did it, much as it would be remarkable for a trained chimp to ride a bicycle.

    And their failure to come up with better poster girls (Winter proposes top science bureaucrats and Lise Meitner) shows there are no better poster girls. If women could do top science, you would by now have a pile of science poster girls more impressive than Marie Curie.

    Similarly, observe the black poster boy intellectuals. The twenty first century black poster boy intellectuals are not a big improvement on the nineteenth century black poster boy intellectuals, and the nineteenth century black poster boy intellectuals are unremarkable. They are smart enough, but for the most part people only notice them because they are smart for a black man, much as people are wowed by Obama’s ability to read from a teleprompter without mucking up the long sentences too often.

    1. >If women could do top science, you would by now have a pile of science poster girls more impressive than Marie Curie.

      There is, unfortunately, some point to this. The average IQ of women is very slightly below the average IQ of men, but depending on what study you believe the difference is either statistically insignificant or just barely significant, not enough to account for the near absence of women in the top echelon. The killer is the difference in dispersion; the IQ distribution of white males is wider than of white females (and of both male and female nonwhites). Thus, the white male population has a disproportionate share of the people at both extreme ends of the IQ distribution – both geniuses and idiots. (Male Jews as a population have the double advantage of higher average IQ and higher dispersion.)

      While this doesn’t exclude “poster girls more impressive than Marie Curie” (and I have a better opinion of her than JAD does) it means we can statistically expect they will be quite rare. One carefully-worked-out estimate I know I’ve mentioned before is that a female mathematician capable enough to win a Fields Medal will come along about once a century. I don’t know exactly how far off the median Nobel Prize winners are as a group, but my informed guess is that the expected interval between female Nobelists is also on the close order of a century – perhaps a bit less. JAD is correct that a frequency significantly higher than that would suggest political deck-stacking, but I don’t know what the observed frequency is.

      No, institutional prejudice does not explain these figures. Prejudice is effective at suppressing average and moderately gifted people, much less so at stopping the exceptionally bright – who, especially in the last 200 years, tend to get adopted as poster children because they’re good at gaming for that response (that is, when they don’t simply drive the dimwits around them like cattle). Thus, the high right-hand end of the ability distribution is least hindered by prejudice. (This argument is informal but there is statistical evidence for it.)

      On the other hand…about two weeks ago I met the scariest-bright new acquaintance I’ve made in the last five or six years at least. Take that description seriously because my social network is stiff with geniuses and the highly gifted. This one, who had me picking my jaw off up off the floor from about three minutes after we started talking, is both black and female.

      Bell curves are not individuals. It is important never to forget this.

  374. The proposition that colonizers introduced equilibrium where it was hitherto unknown
    has been disputed.

  375. esr on Thursday, January 17 2013 at 4:49 pm said:
    > Yes. There was a quiet period [in Islam] of about a century around the year 1000. The Mu’utazilite (rationalist) school was at its height. The veil and strict purdah had not yet been imported from Persia. These were the years of Haroun al-Rashid and the Thousand and One Nights; Islamic art and science achieved heights they would never again attain. It was all ended by the occasionalist theology of Abu Hamed al-Ghazali, the second most effective civilization-wrecker in history after Karl Marx.

    Some time around one thousand ad was indeed the height of Islamic culture and civilization, but it was not all that quiet:

    1000 AD would be the rule of Al-Hakim bi Amr al-L?h, known to non Muslims and a great many Muslims as “The mad Caliph” whose cruelty, sacrilege, and religious delusions were forever afterwards the justification for the crusades.

    I suppose he was quiet enough in that he was massacring internal minorities, not external majorities. It was indeed a period when Islam was at peace with Dar al Harb. However, the middle eastern period of colonial domination, from 1830 to 1960, was the only period when Dhimmis did OK.

    I would not call a period that for near a thousand years has been used as justification for non Muslims to resist Islam, and which permanently discredited the Caliphate among Muslims, all that quiet. Relatively quiet, I suppose.

  376. dotpaw on Thursday, January 17 2013 at 5:47 pm said:
    > The proposition that colonizers introduced equilibrium where it was hitherto unknown
    has been disputed.

    Has been demonized, rather than disputed, denounced as evil rather than false.

    For eye witness testimony, I recommend “Translations from the Hakayit Abdulla, with comments by J.T. Thomson” which describes the colonialists as what libertarians and public choice theorists would now call stationary bandits, and the native rulers as what libertarians and public choice theorists would now call mobile bandits.

  377. cruelty, sacrilege, and religious delusions
    No one is asking for sources to be fabricated supporting the
    claims made here, but respected historians will cringe.

  378. @ ESR

    >If women could do top science, you would by now have a pile of science poster girls more impressive than Marie Curie.

    How about the idea that many (great) scientists, like hackers, come from the part of the population that gets obsessed with some particular idea or subject to the exclusion of almost everything else, and that boys and men have this trait more than girls and women?

    1. >How about the idea that many (great) scientists, like hackers, come from the part of the population that gets obsessed with some particular idea or subject to the exclusion of almost everything else, and that boys and men have this trait more than girls and women?

      For our explanatory purposes, it does not actually matter very much whether the relevant statistic is IQ alone or IQ plus some measure of other personality cofactors that are differentially found in males. The important features are the relative means and dispersions of the resulting curves.

      In fact, any such cofactor-X theory lowers the odds that differences in achievement are due to exogenous forces like institutional prejudice and makes genuine, earned female excellence in the sciences and mathematics less likely rather than more. It might be that some such theory is true – but that’s not usually the outcome people proposing such theories are hoping for.

      As usual, fighting the idea that IQ is important lands you in a worse pickle than accepting it.

  379. @esr: I don’t know what the observed frequency is.

    This site lists all the Nobel winners and gives some totals:

    http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/all/

    A total of 863 individual Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 835 recipients. Assuming that nobody has gotten one more than twice (AFAIK that’s true), that means 28 people have received two Nobels, and 807 have received one.

    Elsewhere on the same site they give the numbers for women: 44 prizes have been awarded to 43 women recipients, meaning that only one woman (Marie Curie) has received two prizes, and 42 have received one.

    So the stats look like this, for a period of 112 years (1901 to 2012, inclusive):

    * 42 women out of 807 people have received one Nobel, or 5.2 percent.

    * 1 woman out of 28 people has received two Nobels, or 3.6 percent.

    This suggests that if the null hypothesis (no political deck-stacking in Nobels) is true, a Fields Medal is more or less equivalent to winning *two* Nobels, not one. That actually makes some sense, since the pool of potential Fields Medal winners is smaller–you can’t be past your 40th birthday on 1 January of the year of award–and there are fewer such medals awarded since they are only awarded every four years. I count 52 total recipients from 1936 to 2010 listed on the Wikipedia page, all of whom are men:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal

    1. >This suggests that if the null hypothesis (no political deck-stacking in Nobels) is true, a Fields Medal is more or less equivalent to winning *two* Nobels, not one.

      Well analyzed! 2:1 is near the high end of the ratios I would consider credible, but in the right range.

  380. a Fields Medal is more or less equivalent to winning *two* Nobels, not one

    Actually, I mis-stated this a bit: the null hypothesis requires that winning a Fields Medal is *harder* than winning two Nobels, since 1 woman of 28 people has won two Nobels, but no women have yet won a Fields Medal with 52 winners.

  381. Having sat through the Landmark Forum, I think I’m qualified to say that I think you bailing so quickly pretty much disqualifies you from knowing what you’re talking about. Admitted, they do a hard sell, because it’s the only way they advertise … kind of like network marketing/Amway. And the Forum could be easily summarized in 15 minutes … there’s a lot of sales pitches, and some nice teaching context on how to look at your life. But it basically comes down to this …
    1. The past is the past, get over it. You probably don’t remember what really happened anyway, just your interpretation of what happened.
    2. You’ve probably dragged a lot of that past history around and are letting it influence your behavior now in negative ways. Don’t. Your brain looks for reinforcement of those events in every little thing, and it becomes your truth. It isn’t true though.
    3. Live in the moment.
    4. Don’t procrastinate, you may not be here tomorrow.
    5. Give your lif the meaning you want it to have, because that’s all there is.

    Not very cultish. You are such a whiner. Get over yourself.

  382. subject of the tread is nut cases rising to power and causing mass violence involving killing many (, MANY) people, and the Nazis are the best example to make a point.

    Actually if you’re making a point about killing many people (generic) then i seem to recall someone showing that Stalin had the Nazi’s beat. The thing that distinguished Stalin from Hitler is that Hitler would have (theoretically) killed his most valuable supporter for being Jewish, whereas Stalin killed those who political/ideological enemies (or just inconvenient).

  383. @ESR – “My original point was that these outbreaks of mass insanity are not just humans being randomly vile . . . These massacres happen because the pogromists believe insane things that they have been taught by an insane ideology.”

    Game theory modeling has demonstrated that certain types of memetic conditioning can reach a critical mass in threatened populations, and lead to runaway destructive behavior. The resultant population reduction often has the effect of lessening the original threat and restoring balance to the system.

  384. James A. Donald:
    > > cruelty, sacrilege, and religious delusions
    dotpaw on Thursday, January 17 2013 at 6:17 pm said:
    > No one is asking for sources to be fabricated supporting the claims made here, but respected historians will cringe.

    “A History of Egypt: in the middle ages” By Stanley Lane-Poole, who is surely a respected historian
    http://books.google.com/books?id=OzUix2rKFqwC&pg=PA131&lpg=PA134 depicts the mad caliph as mad, evil, and sacrilegious, desecrating both things sacred to Christians, and things sacred to Muslims.

  385. Stereotypically male activities are denigrated and de-emphasized, collectively lowering male status, while individual males have their individual performance ignored, individually lowering male status case by case.

    Can you make this assertion concrete? Because thinking of any school system I have heard of, the most obvious “male activity” is “football” (of whatever kind is dominant in the individual school context. E.G. Gridiron in the american context). Which is frequently and repeatedly accused of being a breeding ground of people to whom “the rules don’t apply”.

    Note that the only equivalent I can think of (Cheerleading… although that doesn’t really appear in my culture) has much the same reputation, showing to me that there’s (as usual) less difference between the sexes in aggregate than might be expected.

  386. ““A History of Egypt: in the middle ages” By Stanley Lane-Poole …depicts the mad caliph as mad…””
    You have me on that. At least it is a plausible character study of a single
    man.

  387. @esr: Well analyzed!

    Thanks!

    2:1 is near the high end of the ratios I would consider credible, but in the right range.

    I think some of the difference is due to the fact that the stats I quoted include all the Nobels, including the non-scientific ones, which are much more subject to political correctness in their award methodology. I’m trying to pull separate stats for just the science prizes now.

  388. Ok, here are stats for just the science Nobels–physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine. I didn’t include the prize in economic sciences because it’s only been awarded since 1968 and I wanted to have stats all covering the same time period, 1901-2012.

    554 people total have been awarded at least one Nobel science prize. 2 of them have received 2 prizes in the same category (1 of them in physics, 1 in chemistry). No data is given for how many people received 2 prizes in different categories, but assuming that the ratio is the same as for the total of all prizes that I gave before, we would estimate 28/835 * 554 people total have received 2 prizes, or 19 people total (including the 2 who got one in the same category, plus an estimated 17 others who got 2 prizes in different categories).

    15 women total have been awarded at least one Nobel science prize; only one (Marie Curie) has received 2 prizes.

    So the stats are:

    * 14 women out of 533 people have received one Nobel science prize, or 2.6 percent.

    * 1 woman out of 19 people has received two Nobel science prizes, or 5.3 percent.

    IMO this makes it considerably more likely that Marie Curie winning two science prizes is not consistent with the null hypothesis. (The number of women winning one science prize still seems reasonable to me under the null hypothesis; if Marie Curie had only won one she would not be an outlier.)

    1. >(The number of women winning one science prize still seems reasonable to me under the null hypothesis; if Marie Curie had only won one she would not be an outlier.)

      When I read this, it rang faint bells. Then louder ones.

      I realized why while in the shower just now. A very long time ago, as a child, I read a biographical precis of Marie Curie’s scientific work. And thought: Over the whole span, one Nobel is reasonable. A second seems excessive.

      Huh. I guess I had a pretty good feel for these things even then.

  389. @Winter “Sorry, evolution is simple, but the history of the earth is not. History never is simple.”

    I have a directory full of huge PDF files and none of them are about history, but theory and experiment (mostly unsuccessful), not history, so I am certainly not about to buy “Sorry, evolution is simple.”

    @Winter “The ‘Simple’ part is that a Creationist does not have to explain or understand anything:
    ‘His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts’ [citation needed]”

    Maybe I don’t have to, but I have, and you (and Peter) damn well know it. Isaiah 55:8 aside, you decide to simply cop out and say that anyway. Ignore that I mentioned a Christian (and Creationist) scientist, quite possibly the most famous black scientist ever and what he explained and understood. Don’t even use him as an example to add to your curbstomping of JAD and his racist ideas.

    @Winter “Creationism is a ‘Just so story’.”

    If you’re going to reduce multiple three screen posts of mine to “just so” without successfully refuting a single point I have made, you’re wasting my connection bandwidth. If you’re going to answer all the questions you should actually be asking me (or better yet, ask ICR, they’ve spent years answering them) by typing “Just so.” before even hitting the “Post Comment” button, it is a complete and total waste of my time to talk or listen to you. Go home.

    @Peter “That’s where the ‘just so’ ultimately comes from: ‘the Creator wanted it that way.'”

    I suppose this could make sense of why life makes sense. Evolution says it should not be so. Here’s a video with a really good clock building evolutionary program that quietly puts in “This gear does nothing. It is neutral. I will no longer display such gears.”

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAq9bmCeR0&t=6m29s

    In actual biology, there are no such gears, and when there are, it is a congenital defect. Every organ has a function, and when it occurs that one doesn’t, he tends to get deselected. It is easier to say, “God wanted it that way” than to wonder after Evolution’s lack of vestigial organs (oh, they looked hard, and they found four candidates in the human body, all of which turned out to have a function after all.) Why does Evolution want it that way, and how can Evolution add information and complexity to life it has such a tendency to do away with the only things it has to work with?

    @Eric “Give it time. The acute form of the mass insanity can go dormant for long periods. Even Islam has had quiet centuries.”

    A way of denying that there may be, just maybe, some believers and practitioners of the popular religions and ideologies who are not crazy.

  390. @LS “Sumer started ca. 4000BC
    Akkad ca. 2200BC
    Assyria ca. 1200BC
    Babylon ca. 800BC”

    Time travel needed:

    Israel: 1406BC :p

  391. @Terry: how can Evolution add information and complexity to life it has such a tendency to do away with the only things it has to work with?

    Why do you think the lack of vestigial organs in, say, humans implies that organs in ancestors were “done away with”? In some cases we have good evidence that that did in fact happen: parasites such as tapeworms are a good example. But in other cases, organs didn’t lose functions, they changed functions. Our limbs are modified fish fins, for example; does that mean we’ve “lost complexity” because we no longer have fins?

    Also, there is no requirement that evolution *must* always add complexity. It adds complexity if more complex organisms are better at reproducing in a particular ecological niche; it takes away complexity if simpler organisms are better at reproducing in some other ecological niche (as with the tapeworms).

  392. > > Stereotypically male activities are denigrated and de-emphasized, collectively lowering male status, while individual males have their individual performance ignored, individually lowering male status case by case.

    JonCB on Thursday, January 17 2013 at 7:27 pm said:
    > Can you make this assertion concrete?

    Once upon a time, every school for small children had a playground that permitted and encouraged boisterous physical activity, and at fairly frequent intervals, the children were allowed out into the playground to let off steam, It featured stuff like slides, see saws, swings, monkey bars, etc. This required strength and dexterity, so tended to be male dominated. Boys and girls played together at athletic stuff at which the boys were very much better than the girls. It was therefore suppressed, and replaced with drugs, collectively lowering male status.

    Instead of male energy demonstrating superior status at playtime activities, it became a sickness that required medication and harsh repression.

    As for individually lowering male status, I have already mentioned how male academic achievement is ignored and discouraged but to rehash: The supposed top achievers in class, often the top five or so, are supposedly girls, with the result that girls grade point average is substantially higher than boys. Since boys have on average higher SAT and LSAT, and SAT measures the same stuff as class achievement is supposed to, it is highly improbable that none of the top academic achievers in class are boys.

  393. As usual, fighting the idea that IQ is important lands you in a worse pickle than accepting it.

    Sorry, Eric, but once again you’re on the wrong side of science.

    http://m.thestar.com/living/article/1304289–iq-a-myth-study-says

    “When we looked at the data, the bottom line is the whole concept of IQ — or of you having a higher IQ than me — is a myth,” said Dr. Adrian Owen, the study’s senior investigator and the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at the university’s Brain and Mind Institute. “There is no such thing as a single measure of IQ or a measure of general intelligence.”

    1. > “There is no such thing as a single measure of IQ or a measure of general intelligence.”

      Similar claims have been made before. They have always turned out to be junk. IQ stubbornly continues to be predictive of a wide range of important outcomes, including not just academic success but lifetime income and propensity to criminality. And remains so when you normalize out for SES and other potential confounders.

  394. There are very few purer tests of raw intellectual capacity than competitive chess.

    Until 1978, no woman had ever qualified as a Grandmaster. The second was not qualified until 1991.

    Today there are 28. This is a small number, compared to the 1,360 male grandmaster. But there was a period when people speculated that there might be some obscure sex-linked neurological factor at work, not just the relative numbers of male and female players.

    I mention this as an example of how real-world results can change dramatically.

    1. >But there was a period when people speculated that there might be some obscure sex-linked neurological factor at work, not just the relative numbers of male and female players.

      Those numbers don’t do much to falsify such a theory. At 2% of the grandmaster pool, we’re still down in the range where you have to think seriously about fetal androgen exposure and mosaic chromosome abnormalities as possible causative factors. Especially since the entire grandmaster population is highly deviant to begin with.

      Here’s a consequent testable prediction for you: the incidence of lesbianism in that 2% will be well above the 4% that we would expect from a random female-population sample. In 28 randomly sampled women, expect 1 self-reported lesbian; among 28 female grandmasters, I predict significantly more – I’m going to guess 5, and 10 wouldn’t startle me.

  395. @esr:

    Those numbers don’t do much to falsify such a theory. At 2% of the grandmaster pool, we’re still down in the range where you have to think seriously about fetal androgen exposure and mosaic chromosome abnormalities as possible causative factors.

    I would assume, from what little I know about chess, there is some reasonably objective way to compare current grandmasters to previous ones. So, perhaps the converse of the argument that chess is more appealing to women than it used to be can be tested — is chess less appealing to men than it used to be? Chess used to be unique — intellectual yet approachable, easy to learn, hard to master, good rewards for mastery. It would not surprise me if many who would have taken up chess in past decades are now taking up other pursuits with some of those same attributes. Programming, for example.

    1. >I would assume, from what little I know about chess, there is some reasonably objective way to compare current grandmasters to previous ones.

      There is. FIDE rating methods have been stable since 1970. Very similar and comparable systems go back to around 1950.

      >It would not surprise me if many who would have taken up chess in past decades are now taking up other pursuits with some of those same attributes. Programming, for example.

      That could well be. Arguably that set includes me.

  396. Peter Donis on Thursday, January 17 2013 at 7:05 pm said:

    Those numbers include the Nobel Peace Prize, which is of dubious merit, and awards to organizations.

    There have been 841 awards to persons, and exactly four second awards to persons:

    Marie Curie: Physics: 1903; Chemistry, 1911
    Linus Carl Pauling: Chemistry, 1954; Peace, 1962
    John Bardeen: Physics, 1956; Physics, 1972
    Frederick Sanger: Chemistry, 1958; Chemistry, 1980

    Excluding Pauling, for obvious reasons, there have been three double laureates, one of whom was a woman.

    As to the number of aggregate awards to men and women: the totals include the Peace Prize, which is a largely political act, and has been given to outright charlatans such as Rigoberta Menchu and Al Gore, and to miscellaneous distinguished windbags such as Nicholas Murray Butler and Sir Austen Chamberlain. (Also to genuine peacemakers like Sadat and Begin, to heroes like Carl von Ossietzky and Liu Xiaobo, and major humanitarians like Mother Teresa and Norman Borlaug.)

    The totals also include the Literature Prize, which is also problematic. (What committee could possibly evaluate the relative merits of authors working in many different languages?)

    And also the Economics Prize, which many think is not really a Nobel.

    So they should be excluded.
    Women have 12 Literature, 10 Peace, 1 Economics; leaving 16 in the sciences (15 laureates)
    Men have 97 Literature, 93 Peace, 70 Economics. leaving 542 in the sciences (540 laureates).

    1 double out of 15 women, 2 doubles out of 540 men.

    I wouldn’t make too much of this: sometimes an elephant just comes through. And also, Curie was early in the history of the awards, so the process was still erratic.

  397. @Rich Rostrom: The numbers I quoted from nobelprize.org were only for individual prizes, not awards for organizations. But see my later post that only counted the physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine prizes.

    Btw, your numbers for second awards are much lower than mine; what source are you using?

  398. esr on Thursday, January 17 2013 at 10:28 pm said:
    >But there was a period when people speculated that there might be some obscure
    >sex-linked neurological factor at work, not just the relative numbers of male and female players.

    Those numbers don’t do much to falsify such a theory.

    More than you think. Bear in mind that 21 of these 28 women are under 40, whereas that’s about the median age for male grandmasters. The change is still in progress, it seems to me, and 5% or even 10% looks possible as an end state. In any case, 2% is ample to disprove the counter-proposition: that women couldn’t do it at all.

    At 2% of the grandmaster pool, we’re still down in the range where you have to think seriously about fetal androgen exposure and mosaic chromosome abnormalities as possible causative factors.

    Actually, the speculation was that women are wired to be responsive to child distress calls at all times, and thus can’t achieve the total focus on the game required for top-level play.

    Especially since the entire grandmaster population is highly deviant to begin with.

    Well, they’re at one end of the curve. People that distinctive in any category tend to be deviant in other categores as well.

    Here’s a consequent testable prediction for you: the incidence of lesbianism in that 2% will be well above the 4% that we would expect from a random female-population sample. In 28 randomly sampled women, expect 1 self-reported lesbian; among 28 female grandmasters, I predict significantly more – I’m going to guess 5, and 10 wouldn’t startle me.

    Not going there… For one thing, all I have is names and countries. Most are east European or Chinese.

    1. >The change is still in progress, it seems to me, and 5% or even 10% looks possible as an end state.

      Right. At that level developmental abnormality stops looking like a plausible explanation.

      >Actually, the speculation was that women are wired to be responsive to child distress calls at all times, and thus can’t achieve the total focus on the game required for top-level play.

      Really? That strikes me as an astoundingly stupid idea. Selfish-gene theory predicts that women should be responsive to the distress calls of near kin, and that it should be advantageous not to respond readily otherwise. If such sensitivity existed, I would expect it to vary in inverse proportion to the amount of time since a woman gave birth or lactated.

  399. Peter Donis on Thursday, January 17 2013 at 11:42 pm said:

    @Rich Rostrom: The numbers I quoted from nobelprize.org were only for individual prizes, not awards for organizations. But see my later post that only counted the physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine prizes.
    Btw, your numbers for second awards are much lower than mine; what source are you using?

    nobelprize.org;

    I grabbed the complete list of laureates, and massaged it.

    That’s how I identified the double laureates. Your estimate of 17 two-category science laureates struck me as absurdly high.

    BTW I count 555 science laureates, you count 554. I may have dropped one somewhere.

  400. Getting back toward the original topic…

    ESR: would you consider these people to be a cult? (The Satmar Hasidim community in NYC, who have a communally-enforced lifestyle that is close to totalitarian. But they don’t recruit at all.)

    1. >ESR: would you consider these people to be a cult?

      Hmmmm. No attempt to recruit outsiders. Unclear whether the hypomania I associate with cults (and have ever since meeting my first Jesus freaks in the 1970s) is normal; my guess is probably not. The characteristic attempt to prevent people from having ties outside the group is present. Heavy and pervasive indoctrination in a faith system, check. Extremes of sexual practice tied to doctrine, check. No explicit information about how the group’s internal power dynamics work, but reading between the lines I’d say authoritarianism centered on charismatic leaders appears highly likely.

      Interesting borderline case. Exhibits significant cult-like behaviors, but lacks some of those I consider central. Whether we want to label it a ‘cult’ is a definitional wrangle I’m not really very interested in; the territory is what’s interesting, not the map.

      I’m glad she got out. Cult or non-cult, it’s nasty.

  401. @Rich Rostrom: I grabbed the complete list of laureates, and massaged it.

    Ah, ok. I was too lazy to do that. :-) Then you’re right, the number of double laureates in the sciences is too small to draw any conclusions about Marie Curie.

    It’s interesting that there are so few double laureates in the science prizes, whereas there are considerably more in the non-science prizes; the difference is even greater if you look at percentages instead of absolute numbers. That makes me think I was right when I said the non-science prizes are considerably more prone to political correctness in the award methodology.

    1. >That makes me think I was right when I said the non-science prizes are considerably more prone to political correctness in the award methodology.

      No offense meant, but I think that is obvious to anyone who isn’t thicker than a cinderblock.

  402. Actually if you’re making a point about killing many people (generic) then i seem to recall someone showing that Stalin had the Nazi’s beat.

    Millions of people starved to death as a result of Stalin’s policies, although AFAIK it is hard to say how much of this was a goal and not an unintended result. Millions more were killed or imprisoned for political reasons.

  403. Wrt women chess masters.

    I expect women to do less well in anything that correlates with Asperger autism spectrum.

    It is well known that Asperger is more prevalent in men. People along the autism spectrum are attracted to activities that require spending most of your time doing something regular without direct interaction with other people. Chess and programming are obvious examples.

    The underlying, evolutionary, explanation is as yet unknown. The most interesting story I have heard is that Autism and Psychopathy are the symptoms of a “war in the uterus” by the parents (idiotic terminology) in epi-genomic imprinting.

    Summarized, fathers imprint the DNA of their sperm for maximal resource use by the offspring. Mothers imprint the DNA of their eggs to minimize resource use by the offspring so they can make more offspring.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics_in_psychology

    The result is, in general, a draw (pun intended). However, if the imprinting by either of the parents is “too weak”, the child will overshoot the target due to the imprinting of the other parent.

    It is well known that “evolution” gambles more with boys than girls so it is not surprising that boys are more extreme (prone to pathologies) in any respect than girls.

    Cutting many corners, the imprinting of the mother tries to make the child “easy” and undemanding, which fits autism. The imprinting of the father makes the child “difficult”, demanding, and anti-social, which fits psychopathy.

    Note, this is a story, or an unvalidated hypothesis if you like.

  404. @Terry
    “If you’re going to reduce multiple three screen posts of mine to “just so” without successfully refuting a single point I have made, you’re wasting my connection bandwidth.”

    Sorry, but my time has value too. You have not answered or reacted to many of my questions and answers.

    You wanted useful mutations in multi-cellular organisms in the lab. I gave you half a dozen titles.

    You wanted to know how complexity could arise from random processes, I gave you a random walk model. Evolution really is simple.

    I gave you a lot of Creationist “Just-So” stories that can be explained from the deep history of the earth.

    All I saw as a response, if any, were excuses.

    A land bridge in Indonesia when the earth had just been flooded miles high with fresh water? A land bridge only found by marsupials? Please, spare me.

    The fact that many vestigal organs and bad designs (human retina, human backbone) do not damage survival is to be expected, or else they would have been disposed with completely.

    Most of these bad designs are just good enough. Human bad backs develop only after children have grown up, wisdom teeth can sometimes work as a spare tooth etc. That does not make them perfect designs by any stretch of the imagination. They are just good compromises given history and resource needs.

  405. @JAD
    “(Winter proposes top science bureaucrats and Lise Meitner)”

    No I didn’t. I proposed Christiane Nüsslein. I would add Emmy Noether. I know some others, but I do not want to drag personal acquaintances into this fight.

    But hey, this is an opportunity to advertise Dutch science, so here is the list of people who received the highest Dutch science price, the Spinoza prices:
    http://www.nwo.nl/nwohome.nsf/pages/NWOP_8FVBQR_Eng

    And here the Heineken prices for young scientists:
    http://www.knaw.nl/Pages/DEF/27/619.bGFuZz1FTkc.html

    All for scientists doing active work in experimental science. Check out the women.

    JAD will simply ignore their work and claim the women did not do it. The Netherlands are a small country, and I know the prices were justified from having spoken to (and worked with) people who were involved in some of the research.

  406. @Terry
    I only found your gem today:
    “As for everything else, if you look closely enough, it actually doesn’t seem that old. Radioisotope dating has all kinds of problems, and so it is rarely used (among the Egyptian kings, which could be dated by documentation, the mummy of a son appeared to be older than his father based on radiocarbon dating.) Earlier this year, galaxy formation science was upset by the discovery of an out-sized black hole 12.8 billion light years away, only 900 million light years from the redshift event horizon. There are a lot of other signs that the universe doesn’t appear to be any younger way out there than it is right next door, except for the frustratingly uniform cosmic background.”

    This sums up what is wrong with Creationism very well.
    1) You dismiss all of physics and chemistry.
    Radio-Isotope dating leads to very consistent numbers. Cherry picking sampling problems in a very large field is the hallmark of pseudo science. It is especially telling that Creationists ignore the vast scientific literature on the limitations of radio-isotope dating and the even vaster literature on how to cope with these limitations. Creationists also ignore the fact that this literature is completely devoid of any references to religion. Scientists in this field do not care about religious scriptures in their work and most certainly are not involved in any conspiracy coordinating and fabricating results to annoy Christians. And claiming God created trees with tree rings matching past weather patterns is cunning indeed. Who is conspiring here?

    2) Predicting and understanding the cosmic background radiation and the composition of the universe (90% H, 10% He, traces of Li) are the triumphs of Cosmology. Everything fits together for a universe with an age of around 13B years.

    3) Whatever the shortcomings in our scientific knowledge, nothing, absolutely nothing at all in the universe around us makes any sense for a universe less than 10k years old. From biology, through history, medicine, geology, chemistry, astrophysics, cosmology, it all breaks down when the earth is less than 10k years old.

    As I wrote before, all of our scientific knowledge becomes a “Just So” story in Creationism.

  407. @JAD
    > > “(Winter proposes top science bureaucrats and Lise Meitner)”

    Winter on Friday, January 18 2013 at 2:41 am said:
    > No I didn’t. I proposed Christiane Nüsslein. I would add Emmy Noether.

    Christiane Nüsslein is a science bureaucrat, not a scientist. Emmy Noether was indeed a great female scientist, but the fact that you started with Christiane Nüsslein shows you are hard up for great female scientists.

  408. IIRC, in the sixties, orchestras recruiting musicians did decide to hide the person they were hearing. Rationale was to avoid recruiting musicians they’d know. Percentage from women in orchestras went up from 0% to 35%, quickly, and then didn’t move any more.

    0% was due to the old belief that women’s coordination eye-to-hand was lower than men’s. Statistically true. But when you recruit, you shouldn’t care about statistics : you should focus about that person, there, and not about f****g statistics.
    That’s the story about Marie Curie.
    That’s also the story of that black woman who did impress Eric : statistics about IQ of women/black may be true or false, they shall not be used, as they are deceiving.

    Yup, you read me right. My opinion goes further than Eric’s. He say you shall not pay attention to ethnic statistics when speaking to a specific person. I say you shall not use them, at all, as the natural tendency of the human brain is to use available data. Not everyone has Eric’s ability to bypass “known” data; I’d even say it’s the opposite. My stance is to view those statistics as false. Maybe they are not, but if I see them as false, they will not make me think wrong about someone.

    1. >Percentage from women in orchestras went up from 0% to 35%, quickly, and then didn’t move any more.

      That is fascinating. It tells us two valuable things: (1) Exactly how much talent was being wasted by prejudice against women, and (2) what the (quite large) difference in the percentages of sufficiently capable males and females is in the absence of prejudice. Larger than I would have guessed, frankly.

      I want to be able to cite this. Can you point me at a documentary source?

      >I say you shall not use them, at all […] if I see them as false, they will not make me think wrong about someone.

      But ignoring real differences in means and dispersion is also dangerous in a different way. There is a certain sort of political animal that thinks it is “justice” to require orchestras to be at 50% male/female parity. (Don’t laugh – google for “Title IX”.) Unless you know what the statistics are and are prepared to deploy them in argument to stop this, here’s what will happen: 35% of the competent male players will be forcibly displaced by women who are not capable enough to meet the standards the orchestra would set if its choices were sex-blind.

      The quality of the playing will crash, not just because of the drop in skill level but because players at both ends of the curve will be demoralized – the really good ones of both sexes by having to play with duffers and the mostly-female duffers by having their noses rubbed in their ineptitude (when they might have been happy and productive in an organization with lower standards where they were closer to the mean).

      Now consider what this costs if the players are…architects, or medical doctors, or military officers, or scientists. And shudder.

  409. > The Satmar Hasidim community in NYC, who have a communally-enforced lifestyle that is close to totalitarian. But they don’t recruit at all.)

    Genuinely ancient religion, therefore not a cult.

    Of course all modern Judaism really goes back only to 200-400AD, it almost as different from the Judaism of Jesus’s time as Christianity is, but this is nonetheless the genuinely sixteen hundred year old stuff. Cults don’t last that long, or if they do, they do by transforming into not-cults

    There is nothing sexually peculiar about their practices, it is the complainant that is sexually peculiar. Observe that her sex life is still mucked up. Somehow I seriously doubt that not being told about sex until you are seventeen is likely to produce that effect.

    1. >Genuinely ancient religion, therefore not a cult.

      Not dispositive. Ancient religions spin off cults all the time. Compare “Jesus freaks”.

      >There is nothing sexually peculiar about their practices

      Yes there is. Maintaining sexual ignorance that deep and that late is beyond peculiar and well into perverse. The article makes gruesomely clear that the woman profiled is neither an isolated case nor the worst one – recall the ruptured colon.

  410. @JAD
    “Christiane Nüsslein is a science bureaucrat, not a scientist.”

    That is “Proof by assertion”
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_assertion

    We have witness accounts that she did great experimental work, eg, from our current minister of the Interior Ronald Plasterk, one of the Spinoza winners I mentioned before.

    You say she is not. This is one of your “Just So” stories. Where is the evidence?

    Anyhow, you still have a number of laureates to go in the list I put up before.

  411. > Maintaining sexual ignorance that deep and that late is beyond peculiar and well into perverse.

    Had to go back and read the article. Dafuq? There is no other way to say it, just Dafaq?

    I can understand the idea of sex only for reproduction and well, whatever, but this kind of thing? WHAT THE FUCK!??!?!?!!?!?!?!?!?

  412. Once upon a time, every school for small children had a playground that permitted and encouraged boisterous physical activity, and at fairly frequent intervals, the children were allowed out into the playground to let off steam, It featured stuff like slides, see saws, swings, monkey bars, etc. This required strength and dexterity, so tended to be male dominated. Boys and girls played together at athletic stuff at which the boys were very much better than the girls. It was therefore suppressed, and replaced with drugs, collectively lowering male status.

    Ok, that certainly is concrete. Thank you for that.

    I remember when the events you describe happened in Aus. The cause was openly described as being because of “fears of injury leading to lawsuits”. This is supported by the fact that the first attempt was to pad the entire thing with shredded tyres so that you bounce instead of break. Note that this trend continues to this day with news articles even in 2010 talking about the sad removal of playground equipment due to risk of injury.

    At the same time, my memory gives no clear temporal linkage between the decommissioning playgrounds and the other effects you describe. Indeed, the response i remember tended more towards an increase in boys sports programs which I would suggest would have at best a neutral and at worst the opposite effect to what you describe.

    In short, the events you mention certainly took place, but i doubt the causal result you describe and the motivation is well documented as completely unrelated to your assertion (e.g. google for playground equipment removal).

  413. Unless, of course, you have documentation for this. I’m assuming not since it would be a conspiracy spanning a good 4 different countries that hasn’t been reported on despite the significant number of exposes on various other gender bias topics (e.g. upper management, computing).

  414. >>Genuinely ancient religion, therefore not a cult.

    >Not dispositive. Ancient religions spin off cults all the time. Compare “Jesus freaks”.

    Indeed. And this one… it’s mentioned in the article that was linked that it’s something akin to a “revival movement”, with practices that were modified in reaction to events from only 70 years ago.

  415. > “Anyhow, you still have a number of laureates to go in the list I put up before.”

    Winter, it does’t really matter what you put up. It just leads to yet another variation of
    “They didn’t do it themselves, they got awarded for political reasons, and you (Winter) know this but are afraid to admit it”. Possibly with a slur on “leftists” or so in there somewhere too – one is well overdue.

  416. el_slapper on Friday, January 18 2013 at 5:42 am said:
    > But when you recruit, you shouldn’t care about statistics : you should focus about that person, there, and not about f****g statistics.
    > That’s the story about Marie Curie.

    Marie Curie did not discover radium. She was a member of a team of three people that discovered radium.

    Radon has similar remarkable properties to radium, and was scientifically far more important, for radon revealed that radioactivity was the result of transmutation of the elements. No one remembers the discovery of radon, because a woman was not on the team. A big dramatic fuss was made about the discovery of radium because a woman was on the team

    Marie Curie was planned to be a poster girl for females in science before she set foot in the lab. This is analogous to current practice with female programmers, where a female “programmer” is teamed up with good male programmers. Indeed, this is the general tendency with all affirmative action jobs: Either the job is redefined so that it does not need to be done, as with firefighting and most government jobs, or a white male does the actual work. Observe that with many black college professors, people are somewhat relieved if the professor never actually turns up for work, and often enough, he does not.

    You write as if there was systematic discrimination against members of inferior groups, but we have also had systematic discrimination in favor of members of inferior groups for over two hundred years. As individuals, people tend to make assumptions about strangers on the basis of group membership, and these assumptions disadvantage unusually able members of inferior groups, but we have had intervention in the other direction, helicoptering members of inferior groups into posts to which they are not qualified, for over two hundred years.

    Further, we have had no genocides of members of inferior groups, while we have had repeated genocides of innumerable superior groups. The doctrine of equality has repeatedly led to the mass murder of those who violate it by being superior, the current internationally sponsored mass murder of the superior happening in the Congo, but when they are done equalizing the Tutsi, someone else will be up for the high jump. The doctrine of inequality, since it corresponds to reality, seldom leads to any problems.

    esr observes that religious beliefs frequently lead to mass murder, and that some religious beliefs are more apt to lead to mass murder than others, but fails to notice the religious belief that in the twentieth century has led to more mass murder than any other, and fails to notice the current mass murder driven by that belief.

    Esr tells us that Tutsi cannot possibly be superior to their neighbors. But, since the Tutsi keep, in practice, being superior to their neighbors, obviously they are doing something nasty and unkind, and have to be taken down a peg or two.

  417. @esr: No offense meant, but I think that is obvious to anyone who isn’t thicker than a cinderblock.

    No offense taken; you’re quite right. I just hadn’t thought about it showing up so clearly in that specific metric.

  418. Peter Donis on Friday, January 18 2013 at 12:37 am said:

    It’s interesting that there are so few double laureates in the science prizes, whereas there are considerably more in the non-science prizes…

    Say what? The four names I listed are the only double laureate individuals, period. Three were double-science, one was science-Peace.

    No Literature or Economics laureate has received a second award, ever.

    There have been multiple awards of the Peace Prize to organizations (Red Cross 4, Quakers 2); but an organization is longer lived than a person, anyway.

    The Peace Prize is inherently political. The award to Carl von Ossietzky, then a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, was extremely controversial.

  419. “It would not surprise me if many who would have taken up chess in past decades are now taking up other pursuits with some of those same attributes. Programming, for example.
    @ESR – That could well be. Arguably that set includes me.”

    In the 1970s, when I was playing chess competitively, it was the United States Chess Federation (USCF) than tabulated rankings. My highest was 1982; however, the demands of work and family forced me to put the game aside.

    Eric, did you play competitive chess, and if so, what was your highest ranking?

  420. @Eric. I’ll try to find it. Thing is, I’m rather old-fashioned & mainly read papers. My source is probably an old edition of “courrier international”, but their online articles are not their written articles.

    And don’t forget that there might be other reasons for the difference, like the choice of certain women to not have a job, instead taking care of children(my wife comes to mind).

    @JAD : erm, I’m french, and do not have experience of positive discrimination. But I’m unconvinced by your extreme description.

  421. @Rich Rostrom: Looking at the page I linked to before, it looks like I misinterpreted their totals. Here’s the actual quote:

    “Between 1901 and 2012, the Nobel Prizes and the Prize in Economic Sciences were awarded 553 times to 863 people and organizations. With some receiving the Nobel Prize more than once, this makes a total of 835 individuals and 21 organizations.”

    So there are 856 people and organizations that have received awards. From your count, 4 people have received two awards, one organization has received two awards, and one organization has received four awards; that adds 4 + 1 + 3 = 8 to the 856, for 864 total awards to people and organizations. That’s off by one from the 863 given in the quote above. I had calculated double awards assuming that the 863 meant 863 individuals, but you’re right, that’s not the case.

  422. @Peter: “Why do you think the lack of vestigial organs in, say, humans implies that organs in ancestors were ‘done away with’?”

    Because that was the line I was fed as a child: That these organs were vestigial because in humans, their functions were no longer necessary. The evidence, however, shows that natural selection tends to eliminate the useless in the phenotype and what remains is useful. “New” useful things appear only when the thing had been done away with previously. Dark cave animals losing and regaining their eyes are the common example cited by both sides.

    “Our limbs are modified fish fins, for example; does that mean we’ve ‘lost complexity’ because we no longer have fins?”

    Homologous doesn’t necessarily mean modified or evolved. The fish fin is so different from the homologous amphibian limbs they are supposed to have evolved into that I find it very difficult to swallow (much harder to swallow than limbs evolving from those amphibians, but there the leaps lie in other systems.) It also makes little sense to me that a fish, superbly adapted to life at sea, could evolve into an amphibian which is poorly suited as either sea dweller or land lubber (although some have pretty fantastic defenses to compensate.) My experience with TOT shows that once it has made up its mind to beeline for a particular local maximum, it does not change it. I therefore would never expect a fish to evolve into anything other than a sea dwelling creature, and find the thought more plausible that fish evolved directly into whales and dolphins without there ever being a land-dwelling phase.

    Also, there is no requirement that evolution *must* always add complexity. It adds complexity if more complex organisms are better at reproducing in a particular ecological niche; it takes away complexity if simpler organisms are better at reproducing in some other ecological niche (as with the tapeworms).”

    @Winter: “You wanted useful mutations in multi-cellular organisms in the lab. I gave you half a dozen titles.”

    @Terry (earlier): “both of these articles are about nematode populations recovering from ‘deleterious mutations’ rather than producing beneficial mutations. So I’m pretty sure I’m still correct.”

    Winter, you’re not worth refuting anymore. Quit wasting your time.

  423. @Terry: Homologous doesn’t necessarily mean modified or evolved.

    As the term is used in biology, it does; biologists only call a feature homologous to an earlier feature if they have evidence to show that it evolved with modification from the earlier feature.

    The fish fin is so different from the homologous amphibian limbs they are supposed to have evolved into that I find it very difficult to swallow

    It looks different on the surface, but when you look at the bones, there are the same number in the same arrangement (they have different sizes and shapes, but the correspondence is there). AFAIK there is also embryological research that shows that fish fins and animal limbs develop the same way. These are the kinds of evidence that show homology. If fish and land animals didn’t evolve from a common ancestor, there would be no reason for them to have the same number of bones in the same general arrangement in fins and limbs, or for fins and limbs to develop in embryos in similar ways.

    (In fact, the fact that fish and land animals both *have* embryos, not to mention sharing much of the same DNA, is strong evidence that they evolved from a common ancestor. There would be no reason for this if they were separately created.)

    (Also, it’s important to realize that, as I said just now, fish and land animals evolved from a common ancestor; present-day land animals did not evolve from present-day fish. Both have undergone changes from the common ancestor; land animals have undergone more change, but present-day fish are not the same as the common ancestor was.)

    My experience with TOT shows that once it has made up its mind to beeline for a particular local maximum, it does not change it.

    That’s because the environment is fixed in TOT. In evolution, the environment changes, which means that selection pressures change, which means that a local maximum at a particular time does not *stay* a local maximum. Those changes trigger evolutionary changes in organisms.

    Also, the changes do not have to always be in the same direction. You mentioned cetaceans; there is much evidence that yes, they did have land-dwelling ancestors, who in turn evolved, like all land animals, from fish-like ancestors. Why the “reverse in direction”? Because, again, environments and selection pressures change, and the changes aren’t always in the same direction. We would not expect them to be, since the changes in environments and selection pressures are not directed at any goal; they are effectively random. That means we should *expect* to see “reversals of direction” in evolutionary lineages. (Organisms that lose functional parts, like the tapeworms I mentioned before, are also examples of such reversals; the ancestors of tapeworms needed organs that the tapeworms don’t, because the selection pressures were different; but ancestors of those ancestors didn’t have those organs either. Those organs evolved, and then were lost; that’s a “reversal” as much as cetaceans evolving from land-dwelling ancestors who in turn evolved from sea-dwelling ancestors.)

  424. @JAD
    > > “Christiane Nüsslein is a science bureaucrat, not a scientist.”

    Winter on Friday, January 18 2013 at 6:08 am said:
    > That is “Proof by assertion”

    You assert she is a famous scientist, I assert she is a senior bureaucrat. If she was a scientist, you would have listed her most prominent scientific accomplishment, rather than her position.

  425. el_slapper on Friday, January 18 2013 at 11:31 am said:
    > erm, I’m french, and do not have experience of positive discrimination

    Madam Curie was french, and she is my favorite example of positive discrimination, being still the most prominent poster girl of all time.

    People from “priority education zones”, aka blacks and Muslims, get special treatment and favorable placement in the french education system. Highly ranked French schools are required to give special treatment to “impoverished” people. In the US, “impoverished” is a code for certain racial groups, and even if in France it really does mean impoverished, which I much doubt, the overwhelming majority of the impoverished in France are black and/or Muslim.

  426. @Peter: “As the term is used in biology, it does; biologists only call a feature homologous to an earlier feature if they have evidence to show that it evolved with modification from the earlier feature.”

    That is more symptom than cause. The field of biology is sold enough on Evolution that the entire language is built around it.

    @Peter: “It looks different on the surface, but when you look at the bones, there are the same number in the same arrangement (they have different sizes and shapes, but the correspondence is there).”

    The arrangements are similar, I know that, and they also give the same names to the bones. In human aircraft, wings have had main spars since Cayley’s time and still do today, for a form of homology in something that was designed. Wheels on carts and wagons have been around for far longer. Leaf springs on modern pickup trucks are nearly identical to leaf springs on stage coaches from the 1880s. Homology is not evidence of evolution if we see it so often in design. Why didn’t God use different bone arrangements? I don’t know, but you can’t turn a “why not?” question into a “just so” retort. Why would he? James Watt used a planetary gear instead of a crankshaft to convert the reciprocal action of his steam engine into rotary motion, but he did that only because of a dumb patent that should never have been issued. God has no such limitations. That could well be why every vertebrate has a tibia and a fibia in his upper legs.

    Peter: “AFAIK there is also embryological research that shows that fish fins and animal limbs develop the same way.”

    That’s probably from Ernst Haeckel, the nineteenth century evolutionist crackpot:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haeckel

    There is certainly no doubt today that this 1874 embryological drawings are totally inaccurate, and some like to say they are even fraudulent. Nevertheless, I remember seeing them in school over a hundred years later and noticed the contrast between them and more modern beautiful color photographs in library books. That was back when I believed in Evolution, so it didn’t trigger much doubt at the time.

    Peter: “(In fact, the fact that fish and land animals both *have* embryos, not to mention sharing much of the same DNA, is strong evidence that they evolved from a common ancestor. There would be no reason for this if they were separately created.)”

    Au contrare, you have to remember what DNA does: it encodes proteins. All life on Earth uses the same twenty amino acids (all right-handed, for whatever reason), and various really wide swaths of life (plants, vertebrates, invertebrates, bacteria) use similar families of proteins to construct their phenotypes. Whether I believe in Creation or Evolution, I would expect all life in each broad category to have a lot in common in their DNA (actually, I find it troubling that their DNA is as different as it is.)

    As for the first point, all life has young, so it is really no point at all. Biologists even talk of plant embryos with the same word.

  427. @Terry:

    “Winter, you’re not worth refuting anymore. Quit wasting your time.”

    Whatever. I’m still waiting for answers about the citrate consuming mutations pointed out by David Gerard, and the mutation breeding pointed out by me. You seem to be very good at picking and choosing what you respond to, which isn’t particularly surprising, but is disappointing.

  428. Terry on Friday, January 18 2013 at 12:03 pm said:
    > The fish fin is so different from the homologous amphibian limbs they are supposed to have evolved into that I find it very difficult to swallow (much harder to swallow than limbs evolving from those amphibians, but there the leaps lie in other systems.) It also makes little sense to me that a fish, superbly adapted to life at sea, could evolve into an amphibian which is poorly suited as either sea dweller or land lubber.

    We have found skeletons of the intermediate kinds. They appear to have lived in mud flats or river deltas by the sea. They are fish, with fingers at the end of their four fins. In that environment, you are apt to frequently find yourself stuck in shallow water on top of thick mud, with what little water you do have draining away due to the tides, the winds, and the weather. The fingers allow you to grab onto things in the mud and haul yourself through the too shallow water.

    The next intermediate kind after that one is ambush predator with hands on his fins that lived in running water. Presumably he holds onto things so he can remain motionless in running water.

    The next intermediate kind after that one is back to stagnant water and muddy shallows. He has a fish body but a crocodile head, capable of grabbing land prey, with something rather like legs, that could propel him partially out of the water. I conjecture he ate something like crabs or land insects. At this point, the intermediate looks mighty like an axolotl, ready to grow up into a salamander.

  429. @Terry: Homology is not evidence of evolution if we see it so often in design.

    You should say “similarity of structure” instead of “homology”, since the whole point is that you are questioning the standard meaning of “homology” as it is used by biologists. It’s their word, not yours.

    You’re correct that similarities of structure are often dictated by functional requirements, and in such cases they can arise from separate design processes operating under the same functional requirements, rather than from common ancestry. That’s why biologists look for similarities of structure that are *not* dictated by functional requirements, in order to show homology. For example, fish fins and animal limbs have very different functional requirements; similarities of structure between them are therefore not explainable by functional constraints on separate design processes.

    That’s probably from Ernst Haeckel

    There has been a lot of embryology research done since the 1870’s. You realize that, right?

    you have to remember what DNA does: it encodes proteins.

    Yes; so what? That’s just one more commonality that makes no sense if organisms didn’t evolve from a common ancestor. Why should they all have the same proteins with the same amino acids? Also, why should they all use the same encoding scheme? Not just DNA–though there are other ways to encode for proteins than by using DNA, RNA for instance–but also the same genetic code? There are many ways of arranging DNA to encode for proteins, yet all organisms use the same one.

    Again, these are similarities of structure that can’t be explained by functional constraints; they only make sense if they are due to common ancestry.

  430. I find many of these discussions of the faults of evolutionary theory tiresome, because they totally miss the big picture. Scientists with good will can certainly discuss the different aspects of evolution, but whenever a creationist comes along (or an intelligent design-ist, which amounts to the same thing) the good will is gone. The point is no longer a search for truth but rather a search for justification of the pre-determined truth.

    From a big picture point of view the Christian Bible’s teaching on the origins of the world are so laughable as to justify such acronyms as ROTFLMGAO. Laughable were they not actually taken seriously by some people. Might as well believe the world is supported on the back of a turtle.

    Secondly, even if you buy that “I don’t believe Adam and Eve, but I do believe that the complexity of the world demands a designer” one is left to say that he/she/it wasn’t a very good designer. Although nature is miraculous you find lots and lots of “slaps forehead” engineering errors all over the place. The human eye, for example, has some pretty dumb design features.

    Nonetheless, those are, generally speaking, engineering errors that you are quite likely to get from being stuck in an evolutionary minima, where the evolutionary cost in the short term is far to large to realize the evolutionary benefit in the long term.

    On a purely tangential basis, if you can’t believe the Genesis story of creation the whole of Christian doctrine falls to pieces, since it is rooted in the idea of an original sin of one man, and the consequential redemption of one man. But lets not do doctrine here.

    Nonetheless, my point is that playing defense on the theory of evolution against ID people is nuts. It is like arguing about the possibility of ET life with someone wearing an aluminum foil hat. Is there a legitimate discussion? Sure, but the participants have to be coming from a moderately sane, moderately honest point of view to get a seat at the discussion table.

  431. @Terry
    I gave 6 or so new titles in response to your quip about deleterious mutations. You probably missed it.

    The fin/arm homology is not to modern fish but to coelacanth lungfish.

    Modern fish have stongly reduced the bone counts of their fins. Hence all the fuss when they found a living coelacanth.

  432. Having sat through the Landmark Forum, I think I’m qualified to say that I think you bailing so quickly pretty much disqualifies you from knowing what you’re talking about. Admitted, they do a hard sell, because it’s the only way they advertise … kind of like network marketing/Amway.

    There’s a reason MLMs are called “sales cults”.

    And the Forum could be easily summarized in 15 minutes … there’s a lot of sales pitches, and some nice teaching context on how to look at your life. But it basically comes down to this …

    All good advice. But inasmuch as sales cults sell something useful, it’s a secondary business goal. The primary business goal is recruitment — getting people signed up, paying into the system, and actively expanding the network to their friends and family, hopeful to receive the boons that supposedly only membership can provide.

    Landmark is Isagenix for the soul.

  433. @JAD
    Nuesslein unraveled a significant part of the genetics of vertebrate embryonic development. She did that by building a mutant “library” of zebra fish. Truely fascinating work. But you would never admit that she had done the work. Even if you had stood next t her when she did.

    Good luck trying to find faults in all the laureates I listed. I think I can draw up another dozen of brilliant female scientists for every one you can draw evidence against.

  434. My answer to Bible literalists among both the believers and the anti-believers is:

    Chronicles II, Chapter 4, Verse 2

    The Bible is not *meant* to be taken literally.

    Thank you, Harry Turtledove.

  435. Chronicles II, Chapter 4, Verse 2

    The Bible is not *meant* to be taken literally.

    “4:2 Also he made a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and five cubits the height thereof; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.”

    Um… other than thinking that pi == 3 (which some folks have defended by claiming that one measurement was on the inside and one on the outside of some thick walled container), what does this have to do with not taking the Bible literally?

    On the Internet, no one knows that you are a person that doesn’t own a Bible.

  436. @Jessica Boxer: Nonetheless, my point is that playing defense on the theory of evolution against ID people is nuts. It is like arguing about the possibility of ET life with someone wearing an aluminum foil hat. Is there a legitimate discussion? Sure, but the participants have to be coming from a moderately sane, moderately honest point of view to get a seat at the discussion table.

    I don’t really disagree with this, but I would note that one can respond to particular points where misconceptions or misstatements about evolution can be corrected, without getting drawn into a discussion in areas where there is no common ground and thus no real prospect of any benefit coming from it. That’s what I’ve been trying to do.

  437. @ Terry The fish fin is so different from the homologous amphibian limbs they are supposed to have evolved into that I find it very difficult to swallow (much harder to swallow than limbs evolving from those amphibians, but there the leaps lie in other systems.) It also makes little sense to me that a fish, superbly adapted to life at sea, could evolve into an amphibian which is poorly suited as either sea dweller or land lubber (although some have pretty fantastic defenses to compensate.) My experience with TOT shows that once it has made up its mind to beeline for a particular local maximum, it does not change it. I therefore would never expect a fish to evolve into anything other than a sea dwelling creature, and find the thought more plausible that fish evolved directly into whales and dolphins without there ever being a land-dwelling phase.

    The following was widely reported in the lay press when it was first published, and once again with Prof Jenkins’ recent passing:

    Nature 440, 757-763 (6 April 2006) | doi:10.1038/nature04639; Received 11 October 2005; ; Accepted 8 February 2006

    A Devonian tetrapod-like fish and the evolution of the tetrapod body plan
    Edward B. Daeschler, Neil H. Shubin and Farish A. Jenkins, Jr

    Abstract

    The relationship of limbed vertebrates (tetrapods) to lobe-finned fish (sarcopterygians) is well established, but the origin of major tetrapod features has remained obscure for lack of fossils that document the sequence of evolutionary changes. Here we report the discovery of a well-preserved species of fossil sarcopterygian fish from the Late Devonian of Arctic Canada that represents an intermediate between fish with fins and tetrapods with limbs, and provides unique insights into how and in what order important tetrapod characters arose. Although the body scales, fin rays, lower jaw and palate are comparable to those in more primitive sarcopterygians, the new species also has a shortened skull roof, a modified ear region, a mobile neck, a functional wrist joint, and other features that presage tetrapod conditions. The morphological features and geological setting of this new animal are suggestive of life in shallow-water, marginal and subaerial habitats.

  438. Although nature is miraculous you find lots and lots of “slaps forehead” engineering errors all over the place.

    Not to mention that even if evolution is evidence for a designer, either that designer has serious multiple personality disorder, or “the designer” was actually a committee. Foxes are well designed to catch rabbits but rabbits are also well designed to evade foxes. Surely if there was one designer with a “grand plan” one of these two statements should not be true.

    So unless any given theist happens to believe in a pantheon or their god is Azathoth, they’re still shit out of luck.

  439. On the Internet, no one knows that you are a person that doesn’t own a Bible.

    I read somewhere that a study found that the longer someone spent on the internet daily, the higher the chance that they’d be an atheist.

  440. I am in Philadelphia occasionally and like walking through CIty Hall, feeling the presence of the ghosts of corrupt pols who make Enoch Thompson of Boardwalk Empire look like an amateur.

  441. @ JonCB

    I read somewhere that a study found that the longer someone spent on the internet daily, the higher the chance that they’d be an atheist.

    That is interesting, particularly considering that this study presumably included people that write “Your an ashole.”

  442. Winter on Friday, January 18 2013 at 4:23 pm said:
    > Nuesslein unraveled a significant part of the genetics of vertebrate embryonic development. She did that by building a mutant “library” of zebra fish.

    She, or rather PhD students under her supervision, did not unravel, merely cataloged. Makework. Bureaucracy grinding remorselessly onwards, remorselessly increasing its publication count by publishing papers no one reads. Other people subsequently made sense of the catalog.

  443. JonCB on Friday, January 18 2013 at 6:30 pm said:
    > Foxes are well designed to catch rabbits but rabbits are also well designed to evade foxes. Surely if there was one designer with a “grand plan” one of these two statements should not be true.

    This is just a variation on the problem of evil.

    In “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” the goddess created the universe quite recently for her entertainment, with incomplete evidence of ancientness, gave people remarkable abilities to solve problems, and then, for her entertainment, arbitrarily created problems too tough for their abilities.

    Of course the goddess of “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” is not omnibenevolent, but ludicrously selfish and self centered, regarding all other creatures as only existing for her entertainment, as, in fact, they do. Since she takes human form, inserting herself into her universe as a Mary Sue character, her absolute self centeredness is a continual running joke and dark humor.

    A goddess similar to that depicted in “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” would take great pleasure in creating the ichneumon wasp. She would make the rabbit very fast, and the fox a tiny bit faster.

  444. JonCB on Friday, January 18 2013 at 9:14 am said:
    > The cause was openly described as being because of “fears of injury leading to lawsuits”.

    But there were no lawsuits. They are not going to describe it as fears of high male self esteem leading to sexism, so what else are they going to say? The practical effect, the consequences, were an attack on male self esteem and masculinity, something that they have been attacking with a wide variety of measures of ever increasing intensity.

    Similarly, no one said, or is likely to say in plain words “Let us sexually mutilate those Tutsi to lower their self esteem”. But when a hundred and fifty years of ever more drastic international programs to eliminate Tutsi privilege somehow mysteriously failed to eliminate Tutsi privilge, their efforts to promote “racial justice”, to make the unequal equal, drifted ever closer to war, and when their efforts finally manifested in war, they did not turn around and back off.

    Indeed, when esr says that Tutsi are not superior, and that warlords are responsible for the violence, he is pretty much saying that Tutsi have it coming. If Tutsi are not superior, yet strangely, somehow, continue to possess Tutsi privilege, then obviously something must be done about it, done about this quite unjustified Tutsi privilege. To say that warlords are responsible, is to say that Tutsi are responsible, for the “warlords” in the Congo are all Tutsi. Tutsi are somehow mysteriously and unjustifiably holding on to Tutsi privilege, (doubtless due to the nefarious violence of these warlords) making it necessary to use ever more drastic measures to fix the problem. And when the drastic measures turn out to be shocking, the international community is piously shocked, but does not deviate from its program to end Tutsi privilege.

    Analogously, male privilege.

    > Indeed, the response i remember tended more towards an increase in boys sports programs which I would suggest would have at best a neutral and at worst the opposite effect to what you describe.

    Yet oddly, boys sports programs have somehow diminished, and diminished markedly and strikingly. Despite much noise about the obesity problem, fewer and fewer boys have the opportunity to participate in school related team sports.

    Funny thing that. Much like the international community continuing to fund and arm an army whose major military activities consist of horrifying attacks on women.

    In short, the events you mention certainly took place, but i doubt the causal result you describe and the motivation is well documented as completely unrelated to your assertion (e.g. google for playground equipment removal).

    1. >Indeed, when esr says that Tutsi are not superior, and that warlords are responsible for the violence, he is pretty much saying that Tutsi have it coming.

      Er. No, that is not what I am saying or implying. You’re babbling incoherently. As usual, your thinking is warped by an emotional need to reach racist conclusions.

  445. JonCB on Friday, January 18 2013 at 9:14 am said:
    > The cause was openly described as being because of “fears of injury leading to lawsuits”.

    If the cause was fear of lawsuits, the courts, or the regulators, would attempt to lay down rules as to what constituted a safe playground. No attempt to do this, therefore, the official story a lie.

  446. @ James A. Donald on Friday, January 18 2013 at 6:06 am said:
    i
    > The Satmar Hasidim community in NYC, who have a communally-enforced lifestyle
    > that is close to totalitarian. But they don’t recruit at all.)

    Genuinely ancient religion, therefore not a cult.

    1) This particular variant only dates back about 60 years; the community formed after WW II, from refugees from one district in Hungary.

    2) Cults often develop from established religions: the Society of St. Pius X, the Hashishin, the Skoptsy, Hare Krishna, Soka Gakkai.

    There is nothing sexually peculiar about their practices, it is the complainant that is sexually peculiar. Observe that her sex life is still mucked up. Somehow I seriously doubt that not being told about sex until you are seventeen is likely to produce that effect.

    1) A report (in a comment to a posting at PJmedia) of a sex therapist who uses surrogates, of patients who are Orthodox Jewish men who married late in life with no previous sexual experience. They literally don’t know what to do, not only physically but mentally.

    2) Despite the negative effect reported in this case, most of these people manage to function. Fertility was laid down as a divine commandment by the founder of the community – in part as a revenge against the Nazi effort to exterminate them – and they have multiplied. One matriarch who died in 2010 at age 92 was reported to have 2,000 living descendants.

    Indeed the Orthodox Jewry of New York are generally successful in this – it was recently reported that over 60% of Jewish children in the NYC area are from Orthodox families.

    1. >Society of St. Pius X, the Hashishin, the Skoptsy, Hare Krishna, Soka Gakkai.

      I grant you all the others on this list, but I’m curious why you included SSPX. Nasty and theologically conservative does not imply “cult”; I’ve heard no reports of SSPX that suggest cultlike behavior.

  447. > > Indeed, when esr says that Tutsi are not superior, and that warlords are responsible for the violence, he is pretty much saying that Tutsi have it coming.

    > Er. No, that is not what I am saying or implying.

    If all men are created equal, then Tutsis are the equal of their neighbors. If Tutsis are the equal of their neighbors, then their regrettable misbehavior has regrettably made the sexual mutilation of Tutsi women an unfortunate and regrettable necessity.

    if you are not a racist as you and progressives define racism, then you have to support sexual mutilation in the Congo. And, in practice, progressives do support it, fund it, arm it, and propagandize for it, and in practice you do support it by propagandizing for it, while applying crimestop to avoid thinking about what they and you are doing.

    “Warlords” in the Congo are Tutsi. If “warlords” are responsible for bad things happening in the Congo, such as government sponsored sexual mutilation of Tutsi women by the government army, then the government is not responsible, and the Tutsi are responsible.

    If the Tutsi are not superior, then persistent and uncorrectable Tutsi privilege is, like persistent and uncorrectable male privilege and white privilege, some sort of evil sinister plot, a sinister plot that the international community has been valiantly and virtuously working to remedy for about one hundred and fifty years. Perhaps Tutsi warlords are upholding Tutsi privilege.

    White privilege is obvious – and equally obvious is the horribly racist fact that because whites tend to voluntarily hang out with whites, and blacks with blacks, and because seventy percent of the time a random white is better than a random black, then one hundred percent of the time the white group is wiser and more virtuous than the black group, and a white will be undeservedly advantaged by being a member of a better group than the black, that even if a particular white, call him Bob, has the same IQ and inclination to criminality as a particular black, call him Mike, Bob is a lot less likely to go to jail, a lot less likely to be a victim of crime, a lot more likely to succeed, than Mike, because of the company he keeps, regardless of his own merits. If Bob commits a crime, he will likely get away with it, while Mike will likely wind up spending some time in jail because people around him committed crimes incompetently, even if Mike is entirely innocent. White privilege.

    Similarly male privilege. Because women lack moral agency, groups of women behave badly and function badly, as do groups containing a large proportion of female decision makers, even though individual men and women vary, hence the Pauline rule on leadership, and this bad behavior will tend to disadvantage women. Groups of decision makers that successfully undertake collective action are necessarily male groups, which makes it better to be male regardless of one’s own merits. Female weaknesses not only create deserved male privilege, but also entirely undeserved male privilege. Chances are that Bob enjoys undeserved safety and prosperity relative to Mike, and undeserved power relative to Ann.

    Thus, white privilege, male privilege, etc, is real, substantial, and cannot be remedied.

    Since progressive ideology tells us that it can and must be remedied, progressives will use ever more drastic means.

    And, in our schools, those means are getting pretty drastic, and in the Congo, even more drastic.

    If Tutsi really are no better than other blacks, then there is something horribly wrong about the fact that Tutsis are privileged, and something needs to be done about it. Sexually mutilating Tutsi women is something.

    Of course when it is spelled out as bluntly and horrifyingly as that, you don’t agree with any of it. That, you quite sincerely say, is not what you are saying, not what you mean. So you, like our progressive elite, refrain from spelling it out. You are in favor of justice and equality, and don’t want to think about the horrifyingly brutal implications of justice and equality, which have led to the murder of so many people.

    And you call anyone who does think about the implications of justice and equality a “racist”.

  448. esr>
    > You’re babbling incoherently. As usual, your thinking is warped by an emotional need to reach racist conclusions.

    The good progressive is, of course, opposed both to Tutsi privilege in the Congo, and rape and sexual mutilation in the Congo.

    But, alas, he has to have priorities, and so, of course, Tutsi privilege has to be suppressed first, and then we can worry about rape and mutilation. It is difficult to suppress rape and mutilation of Tutsis when they are being so stubbornly obstructive against democracy, equality, and racial justice.

    Strangely, however, Tutsi privilege seems curiously hard to suppress. Perhaps we need to suppress it harder.

  449. esr:
    > your thinking is warped by an emotional need to reach racist conclusions.

    Ah, James Donald is a racist, and the Tutsis are racists. We know the Tutsis are racists, because somehow, strangely, Tutsi privilege continues despite one hundred and fifty years of benevolent government action to end it.

    The good progressive anti racist US, like the good progressive esr, of course opposes and condemns the regrettable propensity of the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo to rape, sexually mutilate, and impale Tutsi woman, but, alas, the US must continue to fund and arm the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo, and esr must excuse them and deny their crimes, lest those horrid racists might win.

  450. esr
    > your thinking is warped by an emotional need to reach racist conclusions.

    And what conclusion would that be? That in a world where all men are not created equal, imposing equality winds up as terror and mass murder?

    You believe that Tutsi are equal to Hutu. Whose thinking is warped? You just have to look at them. They don’t even look equal. The Tutsi look aristocratic, the Hutu look like criminals. You may not be able to tell a book by its cover, but you can tell they are not the same book.

    You believe that the Tutsi are somehow responsible for the crimes committed by the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo against the Tutsi. Whose thinking is warped?

  451. @Patrick “Whatever. I’m still waiting for answers about the citrate consuming mutations pointed out by David Gerard, and the mutation breeding pointed out by me.”

    Oh, sorry. The citrate thing in E. Coli was apparently due to a switch to a copy of the CitT gene controlled by a promotor that did not shut down in the presence of oxygen. The CitT gene is actually quite amplified and not a new feature of E. Coli.

    http://www.icr.org/article/7083/

    And I detected some flak in your link as well. The mutation breeding link was far to thin to form a basis for beneficial mutations. If the CitT response in E. Coli is a typical mutation response, it probably won’t get any thicker.

    @Patrick “You seem to be very good at picking and choosing what you respond to, which isn’t particularly surprising, but is disappointing.”

    There are those here who are better at it than I am.

    @James “They appear to have lived in mud flats or river deltas by the sea. They are fish, with fingers at the end of their four fins.”

    I need a link for that, since anything of the sort has proven highly questionable. A fine example is the lobe-finned (some would say “tetrapod”) coelacanth, which was last seen in the fossil record, according to deep timers, about 510 million years ago (I remember seeing painted pictures of it as a child.) Then, after a very interesting 510Ma hiatus, was found alive in the sea. Cute, huh?

    http://www.icr.org/article/will-true-tetrapod-transition-please-step-forward/

    @James “The next intermediate kind after that one is ambush predator with hands on his fins that lived in running water. Presumably he holds onto things so he can remain motionless in running water.”

    That got a Three Dog Night song stuck in my head almost immediately as I remember how Jeremiah the Bullfrog used his hands while jumping after flies over perfectly still water in a National Geographic article (I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but I do remember that the author lamented that a normal camera was useless for such work and celebrated his new high-speed model.)

    @Peter: “There has been a lot of embryology research done since the 1870?s. You realize that, right?”

    Lol, how do you think we debunked Ernst Haeckel? Very funny.

    @Peter: “For example, fish fins and animal limbs have very different functional requirements; similarities of structure between them are therefore not explainable by functional constraints on separate design processes.”

    Spars in wings and bridges, axles and I-beams and Whipple trusses. Still nothing spectacularly conclusive. I used the word “homologous” so that no one could accuse me of not having ever read a biology text (although that isn’t likely to stop anyone determined, of course.)

    @Terry (earlier): “you have to remember what DNA does: it encodes proteins.”

    Peter, your retort is a bunch of nonsense. The first part is like saying the popularity of Microsoft Windows on modern computers can only be explained by Evolution. Also, since tRNA is the same everywhere, how is protein supposed to be encoded differently in DNA by different forms of life? Or are you saying God should have made different forms of tRNA for different forms of life. Why should He be obliged to do that? That wouldn’t convince a staunch Evolutionist of jack poop if everything else hasn’t already. I think members of food chains would be nutritionally incompatible if He did, a reason for _not_ doing so.

    Why should God try to make Himself too obvious to people who wouldn’t give Him the time-of-day in the first place? With all the objections to deep time and Evolution, and the non-Biblical historical facts of Jesus’ life and its similarity to the Biblical account, hasn’t He done so already?

    @Jessica “The human eye, for example, has some pretty dumb design features.”

    Yup, I’m going take the most sensible sounding thing in that entire post and thrash it.

    Since learning of the nerves being above the optical path in the human eye, I’ve given the question some thought. The “bottom” of the eye, closest to where the sensitive part of retinal cells are, is the pigment layer. It reflects light out of the back of the eye, far better than cats than in humans, but anyone who’s had to use “redeye correction” in GIMP or Photoshop knows. It is widely believed, and for good reason, that the reason why it reflects (in our case, the lowest energy and hardest to detect visible red photons) is so that the light has two chances to get caught by the rhodopsin (which is not as sensitive to red light.) If the nerve layer were underneath the retina cells and those retina cells were turned around, one or both of those passes would be out of focus, reducing the image resolution. Sure, they might be more sensitive to light, but to most vertebrate eyes, resolution is more important, and since our eyes can generate nerve signals in response to single photons, they are obviously sensitive enough.

    If this is really the case, Evolution could not have had the foresight to have our cone and rod cells pointed towards the pigment layer in anticipation of this problem millions of years into the future, could it?

    Now, I thought of that all by myself. Let’s see who might agree… ah, there’s a start: “In a recent piece in Scientific American, neuroscientist Trevor Lamb wrote that vertebrate eyes contain numerous defects that he called ‘the scars of evolution.'” – 305 (1): 64-69 A start because Brian Thomas is citing it:

    http://www.icr.org/article/do-eyes-carry-scars-evolution/

    Holy crap, did I ever get it wrong! Beat down by Brian Thomas. Reminds me of My Cousin Vinny:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiA1NVEf9K4

    “On the Internet, no one knows that you are a person that doesn’t own a Bible.”

    Kerrrrrr…..

    http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20chronicles%204:2&version=KJV

    Splat.

  452. @Terry:

    > http://www.icr.org/article/7083/

    “Does any of this resemble natural, undirected Darwinian evolution? Not at all. This amazing mechanism invented no new functional coded elements. It merely modified pre-existing elements.”

    That’s the turtles all the way down argument — any new DNA can be characterized as a modification of pre-existing elements at some level. Either there is new stuff or not. Nobody expects that, to prove evolution, you have to show that “modified” DNA contains some unheretoforseen arsenic-containing base pairs. Every rational disinterested observer would say that a “modification” that is a slight rearrangement of existing DNA is, in fact, the expected normal path of evolution, and would furthermore question how anyone could, with a straight face, classify such a reproducing spontaneous “modification” as not resembling evolution in the slightest.

    In toto, that paper is not even wrong. I think that eyeonicr is right that Brian Thomas is working hard to become the next Andrew Schlafly. The design was there all along, it just took 30K mutations to unearth it! What a crock.

    As Jessica already pointed out, this is tiresome. Have your way and whatever last word you want. I’m done.

  453. BobW on Friday, January 18 2013 at 4:36 pm said:

    > My answer to Bible literalists among both the believers and the anti-believers is:
    >
    > Chronicles II, Chapter 4, Verse 2
    >
    > The Bible is not *meant* to be taken literally.

    Unless you have one man binding us all in original sin, and one man freeing us from sin, Christianity is in trouble, thus if you don’t have a creator god actually creating Adam, Christianity is in trouble:

    That humans are evolved creatures has horrifying implications for both Christians and progressives. I notice that esr goes wobbly whenever I mention the implications for progressives, so I will not piss him off even further by mentioning them again.

    Christians are fine with evolutionary psychology on the differences between men and women, because that arguably prescribes the Pauline marital and sexual code as necessary for civilization, while progressives froth at the mouth and cry should one mention those aspects of evolutionary psychology. (I would expect esr to behave similarly, but have not tried him yet) However Christians are not fine with evolutionary psychology on vengeance and treatment of strangers, the bottom line being, yes, Christianity really is a slave religion.

  454. If the cause was fear of lawsuits, the courts, or the regulators, would attempt to lay down rules as to what constituted a safe playground. No attempt to do this, therefore, the official story a lie.

    Have you perchance actually looked at pretty much any western legal system recently?
    These are the same legal systems that requires MacD to label COFFEE with “Warning: contents may be hot”, Peanut manufacturers with “Warning: May contain traces of nuts”, councils have to put signage on cliffs above rocks warning against diving off and, my personal(local) favourite, rail organisations have to label 5 meter high fences above the train lines below warning against people sitting on them.

    * Did you know that if someone runs through your back lawn and, for example, harms themself on your pool, you could be sued for failing in your duty of care?
    * If thats not crackpot enough for you… did you know that if someone breaks into your home and then hurts themselves, same thing.
    * If THAT’s not crackpot enough for you… Did you know that if you hire a painter to paint your house, they set up their ladders and then injure themselves falling off them, you could get sued for failing to provide a safe workplace…

    The reality is that both the courts and the regulators have been routinely dropping the ball on this kind of thing for at LEAST 20 years now and there’s no likelihood of this sad fact changing.

    And I haven’t started on the patent system yet…

    (BTW, i’ve seen references to the EU regulations doing exactly what you’re suggesting, regulations that have required several parks to dismantle and remove playground equipment because they’re not up to standard)

  455. If all men are created equal, then Tutsis are the equal of their neighbors.

    I would point that ESR has never said that all men are created equal, in fact has explicitly stated the exact opposite. This is a strawman.

    ESR’s point is that people who racially hyperfocus on the “average” part are missing the fact that any statistical sample has not just an average but a dispersion, and any given individual can have a varied location on the actual curve. For example, assuming that Oompaloompahs are repeatably and reliably measured as having an average intelligence(insert magic test here) less than the proverbial white male, a large enough sample space is still going to have at least one white male whose intelligence is significantly less than the Oompaloompah average and it’s still going to have at least one Oompaloompah with significantly more than the white male average.

    Thus while it is may be arguable to use the average in the absence of any specific information, it’s personally counter-productive to ignore specific information because of the average.

  456. But there were no lawsuits. They are not going to describe it as fears of high male self esteem leading to sexism, so what else are they going to say?

    Actually yes there have been. A cursory Google search gives proof of that.

    And no they’re not going to describe it as “fears of high male self esteem” but “fears of playground bullying” and “fears of antisocial behavior” are all much more likely proxies. And i partly say that because we’ve SEEN the “playground bullying” card played but it wasn’t played in relation to removing equipment at all to my knowledge.

    The practical effect, the consequences, were an attack on male self esteem and masculinity, something that they have been attacking with a wide variety of measures of ever increasing intensity.

    Actually the effect from my recollection was precisely the opposite. Instead of existing in an environment where both sexes could take part a significant number of them instead moved to an environment where females are almost completely segregated(football). This segregation was with the active support(political and financial) of faculty and government.

    Yet oddly, boys sports programs have somehow diminished, and diminished markedly and strikingly. Despite much noise about the obesity problem, fewer and fewer boys have the opportunity to participate in school related team sports.

    Absolutely not in Australia, the sports programs that were generated around that time still exist today. I can’t speak directly for America but I find this difficult to believe given the often reported “god-like” status of football players(and teams) and to a lesser extent basketball and baseball… I’d need evidence of a decline that can’t be attributed to “the government is broke”.

    As a side-note, i have no personal knowledge or commentary on the situation of the Tutsi. About the only thing that i believe i know is that the area is so generally unstable that i wouldn’t be that surprised if someone were to show that nuking the entire place and giving it back to the cockroaches would result in a significant improvement in aggregate human rights. As such i limit my commentary to items i have knowledge of.

  457. @JAD
    “She, or rather PhD students under her supervision, did not unravel, merely cataloged. Makework. Bureaucracy grinding remorselessly onwards, remorselessly increasing its publication count by publishing papers no one reads. Other people subsequently made sense of the catalog.”

    That is the science of biology. All of it. That is why biologists admire the likes of Christiane Nüsslein and Thomas Morgan.

    I know some prefer the school boy accounts of Watson on how he spied on other peoples data and found the solution by a stroke of genius. But most prefer science following Crick and Franklin, who march on collecting data and furthering our understanding the hard way. Literally until their dying days.

    I think JAD would have liked Watson, as they seem to share ideas of how to treat women in science.
    (Francis Crick seems to be a whole different type of guy)

  458. James Donald wrote of Christiane Nüsslein “She […] merely cataloged. […] Other people subsequently made sense of the catalog.”

    (My impression is that JAD is probably overstating his case here. Wouldn’t be the first time.)

    Winter wrote in response “That is the science of biology. All of it.”

    That seems like an even stronger and clearer overstatement. There is a related kernel of truth: merely collecting useful data does have a long and honorable history in biology. I happen to have an undergrad degree in biology, and I am suitably impressed with work like, e.g., systematically cataloguing all the individual cell divisions and cell deaths that occur in the ordinary embryonic development of C. elegans. However, that kernel of truth merely corresponds to “some of it” and doesn’t justify jumping to “all of it”. (Perhaps intentionally gunning for the Internet achievement “won an overstatement contest with James Donald”?) Various biologists have famously made progress in biology by both collecting evidence of a pattern and making sense of it. Most people reading this will have heard of Darwin and Pasteur and Mendel. Almost anyone reading this can look up Semmelweis or (John) Snow in less time than it takes to read another comment. We could even refute this while limiting ourself to famous female researchers: Barbara McClintock is popularly credited for not just collecting data indicating that genes were jumping, but starting to make sense of what was going on. (And I’m not trying to minimize her achievement by writing “starting to make sense”: I don’t think it was humanly possible for researchers working in the 1950s and 1960s to make sense of some of the rambunctious genetic frolicking that was worked out later with more powerful experimental tools.)

  459. @Terry: Peter, your retort is a bunch of nonsense.

    How so? You keep on pointing out further things that only make sense on the hypothesis of common ancestry (for example, tRNA is the same everywhere). How does that argue against the claim of common ancestry?

    The first part is like saying the popularity of Microsoft Windows on modern computers can only be explained by Evolution.

    You’re going to have to spell this out, because I don’t see it at all. I talked about similarities of structure, not similarities of function. Windows is similar in function to competitors like Linux and OS X–we’re speaking charitably here :-)–but it is not similar in structure. So this example has nothing to do with what I was saying, as far as I can see.

  460. @Terry: Lol, how do you think we debunked Ernst Haeckel?

    By doing better embryology, which showed the sorts of things I was claiming. Biologists today don’t use Haeckel’s data to support their theories, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have embryological data.

  461. @Terry: Spars in wings and bridges, axles and I-beams and Whipple trusses. Still nothing spectacularly conclusive.

    These are all similarities of structure that *are* due to functional requirements. I was talking about similarities of structure that *aren’t* due to functional requirements. For example, suppose you analyzed the steel in the I-beams of bridges in different countries, and found that it all had trace amounts of a particular impurity that is only found in steel from a particular steel mill. That would be evidence that the steel in all of those I-beams had a common ancestry; but common ancestry would not explain the shape of the I-beams, only the presence of the impurity. The shape of the I-beams would still be explained by functional requirements.

  462. This thread has reached 595 posts, which is extraordinary in its own right. Nevertheless, getting back to the original post by Eric . . .

    Is it possible that cults arise as mutations in social evolution, and the ones that “work” eventually grow, persist, and become established religions?

  463. @TomA:

    You’re making a distinction that a lot of people make, but one that I (and presumably our host) don’t actually make.

    As the old joke goes:

    Q: What’s the difference between a cult and a religion?

    A: A few hundred years.

  464. @Newman
    Do you think Thomas Morgan was a great biologist? And how was his fruit fly project different?

    Collecting data and publishing articles is a good description of science. And you can read in many places why her articles matter. JAD is delusional, so any attempt to be more specific is wasted on him. He does not care beyond the words woman and science.

  465. There could be a useful distinction there, actually. There’s the cult/religion when led by the founder(s), and the cult/religion when it’s led by the first generation of clergy ordained by the founding set, etc. It’s like the telephone game. Christian doctrine today is different from Christian doctrine circa 500 AD. Netherlands doctrine in 2012 is different from Netherlands doctrine in 1958.

    I don’t think it impacts whether Eric’s list of conditions holds (a trait that makes that list useful), but it’s more insight into the whole model that interests me. It could also have impact on what course of action most effectively achieves a given goal in the presence of a cult/religion. (I’ve noticed that Eric has, in the OP and all his comments, curiously refrained from saying what to *do* in response to cults. If I read in to them, I gather he’s suggesting what to do by actually doing it – one, don’t sign up, and two, share information. But that still leaves open the matter of what information is most effective to share.)

  466. @Paul Brinkley:

    There could be a useful distinction there, actually. There’s the cult/religion when led by the founder(s), and the cult/religion when it’s led by the first generation of clergy ordained by the founding set, etc. It’s like the telephone game. Christian doctrine today is different from Christian doctrine circa 500 AD. Netherlands doctrine in 2012 is different from Netherlands doctrine in 1958.

    If I accept for a moment that this is, in fact, a useful distinction, my next question is: how is this different than the distinction between a successful sole proprietorship and a corporation that has been in existence for a hundred years?

  467. @esr on Friday, January 18 2013 at 11:36 pm said:
    >Society of St. Pius X, the Hashishin, the Skoptsy, Hare Krishna, Soka Gakkai.

    I grant you all the others on this list, but I’m curious why you included SSPX. Nasty and theologically conservative does not imply “cult”; I’ve heard no reports of SSPX that suggest cultlike behavior.

    See Cults: The Mind Enslaved and …Part II.

    The author was in SSPX for decades. She has some interesting thoughts about what makes a cult: “Gnostic mental processes”; “thinking my group alone held the key to salvation”.

    1. >“thinking my group alone held the key to salvation”.

      Well, hell. That’s all monotheisms.

      I think ‘cult’ is being applied more broadly than I would here.

  468. @Patrick:

    Er? I think the analogy doesn’t carry the distinction into one between a successful sole proprietorship and a centuries-old corporation. A sole proprietorship is just one proprietor; a cult of one, if you will, and it ceases to exist when the proprietor retires, shuts it down, dies, etc. (If you’re talking about it being handed down through generations and remaining a sole proprietorship, then I think the analogy carries, but I don’t know why we’re interested in cults of size one here…)

    What distinction am I talking about? Suppose you have a cult with a sincere founder (i.e. not doing it as a con game). The founder has a semi-stable vision of what that cult is about, that informs its doctrine. The vision is expressed in manifestos, sermons, speeches, etc. The expression of the vision, or more importantly, the interpretation of it by the founder’s disciples, might be unequal, but that’s generally okay as far as the founder is concerned, so long as the founder is accorded authority to course-correct the cult as he desires. His disciples will permit him to say “no, that’s not what I meant; I meant this” because something about his reputation convinces them they should let his judgement supersede their own.

    Suppose the founder dies, leaves, etc. The cult lives on. But the vision is now interpreted by those disciples; the founder is no longer there to course-correct, and the second-order disciples aren’t convinced of the first order’s reputation as they are of its ability to interpret the original vision. So you get a chance for some doctrine drift, and also a chance for some loss of trust within the second order – the seeds of schism. There’s also a chance that one or more of the first order is not sincere, and willfully misinterprets or warps the original vision to pursue other goals. These drifts resemble a random walk from the original vision, in that they get increasingly scattered as successive generations of disciples pass on.

    I could see the exact same thing happening in any company where the leadership changes, with the plausible exception that such drift is customarily much more accepted, while “the Deadheads are *always* the Deadheads!”.

    Were you driving at a different point?

  469. @ Patrick Mauoin – “Q: What’s the difference between a cult and a religion?
    A: A few hundred years.”

    Not all cults evolve into religions, some die out.

    In any event, what I was querying was whether a cult might equate with a societal mutation.

    Mutation is a necessary component of evolution. By extension, if a society chose to (forcibly) eliminate all cults, would they be compromising their natural evolutionary process?

  470. @ Paul Brinkley

    There could be a useful distinction there, actually. There’s the cult/religion when led by the founder(s), and the cult/religion when it’s led by the first generation of clergy ordained by the founding set, etc. It’s like the telephone game. Christian doctrine today is different from Christian doctrine circa 500 AD. Netherlands doctrine in 2012 is different from Netherlands doctrine in 1958.

    There is Islam. From Wikipedia:

    articulated by the Qur’an, a text considered by its adherents to be the verbatim word of God … and by the teachings and normative example … of Muhammad [c.570-632] , considered by them to be the last prophet of God.

    It is worth noting that if our legal system had not changed since 600 ad, it would be pretty gruesome as well.

  471. @Paul Brinkley:

    A sole proprietorship is just one proprietor

    Sure, but he could have lots of employees.

    ; a cult of one, if you will

    Not at all.

    , and it ceases to exist when the proprietor retires, shuts it down, dies, etc. (If you’re talking about it being handed down through generations and remaining a sole proprietorship, then I think the analogy carries, but I don’t know why we’re interested in cults of size one here…)

    I’m not talking about a size of one.

    I could see the exact same thing happening in any company where the leadership changes, with the plausible exception that such drift is customarily much more accepted, while “the Deadheads are *always* the Deadheads!”.

    I think if you look at the rise of evangelical Christianity (the entire concept of which, to me, seems the antithesis of some of Jesus’s better teachings, btw) we see that, yes religions evolve, just like companies. And even the Deadheads always being the Deadheads is the sort of thing that can be emphasized or deemphasized and dwindle away. It may be that successful religions necessarily change more slowly than successful corporations or other organizations, but I’m not really convinced even of that.

    Were you driving at a different point?

    No, I think, despite your misunderstanding of the legal meaning of sole proprietorship, you get the point precisely — what distinguishes the evolution of a cult with a strong leader into either a viable religion (or the devolution into nothingness) from the same evolution or devolution of any other organization? I’m not sure there is much to distinguish the processes. The difference in lifespan between the largest religions and largest corporations is almost certainly driven in large part by the profit vs. non-profit focus, but in many of the ways that matter, the evolutionary mechanisms are identical (IMO).

    @TomA:

    Not all cults evolve into religions, some die out.

    Precisely.

    In any event, what I was querying was whether a cult might equate with a societal mutation.

    A cult, or a business, or an organism evolves to fill a niche. A successful new one almost always represents some sort of mutation — something is being done differently than before. One that is successful in life and that also is successful past the life of the founder has something more, that sometimes depends on structures that the founder put in place or not, but almost always requires some “mutation” after the founder has gone.

  472. @ ESR

    I think ‘cult’ is being applied more broadly than I would here.

    I think that ‘cult’ is also being applied more narrowly than you would, in that many participants here are focusing on cults that are or may be religions. Landmark Forum (from the OP) is a good counter example.

  473. James A. Donald:
    > > If the cause was fear of lawsuits, the courts, or the regulators, would attempt to lay down rules as to what constituted a safe playground. No attempt to do this, therefore, the official story a lie.

    JonCB on Saturday, January 19 2013 at 4:51 am said:
    > These are the same legal systems that requires MacD to label COFFEE with “Warning: contents may be hot”,

    McDonald’s still serves coffee. Peanut butter still contains peanuts. Schools, however, now forbid any environment where the superior upper body strength of males over females is apparent.

    If society is ruled by a group with a religious belief that all men are created equal, yet is is apparent that groups are unequal, obviously this is a crime, and drastic measures are required to fix it. Yet, strangely, they go right on being unequal, they have male privilege, white privilege, and whatever it is that male homosexuals call the fact that male heterosexuals are generally saner, more dignified, more mature, and less apt to die of disgusting diseases than male homosexuals. Heteronormative privilege?

    This inequality is deemed to be cheating on the the original measures, which are considered some kind of compromise, and the compromise has been invalidated by cheating, so sterner measures are required, punitive measures.

    Things are mighty bad in our schools, and to see how bad this can get, probably will get, observe a hundred and fifty years of increasingly drastic and brutal measures directed against the Tutsi, which measures our host is still in denial about.

    If you believe in equality and justice, there is no limit to how evil and how horrid the measures required to impose your religion, in the face of the persistent perfidy of evil groups that remain stubbornly unequal.

    No compromise is possible. The only way to avoid ever more brutal, bloody, destructive and terrible egalitarian measures is to back all the way out to a society that admits and expects group differences: Women need male supervision. Blacks and whites prefer segregation (observe the school cafetaria), and violating segregation is impolite. Homosexuals and bastards should not be permitted in positions of trust. Positions of leadership over white males should only be occupied by white males (and that is especially important for teachers and students) and as for the small minority of talented black males, see segregation.

    The alternative to society recognizing reality and functioning in accordance with that reality is ever more lies, ever more extreme measures, and ever more fear. For how much fear, see racial justice in the Congo.

  474. @ James A. Donald

    Even if your evaluation of groups is correct (a premise no rational person would accept), has it not occurred to you that when evaluating an individual, it is best to evaluate the individual?

  475. @Patrick:

    Oh, I know quite well what a sole proprietorship is. :-) I just couldn’t make out what you were trying to say about them here, and it threw me; that was all.

    Being nitpicky: I still think there’s a relevant distinction between cults/religions and companies. One is a member of a cult/religion by embracing the mindset (and being recognized as doing so by the rest of its members); one is a member of a company by agreeing to do work in exchange for money. I’d incline more toward equating cult memberships and company shareholders, in other words. I don’t expect employees to defend their companies’ vision as earnestly.

    Meanwhile, I’m much more interested in what makes a cult succeed, and how its doctrine changes along the way. For example, where do eschatological cults come from? Do they always start that way? Do they often drift there from another predictable source (e.g. places of arbitrarily enforced poverty)? How often are they copying previous eschatological cults, versus coming up with such notions independently (would that even be knowable)?

  476. I’d suggest “cultishness” for a quality of a group that comes in degrees, rather than attempting to make binary distinctions of “is a cult” or “isn’t a cult”. It seems to me to be a failure mode of human interaction. It can happen in all sorts of small groups – churches, political groups, drug rehabilitation programmes, etc. A group turns inward, it has an enemy, certain thinking is discouraged, etc.

    It may be useful to think of cultishness as a memetic parasite that, like most parasites, tends to evolve to do less damage to its host. Cultish groups that don’t implode tend to get less nasty with time. Mormonism was considerably weirder and nastier in Brigham Young’s day than today, for example. (Brigham Young was pretty comparable to David Miscavige for combining some competence with a fundamental frothing lunacy.)

    Source for my opining: experience as an Internet critic of Scientology in the late ’90s.

  477. Paul Brinkley on Saturday, January 19 2013 at 1:22 pm said:
    > There could be a useful distinction there, actually. There’s the cult/religion when led by the founder(s), and the cult/religion when it’s led by the first generation of clergy ordained by the founding set, etc. It’s like the telephone game. Christian doctrine today is different from Christian doctrine circa 500 AD. Netherlands doctrine in 2012 is different from Netherlands doctrine in 1958.

    Mainstream Christian was pretty much unchanging from the earliest historical records to the 1960s, for those who most passionately criticized it for changing could only come up with trivia.

    From the earliest historical records to 1960 or so, Christian doctrine and practice was pretty uniform, apart from the puritans and puritan descended religions and such like sects, and the dispute over marriage and consanguinity. If you look at the differences they debating, they thought those differences very important, but they were entirely minute.

    Christianity only started changing in the sixties, when the progressives started making Christ into the chief community organizer, rather than the redeemer, and preaching progressive, rather than Christian, marriage.

    The puritans supposedly wanted to go back to the pure Christian doctrine, Christianity as it was in the earliest historical records, but to the extent that their critique of contemporary seventeenth century Christianity was accurate and well founded upon the bible and historical records, the differences were minute, and pretty much incomprehensible to moderns.. They remained, however highly motivated to differentiate themselves and they proceeded to go of the rails by manufacturing unhistorical and unbiblical differences between themselves and the rest, for example dressing in monochrome, desacralizing marriage, and launching the war on Christmas, but to the extent that they were true to their original critique that Christianity had drifted, they did not have much.

    Their major legitimate issue was that Christ probably was not born on Christmas day. Big whoop! Was there anyone who did not know that? If that is all you have, you are hard up for differences.

    And when they wore monochrome and desacralized marriage, they totally went of the rails. They, not the seventeenth century mainstream Christians, were the ones deviating from biblical and historical Christianity.

  478. @ Paul Brinkley:

    Being nitpicky: I still think there’s a relevant distinction between cults/religions and companies.

    I’m sure there are several; but are the relevant to the changes required for longevity under discussion? (In fact, I previously identified one that I think is relevant — the non-profit motive of a cult means that it can more easily weather setbacks than a for-profit company.)

    One is a member of a cult/religion by embracing the mindset (and being recognized as doing so by the rest of its members); one is a member of a company by agreeing to do work in exchange for money.

    That’s a gross oversimplification. If the employees at the top simplify it that much, I’m sure the company is doomed.

    I’d incline more toward equating cult memberships and company shareholders, in other words. I don’t expect employees to defend their companies’ vision as earnestly.

    I couldn’t disagree more. Most of the long-lived companies are publicly traded. Share ownership is much more fungible than employees. I own stock in lots of companies, but I only work for one.

    For example, where do eschatological cults come from? Do they always start that way?

    I don’t really know anything about this. OTOH if I wanted to mind-fuck people into doing my bidding, it would seem incredibly useful to try to keep them convinced that the afterlife might be happening sooner rather than later, and that their chances for a _good_ afterlife greatly depended on how well they followed my edicts in this life.

  479. I think if you look at the rise of evangelical Christianity (the entire concept of which, to me, seems the antithesis of some of Jesus’s better teachings, btw) we see that, yes religions evolve, just like companies.

    The Baptist Church in the United States was actually founded on principles many modern Americans would consider liberal, let alone the people of the day. Roger Williams believed strongly in the separation of church and state, in “believer’s baptism” (i.e., you had to be an independently thinking adult who could make a profession of faith of his own free will in order to qualify to be baptized or inducted into a church), and in the “priesthood of all believers” (i.e., that all believers were, individually, responsible for their own relationship with the Divine, and that it really was none of anyone else’s business). He also strongly opposed conversion by the sword, stating “forced worship stinks in the nostrils of God”. I think we owe some of the provisions of the Constitution, such as the anti-establishment clause and the unstated but generally agreed upon separation of church and state, to the thinking of the first American Baptist.

    Incidentally, Sarah Vowell, super-adorable history geek and the voice of Violet Parr from The Incredibles, said on a talk show that the problem with Islamic fundamentalists is they don’t have a Roger Williams.

    Of course, we don’t associate Baptist churches with these views today. It’s enough to make me wonder what the problem is, why these memes didn’t take hold. Is there something deep within the human spirit that cries out for domination? Upthread, Jessica Boxer said that most people aren’t smart enough to make good atheists. I agree; to that I would add that they aren’t courageous enough to make good libertarians.

  480. @David Gerard:

    It may be useful to think of cultishness as a memetic parasite that, like most parasites, tends to evolve to do less damage to its host. Cultish groups that don’t implode tend to get less nasty with time.

    Just to be a tiny bit nit-picky — in the case of cultishness, is it the parasite weakening or the host developing a certain amount of resistance? I’m sure we have seen both, and there is some self-reinforcement there — if enough people leave the cult, the remaining ones might tone it down a bit to attract more followers and keep more people from defectors. OTOH, the imploding cults usually seem to go the other way and ratchet it up to the next level.

  481. >Just to be a tiny bit nit-picky — in the case of cultishness, is it the parasite weakening or the host developing a certain amount of resistance?

    I think the analogy to biological parasites holds – killing your host is bad business, and parasites do better if they don’t quite do that. This would suggest that religions, like biological parasites, evolve toward symbiosis.

    (I’m now thinking of my local Anglican church, which spends quite a lot of energy on charitable works and the ridiculously difficult task of being good to one’s fellow human. I mean, I’m a surly atheist and I approve wholeheartedly and have donated them money.)

  482. Brian Marshall on Saturday, January 19 2013 at 4:58 pm said:
    > Even if your evaluation of groups is correct (a premise no rational person would accept), has it not occurred to you that when evaluating an individual, it is best to evaluate the individual?

    But, if you evaluate the individual, you still get white privilege, male privilege, heteronormative privilege, and so on and so forth, So evaluating the individual is forbidden, and in practice severely punshed.

    Instead we get affirmative action, and worse, much worse, for example class evaluations systematically falsified to make the top five performers in the class female, kids prevented from engaging in physical activities that would display upper body strength.

    If you evaluate the individua we get continuing X privilege because individuals are not equal, with the result that groups as groups are even less equal. If you take a random white guy and a random black guy and individually evaluate them, there is a seventy percent chance the white is better (more likely to do the sensible thing, less likely to mug you). If you take a group of whites hanging out with each other, and a group of blacks hanging out with each other, there is a hundred percent chance that the group of whites is better. (Esr will doubtless point out that it is not a hundred percent, but merely very close to 100%) The group of white guys maintain constructive prosocial norms on each other, the group of black guys maintain self destructive anti social norms on each other, because the average of the white guys is higher than the average of the black guys.

    Since, mysteriously, the privilege some how strangely continues, more drastic measures are necessary: Those evil males, whites, heteros, etc, are somehow, mysteriously, remaining privileged. Thus, large numbers of women are helicoptered into computer science courses, yet strangely, mysteriously, do not actually wind up writing computer programs – because, of course, very few women are genuinely capable of doing computer science, something everyone is forbidden to notice.

    That somehow very few women wind up writing computer programs is, of course, male privilege, requiring even more drastic measures to deter males from academic performance, requiring ever harsher punishment of males collectively and individually – it being easy to level down, but impossible to level up.

    In school, boys are not in fact evaluated on their work, but rather punished for being males. The discrepancy between the GPA and SAT proves that boys are being systematically discriminated against and discouraged in class evaluations

    And so, since X privilege continues, despite ever more drastic measures against group X, you eventually wind up impaling Tutsi women by inserting large objects up their vaginas, which problem esr assures us all the fault of the Tutsis, just as the supposedly poor performance of males in schools is supposedly all the fault of the males.

  483. It may be useful to think of cultishness as a memetic parasite that, like most parasites, tends to evolve to do less damage to its host.

    It may also be useful to think of cultishness as not a single parasite, but a bunch of related “modules” of pathological belief and behavior.

    In one of my rants against Isagenix I described Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret as a bit of memetic malware that broke off from some larger movement, perhaps a sales cult or ponzi scheme.

    My reasoning is as follows: I’ve an acquaintance who got involved with a sales cult a few years back. Thankfully that only lasted a few months and she is now a committed skeptic and devout atheist. During this time, she made me privy to some of the training/motivational materials the MLM made available to some of its members — audio recordings of a seminar given by one of the leaders of the MLM’s Australian network. I listened to an hour or so of this guy telling people in his comically twangy Australian accent about how you could achieve great things and have whatever you want with just “the power of your mind” and positive thoughts. When I first came across The Secret, I recognized the cant immediately. But inside the context of the MLM it served a darker purpose: to pump people up and prevent them from getting discouraged if they didn’t see the results that they wanted, to keep them in the network, buying the merchandise and the materials, feeding the upline. So my suspicion grew that this was the original purpose of the malware, and that it somehow spread beyond its original context, lacking its purpose but still virulent enough to take root in people’s minds. and spread.

    With this insight, I began to consider a cult as an entire malware stack consisting of various components, and the possibility that a given cultish organization or movement could be part of a cult, but not a whole one. The irrational fawning over Barack Obama, for example, gives off a whiff of being “part of a cult”, namely the part that induces a person to seek out, venerate, and commit one’s life to a savior to avoid personal responsibility for one’s problems.

  484. I think the analogy to biological parasites holds – killing your host is bad business, and parasites do better if they don’t quite do that. This would suggest that religions, like biological parasites, evolve toward symbiosis.

    Funny you should mention that. This is a principle underlying a big idea for whose acceptance one of the brilliant female scientists JAD maintains don’t exist — Lynn Margulis — had fought for decades against a hostile scientific community. The idea is that not only are eukaryotic cells themselves bacterial in origin, but that intelligence itself is an emergent quality of bacterial symbiosis — indeed, that symbiosis and not competition dominates the history of evolution.

    Think of it. Cooperation — not competition — is the prime force that drives evolution forward. Kind of puts the lie to the naturalistic basis on which capitalists justify themselves, doesn’t it?

  485. Jeff – yeah. I don’t know how to test this surmise, but it does sound very plausible to me. What we call “general intelligence” is 60-100 specialised hardware coprocessors all doing their thing, and each with their failure modes and ‘sploits galore.

    I did notice that bit in your post. It strikes me as an idea worth considering.

    (I so wish I could work out how to quantify this stuff even in principle, instead of just saying “yep! sounds plausible!”)

  486. @ Patrick Maupin

    … if enough people leave the cult, the remaining ones might tone it down a bit to attract more followers and keep more people from defectors.

    There is another interesting aspect… Some people leave for various reasons. The remaining people are the ones most into the cult, its leader, the story – these all (can) become even stronger. (It seems to me that this would often make the cult either significantly stronger or significantly less stable over time.)

  487. Brian – cults don’t tend to tone down when people leave thinking they’re too crazy – they get worse. See the LessWrong essay Evaporative cooling of cult beliefs. “Early studiers of cults were surprised to discover than when cults receive a major shock—a prophecy fails to come true, a moral flaw of the founder is revealed—they often come back stronger than before, with increased belief and fanaticism.”

  488. @ David Gerard

    Brian – cults don’t tend to tone down when people leave thinking they’re too crazy – they get worse.

    That was exactly the point I was trying to make. It is the same principle as the molecules of water with the highest energy breaking away, leaving the average energy of the remaining molecules lower.

    Actually, I just now noticed the name of your link – “Evaporative cooling of cult beliefs.”! Good essay, btw.

  489. Trust me when I say you’re not as weird as them – look up “Roko’s basilisk”. That said, I know they actually have meetings where they try to work out if they’ve actually turned into a cult without noticing – they really don’t want to fall to the cult attractor themselves.

  490. re: Intelligence and Chess

    I have never done a formal IQ test, but I believe that I am pretty darn intelligent. In high school, I discovered that I have a great talent for programming. I loved it and was paid very well to do it.

    However, I suck at chess. The reason is apparent in my posts, particularly in relation to HTML tags. Initially, I often don’t see mistakes.

    When programming (mostly in the past – I am basically retired now), I wasn’t the world’s fastest coder, but I found that my elegant code generally either worked or it failed. Usually, in few-thousand-line software), walking through it with a debugger plus identifying the special cases and specifically testing them was all it took to write damn-near bug-free code that would run for years without exhibiting a bug.

    But chess? No. I haven’t even tried since I was a mid-teen.

  491. I think that I may have mentioned this before, but one of my programs – a fairly simple graphing program that automatically chose how to label the arises (back in the ’80s) would screw up the labelling of the X axis in some cases.

    After much iteratively removing code, I established that it was a hardware problem and the floating point board on a VAX 11-780 was replaced (at a cost of $22,000, IIRC).

    It was a an interesting career.

  492. JonCB on Saturday, January 19 2013 at 5:04 am said:
    > I would point that ESR has never said that all men are created equal, in fact has explicitly stated the exact opposite. This is a strawman.

    ESR claimed that Tutsi are on average equal to non Tutsi, which if true makes mass murder, state sponsored rape, and degrading sexual forms of murder regrettably necessary, since somehow the Tutsi strangely remain unequal to their neighbors despite one hundred and fifty years of efforts to remedy this problem.

    ESR also claimed that the problems in the Congo are due to warlords. It is the government army that is sponsoring rape and murder by sexual impalement, (an activity that progressives and the Congo government piously decry, but somehow strangely fail to do anything effectual to stop) and the warlords are Tutsi, or races perceived to be related to Tutsi. So if problems in the Congo are due to warlords, they are not due to the government, but due to Tutsi.

    The Congo is the part of the world where today the doctrine of equality and social justice displays its evil in the most monstrous fashion, and in this conflict, which side does esr choose? He, predictably, chooses the side of equality and social justice.

    1. >ESR claimed that Tutsi are on average equal to non Tutsi, which if true makes mass murder, state sponsored rape, and degrading sexual forms of murder regrettably necessary

      There is nothing that ever makes such atrocities “necessary”. Your assumption that other people must reason from equality to atrocity merely projects the evil and hatred in your own soul onto others.

  493. McDonald’s still serves coffee. Peanut butter still contains peanuts. Schools, however, now forbid any environment where the superior upper body strength of males over females is apparent.

    This is incorrect. They still have sports ovals which is an environment where the “superior upper body strength of males over females” is vastly more apparent than the one you say they removed.

    And to re-iterate my earlier comment, the death of sports has demonstrably not occurred in Australia and i don’t believe it’s happened in the US without evidence to show it.

  494. [Gonna see if I can fix the blockquotes.]

    One is a member of a cult/religion by embracing the mindset (and being recognized as doing so by the rest of its members); one is a member of a company by agreeing to do work in exchange for money.

    That’s a gross oversimplification. If the employees at the top simplify it that much, I’m sure the company is doomed.

    A simplification, I agree, but I wouldn’t call it gross. You don’t think large companies operate on the assumption that lower-ranking employees tend to be less loyal than higher-ranking ones?

    I’d incline more toward equating cult memberships and company shareholders, in other words. I don’t expect employees to defend their companies’ vision as earnestly.

    I couldn’t disagree more. Most of the long-lived companies are publicly traded. Share ownership is much more fungible than employees. I own stock in lots of companies, but I only work for one.

    I can see enough wrong with my claim to not press it strongly. But do you disagree that there exist people who purchase shares in a company they don’t work for, because they believe in its vision? Meanwhile, I hope you don’t mean that you’re more tied to your company of employment simply because you can only work for one; people can and do have multiple jobs, after all. …Either way, I didn’t mean this as a strong point.

    For example, where do eschatological cults come from? Do they always start that way?

    I don’t really know anything about this. OTOH if I wanted to mind-fuck people into doing my bidding, it would seem incredibly useful to try to keep them convinced that the afterlife might be happening sooner rather than later, and that their chances for a _good_ afterlife greatly depended on how well they followed my edicts in this life.

    That would work as long as you were the one leading the cult. But that still leaves me interested in cases where the cult is led by a sincere believer, cases where the founder is sincere and benevolent, but the cult drifts into malignancy after the founder is gone, and cases where the cult is so large that its leader holds too little physical influence over outlying followers to be able to mindfuck them for personal gain, and yet they follow him anyway.

    I also have to ask why it has to be an afterlife threat (or lure), rather than something else. What other tool(s) might there be? Is a claim about experience after death really necessary to the phenomenon?

  495. I wrote:
    > which side does esr choose? He, predictably, chooses the side of equality and social justice.
    This might puzzle some readers. Why did I find it entirely predictable that esr would choose the side of evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success?

    Because esr hangs out at the very right hand edge of the Overton Window. As the Overton window gets narrower and narrower, and moves ever leftwards, the difference between people on the right hand edge of the Overton window and people on the left hand edge of the Overton window ceases to matter.

    Esr thinks that the difference between himself and progressives is big, but it is only big compared to the Overton window, which, compared to the difference between progressives and reality, is tiny and getting ever ever smaller.

    Esr on race is like the tea party on the deficit. Part of the Republican party wants the US to head towards bankruptcy at one percent slower speed, and the ultra extreme far far right of the far right lunatic fringe of the Republican party wants the US to head towards bankruptcy at two percent slower speed.

  496. d

    ESR claimed that Tutsi are on average equal to non Tutsi

    This is not quite accurate but close enough for our purposes here.

    which if true makes mass murder, state sponsored rape, and degrading sexual forms of murder regrettably necessary, since somehow the Tutsi strangely remain unequal to their neighbors despite one hundred and fifty years of efforts to remedy this problem.

    I would never believe this of ESR’s world view.

    The idea that all these are a campaign to make males inferior seem massively over-complex. And by massively over-complex i kind of mean “functionally indistinguishable from loony tin-foil-hat theory”.

  497. esr:
    > There is nothing that ever makes such atrocities “necessary”. Your assumption that other people must reason from equality to atrocity merely projects the evil and hatred in your own soul onto others.

    And yet, just as I predicted, your reflex reaction was to defend those committing the atrocities and blame the victims. You reflexively and instinctively blamed the “warlords”, not the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo.

    I am sure that there is not one progressive who thinks that the measures taken by the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo are “necessary”, yet strangely, somehow, most of them still think military support for the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo is regrettably necessary – which means that they do in fact think that such atrocities are necessary: Doublethink and crimestop.

    The Congo is to progressives today, what Khmer Rouge Cambodia was to the radical left in 1976. You can quietly side with the monsters, or you can realize that there is something horribly wrong with your ideals.

    Equality leads to terror, because reality is not equal, so you wind up criminalizing reality. Moderate and humane measures are never enough, so they endless creep into more extreme measures. In the US we have moved beyond hypocrisy, to fear and lies. The next step after fear and lies, is terror.

  498. @Patrick “That’s the turtles all the way down argument”

    You did miss the whole point: It is the genetic system operating as designed in small-e evolution. Even if it is the sort of mutation-induced change that you expect in macro-evolution (bit-E Evolution), it doesn’t prove that the process of evolution adds any useful information.

    “unheretoforseen arsenic-containing base pairs.”

    Citation needed.

    I’ll take your eyeonicr blog at face value until and unless it is disproved. It is obviously a fairly easy and straightforward example of beneficial-apparent evolution. But (and, of course, you are free to label this as “Just so” or “turtles all the way down” or some other such balderdash as per your First Amendment or equivalent right) the main role of E. coli in the ecology is as a gut bacteria. Is the ability to use citrate in an environment with enough oxygen for aerobic respiration such a good thing? It seems likely to me that if E. coli is indeed designed by God for this role, one of its functions would be to keep the intestines relatively clear of free oxygen and hydroxyl radicals, a function which would be compromised by it going after citrate instead of oxygen. The original citT gene in non-Cit+ bacteria is therefore there to allow the bacteria to keep from going extinct in the gut if it isn’t getting enough oxygen. So, the Cit+ mutation might be beneficial to a bunch of E. coli in a highly oxygenated lab flask, but is it a good thing in its actual ecological environment?

    @Peter “You’re going to have to spell this out, because I don’t see it at all. I talked about similarities of structure, not similarities of function.”

    @Terry (earlier): “The first part is like saying the popularity of Microsoft Windows on modern computers can only be explained by Evolution.”

    @Peter (earlier): “That’s just one more commonality that makes no sense if organisms didn’t evolve from a common ancestor.”

    Why does commonality of structure make no sense without Evolution? Why should God be obliged to design different structures for the same function? (And never mind that bird wings are different from bat wings, butterfly wings, dragonfly wings, and bumblebee wings… never mind the last two since dragonfly wings and bumblebee wings are similar in structure, but function very differently in the same role.) Commonality of structure could be used as an argument for a single creator God, I wonder if anyone has done that…

    @Peter: “Biologists today don’t use Haeckel’s data to support their theories,”

    Hmm… okay, that much is obvious to me, anyway. But er… why are his drawings still found in textbooks to support Evolution?

    (Note: I’m not a pure monotheist, and no Christian should be, since the Bible speaks quite a bit about gods other than Yahweh, including Baal, Dagon, and Mammon. I do believe that there is only one God who created the universe.)

  499. @Terry: Why does commonality of structure make no sense without Evolution?

    Perhaps a better way of phrasing it is that, on the hypothesis of common ancestry, I *expect* to see similarities of structure that are not forced by functional constraints. On any other hypothesis, I have no reason to expect to see that.

    On the hypothesis that organisms were created by a designer, in fact, I would expect *not* to see similar structures performing different functions; I would expect to see different structures for different functions.

    Why should God be obliged to design different structures for the same function?

    You keep talking about structures which have the same function, which is irrelevant to the point I’m making. I’m talking about similar structures that have *different* functions, like fish fins and animal limbs. As I said above, a designer would design different structures for different functions.

    why are his drawings still found in textbooks to support Evolution?

    I couldn’t say. They weren’t in any textbooks I saw, but it’s been quite a while since I was in any biology classes.

  500. @Peter: “On the hypothesis that organisms were created by a designer, in fact, I would expect *not* to see similar structures performing different functions; I would expect to see different structures for different functions.”

    It is perhaps because I don’t see similar structures performing different functions very often, and the examples which seem to have you so held up are not very good ones. Anyway, why should God be obliged to use different structures for different functions?

  501. @Terry: There’s no point in arguing about whether or not my examples are “good” ones. If you don’t find them so, there’s not much of a basis for discussion. But you do ask:

    why should God be obliged to use different structures for different functions?

    Because different structures will be better suited to different functions. If you’re going to allow God to pick any structure for any function, regardless of how badly suited it is, then the God hypothesis can explain anything, which means it explains nothing.

  502. Terry on Saturday, January 19 2013 at 9:55 pm said:
    > It is perhaps because I don’t see similar structures performing different functions very often,

    Inside the dolphin’s flipper is a five fingered hand.

    If not evolution, why?

    The fishy ancestor of all land vertebrates had fingers on his fins so that he could grab onto things and haul himself through the mud when stranded by tide and weather. The dolphin is not designed to do such things, yet the fingers are still there, hidden inside, and now useless.

  503. JonCB on Saturday, January 19 2013 at 8:24 pm said:
    > The idea that all these are a campaign to make males inferior seem massively over-complex.

    Let us hear your explanation for the disappearance from schools of anything that would render upper body strength apparent, or your explanation for the fact that the top five academic achievers in class are usually supposedly female, even though the SAT tells us that males achieve slightly better.

    Further, let us look at the discussion of boys supposed failure in school: Supposedly it is because boys are no good, supposedly it is because of testosterone poisoning, supposedly it is because schools are too tolerant of masculinity. The discussion is entirely dominated by people who quite obviously hate all males, think that males feel to good about themselves, and want males to feel bad. We see the actions, and in the discussion, we see the attitude of hostility and anger directed against maleness and masculinity. Masculinity is equated with bullying.

  504. Winter on Saturday, January 19 2013 at 12:54 pm said:
    > Do you think Thomas Morgan was a great biologist? And how was his fruit fly project different?
    >
    > Collecting data and publishing articles is a good description of science.

    It is a good description of a bureaucracy ritualistically and mindlessly going through the motions of science

    Thomas Morgan’s fruit fly project showed us that chromosomes contained the material of heredity, were heredity. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard was superficially doing exactly and precisely what Thomas Morgan did, but whereas Thomas Morgan’s work helped us understand the world, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard’s work was just piling up papers and getting grants. Her work showed us absolutely nothing other than that having a pussy helps a hell of a lot in getting science grants.

  505. JonCB on Saturday, January 19 2013 at 7:54 pm said:
    > They still have sports ovals which is an environment where the “superior upper body strength of males over females” is vastly more apparent than the one you say they removed.

    Is it?

    In every other area segregation is forbidden, but on the sports oval, segregation is absolutely total and mandatory, so that no invidious comparison between males and females can ever be drawn.

    Further, they don’t really have sports ovals at all, in the sense that these days most kids do not routinely get out on them and play sport. In this sense, sports ovals have been as thoroughly abolished as playgrounds.

  506. “(Note: I’m not a pure monotheist, and no Christian should be, since the Bible speaks quite a bit about gods other than Yahweh, including Baal, Dagon, and Mammon. I do believe that there is only one God who created the universe.)”

    @Terry: The Bible does mention them, as Canaanite gods NOT to be worshipped. That does NOT mean that they are real. I will refer you to the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal. Instead of wasting your time trying to turn Scripture into a high school biology textbook, you really ought to spend some time actually reading it.

  507. @Peter: “If you’re going to allow God to pick any structure for any function, regardless of how badly suited it is, then the God hypothesis can explain anything, which means it explains nothing.”

    Of course, you have a point. What the God hypothesis (or should I say “theory”, i.e. god = “theos” in Greek) explains is why form fits function so superbly, even when homologous structures are present.

    @James “The fishy ancestor of all land vertebrates had fingers on his fins”

    Never seen him. And the coelocanth doesn’t fit this description.

    @James “Inside the dolphin’s flipper is a five fingered hand.”

    I’m absolutely certain that is not the case. Even if all the homologous bones necessary to make a hand with five fingers are present, there obviously isn’t a hand there. It’s a flipper – “hydrofoil” might be a more appropriate word – and a darn good one.

    I’ve made it my business to understand birds’ wings, and while each wing has a humerus, radius, ulna, and metacarpals similar to our arms, birds’ wings are very, very different from our arms. There is also the very non-homologous supracoracoideus muscles and coracoid (wishbone) pulley system that has the same function as our triceps (wing/arm roll-to-dorsal movement) but bears very little resemblance.

    Evolution should predict that either humans would have supracoracoids, or birds would have triceps. Also, a whole bunch of measures of the “engineering” in birds (in some ways they make our best aircraft look like Tonka(R) toys) exceed our human bodies so much that you’d have to conclude they were more highly Evolved than we are, including being incredibly smart for their size. Why then are we in charge of the Earth? The answers are easy to find in the Bible, but I’d love to hear what you guys have to say on the topic.

  508. @LS “The Bible does mention them, as Canaanite gods NOT to be worshipped. That does NOT mean that they are real. … you really ought to spend some time actually reading it.”

    aHEM… you are of course ignoring some of the Bible’s most important parts:

    “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.” – Job 1:6/2:1

    “…Dagon was fallen upon his face to the earth before the ark of the LORD.” – 1 Samuel 5:3

    “And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” – 2 Corinthians 11:14

    “And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist…” – 1 John 4:3

    “And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.” – Revelation 12:3 “And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast.” – Revelation 13:4

    “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” – Ephesians 6:12

    And now, for one final quote that shows what the ignorance of the Bible can make you think about the false gods the Bible speaks of. Eric, I hope you don’t mind my putting your words into such a context even if you disagree (and that I’m too lazy to use HTML tags):

    “It doesn’t _matter_ whether the Horned Lord is a merely a storm in my neurons or an externally existing entity; what matters is what happens when I evoke him.” – A&D Comment 393319

    LS, before you start pointing out how little I know about the Bible, start catching up:

    http://www.biblegateway.com

  509. @Terry: What the God hypothesis (or should I say “theory”, i.e. god = “theos” in Greek) explains is why form fits function so superbly, even when homologous structures are present.

    Evolution explains that too; but evolution also explains the cases where form does *not* fit function superbly. The God hypothesis has to resort to special pleading every time form does not fit function perfectly, as you did earlier when talking about the eye. Evolution does not; on the evolution hypothesis we *expect* that form will not fit function perfectly, and no special pleading is required to account for it.

  510. Let us hear your explanation for the disappearance from schools of anything that would render upper body strength apparent,

    As i’ve mentioned before, i disagree that this has even happened. It certainly hasn’t happened in Australia. I’ll grant you that the playgrounds of my childhood are gone and i gave a vastly more likely excuse. Because both our countries have become sue happy and schools are a beleaguered institutions that cannot afford even the possibility of a lawsuit.

    explanation for the fact that the top five academic achievers in class are usually supposedly female

    Fact according to who or what?

    even though the SAT tells us that males achieve slightly better.

    The numbers i’ve seen for make that a naive read at best. Yes if you look at the mean combined scores then you get a difference that is probably barely significant but is in favour of males. If you examine the math scores you get a clearer advantage for males. However if you examine reading and writing the difference is neutral or in favour of females.

  511. Terry on Saturday, January 19 2013 at 11:14 pm said:
    > Even if all the homologous bones necessary to make a hand with five fingers are present, there obviously isn’t a hand there. It’s a flipper – “hydrofoil” might be a more appropriate word – and a darn good one.

    But it is a flipper made from a hand, not a flipper made from scratch. Thus, evolved.

  512. JonCB on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 12:47 am said:
    > Yes if you look at the mean combined scores then you get a difference that is probably barely significant but is in favour of males.

    But if you look at the class rankings you don’t get a barely significant difference. You get a huge dramatic difference in favor of females. Either the class rankings don’t reflect reality, or the SAT does not reflect reality – and it is a lot easier to get away with cooking the class rankings to harm males by ignoring and denigrating male academic achievement, than to cook the SAT to protect males.

    And, as I said, just look at the debate over the topic of poor male performance in schools. Just as everyone respectable and decent and good agrees that the genocide of the Tutsi occurred because those damned Tutsi were so racist colonialist and imperialist, everyone respectable and decent and good agrees that the reason that males do badly in school is because maleness is just so evil, nasty, bullying, domineering and aggressive, that males need to be cured of it.

    The smouldering malevolence and hatred, the wish to do harm, the desire to hurt, will burn your eyebrows off. They automatically blame masculinity and maleness like esr automatically blaming “warlords”

  513. Is it?

    In every other area segregation is forbidden, but on the sports oval, segregation is absolutely total and mandatory, so that no invidious comparison between males and females can ever be drawn.

    And yet it’s interesting that you’re saying that the goal of this is to undermine male esteem when everyone keeps saying that the reason for the segregation is because the boys have too many advantages. If these people are actually trying to achieve this goal, their certainly completely incompetent at doing so.

    Further, they don’t really have sports ovals at all, in the sense that these days most kids do not routinely get out on them and play sport. In this sense, sports ovals have been as thoroughly abolished as playgrounds.

    Certainly nowhere i know of.

  514. @Paul Brinkley on Saturday, January 19 2013 at 5:00 pm said:
    For example, where do eschatological cults come from?
    You might want to look into
    Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience
    by Prof.
    Richard Landes of Boston University. It’s a history of millenialist panics, in the Middle Ages and later. Prof. Landes is also a strong Zionist, who has a blog (The Augean Stables) devoted to fighting the massive corruption and fraud in reporting from the Middle East on Arab-Israeli issues.

  515. @Peter: “The God hypothesis has to resort to special pleading every time form does not fit function perfectly, as you did earlier when talking about the eye.”

    Is it “special pleading” to point out that Trevor Lamb’s flaws in the design of the human eye are imaginary? That form actually does fit function? My “talking about the eye” was informed, but incorrect speculation. The eye actually has these nifty little fiber-optic cells that help focus the light through the nerve layer, filter potentially retina-damaging UV light and allow nutrients to reach retina cells from the vitreum. Form fits function well, better than I had imagined… dang near perfectly in this case!

    http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000063

    @Peter “Evolution does not; on the evolution hypothesis we *expect* that form will not fit function perfectly, and no special pleading is required to account for it.”

    Show me a decent example where form does _not_ fit function well, so maybe I’ll have a chance to do some of this “special pleading” instead of pointing out that I don’t need to. How does Evolution explain that, despite homologous parts, form fits function pretty darn well almost all of the time in biology?

    @James “But it is a flipper made from a hand, not a flipper made from scratch. Thus, evolved.”

    “Thus, evolved.” is just like the “Just so.” I’ve been unjustly accused of. We are well beyond that level. You have to post a citation next time, and the closest I could find to one that supports your particular point is here:

    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/11/061106-dolphin-legs.html

    (Of course, I found it by searching citations at ICR.)

  516. The distinction between a cult and a religion should be understood in terms of memetic diseases:

    A cult is a meme complex totally optimized to spread maximally at the expense of its host. It is purely a disease. People are converted to a cult because they are tricked and lied to.

    A religion is meme complex that provides substantial benefits for its hosts, for example inculcating them with ancient wisdom for living, and providing social enforcement of business contracts, marriages, and agreements. People are converted to a religion to better obtain business deals, and to marry their children to good people. Its fabulous stories are not so much lies, as pious pretenses and white lies.

    A cult turns into a religion when it settles down for the long haul, when it has to survive by its hosts prospering and multiplying, rather than by getting more converts.

    Observe Paul’s rules on sex and marriage are optimized to ensure maximum reproduction by women and maximum investment in posterity by males. Male investment in posterity was, in the ancient environment, necessary for the survival of offspring, and thus the religion, and also had the effect of propagating civilization and encouraging the building of civilization, for civilization is in large part culture transmitted from fathers to sons, and in large part physical capital created by fathers for sons.

  517. James A. Donald:
    > > But it is a flipper made from a hand, not a flipper made from scratch. Thus, evolved.

    Terry on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 2:18 am said:
    > “Thus, evolved.” is just like the “Just so.”

    If God made the dolphin’s flipper, he did not make it from clay, but from a creature that had hands.

    Which renders God redundant.

  518. @James “If God made the dolphin’s flipper, he did not make it from clay, but from a creature that had hands.”

    No, He did not. You haven’t provided me with a need to say any more than that.

  519. “aHEM… you are of course ignoring some of the Bible’s most important parts:”

    @Terry: Most important??!?? WTF? You know, we talk about The Wolf Man and Dracula today, but we don’t really believe in them. The Bible is full of metaphor and cultural background stuff that makes any attempt at a literal reading just plain stupid. That’s really what’s wrong here. It’s not evolution; it’s dumbshit Biblical interpretations.

  520. @LS: If you’re going to get like that, I’ll let you have the last word. It’s obvious you don’t take the Bible at the same level as I (and most other Christians) do, making it very difficult to have an intelligent conversation about it.

  521. @Terry: All the features of the vertebrate eye that you point out as examples of form fitting function well would work even better if the light-sensitive cells in the retina were in front of the nerve fibers instead of behind. Also, the vertebrate eye would not have a blind spot if that were the case. So the vertebrate eye is still a case of form *not* fitting function in a way that would be obvious to any designer.

    It’s not enough for you to show that form fits function well; you have to show that it fits function *perfectly*. You have not shown that at all. Another example, you say the dolphin’s flippers are well designed as flippers with five “finger bones” inside them. But wouldn’t they be even better designed with *one* “flipper bone” inside them, shaped just right? The five bones are a constraint that should not even be there if the flippers were designed.

    Another example along the same lines: horses have only one “toe” (their hoof) that actually functions. A designer would just have left it at that (assuming–which is still a lot to assume–that hoofs are the absolute best way for a running animal’s legs to make contact with the ground). But horses actually have five “toes”–four of them are bone splints along the side of the central toe that has the hoof on the end. There’s no reason for those bone splints to be there if the horse’s toe and hoof were designed. They are only explicable on the hypothesis that the horse evolved from an animal with five toes.

  522. @terry
    Hand evolved to flipper predicts lungs, horizontal tail fin embryonic development (amnion) and DNA make up.

    God predicts nothing.

    God is therefore not falsifyable and any theory based on God is both unscientific and uninformative. Nothing at all can be learned about the universe trusting Creationism.

    So the choice is between learning about the universe and complete ignorance.

  523. @Paul Brinkley:

    You don’t think large companies operate on the assumption that lower-ranking employees tend to be less loyal than higher-ranking ones?

    Actually, I don’t, to a point. At the very bottom, yes, there are fungible people who are paid just enough to keep from having to replace them too often. At the middle are the people who are the lifeblood of the company. At the top are (too often, and only speaking in generalities, obviously) the parasites — if they are really that loyal, why do they need to be paid so much?

    But do you disagree that there exist people who purchase shares in a company they don’t work for, because they believe in its vision? Meanwhile, I hope you don’t mean that you’re more tied to your company of employment simply because you can only work for one; people can and do have multiple jobs, after all.

    My point relates to the amount of (current) commitment required. Yes, you can work for more than one company, but if you work for two simultaneously, you might be in almost as much trouble as if you are married to two women simultaneously. And that’s before we get to the time commitment. Every charity I know of has as one of its goals to get more volunteers, for the simple reason that people who commit time are more psychologically committed, and actually more apt to give more money, than those who don’t. The time commitment is so huge that all my acquaintances know who I work for. They don’t know which stocks I own. (And yes, I have had multiple employers — possibly more than most of my peers.)

    I also have to ask why it has to be an afterlife threat (or lure), rather than something else. What other tool(s) might there be? Is a claim about experience after death really necessary to the phenomenon?

    It might not have to be an afterlife threat or lure. But it has to significantly affect the subject (for example, for all of eternity), and be untestable. If you’re giving advice about a testable hypothesis, you’re simply a mentor (good or bad, depending on the quality of your advice, to be sure), not a cult leader.

  524. @JAD
    I like how your support for Tutsi superiority philosophies illustrates the tight links between inter-tribal genocide and modern Western racism.

    I understand very well how close the horrors in the great lakes area correspond to the plans of neo-Nazi and other fascist parties for Europe and the USA.

  525. @JonCB:

    And yet it’s interesting that you’re saying that the goal of this is to undermine male esteem when everyone keeps saying that the reason for the segregation is because the boys have too many advantages.

    I’ve been following this sub-thread, and I have to say that JAD makes some valid points. You don’t even have to believe in a conspiracy to understand that school is set up to cater to females these days, if you actually go and study schools. But that doesn’t go far enough — in Austin, for example, there is now a school for female “leaders” — but not one for male “leaders”. If that’s not affirmative action in point of fact — probably completely unnecesary given that there are more women than men in the local university, I don’t know what is.

    I have to say, though, that, perhaps unlike JAD, I actually agree with some of the reasoning that might lead some to create such a school. For example, my younger daughter experienced significant peer pressure not to be too “smart.” As a society, it behooves us to encourage our best and brightest, regardless of gender or race.

    And I think the creation of this particular school actually leads to more college opportunities for the top boys — as the smartest girls are siphoned off into this school, more boys will be expected to be in the magical top 10% of ther graduating classes. That gets them automatic admission into the flagship public universities of the state.

    The sports issue is complicated. Looking only at groups, it is generally acknowledged that boys are better at sports than girls, just like it is generally acknowledged that blacks are better at sports than whites. As JAD is quick to point out, and esr and most of the rest of us here know, both of these acknowledgements come with caveats, like how it is politically incorrect to discuss that boys might be better than girls, or whites better than blacks, in other areas.

    The current implementation of laws like Title IX mean that a university is discriminating if not as many women sign up for sports as do men. Imagine if the CS department worked that way. The upshot is, as JAD has noted, that in some cases the availability of sports are reduced until the male participation matches the female.

    And in high school, a really good girl can play football with the boys thus proving the point that (at least some) girls can do anything (that most) boys can.

    You won’t find any guys on an all-girls team, because the rules won’t allow it and the team will lose every time. But you can’t have any discriminatory rules like that for the “better” team, so if the opposing all male team doesn’t want to play a female, <a href="http://www.foxsportsarizona.com/05/10/12/School-forfeits-title-rather-than-play-a/msn_landing.html?blockID=726830"too bad — they lose.

    Personally, I think a girl who can compete at the level of the boys should be allowed to do so. But you have to admit, this does lead to an unequal outcome — a girl is free to compare herself against the best available, or against other girls, while a boy must only compare himself against the best available. It’s exactly the same as having a separate girl’s school. Except of course that the girls are (partly for reasons correctly identified by JAD, ignoring why those policies have been put in place) already doing better academically.

    Imagine if a high school had a “best” basketball team, and a “white” basketball team…

  526. @Terry:

    “unheretoforseen arsenic-containing base pairs.”

    Citation needed.

    Before I can provide the correct sort of citation, I need to know whether this is a reading comprehension problem, or another deliberate attempt at twisting words. Because, of course, what I wrote was “Nobody expects that, to prove evolution, you have to show that “modified” DNA contains some unheretoforseen arsenic-containing base pairs. ” and, of course, if you wish to refute that statement, a citation (on your part) would be extremely useful. It should be easy enough to provide — there are plenty of people set on disproving evolution, and plenty of wacky theories to choose from, so show me that one of those wacky theories involves “it’s not evolution unless arsenic shows up in one of the DNA base pairs” and I will replace the “nobody” in that statement with “AFAIK, only the whack job xxxx”.

  527. @esr:

    I have more in common in every ethically relevant way with Bushmen who are biologically a different species from me than I do with a sociopath who happens to share my skin color.

    Yeah. Which makes the ethical implications of this idea quite interesting.

    Historically, nationalism seems to rank about third on the mass-murder threat scale, a good distance behind variants of Marxism (#1) and monotheistic religions (#2).

    So, if you view Marxism as a religion with zero gods, and you view nationalism as a religion with typically two gods (for example, the nation-state itself as a god alongside Yaweh), what kind of curve fits best?

  528. @Rich: Added Landes’ book to my list-to-get; thanks.

    @Patrick:

    At the very bottom, yes, there are fungible people who are paid just enough to keep from having to replace them too often. At the middle are the people who are the lifeblood of the company. At the top are (too often, and only speaking in generalities, obviously) the parasites — if they are really that loyal, why do they need to be paid so much?

    Nice point. Well, the parasitic ones are what I’d compare to the “insincere disciples” of a cult – they’re not in it for the vision. The sincere disciples would be comparable to business leaders who take large portions of their compensation in the form of stock options, sometimes taking a nominal (read: $1) salary, and so on. Makes them sound like the exceptions to the rule, doesn’t it? Then again, a sincere believer will also make sacrifices we’d think excessive in exchange for rewards the believer thinks is more valuable to him than the sacrifices.

    This analogy between cults and companies is always going to be a bit off IMO, even if I see parallels here and there. Companies are supposed to work within a larger ethos of capitalism; they’re visions within visions. Cults don’t seem to adhere to that.

  529. Winter on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 12:39 pm said:
    > I like how your support for Tutsi superiority philosophies illustrates the tight links between inter-tribal genocide and modern Western racism.

    The genocide was done by those who believe all men were created equal. You suggest that the Tutsi had it coming for not being equal.

    For one hundred and fifty years Tutsi were wholly compliant with every effort to end Tutsi privilege, even though each effort used measures more drastic, more extreme, more cruel, more unjust than the last. They accepted and internalized the doctrine of equality, much like the men’s right movement, which foolishly proposes that men be treated exactly like women.

    But Tutsi privilege is inherent in them actually being superior, no matter how much degradation and mistreatment is applied to them.

    And so, the logical and final step to end Tutsi privilege.

    Which step you just endorsed.

  530. Regarding the value of Pi in the Bible, I am by no means a believer, but that always struck me as an unfair criticism. The science of measurement recognizes that no measurement is ever exactly precise (with a few very specialized exceptions.) The normal rule of precision is that the stated unit would be the degree of precision.

    So ten cubits diameter would be ten cubits *to the nearest cubit*, and a line thirty cubits long would be thirty cubits *to the nearest cubit.*

    Evidently, and assuming a perfectly circular object, then an item with a diameter of 9.70 cubits would have a circumference of 30.46 cubits, which would, of course, match the stated specifications.

    It seems unlikely that some point of mathematics is being made here, or that the measures could be made particularly exactly, nonetheless, this seems a piece of data that cannot be put forward as “the Bible guys are a bunch of backward rubes”, crowing, when one is so readily hoist on one’s own petard seems like a dangerous business.

    Of course there are plenty of those, such as 1Samuel 15.

    (BTW, this explanation is due to a friend of mine.)

  531. Patrick Maupin on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 12:43 pm said:
    > For example, my younger daughter experienced significant peer pressure not to be too “smart.”

    That is not peer pressure, but realism. Girls can only have sex with men who are better than themselves, and since men are not allowed to perform, if a girl does not want to grow up to be a cat lady, she had better perform worse than men are allowed to perform. If a girl tries to force herself to marry a male she perceives as inferior to herself, and these days most men are forced into roles inferior to most women, she just will find herself psychologically unable to have sex with him, and he winds up on the couch.

    As a result of the war on men, all our smartest women are growing up to become cat ladies, while the supermarket checkout girls are doing great. If you hope to have grandchildren, tell her to become a supermarket checkout girl.

    Observe, all our smartest women are becoming cat ladies. Look at the desperate women outside a fertility clinic. They look like elderly whores. Either they are all still single, or they are all still trying to trade up from their current husbands, with less and less prospect of success.

    > As a society, it behooves us to encourage our best and brightest, regardless of gender or race.

    Yet encouraging girls somehow strangely in practice means systematically destroying boys, and also means your daughter will not get married, and your son cannot get married, so, since no prospect of having wife or children, your son will stay at home and play video games.

  532. @JAD

    It’s fine, we do not need more explanations on how you think Tutsi Hutu conflict resolution is an example for solving social problems in the West.

    @Patrick
    We have an odd problem in our schools. Economizing has caused school to rely heavily on the feeling of responsibility of the children. As boys tend to lag girls in the development of self restrsint amd responsibility, boys are starting to fail school in higher numbers. As a result we will need preferential trestment for boys on universities soon.

  533. Patrick Maupin on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 12:43 pm said:
    > And I think the creation of this particular school actually leads to more college opportunities for the top boys — as the smartest girls are siphoned off into this school, more boys will be expected to be in the magical top 10% of ther graduating classes

    No they won’t. That the supposed top five in class are all girls is obviously unrelated to actual ability, so if the five best girls are sent to a girls school, five of the remaining girls will be deemed top of class, even if they have trouble reading and writing.

  534. Winter on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 4:56 pm said:
    > As boys tend to lag girls in the development of self restrsint amd responsibility,

    Ah, supposedly the genocide is the fault of the Tutsi for thinking themselves superior, and that schools refuse to acknowledge male academic ability is the fault of boys because boys are nasty and aggressive.

    But, in fact the Tutsi did not think themselves superior. They internalized, and continue to internalize, the doctrine of equality, and are dismayed that somehow, mysteriously, Tutsi privilege strangely continues to exist. The problem was not that they thought themselves superior, but that they actually were superior.

    And since every measure, no matter how drastic, failed to eradicate this superiority, inevitably progressives escalated to the most drastic measure of all.

  535. @ Jessica Boxer

    It was never my intention to suggest that

    “the Bible guys are a bunch of backward rubes”

    I was simply responding to a comment by BobW…

    Chronicles II, Chapter 4, Verse 2
    The Bible is not *meant* to be taken literally.

    This verse didn’t seem to have anything to do with BobW’s assertion.

    I mentioned the pi == 3 thing only as a curiosity (and because years ago I heard the theory about measurements inside and outside the container).

    Now that I think about it, I agree – the passage isn’t about math and the diameter/circumference business is as accurate as one would expect when referring to (integer) cubits and oxen.

    Of course there are plenty of those, such as 1Samuel 15.

    Yeah… crazy and gruesome stuff.

    On the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible website, you can easily find all manner of passages providing examples of Absurdity, Injustice, Cruelty and Violence, Intolerance, Good Stuff, Contradictions etc.

    This website also advertises a book “Drunk With Blood:
    God’s killings in the Bible”
    .

  536. @JAD:

    Yet encouraging girls somehow strangely in practice means systematically destroying boys, and also means your daughter will not get married, and your son cannot get married, so, since no prospect of having wife or children, your son will stay at home and play video games.

    I have no sons. This particular daughter may not even want to get married; the other one, who happens to be in medical school on an MD/PhD program, got married last summer.

    No they won’t. That the supposed top five in class are all girls is obviously unrelated to actual ability, so if the five best girls are sent to a girls school, five of the remaining girls will be deemed top of class, even if they have trouble reading and writing.

    School may have some inherent, and even growing, biases towards rewarding traits that are considered feminine, but at least the schools around here don’t take it this far, even if it’s just because taking the Ritalin causes the boys to act properly most of the time.

  537. Patrick Maupin on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 7:06 pm said:
    > School may have some inherent, and even growing, biases towards rewarding traits that are considered feminine,

    Untrue.

    You yourself said it: You said that “As a society, it behooves us to encourage our best and brightest, regardless of gender” as a justification for specially encouraging girls and actively discouraging boys, as a justification for not encouraging the best and brightest regardless of gender.

    They don’t have bias. They have a quota. X number of girls have to be top of class, or else the teacher is “sexist”. If one class should temporarily drop below quota, another class in the same school will have to make it up. You also see quotas in the strangely exact equality of computer science classes at the lower levels, where fifty percent of the class is female and even though the female fifty percent of the class cannot perform the work, they on average get exactly the same marks. Quotas follow logically and necessarily from your own arguments.

    If we really do encourage the best and brightest regardless of gender, we immediately run smack bang straight into the problem that little girls want to grow up to be wives and mummies, while little boys want to grow up to be leaders, warriors, and explorers, so immediately just as you said we start encouraging not the best and brightest regardless of gender, but particularly and especially encouraging little girls.

    And then, in practice, because it is a lot easier to level up rather than to level down, we in practice start doing the easy thing, which is to actively discourage, and actively harm, and actively denigrate, little boys. You announce you are going to give special encouragement to little girls, rather than to little boys, and somehow, in a moments inattention, you find that rather than doing the hard thing, which is to specially encourage little girls, you have done the easy thing, which is to specially discourage little boys.

  538. @JAD
    > That is not peer pressure, but realism. Girls can only have sex with men who are better than themselves, and since men are not allowed to perform, if a girl does not want to grow up to be a cat lady, she had better perform worse than men are allowed to perform.

    You are trolling, right? You sound like a frustrated little schoolboy whining because the girls don’t like you. I assure you most people think I am pretty smart and I have far more sexual opportunities than I have time to take them up. Certainly I pick the best opportunities I have, but that is true in every realm of my life, not just the sexual/relationship realm.

    The statement you make above shows you know absolutely nothing about human female sexuality. It is certainly true that both men and women try to find mates that are “better” than they are, but thankfully for heterosexuals, the measure of “better” is different for men and women, and so the obvious circular logic does collapse on itself.

    I suggest you go out and meet a few actual women, and perhaps even get naked with them. I think you will find that your head is firmly shoved up your ass.

    > she just will find herself psychologically unable to have sex with him, and he winds up on the couch.

    OK, lets just deal with this one since you have my dander up. The plain fact is that most women are HORNIER than most men. However, the dynamic range of sexual experience of women is far wider for women than it is for men. Which is to say, for men good sex is great and bad sex is still pretty good. For women good sex is mind blowingly awesome, and bad sex is humiliating, uncomfortable and sometimes painful.

    Here are the facts virgin boy. Many women with a good lover can have a dozen orgasms in an hour. Each orgasm is often better than the previous one. Her orgasms can last up to a minute or more, and they are so body wrenchingly good that she might actually be incapable of walking afterward. Furthermore, women enjoy the whole process of sex, from the flirting to the kissing the the petting through the fucking and on to the cuddling and so forth much more than men do.

    Which is to say, great sex for women is better than anything a guy ever experienced. Five second orgasm? Phffft! Once, twice per night? Pathetic.Saunter to the bathroom to dump your rubber as if you just got a tap on the fanny? Is that all you got? Rushing through the foreplay to get to the sex — what a waste.

    Getting back to your point, if that woman is lying on the couch talking about her frigidity or her sexual problems (real medical and psychological issues aside) then it is most likely that the reason why is that the sex is on the humiliating, uncomfortable and painful side. And that is usually because her guy doesn’t know what the fuck he is doing, or doesn’t care.

    It is the age of the world wide web. Guys no longer have an excuse.

  539. Patrick Maupin on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 7:06 pm said:
    > This particular daughter may not even want to get married; the other one, who happens to be in medical school on an MD/PhD program, got married last summer.

    I would advise your son in law to get a comfortable couch to sleep on, or perhaps to remake the garage into male domain for a single male in exile from his wife’s household.

  540. >>These are the same legal systems that requires MacD to label COFFEE with “Warning: contents may be hot”, Peanut manufacturers with “Warning: May contain traces of nuts”,

    I don’t think that *anything* the warning I saw on a wood stove — cast in, no less.
    “Caution — Hot while in use”

  541. @Patrick: “Before I can provide the correct sort of citation…”

    That was my way of expressing how upset I am at you putting ludicrous words into the mouths of Creation scientists and myself.

    @Peter: “It’s not enough for you to show that form fits function well; you have to show that it fits function *perfectly*.”

    You are incorrect because according to the Bible, death was introduced into the world by the sin of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3; perfection is lost at that moment, and there is plenty of time for evolution (small-e) to go awry since then. All I need to do is prove is that form fits function better than is possible through Evolution. You speak as if Creation Theory is boned if just one example of imperfection in an otherwise perfect creation is pointed out, as though Evolution can do absolutely everything *perfectly* except that one thing.

    @Peter: “All the features of the vertebrate eye that you point out as examples of form fitting function well would work even better if the light-sensitive cells in the retina were in front of the nerve fibers instead of behind. Also, the vertebrate eye would not have a blind spot if that were the case.”

    I’m not at all convinced that the eye would function better “right-side in” or whatever. I don’t know enough about eye structure to be certain, but I’m quite sure that the sensitive part of the eye cell to the pigment layer is important. Also, a “right-side in” eye would not eliminate the blind spot, which exists because of a necessary bunching up of the nerve fibers as they come together to form the optic nerve. Cover that spot with light sensitive cells and they would be on top of a bump and out of focus, generating garbage information for the brain.

    Peter: “Another example, you say the dolphin’s flippers are well designed as flippers with five “finger bones” inside them. But wouldn’t they be even better designed with *one* “flipper bone” inside them, shaped just right?”

    Absolutely not! No matter how superbly shaped, a single bone wouldn’t have the flexibility for the dolphin to swim properly. Do you see submarines with only one hydroplane? Do you see airplane wings without ailerons or some equivalent? Functional doesn’t always mean simple, and I haven’t heard anyone try to convince me that Evolution is stupid enough to believe that. Why should God be so dumb?

    @Peter: “But horses actually have five ‘toes’–four of them are bone splints along the side of the central toe that has the hoof on the end. There’s no reason for those bone splints to be there if the horse’s toe and hoof were designed.”

    I’m not an equestrian. That said, I’ve also never seen these other toes, reduced to bone splints or otherwise, even in diagrams of the horse’s so called Evolution. If bone splints are there, it is likely because the horse’s ankles have a lot of stress going through them and they need the extra strength, not because the horse evolved from something with five toes.

    Finally, if there is one thing I know about God, He loves variety. We have a rather narrow definition of “perfect”, and if God followed it, we wouldn’t have sloths, manatees, auks, ostriches, hippos, catfish, turkeys, loons, bumblebees, corn, elm trees, aloe vera, elephants, bats, bluebirds, ad nauseum.

    Whatever it is you’re trying to sell me about God, Peter, I’m not buying it.

  542. @Terry:

    That was my way of expressing how upset I am at you putting ludicrous words into the mouths of Creation scientists and myself.

    That’s utter bullshit. When I said nobody, I meant nobody. I didn’t put words into anybody’s mouth. You, though, attempted to twist mine. This does you no credit.

  543. @JAD:

    I would advise your son in law to get a comfortable couch to sleep on, or perhaps to remake the garage into male domain for a single male in exile from his wife’s household.

    This is actually excellent advice for any male, probably even moreso for one with a traditional stay-at-home wife who is more likely to view the household as her domain.

  544. Jessica Boxer on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 7:45 pm said:
    > The statement you make above shows you know absolutely nothing about human female sexuality. It is certainly true that both men and women try to find mates that are “better” than they are,

    Your ideology is interfering with your eyesight.

    Men care little about their prospective wife’s social status, except that he worries that if her status is higher than his own, she will not find sex with him pleasurable, or indeed endurable. For this reason most men seek to marry someone slightly lower in social status than themselves. Compatibility is greatest between similar people, so they try to marry someone only slightly lower in social status than themselves, but nonetheless lower. Women, however, try to marry someone of the highest possible social status.

    Women with high status jobs, particularly lawyers, can find very few men of that form of status interested in them, very few successful lawyers or businessmen interested in them, so substitute other forms of status, chasing after musicians, sportsmen, successful criminals, and suchlike. However, they find themselves in competition with younger and hotter women chasing after the same kind of status.

  545. JAD
    > Your ideology is interfering with your eyesight.

    Oh, the irony!

    > Men care little about their prospective wife’s social status, except that he worries that if her status is higher than his own,

    I wonder how you get off with such insanely broad strokes about what “men” care about or what “women” care about. Nonetheless, you totally missed the point of what I was saying. Men and women measure “better” in different ways. The example you give, while thirty years out of date, used to be an example of this dimorphism.

    > she will not find sex with him pleasurable, or indeed endurable.

    Rub her clitoris in the right way, and say the right things and she’ll like it. Give her a screaming orgasm and she’ll not only find it endurable, she will be insatiable. Works for lawyer girls and checkout girls. They all have the same dangly bits. Read a book, there are lots of them, then give it a try. We’d love to hear your research data.

    > Women, however, try to marry someone of the highest possible social status.

    Your data to support this claim is…? Your data to support any of your other handwavy, unquantified claims is…?

  546. > > I would advise your son in law to get a comfortable couch to sleep on, or perhaps to remake the garage into male domain for a single male in exile from his wife’s household.

    Patrick Maupin on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 8:57 pm said:
    > This is actually excellent advice for any male,

    If it is good advice, no male should, and few men would, get married. He should stay with his parents and play video games.

    > probably even moreso for one with a traditional stay-at-home wife who is more likely to view the household as her domain.

    In practice, the stay at home wife views the household as her husband’s kingdom, and when he comes home, fetches him his slippers and makes the King comfortable. Why would any man support a stay at home wife were it otherwise?

    In practice, most successful marriages are furtively eighteenth century. The wife picks up her husbands socks, whether she works or he works, and if she does not pick up his socks, they will be usually be divorced soon enough. It is not that a man will divorce a woman who will not pick up his socks, but that a woman will divorce a man who cannot make his wife pick up his socks, even if she works and he does not.

  547. > > Women, however, try to marry someone of the highest possible social status.

    Jessica Boxer on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 10:05 pm said:
    > Your data to support this claim is…? Y

    The alarmingly low reproduction rate of the most educationally qualified women.

    The misbehavior and low reproduction rate of successful female lawyers. (I would not say alarmingly low, because perhaps it is a good thing they seldom reproduce)

    The sexual misbehavior for which successful female lawyers are so infamous reflects the fact that because they are at the top of the respectable status hierarchy, guys at the top of the respectable status hierarchy will not touch them, so they are forced to go hunting for sex at the top of other, usually disreputable, status hierarchies – sometimes leading to interesting forms of client privilege.

  548. > Your ideology is interfering with your eyesight.

    You left out the second half of her sentence which effectively obviates everything you said in this post.

    Here is is in entirety:
    It is certainly true that both men and women try to find mates that are “better” than they are, but thankfully for heterosexuals, the measure of “better” is different for men and women, and so the obvious circular logic does collapse on itself.

  549. @JAD:

    The sexual misbehavior for which successful female lawyers are so infamous…

    Partly has the same root cause as the sexual misbehavior for which successful male lawyers are so infamous.

    And partly probably has the same root cause as the current rash of mass shootings, and the current rash of female teachers doing it with 13 year olds. Namely, SSRIs.

  550. JAD
    > > Women, however, try to marry someone of the highest possible social status.
    > The alarmingly low reproduction rate of the most educationally qualified women.

    Perhaps being a woman incapable of science, I’m not smart enough, but the two don’t seem connected at all.

    > The sexual misbehavior for which successful female lawyers are so infamous

    Ah, your panties are showing. WTF does “misbehavior” mean in this context, and what data do you have to show that your disapproving furrowed brow reflects a reality of actual average behavior choices rather than your perceptual fantasy from watching too much MILF porn?

  551. @Terry: You speak as if Creation Theory is boned if just one example of imperfection in an otherwise perfect creation is pointed out, as though Evolution can do absolutely everything *perfectly* except that one thing.

    You keep on refuting claims that I haven’t made. The whole point is that on the evolution hypothesis, we don’t *expect* things to be done perfectly.

    I’m not at all convinced that the eye would function better “right-side in” or whatever. I don’t know enough about eye structure to be certain

    Then you can’t really argue for or against *either* hypothesis, can you?

    Also, a “right-side in” eye would not eliminate the blind spot, which exists because of a necessary bunching up of the nerve fibers as they come together to form the optic nerve.

    The cephalopod eye has the light-sensitive fibers “right side in”, and it has no blind spot.

    No matter how superbly shaped, a single bone wouldn’t have the flexibility for the dolphin to swim properly. Do you see submarines with only one hydroplane? Do you see airplane wings without ailerons or some equivalent?

    Multiple submarine hydroplanes correspond to multiple flippers, which dolphins have. Dolphin flippers don’t have ailerons, and an airplane wing isn’t a good analogy anyway because it doesn’t move and doesn’t provide propulsion. You have a knack for picking irrelevant analogies.

    I can see how multiple bones might give a flipper more flexibility than a single bone, but on the hypothesis of a Creator, the bones would still be expected to be optimized for a flipper, not hand bones exapted to provide structure for a flipper. That was my point.

    I’ve also never seen these other toes, reduced to bone splints or otherwise, even in diagrams of the horse’s so called Evolution.

    Where have you been looking? They’re even mentioned on this creationist site:

    http://creation.com/what-about-horse-toe-evolution

    See further comments below for more on that page’s claims about the splint bones.

    If bone splints are there, it is likely because the horse’s ankles have a lot of stress going through them and they need the extra strength, not because the horse evolved from something with five toes.

    More special pleading. Extra strength can be provided by extra mass in the single hoof; there’s no need for bone splints. It is true, as the site I linked to above says, that the splint bones provide joint support, and attachment points for ligaments and tendons. But the site fails to mention that those functions don’t require separate bones, so the fact that the bones perform those functions does not explain why there are separate bones. That’s only explicable if the horse evolved from animals that had separate bones, which were then exapted to perform those functions.

    Whatever it is you’re trying to sell me about God, Peter, I’m not buying it.

    I’m not trying to tell you anything about God. I’m only telling you about evolution. It appears that your knowledge of evolution comes mainly from creationist sources like ICR. You might try the talk.origins site to get a start on the other side of the story:

    http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs.html

    1. >http://www.ssristories.com/

      Holy shit.

      I’ve been suspicious of these drugs for years, on the general principle that I think doing potentially irreversible things to one’s long-term brain chemistry is a Bad Idea. I don’t take recreational drugs stronger than caffeine (in small doses) and try to take as little medication as I can get away with in general. But this…this is monstrous. It’s the-culprits-ought-to-be-lynched-and-hung-from-lampposts monstrous.

  552. @Patrick Maupin
    >And partly probably has the same root cause as the current rash of mass shootings, and the current rash of female teachers doing it with 13 year olds. Namely, SSRIs.

    Happy pills are making everyone horny and murderous?

  553. @Terry: @my You keep on refuting claims that I haven’t made. The whole point is that on the evolution hypothesis, we don’t *expect* things to be done perfectly.

    Re-reading, I see that I misread your argument on this point. What I should have said is that the Earth’s biosphere is not “too perfect” for evolution to have produced it–at any rate, you certainly have not established that.

  554. Jessica Boxer on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 7:45 pm said:
    > You are trolling, right? You sound like a frustrated little schoolboy whining because the girls don’t like you.

    Says she after picking up her boyfriends socks, as any eighteenth century woman would.

  555. @Peter Donis
    > The whole point is that on the evolution hypothesis, we don’t *expect* things to be done perfectly.

    In one sense, I’d make the claim that the imperfection of nature really is the point. Nature has lots of engineering failures, but none of them are the kind a god would make, or a sin nature would cause (whatever that means.)

    On the contrary, the failures in design are exactly the sort of thing you would expect from an evolutionary process where there was a fork of two fairly evenly weighted options which, after one was taken, subsequent evolutions got stuck, couldn’t go back and had to live with it.

  556. JAD
    > Says she after picking up her boyfriends socks, as any eighteenth century woman would.

    Oh now I know you are fucking with us all. YOU are accusing ME of being excessively traditionalist? Welcome to the twilight zone.

    1. >YOU are accusing ME of being excessively traditionalist?

      No, he’s accusing you of hypocrisy – more precisely, that the instincts that drive your actual behavior (i.e picking up your boyfriend’s socks) contradict what you say with your mouth.

      It pains me to admit it, but beneath the misogyny and ranting JAD has an actual point here – he’s not actually stupid, just badly warped by his hatreds.

      There is plenty of empirical evidence that the dominant female mating strategy is hypergamy; if you look at the distribution of differences between members of mated couples in height, IQ, birth SES, and about a jillion other indicators the pattern is extremely clear. Evo-bio tells us why this is a winning strategy: it’s the flip side of why men select for looks. A man who doesn’t present to a woman as a hypergamic target is much less likely to arouse her mating response. See also “game” and the entirety of PUA theory, which (sadly) actually works.

      I’ve written before on this blog about my fear that female equality is not sustainable. Unlike JAD, this is not something I want to be true; in fact the thought that strong, independent women like my wife are a selective dead end and biology may write a merciless epitaph for cultures that try to produce more than a tiny minority of them makes me deeply sad. But female equality does seem to be producing an increasing number of (a) women who can’t find eligible hypergamic targets, and (b) men that can’t find women for whom they are eligible.

      What JAD is asserting is that – if you are properly mated – your hindbrain expresses this by behaving with an instinctive deference to your man that doesn’t match your conscious beliefs about how you do behave and how you should behave.

      Again, it pains me to say this, but…he’s probably right.

  557. JAD
    > > Women, however, try to marry someone of the highest possible social status.
    > > The alarmingly low reproduction rate of the most educationally qualified women.

    Jessica Boxer on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 10:59 pm said:
    > Perhaps being a woman incapable of science, I’m not smart enough, but the two don’t seem connected at all.

    The problem is not science, but that like most women, you are incapable of maths.

    The low reproduction rate of highly educated women is because the more highly educated the woman, the smaller the pool of males they are willing to have sex with, while the supermarket checkout girls are busy getting gravel rash.

  558. @esr
    > this is monstrous. It’s the-culprits-ought-to-be-lynched-and-hung-from-lampposts monstrous.

    Really? This web site looked like a “they are poisoning our kids with floride in the toothpaste” and “fasting and enemas cure your cancer” type of web site. It has all the hallmarks of this, like “all these school shooters were on prozac” type of thing. As if correlation indicated causality, and particularly indicated causality from prozac to columbine.. When there are millions of not murderous prozac users; a fact that would suggest the reverse causality, if anything (kids are depressed so they take prozac, kids are depressed so they shoot up their school.)

    However, your reaction makes me want to read a little deeper. Was there something in particular that made you want to string ’em up?

    1. >However, your reaction makes me want to read a little deeper. Was there something in particular that made you want to string ‘em up?

      Yes. The list of mental-derangement side effects cited from the Physician’s Desk Reference. No drug for which such side effects are at above statistical noise level should ever have been prescribed to human beings.

  559. @JAD
    > The problem is not science, but that like most women, you are incapable of maths.

    Hmmh, I thought I did pretty good saving your sorry ass on the whole Pi = 3 thing, but whatever works for you.

    > The low reproduction rate of highly educated women is because the more highly educated the woman, the smaller the pool of males they are willing to have sex with

    That is one possible explanation, but I am sure you can think of several others, since this dumb chick can come up with at least four other causes of the putatively low birth rate amongst the prissy lawyer chicks. What is your evidence that the explanation you offer is in fact the cause of the alleged facts you claim?

    Just as an FYI, in the whole of human history the supply demand curve for the availability of male sperm for female vaginas has always tended to lean strongly in favor of the vagina.

  560. Uh… I was the one that pointed out that the Bible verse implied Pi = 3, but, as I explained, I wasn’t trying to imply anything in particular – it was simply the only distinctive aspect in the verse that BobW provided as an example of why “The Bible is not *meant* to be taken literally.”. I still don’t know how that verse is supposed to make that point.

  561. @Jessica:

    > Happy pills are making everyone horny and murderous?

    Maybe. We seem to have cross-posted — I posted a link about the same time you posted the question — don’t know if you saw that or not.

    @esr:

    But this…this is monstrous. It’s the-culprits-ought-to-be-lynched-and-hung-from-lampposts monstrous.

    Yeah, the closest analogy I can think of is the reavers on Firefly.

    If this is all true and the knowledge becomes widespread, and it turns out that normal unmedicated people don’t commit mass murders (the shooter in Norway was apparently similarly medicated), then you’ll still have the gun control crowd (probably correctly) explaining how a mass murder lurks inside each and every one of us, but of course leaving out the part of how most of us have him well and truly chained up.

    OTOH, the average man in the street (including me, depending on how it is done and whether it is done in good faith) would almost certainly buy the argument that certain reaver drug abusers, along with felons, should be relieved of their weapons.

  562. esr on Monday, January 21 2013 at 12:12 am said:
    >What JAD is asserting is that – if you are properly mated – your hindbrain knows this and behaves with an instinctive deference to your man that doesn’t match your conscious beliefs about how you do behave and how you should behave.

    I think women do tend to operate in the submissive role in many aspects of relationships, and I also think that both men and women practice “hypergamy”, which is to say, everyone tries to marry/date up. But like I already said, men and women are measured in fitness differently than each other, and so I think your fear is unfounded.

    For example, there was a study published recently that demonstrated that better looking women tend to earn more than less attractive women, with the usual accompanying hysterics. But one might ask again the direction of causality here. Were the women earning more because the boss her boss was a grabby pig, or she a casting couch whore, or was there perhaps a third cause that produced both better looks and higher salary? My experience with women is that this is indeed true, since looks are often shaped quite considerably with the effort one puts into ones looks.

    My gym membership card is worn out and my refrigerator contents green from my attempts to comply with the male measurement scale, and my intelligence has a considerably amount of influence over those decisions.

    Nonetheless, I might very well pick up my putative boyfriend’s socks. I don’t think that the existence of a nurturing tendency somehow belies a preference for egalitarianism, any more than I think paternalism is responsible for there being more guys in my computer programming team than gals.

    I vaguely remember going round and round with you about this in some previous blog post.

    1. >was there perhaps a third cause that produced both better looks and higher salary?

      Why yes. Health of the nervous and immune systems, which are intimately tangled together, and which drive both IQ and physical beauty. IQ, in turn, drives higher salary (this is not a guess but empirically well verified).

      One of the most suppressed truths about human variation is that good looks are positively correlated with intelligence, not negatively as folklore has it. This positive correlation is masked in women by the fact that for women, trading on looks that are X sigmas off the media is often more effective than trading on intelligence that is the same X sigmas off.

      I am never surprised when an exceptionally attractive woman turns out to be exceptionally bright as well. Moreover, the pretty-but-dumb ones tend to be the ones that have attained pretty by cosmetic artifice. I learned to spot these within seconds and ignore them before I was out of my teens.

  563. @Jessica Boxer

    I vaguely remember going round and round with you about this in some previous blog post.

    I can imagine. I believe the point here is that it doesn’t matter what you think or believe but, rather, that there are important aspects to sexual attraction that are hard-wired.

    I vaguely remember reading ESR’s essay on sex for hackers and the one trait that is most important for a man to attract a woman is confidence – the woman sees it as an indicator of success which would imply the ability to defend her and keep her and their children fed – all at a subconscious level, of course.

  564. @Patrick: “That’s utter bullshit. When I said nobody, I meant nobody. I didn’t put words into anybody’s mouth. You, though, attempted to twist mine.”

    I read through your original comment again and… well… er… oops. I misunderstood you, and I’m really sorry. Hopefully, that’ll be my worst brain fart on this thread.

  565. Jessica Boxer on Monday, January 21 2013 at 12:09 am said:
    > in the whole of human history the supply demand curve for the availability of male sperm for female vaginas has always tended to lean strongly in favor of the vagina.

    The supply curve for fathers, however …

    To see how the supply curve for fathers is coming along, wander past a fertility clinic. It looked to me that every woman going in or out was either unmarried, or not having sex with her husband.

  566. Jessica Boxer on Monday, January 21 2013 at 12:34 am said:
    > I don’t think that the existence of a nurturing tendency somehow belies a preference for egalitarianism

    You prefer males of higher social status than yourself, and are willing to pick up your boyfriends socks. And, somehow, strangely, you wound up watching “Twilight”. While you doubtless prefer egalitarianism, it is not altogether obvious that this preference extends to actually being willing to practice it.

    The widespread enthusiasm for egalitarianism much resembles the eagerness of Christians to be united with Jesus.

  567. @JAD
    “Patrick Maupin on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 7:06 pm said:
    > School may have some inherent, and even growing, biases towards rewarding traits that are considered feminine,

    Untrue.”

    JAD, your assertion is wrong, as usual. Schools in Europe (eye witness reports from UK and Netherlands) do reward feminine traits of self-restraint and responsibility.

    @JAD
    “Says she after picking up her boyfriends socks, as any eighteenth century woman would.”

    So this is not about ability at all. This is about power and “might is right”.

    @JAD
    “The low reproduction rate of highly educated women is because the more highly educated the woman, the smaller the pool of males they are willing to have sex with, while the supermarket checkout girls are busy getting gravel rash.”

    As most people since Francis Galton, you have not understood it. In the long run, the “poor” and “simple” get less descendants than the “rich” and “smart”. Investing in less children is an evolutionary maximizing strategy for the resource rich. Getting lots of children is a strategy of desperation for the resource poor.

    To give an example for those who have difficulty understanding this, one very rich boy can sire many children while a poor boy has a good chance of leaving none. On the other hand, a poor girl will get children anyhow (probably from the rich boy), half of which would have a difficult time of getting offspring themselves. So the few children of the rich will leave many descendants while the many children of the poor leave few.

    @esr
    About beautiful women being more successful.

    That holds for both men and women. However, no need to invoke inherent qualities of beauty.

    Attitudes towards beauty are rather stereotype. This holds towards people too. And there is the point that people have a tendency to behave as other people expect them. So beautiful people will be strengthened in their abilities and ugly people will get demotivated. That has also been found for people with Downs syndrome who get more intelligent after plastic surgery that removes their characteristic facial features.

  568. My response seems to linger in the moderater cue.

    In short, JAD shows he is not interested in ability at all, only in power, “might is right”. And all this stuff about fertility and status shows people do not do the math behind long term genetic success.

  569. I wrote earlier:
    “That has also been found for people with Downs syndrome who get more intelligent after plastic surgery that removes their characteristic facial features.”

    Reviewing my earlier post, I was a little too hasty in pushing the “Post” button. These were findings from the 1880s. Later studies questioned this interpretation (to say the least). The effect might be real, but is small at best and depends on the attitudes in the environment. Simple changes in care would would probably produce stronger effects.

  570. @Jessica:

    Nonetheless, I might very well pick up my putative boyfriend’s socks. I don’t think that the existence of a nurturing tendency somehow belies a preference for egalitarianism, any more than I think paternalism is responsible for there being more guys in my computer programming team than gals.

    You sound like a Clair Huxtable type, to put it succinctly.

  571. @Winter:

    To give an example for those who have difficulty understanding this, one very rich boy can sire many children while a poor boy has a good chance of leaving none.

    I remember reading an academic paper, probably more than a decade ago, that showed that for the nobility in Europe a few centuries ago, it may have been worthwhile for the ladies to put up with the extracurricular activities of the men, because as long as the bargain held, and their sons’ wives (a) likewise put up with the extracurricular activity and (b) remained chaste themselves such that the legitimate grandsons still carried their grandmother’s DNA, it was a reproductive win all around.

  572. @JAD
    > You prefer males of higher social status than yourself,

    I’m sorry, have we met? I am wondering how you have managed to project what you perceive as general trends to me in particular.

    > and are willing to pick up your boyfriends socks.

    My boyfriends are generally willing to pick up my socks too, and hang my pictures and fix my car. But this dumb chick is confused as to how that has any relevance whatsoever to my mating preferences or my views on egalitarianism. Equal treatment does not mean equal results.

    In regards to the supply of “husbands”, a lot of that is to do with the liberation of women, which is to say 100 years ago a woman would have a very hard time functioning in society without a husband because law and society thought her worthless if she didn’t have a man to shadow. That is much less true today, women can function quite well without a husband, including having a family, given the large, readily available supply of sperm.

    The first point is illustrated by the contrast between the pejorative connotations of the word “spinster” and the positive connotations of the word “bachelor.” And the second point by the fact that the word “spinster” is almost completely out of vogue.

    Of course women crave companionship, access to regular high quality sex and if they have babies would certainly prefer a partner to have them with, but the cost of not having a husband is much lower than it used to be, especially for women with significant financial capacity. Marriage is a trade off, the cost of the husband (plus the cost of not having one) against the benefit of the husband. Since the cost of not having one is much lower then the benefit of having one has to be offsettingly higher.

    Of course all this applies to hetero couples primarily. Jodie Foster seems quite happy in her non husband arrangement.

  573. JAD : “priority education zones” are just areas where more money is given to schools, because local taxes are not high enough. In some area as mine, they happen to be black or arab quarters. In others, like picardy, not.

    believe me, picardy is one of the poorest part of France, and its poorest parts are white. And you don’t want to look at it. Sounds like the worst parts of the old testament(genesis comes to mind : rape, adultery, manslaughter, incest…)

  574. @Patrick
    ” it may have been worthwhile for the ladies to put up with the extracurricular activities of the men,”

    The most important point in the deal still is that the men would not divert significant resources away from their legitimate children. The evolutionary success of a women and her offspring are not affected by any other offspring of her mate, only by the support he supplies to her children.

    Studies in passerine birds has shown that even female birds are able to handle the trade-offs between chastity, male support, and genetic litter quality quite well. Any sane person (ie, not JAD) will expect humans to be good at this too.

  575. @Jessica
    “Marriage is a trade off, the cost of the husband (plus the cost of not having one) against the benefit of the husband. ”

    That is easily seen in regions of the world where income is so low that men basically cannot support their children, neither in money nor in time. Think seasonal farm laborers in plantation communities. Marriage breaks down and women end up either supporting themselves or effectively living in polyandrous relations where men share the support.

    The other side of the scale is polygamous societies, where income is distributed so unevenly that a woman is economically much better off living in a harem of a rich man than having a husband all to herself (who might not be able to support her at all).

  576. @Winter:

    Studies in passerine birds has shown that even female birds are able to handle the trade-offs between chastity, male support, and genetic litter quality quite well. Any sane person (ie, not JAD) will expect humans to be good at this too.

    Although humans are good at the calculations, the legal equations have changed, which leads to a major upheaval. A man can no longer count on the ability to avoid supporting his illegitimate offspring, and in some cases must support children that he didn’t father:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/magazine/22Paternity-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

    It’s no wonder that some men go to sperm banks to procreate.

  577. @Paul Brinkley
    > You sound like a Clair Huxtable type, to put it succinctly.

    I doubt I am a “Clair Huxtable” type, nonetheless I’m on board with that particular rant, which was quite funny. Thanks for sharing.

  578. @Patrick
    “A man can no longer count on the ability to avoid supporting his illegitimate offspring, and in some cases must support children that he didn’t father:”

    Why do you think this is different for birds? For them, it is supporting the litter with some chance there is a “child” of him in it or abandon it and have no chance of offspring this year. Different strategies have developed to handle the competing interests.

  579. Patrick Maupin on Monday, January 21 2013 at 11:25 am said:
    > Although humans are good at the calculations, the legal equations have changed, which leads to a major upheaval.

    I’ve heard your ennui about the putative unfair advantages of divorce to women before. I think there is some whacked stuff in the system for sure, but the data seems to disagree. Women generally speaking end up worse off after divorce than men, outliers notwithstanding.

    Here is an article from that granola eating, left wing, feminst, “all sex is rape”, bleeding heart liberal rag, the Daily Telegraph:

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1556706/Women-worse-off-after-divorce.html

  580. @Winter:

    Why do you think this is different for birds? For them, it is supporting the litter with some chance there is a “child” of him in it or abandon it and have no chance of offspring this year.

    The investment a bird makes in a single offspring is nowhere near the investment that a court can force a cuckolded father to make in a single offspring that is not his, which could be large enough to actually preclude a responsible human from investing in any offspring that are really his. Do you really think the male bird would support an offspring he _knew_ wasn’t his?

  581. @Jessica Boxer:

    Here is an article from that granola eating, left wing, feminst, “all sex is rape”, bleeding heart liberal rag, the Daily Telegraph:

    Yes. You will, of course, notice that the article I quoted was from JAD’s favorite “all women are whores; men should rule” paper — the New York Times. :-)

    I’ve heard your ennui about the putative unfair advantages of divorce to women before. I think there is some whacked stuff in the system for sure, but the data seems to disagree. Women generally speaking end up worse off after divorce than men, outliers notwithstanding.

    Yes, though as the article points out if you get past the inflammatory first couple of paragraphs:

    In run-of-the-mill cases, where couples earn between £20,000 and £30,000, both men and women are normally worse off. They have to sell the family home, their standard of living goes down, men often have to pay maintenance and women have to work to supplement their incomes.”

    In other words, two really can live more cheaply than one.

    To some extent, I really am interested in the anecdotal evidence of the system being broken, for the simple reason that real cases like those in the NY Times article show examples of unfair laws.

    Statistics are useful, but somewhat less interesting without more context. For example, let’s say for the sake of argument that we study childless couples (to remove kids from the equation) and find that women are still worse off after a divorce. What can we conclude from this?

    My answer is nothing. Especially when you add in the statistic that most divorces are initiated by women.

    One hypothesis would be that women are stupid and don’t realize their income is going to go down. This particular hypothesis seems quite easy to refute — as the education level of the woman goes up, the likelihood that she initiated the divorce goes up — apparently it’s 90% in college educated couples. (Yes, JAD, we know you told us so.)

    So from the woman’s perspective, the trade-off must be worth it. Get rid of marriage, have less money. But what about from the man’s perspective? If he is really better off after marriage, a reasonable conclusion is that (unless he was too stupid to do the math) he realized that marrying would cost him financially and he did it any way.

    There you have it. Statistically, men are willing to pay to marry, and women are willing to pay to divorce. Take from that what you will.

  582. Patrick Maupin on Monday, January 21 2013 at 12:15 pm said:
    >There you have it. Statistically, men are willing to pay to marry, and women are willing to pay to divorce. Take from that what you will.

    Wow, that is quite a conclusion from a small amount of data. From my anecdotal experience men tend to bring a lot of debt to marriage, much more than women. So you could say women are paying to marry (whatever that even means, since, as you point out, two together usually live cheaper than two apart.) Also in my experience, women are better at conflict resolution than men, men tend to take a passive aggressive approach. For example, it is pretty common for guys to dump gals by just being mean to them and waiting for her to do the dumping, which is pretty pathetic really, but also disturbingly common.

    There are good reasons why women talk and resolve conflicts verbally, and men are not as good at it, given their biological roles with children, society and so forth. No doubt they have evolved to be that way.

    So I think a lot of women divorce men, despite the cost, because they have the cojones to actually make the decision after years of bullshit.

    But that is just anecdote based on my personal observations of people in my near and distant circles of acquaintance, along with a broader view of what I see going on in society. I have never been married, and consequently never divorced, so I probably don’t know what I am talking about.

    BTW, all that makes me sound like I am down on men, which I am not. I think good men are awesome, they are just too rare, and in a disturbing departure, I think JAD has identified some of the reasons why (though most of what he says is utter bullshit.) The two genders both have their weird little dysfunctions.

  583. Winter on Monday, January 21 2013 at 1:56 am said:
    > Schools in Europe (eye witness reports from UK and Netherlands) do reward feminine traits of self-restraint and responsibility.

    Funny, I thought that self restraint and responsibility were stereotypically male traits, according to conventional wisdom, the usual jokes about men and women, and according to the old testament. Notoriously women have shorter time preference and less team spirit.

    In practice, when people explain away the supposed poor performance of boys in school, we observe them using curse words that demonize stereotypically male traits: The covert argument is that boys have it coming to them for being more self restrained, more responsible, and, worst of all, more dignified, than girls, just as Tutsi have it coming to them for being smarter, less criminal, and, worst of all, more handsome than Hutu.

    > > “Says she after picking up her boyfriends socks, as any eighteenth century woman would.”

    > So this is not about ability at all. This is about power and “might is right”.

    This is about the fact that that it is rational for girls to want to grow up to be wives and mummies, while boys want to grow up to be leaders and warriors. Thus any equal treatment that is actually equal treatment will produce politically unacceptable results, therefore be deemed to be unequal treatment,

    This is the same rationale and process as led to the genocide of the Tutsi. No amount of persecution could produce equality, so any persecution of the Tutsi, no matter how great, no matter how outrageous, no matter how blatantly evil and malicious, was deemed to be unequal treatment favoring the Tutsi by the international community, Harvard, and the New York Times.

    Chomsky still is outraged that the international community did not finish the genocide. It is so unequal in favor of the Tutsi that some are still alive. Their continued existence is an outrage a against equality and social justice. That they live is inequality, according to Chomsky.

    And of course Chomsky is right. That the Tutsi live is inequality. I however, unlike Chomsky, conclude that so much the worse for equality, that equality is an evil goal, equality the banner of evil people committing terrible deeds.

    The New York Times and Wikipedia does not go all the way with Chomsky, but they have a marked tendency in that direction when discussing the Hutu/Tutsi conflict.

    And so does anyone rationalizing the mistreatment of boys in school..

    By the standard definitions of racism and sexism, wherein the superior race is always racist, and the inferior race can never be racist, even when a gang of them is beating up one of their superiors while shouting racial epithets, and the superior sex is always sexist, even when, especially when, protecting the inferior sex, by these definitions: that any Tutsi continues to breath is racist, and that any male shows up in school at all is sexist.

  584. @Jessica:

    > Wow, that is quite a conclusion from a small amount of data.

    Which was my point, really :-) It’s hard to get from the statistics (women financially worse off after divorce) to anything meaningful.

    From my anecdotal experience men tend to bring a lot of debt to marriage, much more than women.

    That’s interesting. Is that because of more education, financing shiny cars to attract women, daddy helping out the women, or the men already being daddy and having to help out other women?

    So you could say women are paying to marry (whatever that even means, since, as you point out, two together usually live cheaper than two apart.)

    Debt by itself won’t tell much here. Debt vs. income might be a start, but if the debt were incurred for something like a house that both would share, that might be relevant too.

    Also in my experience, women are better at conflict resolution than men, men tend to take a passive aggressive approach. For example, it is pretty common for guys to dump gals by just being mean to them and waiting for her to do the dumping, which is pretty pathetic really, but also disturbingly common.

    I’m sure this happens (this almost certainly happened with my mother and biological father), but I’ve also seen women claim men are being mean when IMO the men are really just being direct.

    There are good reasons why women talk and resolve conflicts verbally, and men are not as good at it

    Women have this capacity, no doubt; many of them also have the capacity for self-martyrship that keeps them from saying anything negative in a manner that would actually get the man to pay attention. A woman can say “I kept telling him I wasn’t happy” and the guy can say “it came out of the blue” and they can both be right. In other words, one of the reasons that women can resolve conflicts verbally with other women is because they assume the listener will read the words in between what they are saying. This might not work with men; to the extent it does, the man might think the woman is the one being passive-aggressive for the timid way she is acting.

    So I think a lot of women divorce men, despite the cost, because they have the cojones to actually make the decision after years of bullshit.

    There is no question it takes cojones to institute a divorce. In fact it takes so much energy that, for most people, it cannot be done until they have thoroughly demonized their former partner. A huge shame for society; a huge win for divorce lawyers. Nonetheless, there are a lot of guys who are stunned and don’t really want the divorce. Still, even for them, it’s probably the right answer at that point — if the woman got pissed enough to initiate the divorce with them being completely clueless, there is no way that the couple will change (she explaining to him what pisses her off so he can stop doing it, before she actually gets pissed off) enough to make it work.

    Ironically, marital problems precipitated by affairs are more often more recoverable than these daily wearing problems you describe; for the simple reason that the guy knows exactly what he did wrong and exactly how to fix it — keep it zipped.

    But that is just anecdote based on my personal observations of people in my near and distant circles of acquaintance, along with a broader view of what I see going on in society. I have never been married, and consequently never divorced, so I probably don’t know what I am talking about.

    Anecdotes are useful. The saying that the plural of anecdote is not data is frankly bullshit, as far as thinking about how to construct a society. My main point was that the statistic that most men are better off after a divorce than most women is useful only as a jumping off point — start collecting the anecdotes and trying to correlate things to figure out if this is really unjust or not, and if it is, then what the best way to address it might be.

    BTW, all that makes me sound like I am down on men, which I am not.

    It doesn’t, really. But it does make it sound like you’ve seen several relationships fall apart (more than me, probably) from the vantage point of probably mostly being friends with the female, and/or just through looking at it from a female perspective.

    I think good men are awesome, they are just too rare, and in a disturbing departure, I think JAD has identified some of the reasons why (though most of what he says is utter bullshit.)

    JAD’s not stupid by any stretch of the imagination. OTOH, I think and hope society can evolve to the point where a woman’s right to vote or work isn’t somehow either diminished or enhanced by whether or not she is willing to pick up her boyfriend’s socks.

    The two genders both have their weird little dysfunctions.

    No argument there.

  585. Patrick Maupin on Monday, January 21 2013 at 12:15 pm said:
    > So from the woman’s perspective, the trade-off must be worth it. Get rid of marriage, have less money.

    A close blood relative of mine, highly educated, intelligent, and all that, had two children by her wealthy husband. She was sleeping with her children’s doctor, possibly other men as well. We all knew it, he never knew it, possibly still does not.

    She divorced her husband, believing the doctor would marry her. As soon as the doctor heard she was divorced, he dropped her like a hot stone.

    So she believed, incorrectly, she would be financially better off after divorce. She was much worse off, and was forever bitter and angry about it.

    Women persistently misjudge their divorce prospects. Women are infamously emotional, irrational, and prone to short term thinking. In the short term, divorce gets them cash and prizes, especially when they divorce a military husband, in the long term penury.

    That divorce is usually female initiated reflects female focus on the short term. In the short term she gets cashed up, in the longer term the doctor will supposedly marry her.

  586. I just recalled something from a science fiction story that I read years ago – it is tangential to the matter at hand (which is, at least, better than being orthogonal, which is my usual way of going OT)…

    Supposedly, 150 years ago, the primary aspect that turned men on in relation to a woman’s looks was broad hips. It occurred to me that women didn’t give birth in a hospital back then (for good reason) and the knowledge, drugs and techniques available to physicians was much lower than it is today. Broad hips would presumably have some positive correlation to the chances of a woman and the baby living through childbirth.

  587. I wrote:
    > two children by her wealthy husband. She was sleeping with her children’s doctor

    The doctor was similar socioeconomic status to her husband, but was much more handsome, dramatically more handsome.

    Hence the completely stupid, self destructive, and insanely irrational infidelity and divorce: The divorce was the infamous self destructive weakness of women on display. To the best of my knowledge, pretty much all divorces are like that: In practice, divorce is women doing stuff that is stupid, evil, and hurtful to themselves, their children, and their husbands, out of illicit sexual desire.

  588. Patrick Maupin on Monday, January 21 2013 at 1:33 pm said:
    > Nonetheless, there are a lot of guys who are stunned and don’t really want the divorce.

    Let us look at this from the other end, from the point of view of the guy who was sleeping with the other man’s wife. (Personal observation: 100% of divorces that I have observed are initiated by women who were sleeping with someone handsomer and usually richer than their husband)

    When a man sleeps with a married woman, what he says is “Hey, we are just friends with benefits, you have your husband, I have my girlfriend, lets just have fun, let us keep it light, no talking about relationship stuff, stop telling me stuff about your husband, and I won’t tell you about my girlfriend.” Every time she talks about relationships he shuts her down or just flatly turns his back on her, so that when she sets to divorcing her husband, she refrains from telling her lover about it until it is an accomplished fact.

    But, nonetheless, what the adulterous woman hears him saying is “Destroy your family, take your husband for all his assets, and we will live together on my income, my assets, and your husband’s considerable assets, plus his child support.”

    So she destroys her family, negotiates a deal that is heavy on assets and light on child support, especially if she is a military wife, because she thinks that pretty soon her children are going to have a new daddy,

    Her lover is almost as stunned as her husband.

  589. @JAD:

    She divorced her husband, believing the doctor would marry her. As soon as the doctor heard she was divorced, he dropped her like a hot stone.

    I have seen other anecdotes the other way around. Sometimes the mistress wants to remain the mistress and not be tied down with marriage. Bottom line is that sentimental fools operating outside social norms are almost always being conned.

  590. Jessica Boxer on Monday, January 21 2013 at 12:37 pm said:
    > Also in my experience, women are better at conflict resolution than men, men tend to take a passive aggressive approach. For example, it is pretty common for guys to dump gals by just being mean to them and waiting for her to do the dumping, which is pretty pathetic really, but also disturbingly common.

    I would describe the same events in terms less favorable to women and more favorable to men: Guys are perfectly happy, very happy indeed, to have a wife or main girlfriend, and one or more other girls that are friends with benefits. From the point of view of the girl who is merely friends with benefits, he is being mean to her and waiting for her to do the dumping. From his point of view, he has got a good thing going, why mess with it?

    Girls however, don’t like to have a husband or main boyfriend plus some guys who are friends with benefits, so dump the husband or boyfriend while fantasizing about marrying the guy who is friends with benefits. (Who is invariably handsomer or richer than their boyfriend or husband.)

    These dramatic female initiated events are viewed by males not as female superiority in conflict resolution but as:

    a: Woman love drama.

    and

    b: Woman are sluts. (Men of course are never sluts even if they sleep with someone else’s wife while themselves being married. Should either wife break up her family, it is entirely her fault)

    An interesting question is, which form of breakup is more common:

    1. The girl makes big drama breaking up with the unfaithful boy as she slowly realizes she is merely friends with benefits to him

    or

    2. the girl makes a big drama breaking up with her faithful husband or boyfriend because she is friends with benefits to someone else.

    Observing other people’s breakups, in every case, it is the faithful boyfriend or husband that is shellshocked and stunned, so this metric type 2 dramas are more common, but perhaps type 1 dramas are less visible than type 2 dramas, so might be more common but invisible.

  591. JAD
    > I would describe the same events in terms less favorable to women and more favorable to men:

    There is surprise.

    > Guys are perfectly happy, very happy indeed, to have a wife or main girlfriend, and one or more other girls that are friends with benefits.

    You don’t know what you are talking about, this is true for some men, it is not true for most men. Not that men don’t like to have lots of sexual partners, just that maintaining multiple relationships is more effort than most men are willing to put forth.

    > From the point of view of the girl who is merely friends with benefits, he is being mean to her

    Straw man, I was talking about a guy who is in a mono relationship dumping her by ignoring, being mean, bla, bla, bla. Happens all the time. Again you don’t know what you are talking about.

    However, if you serious think your “women are emotional, gold digging, money grubbing can’t control their libido sluts” theory as the primary cause of divorce you not only are a misognyistic idiot, you also don’t live in the world of real data. I’m afraid your offensive verbal diarrhea has gotten tiresome.

  592. @patrick

    School may have some inherent, and even growing, biases towards rewarding traits that are considered feminine, but at least the schools around here don’t take it this far, even if it’s just because taking the Ritalin causes the boys to act properly most of the time.

    Ali Carr-Chellman: Gaming to re-engage boys in learning

    * 60% of baccalaureate degrees are awarded to women.
    * boys 4 times more likely to be diagnosed as ADHD as girls
    * in the last 10 years we went from 14% male teachers in elementary schools to 7% – there are 2 in my kids’ school – gym and art.

    http://www.ted.com/talks/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_engage_boys_in_learning.html

  593. Patrick Maupin on Monday, January 21 2013 at 4:30 pm said:
    > I have seen other anecdotes the other way around. Sometimes the mistress wants to remain the mistress and not be tied down with marriage

    Very few men divorce their wife to marry their mistress. If you have a good thing going, why make trouble?

    Men are happy to have girlfriends in addition to their wife or main girlfriend, even if, indeed especially if, those girls are married to someone else, and are never going to do anything to disrupt that happy arrangement.

    Further, few women divorce their husbands for having a lover or two on the side. They don’t like it, but they put up with it provided the news does not get around too much, provided their husband comes home most nights.

    The primary cause of divorce is that a woman is sleeping with someone other than her husband, In the cases where I know what was happening, always someone a lot more attractive or richer than her husband. From which I conclude that almost every divorce begins in an woman’s effort to trade up, trade a long way up.

    But somehow, to the woman’s very great surprise, she never winds up with the richer and handsomer guy after divorcing her husband. Never. It absolutely never happens. Not once, not ever.

    Almost all divorces, all of them that I know of, are women attempting to trade up, though in practice, divorce never ends in trade up. Instead, every switch leaves the women being more damaged goods. She finds that mister handsome has vanished, or restricted her to one hour dates on Wednesday at six, so, if she marries again or gets a real relationship again, she likely finds she has traded down. If she trades even, she is doing well.

    In all divorces where I know what was happened, I conclude from the fact that woman was sleeping with someone way better than her husband, but wound up alone, that the woman had severely deluded expectations, which entirely unreasonable delusions caused the divorce.

  594. On female hypergamy:
    “Don’t you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn’t marry a girl just because she’s pretty, but my goodness, doesn’t it help?” – Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

    James A. Donald on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 10:46 pm said:

    The alarmingly low reproduction rate of the most educationally qualified women.

    That doesn’t actually seem to be true. Here are 2010 births per 1,000 women aged 15-50 by educational attainment, per the Census Bureau:

    Not a high school graduate — 50.2
    High school, 4 years — 68.0
    Some college, no degree — 53.6
    Associate’s degree — 63.5
    Bachelor’s degree — 59.7
    Graduate or professional degree — 73.3

    It surprised me too. To be sure, these numbers are for all women 15-50, and
    girls under 18 aren’t old enough to have graduated high school. So they dilute that pool. They also don’t account for births to women who get more education later.

  595. James Donald:
    > > Guys are perfectly happy, very happy indeed, to have a wife or main girlfriend, and one or more other girls that are friends with benefits.

    Jessica Boxer on Monday, January 21 2013 at 5:18 pm said:
    > You don’t know what you are talking about, this is true for some men, it is not true for most men.

    :-)

  596. @JAD

    >To the best of my knowledge, pretty much all divorces are like that

    >Personal observation: 100% of divorces that I have observed are initiated by women who were sleeping with someone handsomer and usually richer than their husband

    Where the fuck do you live?

    My personal observation: J. Random Average Guy is a total douchebag whose only measure of success in life is getting the high score in seduction. J. Random Average Girl (from what I have been told by members of the fair sex) is likely a semi-slut (sometimes with a side order of total bitch)

    But I don’t pretend that this is precisely accurate.

    @ Jessica Boxer

    On the subject of douchebag guys; what the hell do women see in them?

    — Foo Quuxman

  597. @Nigel:

    in the last 10 years we went from 14% male teachers in elementary schools to 7% – there are 2 in my kids’ school – gym and art.

    Yeah, teaching is apparently not a profession for men anymore. And statistically speaking, you probably need to keep the little girls away from the gym teacher and the little boys away from the art teacher.

  598. Rich Rostrom on Monday, January 21 2013 at 6:18 pm said:
    > The alarmingly low reproduction rate of the most educationally qualified women.
    >
    > That doesn’t actually seem to be true. Here are 2010 births per 1,000 women aged 15-50 by educational attainment, per the Census Bureau:

    This differs substantially from the 1994 results. http://www.census.gov/prod/2/pop/p20/p20-482.pdf Table A, which shows a moderate dysgenic trend by education, and a major dysgenic trend by income, though, confusingly, a moderate eugenic trend by occupation.

    Could you give a more precise source than “the census bureau”

  599. Jessica Boxer on Monday, January 21 2013 at 11:45 am said:
    > Women generally speaking end up worse off after divorce than men, outliers notwithstanding.
    Women generally wind up single and alone after a divorce, which is probably not what they expected or intended. Should they remarry, it is usually to a husband substantially worse than their original husband, which is probably not what they expected or intended.

  600. @JAD:

    Women generally wind up single and alone after a divorce, which is probably not what they expected or intended.

    I’m not sure about this. Many, if not most, of the divorced or widowed women I know are quite happy to take it slow and not rush into anything. Guys seem more likely to want to get into relationships again.

  601. Patrick Maupin on Monday, January 21 2013 at 8:07 pm said:
    > Many, if not most, of the divorced or widowed women I know are quite happy to take it slow and not rush into anything.

    The divorcees are still pining for their demon lover. Observe that Monica Lewinsky is still pining for President Clinton.instead of getting on with dating and marriage.

  602. @ Foo

    On the subject of douchebag guys; what the hell do women see in them?

    I know of an example where the guy was “the quiet type” and the douchebaggery emerged shortly after the couple were married.

  603. A lot of the theophanies that I have had (being the story Featherwing Love and other featherwing stories) are about what God intended marriage to be. Anyone want the short version?

  604. After ~600 posts, for sheer entertainment value its neck and neck between JAD’s offensive reflexive racism and the [cough] interestingly argued creationism spouted by Terry …

    Thank goodness for the internets.

  605. @TomM
    ” its neck and neck between JAD’s offensive reflexive racism and the [cough] interestingly argued creationism spouted by Terry”

    Curiously, while morally at completely different levels, these two share a foundation:
    Both are replacing reality with words* and both think scientists are conspiring against the TRUTH.

    * JAD: There are no individuals, just Men, Women, Blacks, Whites, Tutsis etc
    Terry: There is nor observable reality, just the holy text

    1. >Both are replacing reality with words* and both think scientists are conspiring against the TRUTH.

      Both are case studies in what it looks like when the mechanisms of truth maintainance are seriously deranged by emotional fixations. For me, watching the boundary where the ability to reason shuts down without either of them noticing that they’ve wandered into nutjob country exerts a sort of horrifying fascination, like watching a bad auto accident in progress.

  606. esr:
    > Both are case studies in what it looks like when the mechanisms of truth maintainance are seriously deranged by emotional fixations.

    So tell me esr, who is it that is inserting large objects into the vaginas of women in the Congo, and which tribes are on the receiving end? The first time I asked you this question, you gave me the PC answer, which is the opposite of the truth, and since then you have not been able to utter the thought crime which would be the truthful answer.

    When individuals of certain groups are on average significantly unequal, when groups who tend who tend to associate together are unequal, it is your reasoning that shuts down.

  607. @ Winter
    > and both think scientists are conspiring against the TRUTH.

    At this point it would probably be rude to point out that our host shares this characteristic when it comes to climate science. So I’d best not.

    1. >At this point it would probably be rude to point out that our host shares this characteristic when it comes to climate science.

      No, idiot. An error cascade is not a conspiracy. Most scientists are clean on this one – mistaken, but not fraudulent.

      Mind you, I think there are two conspiracies at the back of some of this, but neither of them includes more than a very tiny minority of climate scientists. I think. I hope. Unlike a paranoid conspiracist, I don’t want the most sinister explanation to be true, so I don’t need to run around manufacturing pseudo-evidence for it.

  608. @esr
    ” like watching a bad auto accident in progress.”

    Indeed, likewise.

    @JAD
    “When individuals of certain groups…”

    And his reaction is to give us even more examples. Priceless.

  609. esr:
    For me, watching the boundary where the ability to reason shuts down without either of them noticing that they’ve wandered into nutjob country

    In what way was I such a horrible racist nutjob?

    In that I said that the Tutsi did not have genocide and state sponsored rape coming to them.

    And what did you say about the Tutsi? You said it was their fault, in that you blamed “warlords” – in other words the Tutsis themselves, for the crimes committed against the Tutsis. You also claimed that the Tutsis were racially equal to the Hutu, which if true implies that the continuing racial privilige of the Tutsi must be something nefarious and wicked, requiring measures even more drastic and brutal to remedy than those measures that have already been applied.

    Much like those who claim that males in school and in university continue to have male privilege (which of course they do) and that this requires even more drastic measures to keep them out of school and out of university.

    Equality and social justice necessarily leads to terror, mass murder, state sponsored rape, and mass torture. Confronted with this disturbing reality, you side with terrorists, torturers, murderers and rapists, and call me a nutjob.

    1. >And what did you say about the Tutsi? You said it was their fault, in that you blamed “warlords”

      I quote myself: “Nor do I have any issue with describing the nightmare in the Congo as at least in part a genocidal race war that happens to be black-on-black. In part – it’s more complicated than that. A lot of it is straight-up old-fashioned warlordism.”

      Anybody who draws from that the inference that I think the Tutsis are at fault is self-identifying as a gibbering loon.

  610. @JAD
    “In that I said that the Tutsi did not have genocide and state sponsored rape coming to them.”

    Only in your twisted mind has anyone on this blog besides you ever written anything at all that might even hint at condoning crimes committed in this sad region in the world.

    The history of Rwanda, Burundi, and the general Great Lakes area in Africa is complex. However, one thing is clear, the tribal warfare, murders, ethnic cleansing, and genocides are coming from all sides. No single group or tribe can be blamed for the crimes, nor is there any single group or tribe whose members never were involved in large scale war-crimes.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burundi_genocide
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwanda_genocide
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War

  611. I’ve only been skimming this comment thread, it’s out of control. But that SSRI thing is giving me chills.

    I have 2 small boys. We live in a nice town, with a very nice town park that has a lovely playground. We often take the boys there when the weather permits. And one thing my wife and I have both noticed, is that many of the older children there, particularly older (middle-school age at the oldest, it’s a children’s playground) boys… they have dead eyes. Dead fish eyes. They seem to behave pretty normally, though with a somewhat flat affect, but their eyes… it’s really fucking creepy.

    I suspect in a few years there’s going to be serious trouble between school systems, and parents who don’t want their little boys zombified.

  612. >I’ve only been skimming this comment thread, it’s out of control.

    If we work at it we could easily break the kilopost barrier, be advised: JAD can be counted on for 2-3 posts for every potshot taken at him, so be sure to make plenty of them :-).

    > [SSRIs]

    I find it strange that more people *aren’t* suspicious of those, every nutjob who goes on a killing spree (that I can remember) had in the recent past done /something/ with their meds, not pretty.

    — Foo Quuxman

  613. >>I’ve only been skimming this comment thread, it’s out of control.

    >If we work at it we could easily break the kilopost barrier, be advised: JAD can be counted on for
    >2-3 posts for every potshot taken at him, so be sure to make plenty of them :-).

    I just don’t enjoy that sort of thing as much anymore, now that I’ve noticed trying to load a post page with a super long comment thread (~500 comments does it) crashes the browser on my phone. :\

    >> [SSRIs]

    >I find it strange that more people *aren’t* suspicious of those, every nutjob who goes on a
    >killing spree (that I can remember) had in the recent past done /something/ with their meds,
    >not pretty.

    I’ve been *suspicious* of them for 20 years, ever since my first exposure to parental drugging of unruly boys (my employers at the time, and their kids). But now, this goes beyond suspicion. We now have 20 years of data on the side effects. Plus I now have small boys, about to grow up in the midst of the War on Boys. This is personal.

  614. @Greg:

    Just (a) make sure your kids get plenty of physical activity outside of school, to let them sit still longer in school, (b) give you kids small sugar pills every morning from an officious-looking container, with the explanation that the pills will help them sit still in school, and (c) explain to the teacher that you are diligently working to get the ritalin dosage right and enlist her help in monitoring the behavior.

  615. @Foo
    > I find it strange that more people *aren’t* suspicious of those, every nutjob who goes on a killing spree (that I can remember) had in the recent past done /something/ with their meds, not pretty.

    Your reasoning is flawed here. SSRIs are prescribed to people with mental health issues, mental health issues cause people to commit mass killings. By no means does that mean that SSRIs lead to the committing of mass killings. The are two independent results of a common cause.

    Your argument could readily be substituted like this:

    Some people have access to guns, guns are mostly used in mass killings, consequently access to guns causes mass killings. I presume you don’t agree with that.

    Or maybe you do, so lets try this one: all those murdering little bastards who committed mass killings in schools ate chicken that had been injected with growth hormones. Pitchforks and torches outside Purdue’s headquarters this weekend everyone.

    Needless to say a gigantic majority of users of SSRIs don’t commit mass killings, and mass killings happened often before the widespread use of SSRIs. I’d say that was pretty good evidence that the two are unconnected, or at least not strongly connected.

    I think widespread reporting has far more to do with the mass killings we have seen recently. It introduced a meme into society that offered a perverse moral justification that it is ok to kill your classmates if you are bullied or weird or can’t get chicks. The SSRI causes mass murder meme is just another memetic justification in the twisted minds of these troubled children.

    1. >By no means does that mean that SSRIs lead to the committing of mass killings.

      You’re missing a pathway, Jessica. The evidence suggests strongly that there are a great many people who start with low-grade mental problems like mild exogenous depression, have SSRIs (over)prescribed to them, and commonly end up with much more serious problems ranging from endogenous bipolar depression up to outright paranoid psychosis – it says so right there in the Physician’s Desk Reference. (I was afraid something like this would turn out to be true 20 years ago. Sometimes I hate being right.)

      So the claim “SSRIs lead to the committing of mass killings” is in fact quite plausible. Your error is in implicitly treating all instances of “mental illness” as causatively equivalent for mass killings. They’re not. If a drug moves people from low-risk categories of mental illness to high-risk ones – as it appears SSRIs are doing – then the drug is a cause of the killings all right.

      This is worse than thalidomide or DES. Much worse. And I thought statins were bad…

  616. >In what way was I such a horrible racist nutjob?
    >In that I said that the Tutsi did not have genocide and state sponsored rape coming to them.[?]

    I don’t recall anyone saying you were “horrible”.

    For some (me anyway) the racist label gets pinned on you as soon as you start speaking seriously about superior or inferior races.

    “(Of course, since Tutsi are the superior race, there is supposedly nothing racist about impaling Tutsi women with large objects. Supposedly only members of superior races can be racist. According to progressives, nothing members of inferior races do to superior races is racist, even impaling women with large objects while calling them by racial epithets.)”

    Claiming that states are allowing this because the victims are members of the “superior race” and suggesting that our host is either blaming the victim or is burying his head deep in the PC sand to avoid discussing it…. That does sound kind of nutty.

  617. @Jessica:

    Your reasoning is flawed here. SSRIs are prescribed to people with mental health issues, mental health issues cause people to commit mass killings. By no means does that mean that SSRIs lead to the committing of mass killings. The are two independent results of a common cause.

    This is exactly one of the things I was getting at around – ohh, midthread now, I’d say. (Search for “hidden mechanism” – I’m still regretting that choice of phrase…) I suspect religion and mass killing are symptoms of something deeper, since not all faith holders turn into mass murderers, and often deplore it, no matter how convincingly the supporting case is made.

  618. @Patrick:

    >Just (a) make sure your kids get plenty of physical activity outside of school, to let them sit
    >still longer in school, (b) give you kids small sugar pills every morning from an officious-looking
    >container, with the explanation that the pills will help them sit still in school, and (c) explain to
    >the teacher that you are diligently working to get the ritalin dosage right and enlist her help in
    >monitoring the behavior.

    I’ve been trying to decide if you’re serious or joking, and then trying to decide which would be worse. I can’t.

  619. @Jessica Boxer:

    Your reasoning is flawed here. SSRIs are prescribed to people with mental health issues, mental health issues cause people to commit mass killings.

    I’m not so sure that the link between mental health issues and mass killings is that strong, until we start saying “oh, he’s a mass murderer — must be a nutjob.” OTOH, the words you wrote above could be used to lock up everybody with a mental health issue.

    By no means does that mean that SSRIs lead to the committing of mass killings. The are two independent results of a common cause.

    From what I have read on several sites, SSRIs tend to strip away inhibitions. Who knows what you or I might do if our inhibitions were removed?

    Some people have access to guns, guns are mostly used in mass killings, consequently access to guns causes mass killings. I presume you don’t agree with that.

    That’s a terrible analogy. People don’t have “access” to prescription drugs, so much as trained professionals tell them “take these, they will make you better” (or even worse, force them down their throats) and then the pills alter who they actually are by stripping away a core part of that which allows them to live in civilization.

    Or maybe you do, so lets try this one: all those murdering little bastards who committed mass killings in schools ate chicken that had been injected with growth hormones. Pitchforks and torches outside Purdue’s headquarters this weekend everyone.

    I could go for that if (a) a strong link was proven and (b) it turned out that Purdue knew about it 20 years ago and covered it up. At trial, I fully expect Purdue to use the same defense the tobacco companies did: “we weren’t all that effective at covering it up — fringe elements of society understood perfectly and tried to warn the rest of you; it’s not our fault if you didn’t listen.” And I fully expect that to work as well as it did for the tobacco companies.

    But that’s all hypothetical. Growth hormone might cause some issues; it’s entirely doubtful it is causing this one. But it may well be that SSRIs are doing a lot of societal damage.

    Needless to say a gigantic majority of users of SSRIs don’t commit mass killings, and mass killings happened often before the widespread use of SSRIs. I’d say that was pretty good evidence that the two are unconnected, or at least not strongly connected.

    One question is if, by some useful yardstick such as per capita, the murders are more frequent than before. If so, that might implicate the drug. But whether or not that’s so, if it turns out that the percentage of mass murderers on SSRIs is higher than the percentage of mass murderers in the general population, then we have to consider whether the mental health professionals have failed us, because (as you effectively point out earlier) in general, if you are on SSRIs, you have already cried out for help and are theoretically receiving it.

    I think widespread reporting has far more to do with the mass killings we have seen recently. It introduced a meme into society that offered a perverse moral justification that it is ok to kill your classmates if you are bullied or weird or can’t get chicks.

    Possible. And correlation is not causation. But if it turns out that all the killings were committed by guys wo can’t get chicks who are on SSRIs, then we have to ask if _all_ the guys who can’t get chicks are on SSRIs, and if not, we have to do the math and figure out if the SSRIs could have been a contributing factor.

    The SSRI causes mass murder meme is just another memetic justification in the twisted minds of these troubled children.

    But I would assume the meme has been heard by lots of guys who can’t get chicks who don’t turn around and murder their classmates.

  620. @esr
    > if a population is saturated with chiliastic collectivist ideology, then the conditional probability of acute mass insanity and atrocities becomes extremely high

    >The Netherlands is now doing its best to destroy that fragile peace by encouraging the unrestricted immigration of Muslims and failing to assimilate them to Western norms of religious tolerance

    Religion is not correlated with every case and may not be the root-most catalyst in any case.

    Poverty seems to the root catalyst of mass insanity, e.g. even in Wiemar Germany.

    Religiosity is positively correlated with poverty.

    Religion comforts poverty by placing emphasis on an after life and shared sacrifice interim.

    The moral value may be subservient to the economic, e.g. 80+% Christianity in Romania doesn’t preclude a low birthrate with a high incidence of abortion.

    When humans face uncertainty, they seek out the collective for surety.

    This destroys individual productivity, i.e. distorts economic feedback loops on the choice of education, career and other individual capital decisions.

    When collective economies fail, the masses cling to its atrocious means for delaying the economic reality, e.g. Hilter socialized everything, thus borrowing from the future to for example build an impressive autobahn road network employing “a thousand spoons”, etc.. As this depleted, Nazi Germany morphed to internal sacrifice and external conquest to garnish more resources to waste.

    If the social insurance of the wealthy nations collapse, the root cause could return.

    Capital is increasingly more intellectual, thus concentrated (IQ, rationality, and motivation not equally distributed), more mobile, and less enslaved by the sovereign. This collapse of equality can be delayed and made more severe in the end with unsustainable sovereign debts, e.g. recently in Europe and USA with Japan probably nearing the end of its two decade sovereign debt rope.

    Google’s cars drive autonomously. Labor is being replaced with robots.

    China has very low social insurance, astronomical 0.60 Gini, massive debt, and a corrupted, severely imbalanced economic model. See mpettis.com. Kyle Bass explains that Japan has probably entered a fiscal spiral, recently going current account deficit.

    @JAD
    Agreed that inequality is natural, so why do you protest so much the INequality created by the collective apparatus where omega men are emasculated? It seems you believe in some chiliastic steady-state unnatural nirvana on one manifestation of equality where most men are on top, or no collectives exist. Debt-master alpha males are on top when debt removes the females’ dependence on the omega males.

  621. @Greg:

    I’ve been trying to decide if you’re serious or joking, and then trying to decide which would be worse. I can’t.

    I can’t either. I never know myself. OTOH, I find that bad jokes often get me in the proper frame of mind to think outside the box. If a problem is systemic, pernicious, intractable, and insoluble by you in time for it to make a difference to your loved ones, it’s definitely time to think outside the box.

    Naturally, you shouldn’t use my proffered suggestion (except (a)) as a first resort, but certainly if you are being pressured to drug your child, it is much easier to pretend you are doing so if, as far as the child knows, you actually are drugging him. And, human nature being what it is, it’s inadvisable not to show too much resistance to the teacher, and always advisable to act as if you believe that the teacher knows what they are doing and has the best interest of your children at heart.

    With your situation in mind, I will give another piece of advice. If you happen to be fortunate enough to be able to afford for one spouse to stay at home to raise the children (as I was), then when the kids start school, the one staying home should start volunteering at the school, as well. Not in the sense of going to PTA meetings and trying to throw your weight around, but in the real sense of going into the office and asking what needs to be copied or what other menial tasks they have. If it’s not greatly appreciated in a heartfelt way, you are doing it all wrong. My wife was a crossing guard, edited and printed the school newsletter, and did some tutoring and other odd jobs around the school.

    I am not at all cynical (though I have been called that to my face when explaining this method) when I say that most schools have at least a few good teachers, and some kid has got to get the good teachers, so why not your kid? The best way to do this is to volunteer, especially since most schools are chronically understaffed. You don’t even have to know who the good teachers are — if you hang around the school enough, they will assume that you know who the good teachers are. With that assumption, and the proof that you care about your kid’s education deeply enough to actually commit real time to help insure it and the proof that you care about other people enough not to wantonly abuse them in the process, there is zero percentage in them treating you badly. They’ve already got plenty of enemies who will come in once a week and complain for half an hour about how Johnny is being mistreated, so why would they take someone who is on their side and who has shown the capacity to come in for 10 hours a week, and turn them into another enemy?

    One caveat — due to a few real problems, and widely imagined problems due to widespread publication of the real problems — this probably works better in most situations if the parent who volunteers at the school happens to be female. OTOH, with the dismal gender ratio of teachers you describe, it might actually be better for society as a whole if the volunteer happened to be male.

  622. esr:
    > I quote myself: “Nor do I have any issue with describing the nightmare in the Congo as at least in part a genocidal race war that happens to be black-on-black. In part – it’s more complicated than that. A lot of it is straight-up old-fashioned warlordism.”.

    You were, and are, dodging the question. The question is “who is committing these terrible crimes, and who is having these terrible crimes committed upon them?” The symmetric language you use refuses to answer the question as to who commit these crimes, implicitly admitting what you explicitly deny: that the answer is horribly politically incorrect.

    If tomorrow the progressives ditch the goal of ending Tutsi privilege, as in 2012 October they ditched global warming, suddenly you will be able to say things which today you are unable to say.

    Firstly, calling it a race war is like saying the Jews and Germans were equally at fault, because the Jews supposedly attacked Germany and, regrettably, Germans may have used excessive means to defend themselves.

    As in Germany, one side is merely guilty of privilege, of being innately unequal, and the other side is guilty of terror, torture, and mass murder. It is not in the slightest bit symmetric. If anyone used symmetric language to describe the entirely one sided conflict within Germany, you would correctly say he supported the genocide of the Jews – and you just used symmetric language to describe what is happening to the Tutsi. Political correctness leads to terror and mass murder, and when this happens, the politically correct find, to their horror and embarrassment, that they are required to support terror and mass murder, as you just did.

    Secondly the “warlords” in the Congo are Tutsis, or people the government thinks of as Tutsis and treats as Tutsis. If you call them “warlords”, you are on the side of the government, which is the side that is using extraordinary and terrible means to crush the race or races that it considers privileged. Because they are well disciplined and well behaved, they are not warlords, but rebels.

    When you call them “warlords” you are saying “well the GermanCongo government may have regrettably done some bad things, but in war terrible things happen. I am sure the JewsTutsi must have done lots of bad things also, even though no very bad things come to mind”

  623. Winter on Tuesday, January 22 2013 at 7:43 am said:
    > The history of Rwanda, Burundi, and the general Great Lakes area in Africa is complex. However, one thing is clear, the tribal warfare, murders, ethnic cleansing, and genocides are coming from all sides.

    That is a simple barefaced lie. If all sides are doing it, name a place and a time and crime when those who were victims of genocide also committed genocide.

    That is a lie rooted in hatred of the superior, and aimed at their deaths, the inevitable result of equality and social justice.

    Every African genocide since 1830 or so has been an attack by inferior races upon superior races sponsored and supported by the international community in the pursuit of social justice. The recent victims of genocide are the Tutsi and the Igbo. When have the Tutsi or the Igbo genocided anyone, or even used shocking or undisciplined measures in warfare? Name a place and a time.

    The worst you lot can come up with is the Tutsi conscripting fifteen year olds. OK, you say, the government is committing mass rape, mass murder, and is impaling Tutsi women with large objects, but look at what the Tutsi communities are doing in response: They are conscripting fifteen year olds! Oh the horror.

  624. @Winter
    “JAD: There are no individuals, just Men, Women, Blacks, Whites, Tutsis etc
    Terry: There is nor observable reality, just the holy text”

    I can’t say anything in defense of James, since I haven’t been paying much attention to him (either?) and racism is something that I don’t want to get into except occasionally pointing out to non-racist Evolutionists that the full title of Charles Darwin’s 1859 book is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

    As for your “short version” of what I’ve had to say, you obviously haven’t been paying any attention to me. To your credit though, you have something you can hold up next time your mother says “What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?” (I wonder if this thread could degrade into an argument about the best ways to implement logic gates (especially the NOR gate) in either real circuitry or Minecraft’s redstone…)

    @TomM ” for sheer entertainment value its neck and neck between JAD’s [stuff and stuff by] Terry …”

    @Terry (earlier): “A lot of the theophanies that I have had (being the story Featherwing Love and other featherwing stories) are about what God intended marriage to be. Anyone want the short version?”

    So Tom, the Bible, Aesop’s Fables, The Jargon File(tm), T.H. Lawrence’s poetry, and Featherwing Love might not be meant entirely for entertainment, but hey they are entertaining…

    And finally, I don’t think Tootsie Rolls are very healthy ;)

  625. @Terry:

    I wonder if this thread could degrade into an argument about the best ways to implement logic gates (especially the NOR gate) in either real circuitry or Minecraft’s redstone…

    I know nothing about redstone, but most NOR gates in real circuitry these days are implemented in CMOS pretty much like this. What kind of controversy are you expecting?

  626. @esr
    > The evidence suggests strongly that there are a great many people who start with low-grade mental problems like mild exogenous depression, have SSRIs (over)prescribed to them, and commonly end up with much more serious problems ranging from endogenous bipolar depression up to outright paranoid psychosis – it says so right there in the Physician’s Desk Reference.

    It doesn’t say “a great many”. What does “a great many” mean? As you know all drugs are a trade off between the benefits and the side-effects and what I have seen is that the FDA is SUPER conservative about that kind of thing, way too much, trading large amounts of hidden morbidity and mortality for much smaller but more visible reductions in the same. There are many examples of this.

    Again this web site with its circus colors just screams of “fluorine in your water is causing your boys to grow breasts and your girls to turn away from Jesus.” But that is just a surface judgement, I haven’t taken the time to read it. Normally I just wouldn’t even bother, but I respect your judgement enough to take the time to do so (esp. since I know many people who use SSRIs to their great benefit.)

    > moves people from low-risk categories of mental illness to high-risk ones – as it appears SSRIs are doing – then the drug is a cause of the killings all right.

    Not really on two points. Firstly, the plain fact is that many people have their mental illness helped greatly by SSRIs. I know from personal experience that that is true (no I haven’t used them but know many people who have.) For example, I know a girl who, during her period would simply weep endlessly for days on end, and was consequently non functional for several days a month. She takes a small dose of prozac and now is asymptomatic. Of course that is one person, I don’t know the averages. Point is that if it helps some people and hurts some people one has to measure the net consequences.

    Secondly, your statement that “the drug causes the killings all right” is far to strong for the data you mention. There are many other possible causes for the increase in killings, one of which I mentioned earlier. And the plain fact is that these massacres are actually extremely rare from a historical point of view. Most places much worse stuff happens all the time. We have one every few years. That is just random statistical noise, not an indication of some deep problem.

    > This is worse than thalidomide or DES. Much worse. And I thought statins were bad…

    Curious, like I say probably less than 200 people have been killed in these sorts of killings in the past decade. As far as cause of death goes, tragedy notwithstanding, that is a miniscule cause of death, and a tiny risk.

    More than 50,000 babies were born deformed as a result of thalidomide in the two or three years it was available. Seems far worse to me. And more importantly, thalidomide was the genesis of the growing and dangerous power of the FDA as the cocked and crowed about their one single success — a success caused more by the fortuitous combination of incompetence, inefficiency, ass covering and a serendipitous result. Truly the FDA is a far worse health crisis than all these things put together.

    1. >Curious, like I say probably less than 200 people have been killed in these sorts of killings in the past decade.

      When I say “much worse” I’m not just counting the possible link to spree killings but the entire spectrum of iatrogenic harm, which is much larger.

      >More than 50,000 babies were born deformed as a result of thalidomide in the two or three years it was available.

      No. The high end of the worldwide estimates is 20K.

      >Truly the FDA is a far worse health crisis than all these things put together.

      No argument with that.

  627. I have a comment stuck in the moderation queue for some unknown reason. Perhaps it was the linking to a gif image. Does wordpress use a long list of rules, or is there some neural network figuring out all this stuff?

    1. >Does wordpress use a long list of rules, or is there some neural network figuring out all this stuff?

      I think it’s Bayesian filtering. So more like a neural network.

  628. esr:
    > No, idiot. An error cascade is not a conspiracy. Most scientists are clean on this one – mistaken, but not fraudulent.

    esr, your fear of being politically incorrect has, as usual, shut down your brain.

    I have read most of the climategate emails, and a good bit of the climate gate files. It is a conspiracy to which, until very recently, until October 2012, the entire scientific community was forced to submit. You could be doing works in astrophysics or solid state, and yet were still required to declare your loyalty to global warming

    If it was an error cascade, Harry would have been in error – but obviously he is not error, but forced to knowingly performing criminal acts. He knew he was falsifying the surface instrument record, and he tells us he was doing so against his will. Doing it against his will, therefore a conspiracy. As was implied to Briffa, Briffa was been trained as a scientist, if he does not play along, he will never get a job as a scientist ever again, which will make it hard to get any job, since he is overqualified, and he has a family to support. Kind of like the evil Nazi in the movies cackling “Ha ha, you have relatives in Germany, ha hah”

    Yes, that kind of conspiracy.

    In the climategate files Mann would tell “the scientific community” to produce a certain scientific fact, and lo and behold, in short order they would then manufacture evidence for that supposed fact. Briffa said he would vomit, but complied. Harry wrote down his protests where no one could possibly read them unless, unless, of course, some mysterious person leaked the documents where Harry repented of systematically falsifying the surface instrument record. (Harry being a person who was in the position and had the necessary computer skills to both adjust the surface record and also to access other people’s emails providing strong evidence that he only cooked the surface instrument records because coerced and anyway everyone else was doing worse things.)

    They were lying. They knew they were lying. They were commanded to lie by central authority, which makes those lies a conspiracy. Briffa and Harry did not like lying and protested quietly about the lies they were forced to make, but the rest of them were as happy as clams in mud, and, by and large, to the extent that they thought about it at all went all postmodern, denying that science has any connection to objective truth, or that scientists should worry about such things. They rationalized that scientists should produce papers that pass peer review, not papers that actually connect to external reality, which is, as Winter assures us, impossible anyway.

    1. >esr, your fear of being politically incorrect has, as usual, shut down your brain.

      What color is the sky on your planet? You aren’t describing any “esr” that anyone reading this blog is going to recognize.

      >They were lying. They knew they were lying. They were commanded to lie by central authority, which makes those lies a conspiracy.

      Agreed, but “they” in this case is just the CRU gang – which I have already described as one of the two genuine conspiracies in the AGW mess (I may have been in error in not counting the IPCC as a third one). The worst crime most scientists have committed is being excessively trustful about the crap Hansen and the CRU gang have been pushing, not because they were commanded but because scientists don’t tend to assume other scientists are frauds.

  629. @Jessica
    >Your reasoning is flawed here.

    Guilty as charged, in my (feeble) defence I was talking about suspicion…

    >[access to guns causing mass murder] I presume you don’t agree with that.

    You presume correctly, I am well within the “None of the governments gorram business” category.

    @ESR
    The SSRI pathway you describe also nicely fits into a pattern in psychology of perodic error cascades; every few decades they realise how badly they have fscked many peoples lives with bewilderingly erroneous theories. Eventually those are corrected (kudos to them) and the stage is set for the next one in a few years.

  630. @esr
    > entire spectrum of iatrogenic harm, which is much larger.

    I’m sure there are significant iatrogenic effects, just as there are from every medical treatment, starting from aspirin. The question is what is the net benefit? I guess it is the fatal irony of the Hippocratic oath. The only way to guarantee that you do no harm is to do nothing at all.

    But perhaps there is some data in the circus web site to make a convincing case that the iatrogenic effects are overwhelming any positive medical benefit. I’ll definitely do some reading.

    > No. The high end of the worldwide estimates is 20K.

    My mistake I was firing from memory. However, thalidomide as well as being the FDA’s one success is also a perfect example of its dysfunction. Thalidomide is an excellent anti emetic, and sedative. Obviously it should not be used by pregnant women or women who have a chance of being or becoming pregnant, (as is true of many drugs) but there is no reason at all to not realize its benefits for men, sterile and post menopausal women. But it is banned for everybody. “Just in case.”

  631. @Jessica Boxer:

    Curious, like I say probably less than 200 people have been killed in these sorts of killings in the past decade. As far as cause of death goes, tragedy notwithstanding, that is a miniscule cause of death, and a tiny risk.

    Antidepressants, like thalidomide, also carry the risk of causing birth defects. Perhaps not usually noticed because the defects often aren’t as noticeable.

    The ability to harm the unborn places these drugs in a special place, which as you note, doesn’t detract from their efficacy for people who aren’t going to get pregnant. But if antidepressants really are also a contributing factor in the shootings, then that places them in a really special place, because complete strangers are bearing the risk but getting none of the benefit.

    In most states, bars can be sued for serving to alcoholics who then go and commit a tort against a third party. Under any similar theory, surely the doctors and drug companies who encourage and provide the antidepressants are at least as responsible as the bars and bartenders.

  632. @Jessica Boxer: No, thalidomide is not banned for everyone. It has been quite useful in the treatment of myeloma. (I was using it, years ago.)

    Celgene, however, is very careful about dispensing it. Patients have to be registered, and must take a telephone survey every month. Doctors may prescribe only one month’s supply at a time, with no refills.

  633. @LS
    > No, thalidomide is not banned for everyone.

    Ah, my mistake, thanks for the clarification.

  634. James A. Donald:
    > > which makes those lies a conspiracy.

    esr:
    > Agreed, but “they” in this case is just the CRU gang – which I have already described as one of the two genuine conspiracies in the AGW mess (I may have been in error in not counting the IPCC as a third one).

    If the IPCC was a conspiracy, or compliant with a conspiracy, then Global Warming is a conspiracy, not an error cascade, for the IPCC is global warming.

    > The worst crime most scientists have committed is being excessively trustful about the crap Hansen and the CRU gang have been pushing,

    The were not just excessively trustful: They signed on, endorsed, and supported, without knowing or caring what they were endorsing or supporting, which is a gross and immoral violation of the scientific method.

    Thousands of scientists directly endorsed the IPCC publications, and all scientists everywhere indirectly endorsed them by being members of institutions and organizations that endorsed them.

    They might say, “I trust Phil Jones, I can’t imagine he would lie.” If someone says that, he is not speaking as a scientist, he is speaking as an outsider who is taking someone else’s word for it. But what they are doing is claiming to speak as scientists, pretending to have examined
    the evidence, when the Climategate files reveal they have not, that they could not have, for Phil Jones has no evidence for them to examine – his surface temperature data comes from a grad student who was under pressure to produce scary looking warming, and no one ever seems to have asked Tim how he produced such scary looking warming, nor did Tim ever record how he produced such scary looking warming. So each of them is guilty of fraud, each of them, the several thousand scientists who directly endorsed the IPCC, and the leadership of every scientific organization everywhere, should be in jail.

    1. >They signed on, endorsed, and supported, without knowing or caring what they were endorsing or supporting, which is a gross and immoral violation of the scientific method.

      Yes, they allowed themselves to be fooled. Many of them are still allowing it. But that in itself is not conspiracy, just the sadly normal behavior of humans in herds.

  635. James A. Donald on Monday, January 21 2013 at 7:38 pm said:
    Could you give a more precise source than “the census bureau”?

    Table 92 in the 2012 Statistical Abstract of the United States. It’s on page 71, in Section 2, “Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Divorces” – formerly “Vital Statistics”, hence the PDF name below.

    http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/12statab/vitstat.pdf

  636. James A. Donald on Tuesday, January 22 2013 at 4:15 pm said:
    Every African genocide since 1830 or so has been an attack by inferior races upon superior races sponsored and supported by the international community in the pursuit of social justice.

    Would that include the Herero genocide of 1903-1907, perpetrated by Imperial German authorities in their colony of Southwest Africa?

    When have the Tutsi… genocided anyone, or even used shocking or undisciplined measures in warfare? Name a place and a time.

    Burundi, May to July 1972.

    You have denounced Laurent Kabila; the majority of his forces in during his take over of Zaire were Tutsi.

    No one is arguing that “the Tutsi deserved to be murdered”; but no one agrees with your description of the Tutsi as innocent victims of an international conspiracy.

  637. esr:
    > You aren’t describing any “esr” that anyone reading this blog is going to recognize.

    You refuse to believe the evidence of your eyes about racial differences, as for example when you made the Gouldian argument that Tutsi and Hutu had to be same on average. You acknowledge gender differences, but not the more disturbing implications of those differences, nor those differences that have really horrible implications, for example that women are by their nature not team players. The implications of the inherent weakness of team spirit and reciprocity among women are rather broader than Title IX.

    You are at the right hand edge of the Overton window – but the Overton window has been moving left, and getting narrower and narrower, for example the federal deficit, federal regulation, the declining male participation in schools, gays, the feminist imperative, open borders for illiterate third worlders, and so on and so forth.

    On the federal deficit, the debate is whether to proceed with business as usual, a huge and rapidly expanding deficit, or business as usual minus one percent, also a huge and rapidly expanding deficit. Similarly, the debate on schools is how fast we should introduce further measures to discourage and exclude boys.

    On the other hand global warmism was abandoned in 2012 October, but that is not a movement right, but merely giving up on one tactic to move us left – the left has been contained on one front of many, but is untroubled because it continues to move forward on numerous other fronts, which you oppose only in the sense of saying “Not quite so fast”.

    Every position, once abandoned, is declared lost forever. To return to the horribly reactionary and oppressive status quo of last century, or last decade, or even last year, is deemed unthinkably, unimaginably, right wing.

    You, for example, find return to the marriage laws, norms, and social expectations of 1960 or so unimaginably sexist, and can mention no connection between the new rules and the fact that the population is now rapidly approaching fifty percent fatherless, nor is it mentionable that declining male participation in schools and universities might reflect changes openly and overtly intended to reduce male participation in schools and universities by applying explicit and overt bias against boys.

  638. Winter on Tuesday, January 22 2013 at 7:43 am said:
    > Only in your twisted mind has anyone on this blog besides you ever written anything at all that might even hint at condoning crimes committed in this sad region in the world.

    A few posts back you said that everyone else was doing it, which if true, would be like Hitler remarking “Who today remembers the Armenians”. But as it happens, it was not true. Only the fans of equality and social justice are doing it. You also said that the Tutsi were doing it too, which is like saying “Well, I don’t condone the concentration camps, but we should also keep in mind the Jewish massacres of Germans”

    Someone who accuses the victims of the crimes does condone the crimes.

  639. @JAD
    > global warmism was abandoned in 2012 October

    Obama mentioned “attacking climate change” in his most recent speech. In at least one developing country, “save the earth” is taught by the local politicians, the schools, and the shopping malls. Money and credit can buy allegiance in poor countries.

    > Every position, once abandoned, is declared lost forever … the fact that the population is now rapidly approaching fifty percent fatherless

    The omega males are being emasculated by the alpha males who control money and credit. Has it ever been different in human history? In the past it was perhaps less subtle (conquest via bloody wars) due to the lack of means (schools, mass media) for control of the lower half of the bell curve. What would do you expect, an egalitarian nirvana?

  640. James A. Donald on Tuesday, January 22 2013 at 4:15 pm said:
    > > Every African genocide since 1830 or so has been an attack by inferior races upon superior races sponsored and supported by the international community in the pursuit of social justice.

    Rich Rostrom on Tuesday, January 22 2013 at 10:59 pm said:
    > Would that include the Herero genocide of 1903-1907, perpetrated by Imperial German authorities in their colony of Southwest Africa?

    The herero “genocide” was an ethnic cleansing. The herero were expelled from their traditional homeland – something that seem to trouble no one when similar measures were recently applied in the Ivory coast by progressives. Those of them that died, did not die under German supervision and control, nor in lands subject to German supervision and control.

    It is probable that the Ivory coast ethnic cleansing by progressives led to considerably fewer deaths than the Herero ethnic cleansing, but if so, that was good luck, not good management.

    > > When have the Tutsi… genocided anyone, or even used shocking or undisciplined measures in warfare? Name a place and a time.

    > Burundi, May to July 1972.

    80000 to 210 000 killed – about two or percent of Hutus in Burundi. I concede that is shocking, contrary to what I claimed above, but it is not genocide.

    > You have denounced Laurent Kabila; the majority of his forces in during his take over of Zaire were Tutsi.

    Whom he subsequently double crossed, at the behest of the international community which displayed obvious concern, alarm, and dislike of the majority of his forces.

  641. > In the past it was perhaps less subtle

    And perhaps less insidious in some respects, e.g. where in the past the omega males were cognizant of their feudal lord. Now they can be misdirected with media to blame politically correct themes. This is another reason I suspect religion is not the root cause of mass atrocities, rather just one of the forms of mind control. When the masses end up in failure (poverty), they lash out with any form of control that provides an a release for their misdirected blame.

  642. bpsouther
    > For some (me anyway) the racist label gets pinned on you as soon as you start speaking seriously about superior or inferior races.

    There are some groups, which, if they beat, rape, and kill members of other groups on the basis of group membership, all right thinking people shall condemn those doing the beating raping and killing. It is absolutely mandatory.

    There are other groups, which if they beat, rape and kill members of other groups on the basis of group membership, no right thinking person shall mention the group that is doing the beating, raping and killing in connection with the crime, and all right thinking people shall condemn the terrible horrible provocations that group whose members are getting beaten raped and killed inflicted upon the poor long suffering group that is doing the beating raping and killing.

    What word do you propose we shall use to describe those groups whose crimes shall receive maximum publicity, and what word do you propose we shall use to describe those groups whose crimes are unmentionable?

    If you don’t like my word, nominate another word.

    Yes, there is a word, and that word is “privileged”, but the problem is that if the groups whose members are getting beaten raped and killed actually were privileged, the problem could be solved by taking the privilege away, but, obviously, strange to report, somehow the problem cannot be solved by taking that supposed privilege away.

    To use the word “privilege” is to endorse the crimes committed by the “unprivileged” against the “privileged”, to endorse the crimes committed against the Tutsi.

    As everyone in this thread who mentions the topic has been doing.

  643. @JAD
    “There are some groups, which, if they beat, rape, and kill members of other groups on the basis of group membership, all right thinking people shall condemn those doing the beating raping and killing.”

    Men?

    @JAD
    “and all right thinking people shall condemn the terrible horrible provocations that group whose members are getting beaten raped and killed inflicted upon the poor long suffering group that is doing the beating raping and killing.”

    Women?
    Heard some pretty conclusive examples of “blaming the victim” from India after the horrible murder of that girl in India.

    @JAD
    “What word do you propose we shall use to describe those groups whose crimes shall receive maximum publicity,”

    Pariahs?

    @JAD
    “and what word do you propose we shall use to describe those groups whose crimes are unmentionable?”

    Elite, gentry, politicians, bankers, top 1%?

    @JAD
    “if the groups whose members are getting beaten raped and killed actually were privileged,”

    Women are privileged? That is new to me.

    @JAD
    “As everyone in this thread who mentions the topic has been doing.”

    Actually, you will be hard pressed to find any “written” evidence for that. It is all in your mind.

  644. @JAD
    “You also said that the Tutsi were doing it too, which is like saying “Well, I don’t condone the concentration camps, but we should also keep in mind the Jewish massacres of Germans”

    I am not sure what you are after here. But I think you are projecting your own prejudices into my words.

    I wrote that members of every group and tribe in the region have been involved in war crimes.

    The fact that every group in society harbors criminals is just a fact of life. There is nothing in there that even hints that I would condone the crimes. Just that I want criminals to be treated effectively, instead of punishing the innocent with racial profiling.

  645. JustSaying on Tuesday, January 22 2013 at 3:19 pm said:
    > Religiosity is positively correlated with poverty.

    No, it is negatively correlated.

    Belief in religions that deviate from the official religion are positively correlated with being rural and poor, with physical and social distance from the capital.

    Belief in the official religion is positively correlated with being urban, wealthy, and with physical and social proximity to the capital.

    In the west religiosity is defined to be beliefs that deviate from the official religion of progressivism, which is of course not a religion but simply the truth, and of course belief in religions that deviate from the official religion correlate with poverty.

    However, in the middle east, religiosity is belief in the official religion. If you deviate from the official religion you are apt to be deemed irreligious, so Islamic religiosity is highly correlated with wealth and proximity to the capital.

  646. @JAD
    “The herero “genocide” was an ethnic cleansing.”

    What a sorry excuse. There is no practical difference between the two. This holds too for your “Tutsis murdered only 200,000 Hutus”.

    @JAD
    “On the other hand global warmism was abandoned in 2012 October, but that is not a movement right, but merely giving up on one tactic to move us left – the left has been contained on one front of many, but is untroubled because it continues to move forward on numerous other fronts, which you oppose only in the sense of saying “Not quite so fast”.”

    I think this is a good example of your dissociation with reality. It is not. Global warming is in the news almost everywhere outside the USA.

    You have also obviously not been following political movements in the rest of the world. You observations do not match your own country, let alone the other 95% of humanity.

    @JAD
    “Someone who accuses the victims of the crimes does condone the crimes.”

    I think these words do match your own behavior. I challenge you to find words written by me that blame the victim of a crime. Any crime.

    @esr
    “> The worst crime most scientists have committed is being excessively trustful about the crap Hansen and the CRU gang have been pushing,”

    Scientist follow the data. Data you all want to go away. If all data fits theory, it is quite normal to assume you have the right theory. Just challenging each and every data point is almost always a sign of weakness. Get better data if you do not like the current crop.

  647. @Jessica
    ” And more importantly, thalidomide was the genesis of the growing and dangerous power of the FDA as the cocked and crowed about their one single success”

    You might want to look what happens in countries where there is no FDA. Even Italy is renowned for registering pseudo medication. Fake drugs and things like prescribing growth hormones to undernourished children are rive in the developing world.

    It is your country, so get rid of the FDA if you want. I know what goes wrong when there is no effective registration. I will fight to keep our version of it.

  648. Winter on Wednesday, January 23 2013 at 1:46 am said:
    > I wrote that members of every group and tribe in the region have been involved in war crimes.

    During the warsaw uprising, did the Jews strictly observe the laws of war?

    It is not true that members of every group are comparably involved in war crimes, and not true that every group has been involved in genocide. The Tutsi have never attempted to eradicate their inferiors. There is no symmetry between the conduct of the “privileged” (superior) races, and the conduct of the “unprivileged” (inferior) races. The superior races have behaved far better, the inferior races far worse, perhaps in part because the inferior races have the backing of the mass media and the international community. Ever since progressives got the upper hand in the early nineteenth century, genocide has almost always been directed against the “privileged” (the superior), by the “unprivileged” (the inferior)

    And this is a necessary consequence of the logic of progressivism, of equality and social justice.. The progressive must make all groups equal, but some groups cannot be made equal, because inherently superior. Thus equalizing measures must necessarily escalate without end until the superior group is eradicated.

    Reading on the under representation of boys in school and academia, it is evident that so long as there is one male in school or academia, males are “privileged”.

  649. @JAD
    “No, [religiosity] is negatively correlated.”

    Proof by assertion. If there is a correlation, the rich and powerful are cynical and atheistic and the poor and uneducated are pious.

    @JAD
    “However, in the middle east, religiosity is belief in the official religion. If you deviate from the official religion you are apt to be deemed irreligious, so Islamic religiosity is highly correlated with wealth and proximity to the capital.”

    Again, you do not get out much, do you?

    Due to the strong social pressure, Arabs are hypocrites about religion (that is what they say themselves). And they fight each other to death over sectarian differences. Few countries, if any, are homogeneous on religion.

    The laws are so monstrous, eg, in Saudi Arabia, exactly because no one wants to live up to them. However, they all want others to abide by them to the letter.

    In short, it is the social pressure among poor Arabs that drives religious puritanism. The powerful just exploit it. The powerful also break every religious law and rule there is.

    Obviously, comparable forces are also in play in other Muslim countries, but there we get a lot of economic, ethnic, and tribal conflicts messing up things even more.

  650. @esr
    > “> The worst crime most scientists have committed is being excessively trustful about the crap Hansen and the CRU gang have been pushing,”

    Winter on Wednesday, January 23 2013 at 2:00 am said:
    > Scientist follow the data

    Cargo Cult Science manufactures the data.

    Starting 2012 October, the Hockey stick became an ungraph, as Stalin’s commissars became unpersons.

    If no more hockey stick, chances are no more supposedly rising temperatures.

  651. @JAD
    “If no more hockey stick, chances are no more supposedly rising temperatures.”

    You really do not get out much.

  652. @JAD
    > > “However, in the middle east, religiosity is belief in the official religion. If you deviate from the official religion you are apt to be deemed irreligious, so Islamic religiosity is highly correlated with wealth and proximity to the capital.”

    Winter on Wednesday, January 23 2013 at 2:30 am said:
    > Again, you do not get out much, do you?

    Osama bin Laden was rich, urban, and went to the best schools. In Egypt, the brotherhood’s votes come from Cairo, not the delta. In the Egyptian presidential elections, Shafiq (secularist) won a majority in the delta, the Muslim equivalent of redneck country.

    The further from the capital, the more rural, the less the faith in the official religion. The less the faith in the official religion, the poorer. In the US, the official religion is progressivism, and poor rural rednecks vote against progressivism, in Egypt, the official religion is Islam, and the poor rural agricultural workers who work bent over in the sun vote against Islam.

  653. Winter on Wednesday, January 23 2013 at 1:32 am said:
    > Heard some pretty conclusive examples of “blaming the victim” from India after the horrible murder of that girl in India.

    There were two victims in that incident, yet, strange to report, only one victim is reported, the “unprivileged” victim. No one worries about the “privileged” victim.

    Further, no one is blaming the “unprivileged” victim. The lawyers for the accused are blaming the privileged victim, which provokes outrage, because it might be disrespectful of his “unprivileged” companion. When you hear that the girl is being blamed, what they actually mean is that her companion is being blamed.

  654. @JAD
    “There were two victims in that incident”

    Only one victim died. And the attacks were aimed at the woman. Her friend was “collateral damage”. Moreover, his ordeal was reported too. Still, he seems to be suffering more from his friend’s fate than his own.
    http://world.time.com/2012/12/28/indian-rape-victims-condition-dies/

    @JAD
    “Further, no one is blaming the “unprivileged” victim.”

    http://www.spatchy.com/showthread.php/8027-Dehli-rape-victim-should-have-submitted-meekly-to-rapists-says-scientist

    http://www.charismanews.com/world/35231-lawyer-blames-victim-in-new-dehli-rape-case

    You are so out of touch with the world, it is weird.

  655. @JAD
    > > “Shafiq (secularist) won a majority in the delta, the Muslim equivalent of redneck country.”

    Winter on Wednesday, January 23 2013 at 4:31 am said:
    > Shafiq was part of the old Mubarak regime. Calling him a candidate for the “secularists” is disingenuous.

    The Mubarak regime was as secular as you get in the middle east – and was in fact reasonably unIslamic, much as the Pinochet regime was reasonably unprogressive. The Brotherhood was voted in by the urban, the wealthy, and the well educated.

    Soldiers and priests are natural enemies, just as lawyers and doctors are natural enemies.

    In the US, the well educated are well educated in progressivism. In the middle east, well educated in Islam.

  656. @JAD
    “The Mubarak regime was as secular as you get in the middle east ”

    As was Saddam Hussein and is Assad. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, but could be just another, even worse, enemy. I know other people think along the same lines.

    @JAD
    “The Brotherhood was voted in by the urban, the wealthy, and the well educated.” [citation needed]

    Actually, this is pure none-sense.
    For a starter, the urban, the wealthy, and the well educated are a minority in Egypt. So they cannot vote in any candidate at all.

    Second, the wealthy might be urban, the urban in Egypt are by a large margin not wealthy.

    @JAD
    “In the US, the well educated are well educated in progressivism.”

    I have a pet theory about this. It goes along the lines: The more you know about the world, the more progressive you get. Works like a charm with religion, morals, tribalism and racism.

    But I must admit that I know the general education system in the USA is in a pretty lousy state. So bad, many people think they can do a better job at home. So, maybe “well educated” in the USA means something completely different than what I suspect.

  657. > No, it is negatively correlated.

    Perhaps you missed the link to the evidence and there are very few outliers:

    http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/09/04/a-correlation-between-poverty-and-religiosity/

    Maybe there are no outliers in the lower, left quadrant if Marxism is a religion. Marxism in its blunt, bloody, revolutionary (not subtle, insidious, progressive) form promises salvation from poverty in this life.

    Greece is already in the upper, right quadrangle, with Italy and Ireland moving leftward as their debt bubbles burst.

    In the USA only 9% say religion is the most important and only 36% attend religiously:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States

    The wealthy status is recent during the boomer generation, leaving only one significantly sized generation to deviate from their parents’ religiosity and former poverty in the Great Depression. Poor religious immigrants have been another factor sustaining religiosity:

    http://religions.pewforum.org/reports

    > Belief in religions that deviate from the official religion are positively correlated with
    > being rural and poor, with physical and social distance from the capital.

    Being wealthier in a rich or poor GDP-per-capita country is an orthogonal correlation.

    Also, you’ve more broadly defined “religiosity” to include political affiliation, which appears to be most importantly a selfish gene socioeconomic opportunity cost phenomenon, than the manipulative control that it also may be. As I see it, political affiliation is the complex positioning of alpha males (greed and control) combined with the complex manipulation of omega males. All perceive they are positioning themselves advantageously for gains in what they perceive to be important to their happiness and evolutionary relevance. It is not due to a fear or hopelessness of being poor forever– which the salvation of a deity and afterlife promises.

    My earlier comment acknowledged that political affiliation is a form of manipulative control over the masses, with potential atrocities when the collective politics fails economically.

    Technological innovation seems to be the only paradigm that has consistently lifted the masses from poverty.

    Globalization is probably spawned by some fundamental technological innovation that increases productive efficiencies, e.g. the combustion engine and most recently the personal computer.

    Society then politically misallocates these new efficiencies (via monetary expansion), because the economic benefits accrue unevenly to the most technologically knowledgeable and/or the capitalists who finance them. This political theft and gridlock can end with a crash of the ignorants. Masses resist the technological adjustment process for employment with socialism and statism, i.e. redirecting capital from the productive future to forestalling the present. Robotics will increase productivity yielding more resources to involve humans in a greater diversity of activities. The most free (and thus informed) societies will be best able to capitalize on the greater diversity of activities coming.

  658. > No, it is negatively correlated.

    Perhaps you missed the link to the evidence and there are very few outliers:

    http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/09/04/a-correlation-between-poverty-and-religiosity/

    Maybe there are no outliers in the lower, left quadrant if Marxism is a religion. Marxism in its blunt, bloody, revolutionary (not subtle, insidious, progressive) form promises salvation from poverty in this life.

    Greece is already in the upper, right quadrangle, with Italy and Ireland moving leftward as their debt bubbles burst.

    In the USA only 9% say religion is the most important and only 36% attend religiously:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States

    The wealthy status is recent during the boomer generation, leaving only one significantly sized generation to deviate from their parents’ religiosity and former poverty in the Great Depression. Poor religious immigrants have been another factor sustaining religiosity:

    http://religions.pewforum.org/reports

    > Belief in religions that deviate from the official religion are positively correlated with
    > being rural and poor, with physical and social distance from the capital.

    Being wealthier in a rich or poor GDP-per-capita country is an orthogonal correlation.

    Also, you’ve more broadly defined “religiosity” to include political affiliation, which appears to be most importantly a selfish gene socioeconomic opportunity cost phenomenon, than the manipulative control that it also may be. As I see it, political affiliation is the complex positioning of alpha males (greed and control) combined with the complex manipulation of omega males. All perceive they are positioning themselves advantageously for gains in what they perceive to be important to their happiness and evolutionary relevance. It is not due to a fear or hopelessness of being poor forever– which the salvation of a deity and afterlife promises.

  659. >But I must admit that I know the general education system in the USA is in a pretty lousy state.
    >So bad, many people think they can do a better job at home. So, maybe “well educated” in the
    >USA means something completely different than what I suspect.

    I’m fairly certain that the majority of people who home school their kids would continue to do so if we had your school systems here.

  660. @bpsouther
    “I’m fairly certain that the majority of people who home school their kids would continue to do so if we had your school systems here.”

    I have zero personal experience with the USA school system. If people from the USA write that their public school system is bad, who am I to argue that?

    On the other hand, I have read accounts that say many of those who home school, do so for religious reasons. Again, I have no personal experience either way. So, I believe you if you say so.

  661. @JAD I agree with your point that poverty is correlated with integration distance from the official system of the developed world. My orthogonal correlation is that statistically as a group, only the poorest believe they will be richer after this life. Here are examples of what they hope for.

    Matthew 5:5 Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

    Qur’an 056.001
    YUSUFALI: When the Event inevitable cometh to pass,
    056.022
    YUSUFALI: And (there will be) Companions with beautiful, big, and lustrous eyes,-
    056.024
    YUSUFALI: A Reward for the deeds of their past (life).
    056.036
    SHAKIR: Then We have made them virgins,
    078.033
    YUSUFALI: And voluptuous women of equal age;

  662. @JustSaying
    > True or not, we can not prove that infinity does not exist as unreachable bound.
    >
    > … Whether it exists or not, infinity or the finite bound is decomposed co-inductively as
    > observations directed towards its final unreachable or finite bound that we can not prove is final.
    >
    > … The scientific method requires that we never trust a bound (e.g. Planck’s constant precision)
    > as final and continue searching and testing forever.

    > Faith that squelches free will (degrees-of-freedom), reason and evidence is insanity.
    > … Sane and prosperous faith channels hope, love, and positive creativity without binding free will.

    My understanding of Hawking’s position is that if the universe is unbounded, thus self-contained, then there is no place for a creator deity:

    http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/645162-professor-stephen-hawking-quotes-on-god-and-religion

    Of if the universe is finite, then has a 100% probability of existing from the summation of all possible finite histories, thus a creator deity with free will (to not create this universe) could not exist:

    http://www.philoonline.org/library/smith_1_1.htm

    I find his position to be illogical. If the universe is finite, there is no guarantee that our space-time is the only possible construction of a universe. If the universe (or quantity of universes) are unbounded, who can prove the totality of existence is comprehensible by the scientific method.

    Thus I separate the possibility for “Sane and prosperous faith that channels hope, love, and positive creativity without binding free will” from “Faith that squelches free will”.

    Is it more rational for me to contemplate the limits of the scientific method (and math) allowing for the possibility of the faith in the divine which maximizes free will with the inexorable trend of entropy in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or to ignore the aliasing error of modeling a potentially infinite universe with only what is observed finitely?

  663. @Winter
    >You might want to look what happens in countries where there is no FDA. Even Italy is renowned for registering pseudo medication.

    Gawd, you can’t believe how much of that crap goes on here. Ever heard of homeopathy? It is rife here. I suppose drinking distilled water isn’t all that harmful though.

    > Fake drugs and things like prescribing growth hormones to undernourished children are rive in the developing world.

    Fake drugs are a matter of false advertising, which is a reasonable matter for the courts, in effect a breach of contract. And prescribing growth hormones are hardly the biggest problem with medicine in the third world. That isn’t due to a lack of “regulation” it is due to a screwed up country.

    > I know what goes wrong when there is no effective registration.

    Registration is very different than regulation. The problem is not that the government publishes information about drugs it is that it prevents you using drugs that, with the advice of your physician you judge beneficial. Not only does it send the cost of healthcare sky high (like 1000% sky high) but also denies medication to people who would greatly benefit from it.
    This thread is way long already so I would introduce another sub thread, but I have commented on this a dozen times on here before with a bunch of specific examples.
    It is true that the FDA has saved lives, it is also true that the FDA has cost lives.

  664. @Jessica Boxer:

    It is true that the FDA has saved lives, it is also true that the FDA has cost lives.

    Amen to that. And a lot of their enforcement efforts are misguided, to say the least.

    But why stop at the FDA? IMO the AMA has done at least as much damage.

  665. @Patrick: “I know nothing about redstone, but most NOR gates in real circuitry these days are implemented in CMOS pretty much like this. What kind of controversy are you expecting?”

    And the Minecraft corollary is that there are basically two ways to do NOR gates in redstone, one of which dominates and the other of which is used only in certain specialized memory applications. I wasn’t expecting any kind of controversy, just ragging on Winter’s spelling or typo or whatever it was.

  666. The superior races have behaved far better, the inferior races far worse, perhaps in part because the inferior races have the backing of the mass media and the international community.

    Ha. Hahahahahahaha. I’m sure that millions of blackfolks, whose kind have suffered for centuries under bondage, only recently — still within living memory — to see the white man finally begin to acknowledge their status as full sapients, would take issue with your characterization of the good behavior of so-called superior races.

    Seriously, JAD, get a job with Fox News. I think you’ll find they’re more your speed.

  667. James A. Donald on Wednesday, January 23 2013 at 1:07 am said:
    The herero “genocide” was an ethnic cleansing. The herero were expelled from their traditional homeland … Those of them that died, did not die under German supervision and control, nor in lands subject to German supervision and control.

    Lie. Shark Island. And also, the many thousands of Herero worked to death in German labor gangs. And the thousands of Herero men killed out of hand during the fighting – the Germans operating on the assumption that all Herero men were – at all times – enemy warriors in arms.

    However, it is true that most of the Herero “did not die under German supervision and control”. Most (especially the women and childer) were driven at gunpoint into the Kalahari Desert, and died of thirst and starvation while trying to cross it to the habitable parts of Bechuanaland.

    One could just as easily say that if I push JAD off a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan, I’ll be miles away by the time he drowns, so he won’t “die under my supervision and control”. Of course, any sane jury would recognize that his death was a foreseeable and intended consequence of my actions, and convict me of murder. And any sane observer would recognize that the deaths of the Herero were a foreseen and intended consequence of Imperial German actions, and condemn the Germans for genocide.

    80000 to 210 000 killed – about two or percent of Hutus in Burundi. I concede that is shocking, contrary to what I claimed above, but it is not genocide.

    OK. We’ll call it a gigantic mass-murder atrocity – nothing really serious, right? Funny thing about gigantic mass-murder atrocities, though – they often lead to retaliation against the group that commits them, sometimes in the form of gigantic mass-murder atrocities. At which point, a disinterested observer might note that “the tribal warfare, murders, ethnic cleansing, and genocides are coming from all sides” – a statement which neither particularly blames or particularly excuses anyone.

  668. @JustSaying
    > political affiliation is the complex positioning of alpha males (greed and control) combined
    > with the complex manipulation of omega males

    Correction. That should be manipulative control of betas, gammas, and omegas. The sigmas can compete with alphas yet don’t crave control because they excel without it, outside of the mainstream social paradigm, or by empowering the individual:

    http://voxday.blogspot.com/2010/05/explaining-sigma-again.html
    http://voxday.blogspot.com/2010/01/roissy-and-limits-of-game.html

    @esr
    > There is plenty of empirical evidence that the dominant female mating strategy is hypergamy
    > … See also “game” and the entirety of PUA theory, which (sadly) actually works.
    > …
    > What JAD is asserting is that – if you are properly mated – your hindbrain expresses this by
    > behaving with an instinctive deference to your man that doesn’t match your conscious beliefs
    > about how you do behave and how you should behave.

    I read the implicated thread and submitted a late comment.

  669. Jeff Read on Wednesday, January 23 2013 at 3:40 pm said:
    > Ha. Hahahahahahaha. I’m sure that millions of blackfolks, whose kind have suffered for centuries under bondage, only recently — still within living memory

    Still within living memory?

    Ebonics goes back goes back one hundred and thirty years. The manufacture of progressive black intellectuals as counter stereotypical poster boys a fair bit longer than that.

    Segregation was in large part affirmative action in the sense that Blacks got places at black universities protected from white competition and became black lawyers and black judges in black communities protected from white competition. Black businessmen were protected by segregation from competition by white businessmen.

    One of the purposes of segregation was to manufacture a law abiding peaceful and powerful black middle class to keep the dangerous wild animals of the lower black classes in order – in which job it succeeded, unlike modern day affirmative action. Modern day affirmative action has led to the black community being dominated by its underclass. The modern black middle class are viewed by lower class blacks as unmanly losers, because every black believes that today’s black middle class have fake jobs.

    Integration has separated the black middle class from the black lower classes and put them in isolated fake jobs, depriving them of power and respect, and depriving the black lower classes of leadership and a good example.

  670. Rich Rostrom on Wednesday, January 23 2013 at 3:53 pm said:
    > And any sane observer would recognize that the deaths of the Herero were a foreseen and intended consequence of Imperial German actions, and condemn the Germans for genocide.

    But the vast majority of the Herero did not die, nor was it the intention of the Germans that they would. Therefore, not genocide.

    If you want to count the high death rate associated with ethnic cleansing as genocide, let us look at the Ivory coast. Hell, let us look at Detroit.

  671. British history is that the Herero ethnic cleansing was genocide – but then they took the territory from the Germans, hence unreliable. That a substantial number of Herero remained in the German territory, not withstanding German efforts to expel all of them, and that large number of Herero are around today, casts considerable doubt on the proposition that it was genocide.

    In a genocide you try to stop the enemy from getting away. You don’t encourage them to get the hell out, and then find that a lot of them have quietly snuck back in again.

  672. Rich Rostrom on Wednesday, January 23 2013 at 3:53 pm said:
    > Lie. Shark Island. And also, the many thousands of Herero worked to death in German labor gangs.

    How many times do the Germans get to genocide the same people in the same territory?

    True, Germany does not fit into my story that progressives have ruled the world since 1830, and are responsible for everything that went wrong since 1830, but progressives have dominated the world since 1830, ruled the entire world since World War II, and are responsible for most political things that went wrong since 1830, and every political thing that went wrong since 1944.

    The doctrines of equality and social justice are responsible for the biggest mass murders ever and are continuing to kill people in large number. Compared with the mass murders and ethnic cleansings driven by the quest for equality and social justice, the Herero were chicken feed.

  673. James A. Donald on Wednesday, January 23 2013 at 5:38 pm said:

    Rich Rostrom on Wednesday, January 23 2013 at 3:53 pm said:
    > Lie. Shark Island. And also, the many thousands of Herero worked to death in German labor gangs.

    How many times do the Germans get to genocide the same people in the same territory?

    Complete non sequitur. You asserted “Those [Herero] that died, did not die under German supervision and control”. The thousands of prisoners who died at Shark Island, died “under German supervision and control”. This happened in 1903-1907, as part of the German campaign against the Herero. So did the deaths by forced labor. No one is counting anything twice.

    True, Germany does not fit into my story that progressives have ruled the world since 1830, and are responsible for everything that went wrong since 1830…

    Actually, the destruction of the Herero could be ascribed in part to “progressive” ideology. Many late 19th and early 20th century progressives embraced a perverted version of Darwinism, in which “progress” included the removal of “inferior”, “backward”, or “degenerate” races and social groups.

  674. [Above post with tags corrected]

    James A. Donald on Wednesday, January 23 2013 at 5:38 pm said:

    Rich Rostrom on Wednesday, January 23 2013 at 3:53 pm said:
    > Lie. Shark Island. And also, the many thousands of Herero worked to death in German labor gangs.

    How many times do the Germans get to genocide the same people in the same territory?

    Complete non sequitur. You asserted “Those [Herero] that died, did not die under German supervision and control”. The thousands of prisoners who died at Shark Island, died “under German supervision and control”. This happened in 1903-1907, as part of the German campaign against the Herero. So did the deaths by forced labor. No one is counting anything twice.

    True, Germany does not fit into my story that progressives have ruled the world since 1830, and are responsible for everything that went wrong since 1830…

    Actually, the destruction of the Herero could be ascribed in part to “progressive” ideology. Many late 19th and early 20th century progressives embraced a perverted version of Darwinism, in which “progress” included the removal of “inferior”, “backward”, or “degenerate” races and social groups.

  675. @JAD
    “But the vast majority of the Herero did not die, nor was it the intention of the Germans that they would. Therefore, not genocide.”

    It is clear that all your lamenting the genocide/war-crimes performed against the Tutsis is not because you are disgusted by the crimes, but only that they were inflicted on the Tutsis. Atrocities committed against others are simply defined away.

    That is a difference between humans and racists like you. Humans lament atrocities against human life and limb. Racists lament only some atrocities and celebrate others. It just depends who is the victim.

  676. Winter on Thursday, January 24 2013 at 2:39 am said:
    > but only that they were inflicted on the Tutsis. Atrocities committed against others are simply defined away.

    About sixty thousand Herero were killed. about a hundred years ago. That you are making a big deal of this shows you are hard up for examples of mass murder by superior against inferior. If Tito had only murdered sixty thousand, you would have hailed him as the second coming of Ghandi. Actually he murdered a million or so, and you are still apt to hail him as the second coming of Ghandi.

    Further, I did not come up with a bunch of reasons why the Herero had it coming to them, while you and esr did come up with a bunch of reasons why the Tutsi had it coming to them.

    The reason I focus on the Tutsi is because it is happening right now

  677. @JAD
    “About sixty thousand Herero were killed. about a hundred years ago. ”

    About 200,000 Hutus were butchered 40 years ago. You defined them away too. But that is a point too. Why should we ague about tens versus hundreds of thousands? Butchering tens of thousands is not “wrong”, somehow?

    To you, the only thing that matters is who is murdered. Some victims you lament, others you celebrate.

    @JAD
    ” That you are making a big deal of this shows you are hard up for examples of mass murder by superior against inferior.”

    I have really no idea how I should classify people along these lines. Except, that the winner must have been the superior as they won?

    But here we have some examples. A million or so in the raging wars in the Congo. Some millions of Chinese, Koreans, and Manchus butchered by the Japanese in WWII. And all the Irish being starved to death for the economic benefit of the English in the 19th century (would be classified as genocide now). The real butchering of the Irish had been done by Cromwell earlier.

    We could add a few million Australian aboriginals that “disappeared” after the colonization of Australia (with man hunting parties). Some tens of millions of Africans dragged from home in the slave trade. And a hundred million natives in the Americas “disappeared” within a century after discovery. At least most of the Americans were not actively murdered but died of Spanish ignorance, stupidity, and cruelty. And, last but not least, the atrocities of the German knights on the Slavic people of Eastern Europe in the 10th century. The root of the English word for “Slave” is a person speaking a Slavic language and it originated in these campaigns.

    @JAD
    “The reason I focus on the Tutsi is because it is happening right now”

    People are murdered right now indeed. And some of them would even identify themselves as Tutsi. Other victims would identify themselves as one of a range of other people. But you care only about some victims and seem to celebrate the others.

    @JAD
    “If Tito had only murdered sixty thousand, you would have hailed him as the second coming of Ghandi. Actually he murdered a million or so, and you are still apt to hail him as the second coming of Ghandi.”

    I have observed you start switching the subject when you have painted yourself into a corner. I interpret this attempt to switch the subject as admission you abandon position and “regroup”.

  678. @JAD
    I forgot a family jewel of the Netherlands, the massacre on the Banda Islands. Given the smallness of the islands, the complete population that was massacred or driven away was only some 15,000 strong. Peanuts in your eyes.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banda_Islands#Massacre_of_the_Bandanese

    My fellow countrymen used to celebrate the “Butcher of the Banda’s”

    http://www.asiacalling.kbr68h.com/bn/news/indonesia/2619-the-controversial-statue-of-the-butcher-of-

  679. @Winter on Thursday, January 24 2013 at 7:08 am said:

    Some millions of Chinese, Koreans, and Manchus butchered by the Japanese in WWII.

    Actually, Japan did not kill masses of Koreans or Manchurians during WW II. Both areas (and Taiwan) had been subjugated by Japan, and were subordinate parts of the Japanese Empire (Manchuria de facto, the others de jure). All three areas provided auxiliary troops to the Japanese army, and I have seen credible anecdotes (from completely independent sources) that these auxiliary troops participated in Japanese atrocities – Manchurian auxiliaries in the Rape of Nanking, Taiwanese in the Bataan Death March.

    This is not enormously surprising – the Japanese military of WW II was a hierarchy of brutality. The non-Japanese auxiliaries ranked below the Japanese; they passed on the abuse from above to POWs and civilians under occupation, who were below them.

    And all the Irish being starved to death for the economic benefit of the English in the 19th century (would be classified as genocide now).

    Not intentional, nor even avoidable. Ireland had become densely populated, thanks to the high productivity of potato farming. Then the potato crop collapsed. The famine that resulted was aggravated by the Corn Laws, which taxed imported grain at prohibitive levels, but even without the Corn Laws, Ireland was going to starve. There was neither money nor transportation to bring in enough grain to fill the gap.

    In any case, the Corn Laws were repealed – and there were extensive efforts to assist Irish immigration to where they could get enough to eat.

    (Ireland, BTW, is AFAICT the only European country which substantially and permanently reduced its population by emigration.)

    England was substantially responsible for Ireland’s impoverished condition at the time, but genocide doesn’t come into it.

    And a hundred million natives in the Americas “disappeared” within a century after discovery.
    At least most of the Americans were not actively murdered but died of Spanish ignorance, stupidity, and cruelty.

    Wrong. The enormous population crash in the Americas in 1500-1700 was almost entirely due to disease. The magnitude of this effect has been properly understood only in the last few decades. White settlers in North America thought they were moving into “primeval” wilderness, with only a few scattered Indians. In fact the American landscape was nearly as artificial as Europe – but had been left untenanted, in some cases only a few years before whites arrived.

    And it would be very difficult to show that the Spanish conquerors were crueler than the Aztecs.

  680. The root of the English word for “Slave” is a person speaking a Slavic language and it originated in these campaigns.

    Actually it goes back to the Greek sklavos with the same meaning. Those poor people had been forced into labor since ancient antiquity.

  681. @Rostrom
    Most of Japanese attrocities were indeed committed in China. However, the other region suffered dearly in the 1920s and 1930s.

    The English were quite adamant in not letting food into starving Ireland. Aand they were quite happy with replacing Irish with brits.

    The diseases that depopulated most of the Americas were introduced unknowingly by the Europeans. They added what they could to help the disesse do its work

  682. @Rich Rostrom:

    There was neither money nor transportation to bring in enough grain to fill the gap.

    There seemed to be plenty of transportation available to take food out of Ireland.

  683. Winter on Thursday, January 24 2013 at 7:08 am said:
    > About 200,000 Hutus were butchered 40 years ago. You defined them away too. But that is a point

    We were talking about genocides. I said that all genocides after 1830 were motivate by equality and social justice.

    So you then wanted to talk about mass killings instead, which implicitly concedes that all genocides and attempted genocides after 1830 were motivated by equality and social justice, unless we start defining genocide rather broadly.

    OK then. Let us talk about mass killings.

    The vast majority of mass killings since 1830 have been motivated by equality and social justice: Communist mass killings, liquidation of the Jews, and so on and so forth, among them the murder of twenty six thousand Boer women and children, mostly children, by the British to put pressure on their husbands and fathers to accept social justice and all that.

    And while we are at it, if we want to broaden the focus from genocide, let us throw in ethnic cleansings and artificial famines. Anglosphere progressives have not done a lot mass killings, though their client states have, but Anglosphere leftists have been pretty big on ethnic cleansing and artificial famine – not as big as the client states of anglosphere leftist, but pretty damned impressive nonetheless. The commies have been the big ones on artificial famine, but anglosphere leftists are doing their bit to catch up. The only big non leftist famines that I recall are the Japanese war famines in Asia.

    Logicaly, if you believe group X is superior to group Y, you do not conclude that group Y should be exterminated, but that they should obey and submit. If they decline to do so you are apt to think it perfectly reasonable that group X should make group Y submit, which can sometimes, more or less inadvertently and accidentally, wind up as killing a lot of group Y.

    But if you believe that group X is “privileged” over you conclude that it is perfectly reasonable that Group Y forcibly take away that “privilege”.

    Observe Patrick Maupin on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 12:43 pm piously invoking equal treatment to justify drastically unequal treatment “As a society, it behooves us to encourage our best and brightest, regardless of gender or race.”, says he of a measure intended to deter males from school and encourage females to take more schooling by radically unequal treatment according to gender.

    And then when, strange to report that “privilege” somehow remains, you logically you must favor even more drastic measures. So long as one male remains in school and academia, somehow, strangely, males are still “privileged”

    But strangely, no matter how drastic the measures …

    Thus belief in equality and social justice reliably leads to persecution, mass murder, and genocide, because reality is that people and groups are not equal.

    Belief in inequality does not, because reality is that people and groups are not equal.

    And this is in fact what we observe.

  684. James A. Donald:
    > > If Tito had only murdered sixty thousand, you would have hailed him as the second coming of Ghandi. Actually he murdered a million or so, and you are still apt to hail him as the second coming of Ghandi.

    Winter on Thursday, January 24 2013 at 7:08 am said:
    > I have observed you start switching the subject when you have painted yourself into a corner

    You changed the subject, not I. I was talking genocides. You wanted to talk about mass killings, starting with Burundi. Fine. Mass killings it is.

    You say Burundi, I raise you Yugoslavia.

    And suddenly you don’t like changing the subject.

  685. >Actually it goes back to the Greek sklavos with the same meaning.

    slav goes back to what the slavic people called themselves; slav or slov, today still present in names of countries (Slovenija, Slovakia, Jugoslavija, … ) and person names. The Slavs I’ve known thought (or were taught) that is means something like “people” or “speaking the same language” (similar to the ancient Greeks’ distinction between “people speaking Greek” and “people making unintelligible noise” (barbaroi))

    If you were referring to the origins of the English word “slave” from geek “sklavos”, that I wouldn’t know..

    >Those poor people had been forced into labor since ancient antiquity.
    Apparently. A similar thing in Classic Latin : servus (Latin : slave) ~ Serb

  686. @JAD:

    Observe Patrick Maupin on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 12:43 pm piously invoking equal treatment to justify drastically unequal treatment “As a society, it behooves us to encourage our best and brightest, regardless of gender or race.”, says he of a measure intended to deter males from school and encourage females to take more schooling by radically unequal treatment according to gender.

    Actually, any unequal treatment I would be happy with would most likely have the effect of increasing the number of males entering college. But that doesn’t prove your point.

    If it can be shown so that arranging things in fashion ‘x’ benefits males over females, and arranging things in fashion ‘y’ benefits females over males, why must we have to choose between ‘x’ and ‘y’?

  687. If you were referring to the origins of the English word “slave” from geek “sklavos”, that I wouldn’t know..

    Indeed, I was; the connection is even more pronounced in Romance languages, e.g., French esclave, Spanish esclavo.

  688. James A. Donald:
    > > Observe Patrick Maupin on Sunday, January 20 2013 at 12:43 pm piously invoking equal treatment to justify unequal treatment “As a society, it behooves us to encourage our best and brightest, regardless of gender or race.”, says he of a measure intended to deter males from school and encourage females to take more schooling by radically unequal treatment according to gender.

    Patrick Maupin on Thursday, January 24 2013 at 6:04 pm said:
    > Actually, any unequal treatment I would be happy with would most likely have the effect of increasing the number of males entering college

    If you inflate female qualifications with overtly female only favored treatment, you devalue male qualifications, both in the eyes of the college, and in their own eyes. There is no way you can argue that measure intended to specially promote girls to college helps boys.

  689. @James A Donald:

    There is no way you can argue that measure intended to specially promote girls to college helps boys.

    I’m not interested in helping girls or boys; I’m interested in helping the best to be all they can be. If the techniques used to help the best girls are probably different than the techniques used to help the best boys. Why can’t we do both? More to the point, why can’t we help the best individuals with their best learing modes?

    BTW, here I mean “help” in the sense of teaching and developing, not “help” in the sense of saying “your SAT scores are lower, but that’s OK because we’ve added 200 points because you are a member of group X”.

  690. @JAD
    “You changed the subject, not I. I was talking genocides. You wanted to talk about mass killings, starting with Burundi. Fine. Mass killings it is.”

    Rwanda is populated by Hutu and Tutsi people prone to tribal unrest resulting in mass killings. Burundi is a neighbor of Rwanda populated by Hutu and Tutsi people prone to tribal unrest resulting in mass killings. East Congo is a neighbor of both Rwanda and Burundi populated by Hutu and Tutsi people, among many others, currently experiencing tribal unrest resulting in mass killings.

    When you write about the plight of the Tutsi being victims of attempted genocide, it is bad faith to limit yourself to only a single country and only a single event. And bad faith is something you show time and again.

    As always, you are trying to define away mutual massacres. Genocide is not only genocide when it actually succeeds in exterminating one component of the population. In international law, it is also genocide when a serious attempt is made to kill a large fraction of a specific component of the population and many die. Or even when only the elite or learned part of the population is murdered. It has proven to be very difficult to actually exterminate each and every individual of a people (Tasmania comes to mind, certain North American tribes).

    @JAD
    “You say Burundi, I raise you Yugoslavia.”

    The number of Hutu nor Tutsi people living in Yugoslavia is vanishing. So it is you who tries, yet again, divert attention from your indefensible positions.

  691. @JAD
    > Thus belief in equality and social justice reliably leads to persecution, mass murder,
    > and genocide, because reality is that people and groups are not equal.

    Agreed. Politics legislates that which can not be controlled top-down, magically promising the people what they think should be but either can not or not sustainably. Equality and social justice means plunder and the redistribution of wealth.

    An insidious form of redistribution that enables many aspects of the political illusion is borrowing from the predicted future using debt to redistribute capital FROM necessary real-time demand, e.g. currently TO excess consumption (west) and excess fixed investment (china). Compared to binding to years of prediction, real-time feedback loops have orders-of-magnitude higher fitness (dynamic adaptability to dynamic opportunities) due the geometrically permuted network effects of real-time degrees-of-freedom. Unfitness manifests as inefficiency, laziness, ignorance, inability, corruption, brutality, etc..

    If I am correctly interpreting esr’s summary of Olson, it implies the special interests groups are a minority, however they comprise the entire population playing the political game.

    Why do you protest against politics, given it is a natural form of human competition? Anarchism would unrealistically require that everyone is a pure sigma (the sigma in PUA theory)– not libertarians who think we can legislate liberty.

    Sigmas are successful when they reject political capital (and money as much as practical) and make innovations or insights in the free market. When they drift to relying on the monetary or political capital they’ve earned from those innovations or insights, they are falling away from their optimum efficacy.

    @Patrick Maupin
    > More to the point, why can’t we help the best individuals with their best learing modes?

    When it is done in the private sector then it does not fall victim to the Olson failure, see khanacademy.org and codecademy.com (the future of education).

    Compare the fitness of accomplishments in the competitive free market, versus the blindness of legislating with no market feedback what other people should do.

    Non-sigmas don’t think they can get all their desired results without some politics. The alphas serve their demand to be deluded on the efficacy of political action.

  692. @JustSaying
    > they are falling away from their optimum efficacy.

    Well their efficacy in the role of sigma to maximize individual freedom and fitness. This is not to say that alphas, betas, etc are not effective in the complex game of evolution. I should not assert that some sprinkling of alpha mode could not be evolutionary advantageous for a sigma.

    The unfitness of debt and political action is apparently evolutionary necessary or optimum, else it wouldn’t be natural and someone would devise a private sector solution.

    For example, from the perspective of debt money as the antithesis of gold, they compete and balance the opposing disadvantages, e.g. gold encourages burying savings in hole and rewards non-production.

    Even if the masses held physical gold (i.e. well distributed wealth), then the money supply could not expand fast enough for financed production to outpace the natural population growth rate. And with that inherent deflation, conservative savers are either motivated to hold the physical thus removing it from the circulating money supply, or to deposit it in return for an interest rate in which case mathematically the banks must do fractional reserve banking.

    Debt is natural and required.

    Infinite degrees-of-freedom (perfect fitness) could not be observable in any reality. There are no absolutes. Contrast requires imperfection. Existence requires perception. Perception requires contrast. Full circle to my early comment.

  693. @JAD&Justsaying
    So a policy of political equality leads to tyrrany and genocide?

    Funny, we have these policies in Europe and have not seen state mass murders nor tyrany for 70 years. Actually, only three countries fit the mass murder pattern you describe. All three after a horrible war and civil war. In all three the governments were not interested in equality. On the countrary.

  694. @Winter on Thursday, January 24 2013 at 2:53 pm said:

    @Rostrom
    Most of Japanese attrocities were indeed committed in China. However, the other region suffered dearly in the 1920s and 1930s.

    You wrote: “Some millions of Chinese, Koreans, and Manchus butchered by the Japanese in WWII.”

    Koreans and Manchurians were not “butchered by the Japanese in WW II”. In fact, there were no large scale murders of Koreans by Japanese at any time since 1600. Japanese rule over Korea was exploitive and oppressive. During WW II, Koreans were conscripted for military labor under conditions that frequenly killed them. Korean women were enslaved as army whores. But massacres? No.

    Manchuria was also exploited by Japan. Manchurians were required to work under dangerous conditions either as slaves or for minimal wages (the worst coal-mine disaster ever – 1,549 dead – was at Honkeiko Colliery in Manchuria in 1942). But massacres? No.

    The English were quite adamant in not letting food into starving Ireland.

    The Corn Laws which blocked grain imports were repealed in 1849.

    Aand they were quite happy with replacing Irish with brits.

    Is this a reference to the settlement of Ulster with Scottish immigrants in the 1600s? If so, it is irrelevant to charges of genocide in the 1800s. In the 1800s, there was very large scale Irish immigration to Britain.

    The diseases that depopulated most of the Americas were introduced unknowingly by the Europeans. They added what they could to help the disesse do its work

    You wrote: “And a hundred million natives in the Americas “disappeared” within a century after discovery. At least most of the Americans were not actively murdered but died of Spanish ignorance, stupidity, and cruelty.”

    This was in response to JAD’s rubbish about genocide only directed at “the superior”. It was clearly intended as an accusation of genocide. It is badly misdirected, since Spain had contact with only a fraction of the New World, but the population crash was everywhere. By “ignorance”, do you mean that the Spanish didn’t know about germ theory? Neither did anyone else for 350 years.

    They added what they could to help the disesse do its work

    Is this an allusion to the long-exploded myth of smallpox-infected blankets?

    I understand that JAD’s rubbish invites refutation. I’ve done quite a bit of that myself, as you many observe. But rubbish is properly refuted with facts, not opposing rubbish.

  695. @Winter
    > @JAD&Justsaying
    > So a policy of political equality leads to tyrrany and genocide?
    >
    > Funny, we have these policies in Europe and have not seen state mass murders nor
    > tyrany for 70 [-> 60] years.

    Note I did not write “tyranny and genocide”, which are extreme cases that may follow a longer period of suffering after the boom (borrowing from future) and bust phase of what I wrote. I wrote “Equality and social justice means plunder and the redistribution of wealth.”, which Europe has now most obviously in the PIIGS.

    I am not emotionally invested as to whether you agree, or differ as to the cause of for example PIIGS woes. I harbor no unsubstantiated faith of an evolutionary benefit from eliminating politics. I am willing to entertain any evidence.

  696. Patrick Maupin on Thursday, January 24 2013 at 9:31 pm said:
    > I’m not interested in helping girls or boys; I’m interested in helping the best to be all they can be

    Which somehow justifies a special elite girls only school for elite girls, and not a special elite boys only school for elite boys.

    So you are only interested in helping some of the best to be all they can be

    Confirming my claim that whenever someone says something like “we should evaluate each person according to their ability and treat them accordingly”, he actually means that “it is horribly racist or sexist to evaluate each person according their ability and treat them accordingly.”

  697. Winter on Friday, January 25 2013 at 12:10 pm said:
    > Funny, we have these policies in Europe and have not seen state mass murders nor tyrany for 70 years.

    You mean western Europe, not Europe. You have had peace, reasonable freedom of trade, and reasonable security of property because you have been subjects of the American empire for seventy years. Pax Americana. On the periphery of empire, or outside the empire …

    When that empire falls, we shall see.

    The anglosphere left is the sole surviving branch of leftism, because all the other variants of leftism self destructed horrifically. The anglosphere left is still standing after one hundred and eighty years of substantial power and thirty years of world domination, without itself having committed any very large massacres or artificial famines. Its genocides have been indirect. It controlled the French, the French sort of controlled the Hutu regime.

    But none of the other branches of leftism remain, and their passing was horrifying.

    To argue that anglosphere leftism has gone one hundred and eighty years without any very great horrors, therefore will likely go on a lot longer without any very great horrors is the error of survivorship bias.

    Pretty soon, China will challenge the US for dominion of the seas, and the US will yield. When it does, it will probably abandon Europeans to their own devices, as the Romans abandoned the Romano British, which will prove interesting.

  698. @JAD
    “The anglosphere left is the sole surviving branch of leftism, because all the other variants of leftism self destructed horrifically.”

    Are you sure we live on the same planet? Or are you a visitor from some alternative reality where “1984” was a history book?

    Leaving aside aliens and alternative realities, you seem to use a newspeak dictionary where all words in English have obtained a warped semantics.

  699. @JustSaying
    “I wrote “Equality and social justice means plunder and the redistribution of wealth.”, which Europe has now most obviously in the PIIGS.”

    Overhere, “plunder and the redistribution of wealth” is associated with USA bankers. Their fraudulent products ripped the foundations from under our banking system. For one thing, the upper 1% in the USA grabbed 90% of all US economic growth the last decades. That is how they could amass their billions and why you have no Middle Class left.

    The PIIGS saw a phenomenal economic growth in the last decades (~1980). The bonfire of the vanities around the dotcom bubble (pumped up by the USA to increase borrowing) translated into bubbles in the PIIGS countries. These burst all at the same time in 2010. The 2008 financial meltdown (caused by insolvent USA banks selling fraudulent loans invented by London bankers) had wiped out all the reserves in the EU. That is why the PIIGS crises are such a problem.

    To summarize, it is the trans-Atlantic financial ties that made a USA financial melt-down lead to PIIGS defaults. And obviously, German banks lending surplus money to poor PIIGS countries.

    Because the socialist Germans are the only ones that can out-compete the Chinese.

  700. @JAD:

    Which somehow justifies a special elite girls only school for elite girls, and not a special elite boys only school for elite boys.

    Completely untrue. But you know that society moves in stages. It is highly unlikely that we would be having this discussion in Austin if we didn’t have the girl’s school first. That’s political reality.

    So you are only interested in helping some of the best to be all they can be

    Also completely untrue, and rude to boot.

    Confirming my claim that whenever someone says something like “we should evaluate each person according to their ability and treat them accordingly”, he actually means that “it is horribly racist or sexist to evaluate each person according their ability and treat them accordingly.”

    Sometimes an inkblot is just an inkblot. Sometimes JAD synthesizes something thought-provoking, and sometimes he’s just a frothing-at-the-mouth reactionary sexist and racist asshole.

  701. @JAD
    >>“The anglosphere left is the sole surviving branch of leftism, because all the other variants
    >>of leftism self destructed horrifically.”

    @Winter
    >Are you sure we live on the same planet? Or are you a visitor from some alternative reality
    >where “1984? was a history book?

    Oh, he’s bright and he does have little scraps of truth mixed into his pathology. You may find reading http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ emlightening (I’ll bet JAD has, though his takeaway from it is probably a little different from anyone else’s).

    And something like this http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,801396,00.html (the whole thing used to be available, now you only get a snippet and the rest is behind a paywall sorry) really points out deep a debt the modern transnational NGO-style left owes (or could simply be said to be a product of) mainstream American Protestantism.

  702. James A. Donald:
    > “The anglosphere left is the sole surviving branch of leftism, because all the other variants of leftism self destructed horrifically.”

    Winter on Saturday, January 26 2013 at 5:30 am said:
    > Are you sure we live on the same planet?

    Well I concede Israeli leftism is still around and has partial independence from the anglosphere left, and you lot probably imagine that Muslims are leftists, but all other leftists were installed in power by English speakers using a mixture of soft or hard power, and are muppets of the state department, or in some cases, for example Mugabe, muppets of the London School of Economics Assange’s files show the state department’s hands manipulating the lips of their French sock puppet, and the London School of Economics is not far from being reduced to the same state.

  703. Patrick Maupin on Thursday, January 24 2013 at 9:31 pm said:
    > > > I’m not interested in helping girls or boys; I’m interested in helping the best to be all they can be

    > > Which somehow justifies a special elite girls only school for elite girls, and not a special elite boys only school for elite boys.

    Patrick Maupin on Saturday, January 26 2013 at 10:00 am said:
    > Completely untrue. But you know that society moves in stages. It is highly unlikely that we would be having this discussion in Austin if we didn’t have the girl’s school first.

    Which sounds like you are conceding that it is completely true.

    > sometimes he’s just a frothing-at-the-mouth reactionary sexist and racist asshole.

    I am horribly racist for opposing mass murder and genocide even in those cases where the victims thoroughly deserve it, and horribly sexist for suggesting that boys and girls should be treated equally.

    Which illustrates how far the Overton window has moved left during recent years.

  704. >Greg – recommending Moldbug to anyone is just evil.

    Nah, it’s mental exercise. There’s a great deal of truth to what he writes (as you will learn if you actually do enough research to try to refute him on facts) but there are also, shall we say, gaps. Everyone should be able to acknowledge the truth and also to find the gaps.

    He’s also frequently just plain fun to read, as is at face value.

  705. Greg – YMMV severely. I tend to give up after the first thousand words. When I go further, it’s frequently a curate’s egg of bloviation. I was particularly impressed with the one where he spent about a zillion words conclusively proving that despite his atheism, Richard Dawkins was actually a cultural Christian … which is something Dawkins has said about himself frequently. Well done.

    (I encounter Moldbug mostly via LessWrong, where he has a few quite enthusiastic fans.)

  706. I wrote:
    > I am horribly racist for opposing mass murder and genocide even in those cases where the victims thoroughly deserve it, and horribly sexist for suggesting that boys and girls should be treated equally.

    Point of clarification: Males and females should be treated equally according to ability and interests by the educational system in regard to education>, but not of course in relation to team sports or sports involving physical contact. Laws relating to sex and reproduction (marital law) should, of course, not treat men and women equally -that would be insane. Contract law should either acknowledge that society, judges, and juries have lesser expectations of female ability and willingness to keep contracts, or start actually enforcing contracts on females, or, my preferred solution, something of both. I would be happy with actually treating women as adults with regard to contracts, but treating them as children would probably be better if only the courts had the balls to admit that they were doing so.

  707. David Gerard on Saturday, January 26 2013 at 12:24 pm said:
    > I was particularly impressed with the one where he[Moldbug] spent about a zillion words conclusively proving that despite his atheism, Richard Dawkins was actually a cultural Christian … which is something Dawkins has said about himself frequently.

    The zillion words were required because Dawkin’s cultural Christianity is very different from what Dawkins kids himself it is.

    Thing is there is a fundamental conflict between cultural Christianity (either version) and Darwinism, so Dawkins has a lot of doublethinking and crimestop to do. In that sense it is not true that Dawkins acknowledges he is a cultural Christian. He is also, inconsistently and incompatibly, a Darwinist.

  708. Completely untrue. But you know that society moves in stages. It is highly unlikely that we would be having this discussion in Austin if we didn’t have the girl’s school first.

    Which sounds like you are conceding that it is completely true.

    Here, you’re doing fine until you conflate the majority with me personally.

  709. >Greg – YMMV severely. I tend to give up after the first thousand words. When I go further, it’s
    >frequently a curate’s egg of bloviation. I was particularly impressed with the one where he
    >spent about a zillion words conclusively proving that despite his atheism, Richard Dawkins
    >was actually a cultural Christian … which is something Dawkins has said about himself
    >frequently. Well done.

    >(I encounter Moldbug mostly via LessWrong, where he has a few quite enthusiastic fans.)

    Oh goodness, that was the *least* of what he was doing. It was just the first step. What’s really important is what flows from that fact. If anyone is curious, try

    http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/10/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-2.html

    as a taste and see for yourself. As someone with close relatives who are loud and proud athiests, also diehard liberals (now “progressives”) and attend Unitarian service when they’re not at (Reform) Synagogue this piece is delightful (explaining what cannot otherwise be explained is a good thing for a theory or line of argument, not so?). Oh and note the link to the ‘American Malvern’ piece I also posted a link to. It’s simply fascinating.

  710. @JAD:

    > … horribly sexist for suggesting that boys and girls should be treated equally.

    For a start, as any good parent knows, when dealing with children of different temperament (even of the same sex) it is often not the right thing to treat them equally, even if you could figure out what equal meant in a given context.

    Schools occupy a halfway position between parents and society as a whole. This makes them a political football; it also makes them surrogate parents.

    > Point of clarification: Males and females should be treated equally according to ability and interests by the educational system in regard to education

    People can’t treat “males” the same as “females” any more than they can treat “Johnny” the same as “Jim.” As soon as differences in behavior are noted, they drive differences in treatment.

    Unfortunately, a lot of school is subjective. This wasn’t any kind of real problem for male students when males and females were essentially tracked into different spheres, but now that they are in more direct competition in more areas, I absolutely agree with you that subtle biases towards females might be problematic. This is particularly true since the vast majority of teachers are females. In the past, a teacher confronted with a room full of rowdy boys could take comfort in the fact that most of them would grow out of it, some might become CEOs, and one might become president. Now, things might be different — perhaps she looks out over her class, and the quiet, studious girl in the front row looks more presidential than the boy in the third row with the spitball gun. I’m sure some of this happens; unfortunately, the study of subjective stuff leads to subjective results. You can find studies that show that girls are favored, studies that show that boys are favored, and even studies that show that girls have higher IQs.

    The right answer probably involves a lot of training of teachers about different learning styles, trying to get more male teachers (which might require increased salaries, which would certainly be problematic), and probably separation of gender where appropriate and/or desired. You seem to see the creation of an all-girls school as proof that the left-wingers have won; I see it as a step towards the creation of single gender schools for both genders, which will certainly benefit some, but not all girls, and some, but not all boys.

    Was the school formed for the wrong reason? Quite possibly. Could its formation lead to better education for all? I certainly hope so. Whether by leading to the formation of all male schools, or even by just providing data that gender separation does or doesn’t help, it will provide another data point on the issue.

  711. Patrick Maupin on Saturday, January 26 2013 at 1:52 pm said:
    > For a start, as any good parent knows, when dealing with children of different temperament (even of the same sex) it is often not the right thing to treat them equally, even if you could figure out what equal meant in a given context.

    Almost every engineer or scientist, and every organized group of engineers or scientists, quietly and furtively acts as if female grades have been inflated by affirmative action – that girls get extra marks merely for being girls. In engineering job interviews, when recent graduates are given little tests as part of their interview, girls seldom perform in a way consistent with their grades and accreditation.

    Just as those who denounce John Derbyshire quietly follow his advice, everyone quietly acts as if female grades are affirmative action grades.

    The discrepancy between GPA and SAT, which these days are supposed to measure the same thing, suggests the same conclusion – that it is school policy that the supposed top of the class will be all female without regard to actual performance.

    Similarly, areas where males conspicuously outperform females, as in areas where performance is objective, such as multiplication tables, are being de-emphasized and move to older ages. Hard measurements of student performance (What is 132 * 478) are being replaced by soft and fuzzy measurements of student performance.

    > People can’t treat “males” the same as “females” any more than they can treat “Johnny” the same as “Jim.” As soon as differences in behavior are noted, they drive differences in treatment.

    {sarcasm}So, maleness being evil and hateful, schools just naturally and spontaneously feel like punishing males for maleness. I guess it just cannot be helped.{/sarcasm}

    But, in fact, for most kinds of behavior, short of mugging teachers and suchlike, differences in behavior should not drive treatment. Grade point average should reflect things like ability to multiply 132 * 478, regardless of whether the teacher thinks that women are wonderful.

    Differences in ability and performance should drive treatment, and quite obviously they do not, because on any performance based measurement, such as SAT and LSAT, males do at least as well as females, and usually better.

    > perhaps she looks out over her class, and the quiet, studious girl in the front row looks more presidential than the boy in the third row

    This is a load of horse manure. It is not individual teacher bias that is driving the problem. It is a government policy of bias, discrimination, and hate, as manifested by the proposal to have a special elite school for elite girls, but not a special elite school for elite boys, as manifested by the devaluation of any form of measurement in which boys perform embarrassingly well, such as math problems. If a teacher gives out excessively good grades to boys, she is going to be reprimanded for being sexist, and some other teacher is going to have to give out better grades for girls and worse grades for boys to make the quota.

    Maths and arithmetic has been de-emphasized, because girls kept performing poorly on it and demathified and dearithmetized to prevent boys from performing well on it.

    When schools decided to replace math problems with essays about maths, that was because the boys were obnoxiously good at maths. That is not individual teacher’s feelings, that was official government policy. Downgrading arithmetic and maths and making it into a branch of English literature in order to prevent males from oppressively bullying girls by being better than them is presidential policy, imposed from above through the Department of Education, not a decision made by individual teachers, or even individual schools.

    Reducing maths, and making it non mathematical, is not a policy of helping girls be all they can be. It is a policy of dumbing everyone down, of preventing anyone from excelling, in order to prevent boys from excelling. And this policy does not come from the individual teacher, but from the presidential administration.

  712. @JAD there is an article on your blog claiming the US Treasury might not possess any unencumbered gold.

    Ah the baiting of the soul with the “gold will save us” emotional trap.

    History has shown that the stored value medium for money is always debased, regardless whether it is gold, paper, Tally sticks, electronic digits, etc..

    An insoluble fact is that debasement is always assured with politics, because the costs of the voters’ desires is obfuscated in the debasement of all citizens, instead of applied individually w.r.t. individual performance.

    Don’t confuse the desire to work and get paid, or to start a business and earn a profit, with the political promises made to voters. Don’t confuse “economic value” with “I saw jobs, prosperity being created”. Economic value is a network of feedback loops from investment followed by profit or bankruptcy. The more individually directed these investments are, the more chances of finding the profitable ones that fit the economic demand. The collective politics has an incentive (to earn votes) to invest in everything voters want, economic or not.

    This insoluble power vacuum (that sucks in a leader who can make the political promises) can not be wished away just because it is repulses a person’s emotions. There is no possible mechanism to remove it.

    For example, some claim that Hitler and Lincoln or recently Iceland and China, took the power from the banking establishment and gave it to the citizens, by handing the control over the creation of paper money to the national treasury. Hitler and Confederate notes both debased their society by spending on uneconomic projects. China is doing the same now. Hitler initially made the people happy with lavish public works spending (e.g. the road network and health care), promising the people more than the economic value of the projects could sustain. When he could not get enough oil to sustain it, he was forced to expropriate via war in order to fulfill the collective social promises. That summary probably misses some complexities, but the essential point remains valid.

    Since the masses don’t hold most of the wealth, if the society enforces a strict gold standard, then the masses don’t get what they want. This is why gold standards are always subverted by politics.

    A strict gold standard would over time concentrate relative wealth from the consuming middle class to the wealthy, who save say 99% and consume 1% of their income. Politics demands debasement, because the rich concentrate wealth (with or) without debasement.

    Some refer to the Byzantine era as an example of a sustainable gold standard. I have not studied the period intensely. Apparently gold was being imported into the economy by their trade surplus, so perhaps political promises were less attractive to citizens who were finding sufficient opportunities to be busy and prosperous. Unlike China’s current situation, their trade surplus was not due to a mercantile policy of debasement of their currency, rather apparently due to some situational and technological advantages, e.g. their cannon spraying flaming oil on pirates. Further insight on this would be appreciated.

    I posit the taxonomy of male social order types from PUA type theory applies to this power vacuum. I asserted that the alphas get their power from public politics and/or Theory of the Firm (corporate politics), with the lower order male types (betas, gammas, omegas) employing politics to fight back. They can band together with politics to fight the rich with political promises including Doublethink such as equality and social justice, which actually end up as debasement and plunder. The sigmas don’t play the class warfare delusion, instead create technology to empower individuals.

    Stored wealth is ephemeral and depleting. It should be this way, otherwise people become unmotivated to continue producing. The rate of growth of relative wealth of the rich decelerates as they grow richer and less in tune with the markets invested in, i.e. smaller things grow faster because of the fitness. I don’t hate the bankers+politicians because I don’t want to hate most people (i.e. the symbiotic borrowers+voters). Why hate what can’t be changed? Why be bitter and perceive the glass as half-empty? The inspiring fact is that despite the booms and busts (and occasional resultant atrocities and wars) caused by the political promises, everyone gets wealthier over time. The cost of commodities is inexorably declining as a relative share of the global GDP. In 323 B.C. iron was a precious metal. Technology, innovation, and art (i.e. knowledge) is the savior of mankind.

    Atrocities repulse all of us. Religion is not the only cause. To entirely prevent them, we would have to somehow eliminate political promises and the Doublethink they create. Unfortunately I don’t see how such a goal is possible or congruent with evolution.

  713. @JAD
    >The discrepancy between GPA and SAT…school policy that the supposed
    > top of the class will be all female without regard to actual performance

    Maybe females conform better, and public school is probably much more political than when I was there in the 70s and 80s.

    Once my black, female 10th grade (Culver City, CA) high school trig teacher (who I liked) tried to mark my perfect test score down, because I didn’t draw boxes around the answers. I surmise she was jealous because I was rarely coming to class, as if she was afraid of becoming irrelevant or losing control.

    We need more comprehensive private (free and paid) online education systems, so that the parents can leap from the antiquated rotting public school morass. I think many of today’s youth would choose to learn from a park or the top of a mountain with their tablet.

    Btw, I argued my case to the principle and won, perhaps because I was league JV cross-country champion. I often didn’t make it to first period class, because I was a jock for hours in afternoon, working in the evenings (pizza then math tutoring), then staying up too late doing my geek hobbies and soaking up the arts. I was in night college by 12th grade.

  714. Stored wealth is ephemeral and depleting. It should be this way, otherwise people become unmotivated to continue producing.

    I think you have that dangerously backwards. Stability of stored wealth encourages all kinds of desirable behaviors, from long term planning, to saving, etc. Having stored wealth evaporate doesn’t encourage production, it encourages consumption as well as all kinds of other nearsighted short-term decision making.

  715. @Greg, we are both correct. Agreed stored wealth should not disappear too fast to discourage saving and planning. It should deplete fast enough so that we remain competitive. Planning too far into the future or managing too much capital, reduces degrees-of-freedom and fitness. For dynamic systems, the best strategy is often an incremental adaptive approach of plan, implement, re-evaluate and repeat. I suppose divergence could be an issue in some cases.

  716. James A. Donald on Saturday, January 26 2013 at 11:44 am said:

    > “The anglosphere left is the sole surviving branch of leftism, because all the other variants of leftism self destructed horrifically.”

    Winter on Saturday, January 26 2013 at 5:30 am said:
    > Are you sure we live on the same planet?

    Well I concede Israeli leftism is still around …but all other leftists were installed in power by English speakers using a mixture of soft or hard powere…

    I guess you don’t speak or read French (Francois Hollande) or Spanish (Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Daniel Ortega, Cristina Kirchner, José “Pepe” Mujica) or Portuguese (Dilma Rousseff).

  717. Well I concede Israeli leftism is still around …but all other leftists were installed in power by English speakers using a mixture of soft or hard powere…

    I guess you don’t speak or read French (Francois Hollande) or Spanish (Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Daniel Ortega, Cristina Kirchner, José “Pepe” Mujica) or Portuguese (Dilma Rousseff).

    Don’t go down the rabbit hole, and don’t get down in the mud to wrestle the pig. It’s been cleverly argued elsewhere (and we’ve already talked about where) that all of these either were, or can trace their roots back to someone who was, a client of some Leftist faction of the Anglosphere.

    It’s not an argument original to JAD, don’t get sucked in.

  718. James A. Donald on Saturday, January 26 2013 at 11:44 am said:
    > > “The anglosphere left is the sole surviving branch of leftism, because all the other variants of leftism self destructed horrifically.”

    Rich Rostrom on Monday, January 28 2013 at 6:12 pm said:
    > I guess you don’t speak or read French (Francois Hollande) or Spanish (Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Daniel Ortega, Cristina Kirchner, José “Pepe” Mujica) or Portuguese (Dilma Rousseff).

    French leftism is a state department Muppet, as the Assange telegrams reveal, and before that was London School of Economics muppet. French leftism, like the French government itself, was installed by English speaking troops.

    Fidel Castro and company have self destructed horrifically. Daniel Ortega was originally a puppet of Castro, himself a puppet of the Soviet Union, and survives by grovelling to World Bank/IMF leftism, which is a muppet of the state department. Before he was a puppet of a puppet, now he is a muppet of a muppet. Like Obama’s mother, Ortega made a timely switch from Soviet leftism to state department leftism.

    Hugo Chavez was originally a state department muppet, took a left turn, which I would call not anti Americanism but ultra Americanism, condemning the US government for not living up sufficiently to its leftist ideals, and, predictably is self destructing, because it is profoundly unhealthy for small time leftists to try to be too much lefter than their patrons. (See Occupy Movement for a similar example of astroturf getting dumped for becoming a little unruly) Dilma Rousseff is 100% orthodox state department leftism, though I am not aware of Assange leaking a state department telegram showing the state department’s hand moving her lips.

  719. JustSaying on Sunday, January 27 2013 at 7:53 am said:
    > Maybe females conform better, and public school is probably much more political than when I was there in the 70s and 80s.

    This does not explain turning maths and science questions into essay questions.

  720. I am never surprised when an exceptionally attractive woman turns out to be exceptionally bright as well. Moreover, the pretty-but-dumb ones tend to be the ones that have attained pretty by cosmetic artifice. I learned to spot these within seconds and ignore them before I was out of my teens.

    I think that you’re showing a bit of bias here which is not really a bad bias to have: the fact that for people like you, extreme intelligence is itself a physical attractor.

    The sad fact is that an attractive girl with the potential for serious smarts will often find herself in a position where posturing, peacocking, and preening will net more benefit — for less work — than cultivating her intellectual gifts. Depending on her chosen profession, betraying her intelligence could be counterproductive so she may decide to play the ditz. You see this a lot in the entertainment industry. Ellie Goulding is a cute and gifted young woman, but when she does interviews I want to smash the screen because she talks like a dumb American girl.

    A big part of it, in this country at least, is that American culture doesn’t particularly reward intellectualism.

  721. A big part of it, in this country at least, is that American culture doesn’t particularly reward intellectualism.

    You had to go and shoot yourself in the foot.

    If you had said “American culture doesn’t particularly reward intelligence” then I would, with some qualifications, agree with you. Particularly as how I live in NJ, which paradoxically is the wealthiest state in the Union, is famed for a well educated white collar work force, and yet is overrun with virulently brain-hating blue collar attitudes.

    But “intellectualism”? Good riddance. Most “intellectuals” could best serve civilization by dying in a fire, and the less said for the pose of trying to look like one the better. You would likely disagree because it seems you’ve internalized the desire to fit in with the existing power structure (which basically means aping leftism), but Western civilizations intellectuals have failed it *very* very badly, particularly this past century.

  722. There’s a famous joke about a poor Jew who comes across another poor Jew reading the Volkischer Beobachter. He asks “Why are you reading that?” The first Jew answers “I like reading about how powerful I am.”

    Reading JAD’s rant about “State Department muppets” has a similar effect. If only the State Department was the Invisible Emperor of the World…

    Alas, I find more truth in what Keith Laumer once said to me: “Any resemblance between [his fictional] Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne and the U.S. State Department is entirely intentional and a damned shame!”

  723. Rich Rostrom on Wednesday, January 30 2013 at 6:55 pm said:
    > Alas, I find more truth in what Keith Laumer once said to me: “Any resemblance between [his fictional] Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne and the U.S. State Department is entirely intentional and a damned shame!”

    But the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne did run most of the universe and all of the allied universe, in the sense that anyone allied was apt to be brutally and casually screwed over by it.

  724. A previous co-worker just committed suicide. Last night, I went to the memorial, the primary theme of which was about how he joined the church (at his wife’s urging, I think) around 5 years ago, and struggled, but finally accepted Christ. Now he’s dead, apparently partly due to his recently acquired understanding of how things are better once you’re dead.

  725. A previous co-worker just committed suicide. Last night, I went to the memorial, the primary theme of which was about how he joined the church (at his wife’s urging, I think) around 5 years ago, and struggled, but finally accepted Christ. Now he’s dead, apparently partly due to his recently acquired understanding of how things are better once you’re dead.

    Had to let this one sit for a while. I’m sorry for your loss (and that of everyone else involved).

    But he really should have read the fine print. Allowing for the existence of a Christian afterlife for conversational purposes, suicides go straight to Hell no passing Go.

  726. I’m leaving most of this alone because I don’t want to be embroiled forever. But I couldn’t let this pass:

    Around 100 BCE, Rabbi Hillel (all those campus Jewish centers are named after him)

    Just Hillel. No title. And 100 BCE is a bit early for him. More like 30 BCE, if that.

    observed:
    “Surely God is too merciful to punish a soul forever and ever because of what they did as a result of their all-too-human weakness.”

    No, he didn’t. Whoever you’re quoting made that up. Nor would he have said anything like it, if only because the idea of eternal punishment wouldn’t have occurred to him.

    OTOH, there are lots of Jewish legends about Gehenna and its boiling pots…

    Gehinnom (the final M got lost in transcription into Greek) is more like Purgatory than Hell.

    In Judaism, a belief in a world after this one is an optional extra.

    Bulldust. In Judaism a belief in an afterlife, where behaviour in this world is rewarded and punished. is core doctrine. One who rejects such a belief is a heretic. There is no dissenting opinion to be found anywhere in the Talmud or any other authoritative source of Jewish law. The exact details of what this entails and how it works are not specified, so one can speculate to ones heart’s content, or just wait to see how it turns out. But the general principle is about as central as the belief in one God.

  727. @Greg:

    > I’m sorry for your loss (and that of everyone else involved).

    Thanks. The crazy coot will be missed.

    > But he really should have read the fine print.

    The one good thing about the memorial service was that they preached on a variant of this:

    http://carm.org/questions/other-questions/if-christian-commits-suicide-he-still-forgiven

    Whether they believed it or not, who knows? But churches evolve and adapt, and this one apparently recognizes that there’s more money to be made by telling the bereaved about how great the deceased was, rather than that he is going to hell. As far as the preacher was concerned, you will wind up in heaven if you confess that Jesus Christ is the son of god.

    As far as my Jewish boss is concerned, that’s the one thing he is not allowed to confess.

  728. @Rich Rostrum

    1. Satmar do recruit; that’s how they got so big. They don’t put much effort into recruiting, it isn’t a major thing, but if they see a likely prospect they will try to close the deal. What I mean to say is that they’re not Parsees.
    2. Enough of Deborah Feldman’s lurid stories have been exposed as fantasies to bring everything she wrote into disrepute.

    1. >2. Enough of Deborah Feldman’s lurid stories have been exposed as fantasies to bring everything she wrote into disrepute.

      [Citation needed] Those “lurid stories” would be quite plausible from any conservative version of a religion in the Zoroastrian-derived group that includes Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. While this does not in itself establish that she is not fantasizing, it makes me skeptical of that dismissal.

  729. The characteristic attempt to prevent people from having ties outside the group is present.

    Not. At least it depends on what you mean by “ties”.

  730. My answer to Bible literalists among both the believers and the anti-believers is:
    Chronicles II, Chapter 4, Verse 2

    This one again? The numbers are rounded to the nearest integer. The actual diameter was between 9.5 and 9.7, and the circumference was between 29.85 and 30.5. Round to the nearest integer, and you get 10 and 30.

  731. @Eric: “[Citation needed] Those “lurid stories” would be quite plausible from any conservative version of a religion in the Zoroastrian-derived group that includes Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.”

    Could you please explain that? It has seemed to me that your view of these religions and their origins (especially Christianity, the one with which I am most familiar) are uniquely your own. I have never heard “Zoroastrian-derived group” with such associations anywhere else, period, while the life and times of Jesus Christ are so well established by the evidence of history that to deny them and assert any other origin for Christianity is more absurd than to deny the Apollo lunar landings. [Citation needed] indeed.

    1. >I have never heard “Zoroastrian-derived group” with such associations anywhere else,

      That tells me that you know nothing about comparative religion. Judaism and Christianity were both very heavily influenced by Zoroastrian dualism at key points in their development, to a sufficient degree that it largely swamped their earlier ideas.

      The influence on Judaism was strong during the two centuries that the former kingdoms of Judah and Israel were provinces of the Achaemenid Empire, during which priestly Jewish theology converged with Zoroastrianism. Such evidence as we have suggests that Judaism moved from henotheism to monotheism during this period, back-editing its own history so thoroughly that the earlier henotheistic phase has to be deduced from linguistic fossils in the Pentateuch.

      The influence on Christianity was more complex, and largely mediated through Mithraism and various Gnostic and dualist sects such as the Manicheists and Valentinians. Nevertheless, by the early medieval period Christian theology and eschatology resembled Zoroastrianism so strongly that Christian accounts of Heaven, Hell and the Last Days read like echoes of Zoroastrian texts from a thousand years earlier. Augustine of Hippo was perhaps the most important figure in this development.

      As for Jesus’s life being well established…no. The only corroborating source outside the New Testament itself is a brief mention by the historian Josephus, and there are grounds for suspicion that this was inserted in medieval times.

  732. Eric, you obviously missed the “[Citation needed]” part. Where did you learn all this, so I might actually be able to find the answers myself instead of relying upon your coloured distillation? Also, according to my own sources, almost everything in your post is bullshit (i.e.: deliberate misinformation and mixing of facts) introduced by the enemies of true religion. For now, I’ll attack only one small part that I know quite a bit about from memory:

    “Such evidence as we have suggests that Judaism moved from henotheism to monotheism during this period, back-editing its own history so thoroughly that the earlier henotheistic phase has to be deduced from linguistic fossils in the Pentateuch.”

    “Such evidence” – what evidence? Where are the manuscripts? What language were they in? What are these “linguistic fossils”? What do we know of the manuscripts’ etymology to recognize these “linguistic fossils”? Do we know enough about the contemporary use of language of the manuscripts to know that they are out-of-place for their period? As the alternative explanation to why they would be out-of-place for their period, do we know that these “linguistic fossils” weren’t added later? Finally, it’s “Torah”, not “Pentateuch”, a word coined by people who have no respect for this work’s historical context (I was slapped down for using it myself, about fourteen years ago.) Finally, is there any other evidence, anywhere, from any source whatsoever, that Judaism ever had an “earlier henotheistic phase”? Or, is this little “deduction” from these mysterious “linguistic fossils” in the most ancient family of documents known to humanity the only “evidence” we have that Judaism was ever henotheistic (aside from the ability to break Yahweh-centered worship commandments and the stories of how they were broken)?

    I’ll provide links if you ask, but not if you don’t substantiate your own position first. Anyone can read the Torah. Here’s a link to my own favorite copy:

    http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis%201&version=KJV

    (For those who might be unfamiliar with the Bible, the Torah is only the first five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.)

    1. >Eric, you obviously missed the “[Citation needed]” part. Where did you learn all this, so I might actually be able to find the answers myself instead of relying upon your coloured distillation?

      The best single source for the Zoroastrian connection is Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God. The evidence for early Judaic henotheism is primarily various plural appelations of God in the Old Testament, and the curious fact that the First Commandment is not actually phrased monotheistically but as though Yahweh was expected to be worshiped as the greatest of multiple gods – see the English translation “you shall have no other gods before me”. I think this was also covered in Campbell (Volume 3, Occidental Mythology) but I may have picked it up from other later sources. The Masks of God is in any case the best single introduction to compararitive religion and mythology I know of.

  733. esr on Friday, February 8 2013 at 6:37 am said:
    > [Citation needed] Those “lurid stories” would be quite plausible from any conservative version of a religion in the Zoroastrian-derived group\

    Citation provided: http://gestetnerupdates.com/2012/03/05/excluisive-explosive-court-documents-undercut-core-of-new-best-selling-book/

    In short, Deborah Feldman was raised in the usual self destructive progressive Jewish liberal family, and sent into a conservative school to get some stability.

    Those lurid stories are not plausible of “any conservative version of” Judeo Christian religions.

    Rather the lurid tales are typical of progressives demonization of their parent religion.

    Like Margaret Mead, Deborah Feldman was sent into an alien society, and reported it to correspond to what progressives like to believe about that society.

    1. >Those lurid stories are not plausible of “any conservative version of” Judeo Christian religions.

      Don’t get out much, do you? Stuff just as bad, or worse, happens anywhere Wahhabi or Deobandi Muslims live. Or among Christian fundamentalists in Texas, where a woman who comments here occasionally and is known to me FTF was, while pregnant, threatened with a beating that would abort her child for having writing on her clothes that offended local bigots.

  734. esr on Friday, February 8 2013 at 6:37 am said:
    > [Citation needed]

    There is an entire blog on the topic:
    http://deborah-feldman-exposed.blogspot.com.au/

    Short summary: Jewish liberal progressive girl from Jewish liberal progressive family. Family explodes due to the moral failings of Jewish liberal progressivism, finds herself briefly in a conservative Jewish school. Makes up a history of being raised ultra conservative by evil Jewish ultra conservatives, Jewish conservatives whose faith strikingly resembles the progressive account of mainstream Christianity as it existed before 1960 or so, with a dash of PC antisemitism added.

    In short, another Margaret Mead story.

  735. esr on Saturday, February 9 2013 at 9:26 am said:
    > Or among Christian fundamentalists in Texas, where a woman who comments here occasionally and is known to me FTF was, while pregnant, threatened with a beating that would abort her child for having writing on her clothes that offended local bigots.

    That they were “bigots” for being offended by stuff intended to offend them, reminds me of the argument that Pinochet there was no freedom of speech under Pinochet, and proof that there was no freedom of speech under Pinochet, was all the organizations and individuals in Chile complaining that they lacked freedom of speech, among their many other complaints about cruel repression by the evil Pinochet regime..

    People who go out of their way to offend members of a hated, despised, and vilified group always exaggerate how much of a rise they got out of that group.

    Thus, for example, there were umpteen claims of death threats arising from Piss Christ, but, of course, no actual death threats.

    Since no actual death threats from Piss Christ, despite innumerable claims, probably no beating threat either.

    1. >That they were “bigots” for being offended by stuff intended to offend them

      Your assumption is incorrect.

  736. > >That they were “bigots” for being offended by stuff intended to offend them

    esr on Saturday, February 9 2013 at 5:50 pm said:
    > Your assumption is incorrect.

    Neither of us can know what really happened in this case. We can, however, know what really happened in the case of Piss Christ, where an attempt to activate “bigots” and get them to show themselves failed utterly.

    If Piss Christ could find not one “bigot” anywhere in the entire world, I doubt your friend could either.

  737. A cult meme is optimized for rapid reproduction at its hosts expense, hence tends to consist of dangerous, hateful, and evil lies.

    When a cult settles down for the long haul, as Christianity did under Paul, it becomes optimized for reproduction with its hosts, thus the evolutionary interests of host and meme largely coincide. Thus the religion becomes, instead of hurtful lies, ancient wisdom expressed as myth.

    Progressivism is a descendent of Christian cults that has become optimized for reproduction through the state apparatus. Thus it is in many important ways inimical to its hosts, which manifests in the low biological reproduction rate of progressives and their lack of solidarity. No enemies to the left, no friends to the right, implies that all one’s friends are enemies. See John Scalzi for a spectacular exemplar of this pathology. Similarly, the high rate of suicide among progressives.

    One of the ways that progressivism is hurtful to its hosts is that it spreads hateful lies about competing and ancestral religions.

    Hence your ignorant bunkum about “bigots”: part of the sacred doctrine of progressivism.

  738. @JAD:
    > > Similarly, the high rate of suicide among progressives.

    Patrick Maupin on Saturday, February 9 2013 at 9:28 pm said:
    > What kind of data do you have for that.

    When someone goes on a killing spree, and attempts to kill until he himself is stopped, if he is not a Muslim, he is usually a progressive motivated by leftism, for example Christoper Jordan Dorner, who as we speak is waging an impressively successful one man war on the LAPD, their wives, and their children, for “racism”, Jared Lee Loughner, who was disappointed when Congresswoman Giffords temporarily swerved to less left wing when campaigning for election, or Floyd Lee Corkins, who found his targets on a map issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center for the convenience of left wing terrorists.

    When right wingers kill their political enemies, they usually have a plausible plan to do so and get away with it, leaving no one the wiser.

    Authors beloved by progressives, for example pretty much everyone school made you read, write up evil, self hating, and self destructive characters, and themselves are apt to commit suicide or screw up their lives in style of their characters, for example Sylvia Plath, author of “The Bell Jar”. Evil is presented as good, self destructiveness as constructiveness, madness as rationality.

    Typical example: Ian Banks. I have partially read one book by him, and the main character was completely disgusting, utterly contemptible, and ends up killing himself:

    The story starts displaying the King and the Crown Prince going to war – but it is shown from the author’s point of view, that a King, simply be being a King, being Kingly and doing the stuff a King is supposed to do, is necessarily a very bad man. The Crown Prince is thoroughly unkingly, which supposedly makes him better.

    The crown prince finds himself set up to be killed in battle, but successfully makes a getaway, all those around him dying to cover his escape. He discovers that his father has been similarly set up, and has been badly wounded. He sees the evil vizier gloat to the King that he, the crown prince, has been killed in battle. He then sees the evil vizier responsible for all this, murder his father in a quite horrible fashion.

    The evil vizier is the only character in the book who expects the father to care deeply about presumed death of his son.

    Now at this point, the story should end on page ten or thereabouts as the prince reveals himself to the troops, they all say “The King is dead, long live the King”, and he then hangs the evil vizier. But instead, this thoroughly unkingly prince runs away, even though running away is probably a lot more dangerous than confronting the evil vizier. He is in the midst of an army that is overwhelmingly loyal to the monarchy, thus to himself, but furtively flees that army, abandoning his duty to lead the army, his duty to save his people from rule by the evil vizier, his duty to avenge his father, and his duty to avenge his loyal troops who died that he might live and the monarchy be preserved.

    In due course, predictably, he kills himself, completely wasting the sacrifice made by his loyal troops.

    The henchman of evil overlord effect: When Aristide personally with his own hands gouged out the eyes of one of his henchmen, his non political henchmen in large part defected to the revolution. His political henchmen remained loyal. When it became obvious that the Khmer Rouge was going to torture to death almost every member of the Khmer Rouge, the Khmer Rouge for the most part remained not merely loyal, but insanely loyal.

  739. @Eric: “The best single source for the Zoroastrian connection is Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God. The evidence for early Judaic henotheism is primarily various plural appelations of God in the Old Testament, and the curious fact that the First Commandment is not actually phrased monotheistically”

    Thank you. Hopefully my library has it.

    I have very little information on how the Jews have this figured out, but I am very well versed in the Christian discussions on the topic of the plurality of Yahweh and the other gods available for worship, in addition to my own experiences of them. How Yahweh and His plurality is portrayed and discussed is remarkably consistent throughout the entire Bible from the Torah to Revelation, far more consistent than I expected it to be: “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness…” (Genesis 1:26) to “…These things saith he that hath the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars…” (Revelation 3:1) God is Spirit, “… And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:2). But God is not the only Spirit, and there is more than one spirit in God: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3), “…try the spirits whether they are of God: … Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God…” (1 John 4:1-3; revisionist translations, including the oldest manuscripts believed by myself and many others to have been ancient rejects surviving due to lack of use, leave out “in the flesh”, which is extremely important to this test.) An interesting thing is that I have met more than one Spirit of God (one of which is feminine), and I have yet to have anyone suggest that I have run afoul of Matthew 12:31-2 (“…but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.”) This isn’t exactly consistent with conventional Trinity notions, and my belief that God is actually much more complex than that is very rare. I don’t believe these Spirits are fully distinct, either, but different aspects of the same God, like the different experiences of the elephant found by the blind men.

    I’ve also met some of the non-Yahweh spirits, and gave them a lot of publicity in my fiction FHD Remix. The four main ones are Maledict, Erebus, Saboath and Lilith, all of which are fictional. Maledict and Sabaoth are named in Doom 3, but the latter, it turns out, is not fictional, as it is mentioned in Romans 9:29 and James 5:4. I only learned that my spelling “Saboath” was incorrect after the entire FHD Remix trilogy was complete. Erebus and Lilith were always fictional and have never been established in actual canon (they inhabit Doom 3 hosts Cyberdemon and Guardian, respectively.) The real ones never gave me their names, but I know there is one named Lucifer and Shaitan, and in reading their writings channeled by others, I recognize that they often give false IDs.

    Eric, I have a question for you. The above basically summarizes my understanding of the nature of the gods. Would you consider it monotheism or henotheism? I am not prejudiced as to the answer myself, since I have found that, despite believing in the same Jesus Christ, related historical events and their significance as most Christians, I’ve discovered that I do not fit any official definition of Christian, least of all the more rigorous ones.

    1. >Would you consider it monotheism or henotheism?

      Closer to monotheism. In henotheistic systems the different gods are held to have separate origins and natures. Your idiosyncratic version of Christianity resembles the Brahminic version of Hinduism, in which the different gods are all emanations or aspects of Brahman (or Atman) and thus all fundamentally have one nature and origin. Polytheisms that develop a formal priestly class often evolve this kind of multiple-aspect monotheism, with folk belief remaining polytheistic but the priest class attempting to impose a monotheistic account first as a matter of abstract theology and then later in actual practice.

      See, for example, the monotheizing cults of Akhnaton and Ra in Ancient Egypt, the worship of the Unknown God in classical times, and (as previously noted) the ongoing priestly attempt to monotheize Hinduism. The traditional Christian take on these developments has been to consider them positive and evolutionary; I, on the other hand, regard them as a process of degeneration into religious fascism parallel to and often directly abetting despotism. Unreconstructed folk polytheism is a much healthier and more humane state of affairs.

    1. >Ah. Obviously none.

      To be fair, social-democratic countries in Europe do average a suicide rate much higher than the U.S’s.

  740. Patrick Maupin on Sunday, February 10 2013 at 2:09 pm said:
    > Anecdotes about book characters who commit suicide,

    Book characters that are required reading on the left. If you can read David Foster Wallace without chucking up, you are obviously more tolerant of suicidal behavior and suicidal ideation than a normal person. People only read David Foster Wallace because they are supposed to read him.

    Similarly, mass murderers who aimed to kill themselves.

  741. > To be fair, social-democratic countries in Europe do average a suicide rate much higher than the U.S’s.

    Wikipedia’s page on this is interesting. Ignoring former Eastern Bloc countries, you have Belgium, Finland, France, and Austria ahead of the US, but Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, UK, Portugal, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Spain, Italy, and Greece with a lower rate.

    If you look at the countries in order, this article looks interesting.

    Also of note is that, as mentioned in an aside in this article, France has an exceedingly high rate of antidepressants prescribed. Not the point they were trying to make, of course, but it might be relevant…

  742. How many mass murdering suicidal lefties do you need? Leftism is second only to Islam for suicidal murder.

    In addition to Christoper Jordan Dorner, Jared Lee Loughner, and Floyd Lee Corkins that I already mentioned, there is James Lee, the discovery channel terrorist who wanted the Discovery channel to broadcast all Al Gore, all the time, and the pro choice terrorist Theodore Shulman.

    Theodore Shulman did not strap on explosives like James Lee, but he openly identified himself when making death threats, and called with caller id active. If the government had not eventually taken care of him, someone else would have, so still qualifies as suicide terrorism.

  743. @JAD
    “How many mass murdering suicidal lefties do you need?”

    Some examples from outside of the USA. Say, Europe. We had mass murdering suicidal righties recently, who were also schizophrenic it seems. But you should refresh my memory on the “mass murdering suicidal lefties” in Europe. It has been some time.

    And any mentioning of high suicide rates in some parts of Europe should do some historic and global searching:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate

    I do not see much of a correlation between socialist policies and suicide rate. And it does not much explain the difference between Belgium and the Netherlands.

    As usual, you make up your own reality.

  744. @JAD:

    Surely you can do enough math to figure out that mass murderers != “high rate of suicide among progressives.”

  745. Patrick Maupin on Monday, February 11 2013 at 8:41 am said:
    > Surely you can do enough math to figure out that mass murderers != “high rate of suicide among progressives.”

    Just as if Muslims are not killing murdering and raping children, they are not good Muslims, similarly if progressives are not committing suicide, they are not good progressives. The required reading, the books progressives are supposed to read, the authors that they beatify, the new canon that has replaced the old canon, encourages destructive and self destructive behavior.

    If a meme complex is selected for propagation by the state, it is not selected to be compatible with the interests of its hosts. Progressives are not only supposed to believe that humans are a cancer on Gaia, they are also supposed to believe that rational self interested behavior is stultifying conformity and that healthy relationships with others are slavery.

    If progressives do not think like David Foster Wallace, nonetheless they aspire to think like David Foster Wallace, they are supposed to think like David Foster Wallace.

  746. You would likely disagree because it seems you’ve internalized the desire to fit in with the existing power structure (which basically means aping leftism),

    Leftism? The “existing power structure”? In this country? Good one.

    (Personal observation: 100% of divorces that I have observed are initiated by women who were sleeping with someone handsomer and usually richer than their husband)

    Where the fuck do you live, Wisteria Lane?

    Just to pick three women I know closely: one divorced to marry an old flame who was considerably poorer than her first husband; one divorced and moved back to her home country because the husband was cheating; and one was in an open marriage, and didn’t see marriage as a reason not to fuck rich handsome blokes. The divorce was because she had started living far away from her husband, although the former couple are still quite amicable.

  747. Deborah Feldman’s most lurid story was of a father who murders his early-teen son for masturbating, and the community covers it up. This has been exposed as an utter fantasy. A 20ish young man committed suicide, and while all the legal paperwork was done, it was hushed up socially, as such things usually are, because it’s painful for the family. She heard a vague rumour, and built a bizarre set of facts out of it.

    I know the world she’s talking about, somewhat. My world is close enough to it that while I couldn’t pass in it, I can understand most things about it, enough to have some sense of what is plausible and what is not. Feldman’s stories were not plausible.

  748. The idea that Judaism is a Zoroastrian religion is interesting, but Zoroatrianism isn’t monotheist, it’s dualist; Christianity is also dualist, but Judaism is decidedly not. There is no Devil in Judaism; there’s a Tempter, a Prosecutor, an Angel of Death, and in Kabalah there’s an “Other Side” and various “peels”, but they’re all faithful servants of the One God, and without free will, so they’re not even able to rebel against Him. Isaiah 45:6-7 is a polemic against Zoroastrian dualism.

    The evidence for henotheism that Eric mentions consists of passages such as the second commandment (or the continuation of the first, depending on how you count them), which don’t say there aren’t other gods, but command the reader to ignore them, i.e. to act as if one were a monotheist without actually denying that other gods exist. But there are also many passages that explicitly deny the existence of other gods. Eric would of course say that these were inserted by the back-editing he posits, but which somehow was not skillful enough to clean up the first sort of passages. That’s a general problem with theories of this sort: they depend on positing redactors who are thorough and yet incompetent; they did their job so thoroughly that nobody noticed it for millennia, and yet so haphazardly that they left clues that we can see. This is similar to the problem with conspiracy theories, such as 9/11 Trutherism; supposedly the Bush/Cheney gang were both capable of perpetrating such a massive crime and covering it up, and yet they left blatant clues because they’re incompetent.

    1. >Eric would of course say that these were inserted by the back-editing he posits, but which somehow was not skillful enough to clean up the first sort of passages.

      I don’t think any lack of skill need be posited. The textual evidence suggests that later authors were reluctant to actually alter the earlier sections, as opposed to adding new material. This would make sense if the Elohist and priestly writers were recording and adding to an earlier part-oral, part-written tradition that they already considered sacred and not to be casually messed with. Thus the henotheistic references in the earliest stratum (what Biblical scholars call “Yahwist”, as distinct from Elohist or priestly) survived by a sort of sacral inertia, like the royal “we” in English – alongside later monotheizing material rather than mingling with it.

      It is probably true that Isaiah 45:6-7 is a polemic against Zoroastrian dualism. But at the point when it was uttered, the evidence suggests that Judaism had already been Zoroastrianized to a significant degree. What little we know about Temple Judaism – the ritual furniture, the modes of sacrifice, the privileges and behavior of the priests – reads like a sort of echo of Zoroastrianism, different from and much more elaborate then the crude tribal religion of the Yahwists. And what would be more natural for the inhabitants of a client state of the Persian empire to (first) be influenced by the prestige religion of the Imperial center, and (second) react against it in a fashion that belatedly asserted their cultural autonomy?

      To those of you new to all this, don’t let Milhouse’s talk of nutters mislead you. The interpretation I’m explaining is quite mainstream among students of comparative religion. Many religious Jewish scholars concede that the earliest Yahwistic Judaism was probably henotheistic, though they dismiss this a failure of understanding. I’ve even heard it proposed (by a religious Jew) that God of the Yahwists presented himself in plural terms because the Yahwists were not yet ready for monotheism.

  749. @esr
    “But at the point when it was uttered, the evidence suggests that Judaism had already been Zoroastrianized to a significant degree.”

    There is a very nice “picture” of this dualism, also expressed in the “Da Vinci Code”. The six pointed star of Judaism is seen as a superposition of two triangles, one pointing up and one down. Pointing up is male, pointing down (the cup) is female. They represent the God and Goddess mating in the earlier stage. Yahweh being the combination of the two.

    Many such stories go around, eg,
    http://www.asphodel-long.com/html/goddess_in_judaism.html

    Much can be made by shifts of meaning of words which lead to reinterpretations of the stories. There is no such thing as a literal meaning of an old text. For a “literal” meaning to be even considered, you would need the original minds with their original language that formulated and communicated these stories. And they are all dead, both the people and the language.

  750. There is a very nice “picture” of this dualism, also expressed in the “Da Vinci Code”. The six pointed star of Judaism is seen as a superposition of two triangles, one pointing up and one down. Pointing up is male, pointing down (the cup) is female. They represent the God and Goddess mating in the earlier stage. Yahweh being the combination of the two.

    Except that the six-pointed star as a symbol of Judaism is very recent — a few centuries at most. Even if this Da Vinci crap were true, the star can’t be related to it.

  751. A general rule regarding The Da Vinci Code is that if you’re going to bring it up to support a fact (other than facts describing the content of TDVC) is that if you do, you’d better have an independent reputable source to confirm it – in which case you don’t need to cite TDVC. :-D

  752. Dan Brown is a novelist. He stitches up his stories from shards of reality. I just picked the most “accessible” version of the story. The use of the shield of David predates its use as a flag for Judaism. According to Wikipedia, there is a 3rd century tomb in Italy that contains a fragment of the hexagram.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_of_david

    Furthermore, there is much more evidence that Judaism evolved from polytheistic roots under the influences of surrounding religions (which would be obvious).

    Note that symbols can travel very, very, far in space and time. One of the oldest symbols in human memory, which circles the globe, is known to you all: Cinderella losing her slipper.

    Here is the likely origin of Dan Brown’s version.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagram#Occurrence_in_Eastern_Religions

    Within Indic lore, the shape is generally understood to consist of two triangles—one pointed up and the other down—locked in harmonious embrace. The two components are called “Om” and the “Hrim” in Sanskrit, and symbolize man’s position between earth and sky. The downward triangle symbolizes Shakti, the sacred embodiment of femininity, and the upward triangle symbolizes Shiva, or Agni Tattva, representing the focused aspects of masculinity. The mystical union of the two triangles represents Creation, occurring through the divine union of male and female. The two locked triangles are also known as ‘Shanmukha’—the six-faced, representing the six faces of Shiva & Shakti’s progeny Kartikeya. This symbol is also a part of several yantras and has deep significance in Hindu ritual worship and history.

  753. My best friend was Stalked and Sexually harassed by a landmark education program leader.
    I blame myself every day for registering my best friend into the landmark forum “I gave the landmark forum to her as her birthday gift”
    She was so impressed with the landmark education work that she went on to do the Introductions leaders program and her lifes purpose became to become a leader in landmark education.
    The Worst happened to her she was Stalked and Sexually harassed by a program leader, a married man!!
    She struggled to function for 3/4 months,she could not talk to him to stop, she finally complained to the Introductions leader program head.
    She quit landmark and now she thinks of herself as incapable of dealing with situations in life. She is so beautiful and vibrant has become dull and silent.
    We all friends wanted to go to the local newspaper here but my friend and her family refused.
    Landmark Education claims are all Bullshit on providing an environment free from sexual or other forms of harassment.
    Please i beg all the GIRLS/WOMEN reading this to STAY AWAY from landmark forum.
    I pray that landmark education shuts down.

  754. Think its very easy to spread bad press about anything you’ve never looked into. I have seen both angles and I find it quite humorous to point a finger using the words ‘brainwashing’ on a topic you actually have no information on? The same way someone may feel entering a Catholic Church or a Tupperware party lets say for the first time – both want to enrol you for a purpose, maybe monetary, maybe spiritual, maybe peaceful – they may seem different? Right now you are spreading your experience in a negative light which is fine and your perogative, HOWEVERRR you are professing it as gospel. You have summed up it is a cult and you will be brainwashed. May i ask – where is your evidence? Where is your experience? Have you sat through it and can see both sides to comment? Have you gained access to the restaurant before you’ve passed judgement on the chefs cooking ability? You sort of see what im getting at? In the same way someone spreads hate on Christianity lets say having never even picked up a bible? Or can judge an entire country based on a small minority. This is one of society’s biggest problems and is actually something i believe the landmark forum touches on. People tend to come from a place of “somethings wrong”. They can dismiss something entirely based solely on their own pre concieved listening. Through eyes that have been moulded through lifes personal experience. But is it fact? Is this why the world seems so messed up? You even stated these things DO tend to change lives and people clean up a lot, but at what price you asked? Again could be ANYTHING. Strange how majority of people’s minds go straight to the worst. Something new? Not conventional? It’s wrong, EEEvil!! THE WORK OF THE DEVIL! Brainwashing. CRAAAAAZY.
    The earth is flat. Freedom for slaves? Non violent protesting in India???? Say whaaaa?

    You say it’s a cult. Cult by definition:

    1. a particular system of religious worship, especially with reference to its rites and ceremonies.
    2. an instance of great veneration of a person, ideal, or thing, especially as manifested by a body of admirers: the physical fitness cult.

    I guess yes, you might say landmark is a cult you sit there for hours listening intently, short food breaks, its a big group, its a unit with millions of followers, admirers and “worshippers”. Sounds like a cult to me.

    Maybe you should do a case study discover why it’s so popular given its bad wrap? My understanding is it not only empowers people to transform their own lives but it also gives them the tools unlimited training and life time support to create change in communities and across humanity. They have created charities that have fed and clothed thousands for example, empowered graduates to create change in the way of child sex abuse, hospitals, starvation, clean water in raped countries and the list goes on and on and ON. “Hold on, thats not advertised anywhere?” My understanding is there are actually three parts to their curriculum – and the latter are focused solely on creating peace. It could be thought that the only way to get people involved in a course for helping “others” is to mask it as a way to help yourself, solve YOUR problems! Who would willingly sign up for a course labelled “time to create world peace and be a world leader!” Ridiculous right? You’ve run for the hills in the belief its all about YOU!!! Let alone some stranger you walk by in the street or flick over on the news!!

    Some food for thought: do some research – know the facts before you preach to tarnish the image of perhaps one of the only pure things in this world working to create peaceful change. Happy stepford people, welcoming and inviting; a good friend DESPERATE for you to attend – someone who loves you has got your back trying to present you with a positive opportunity that COULD potentially alter your life…Blasfeme!!!!!! GOODNESS in this world?! Proposterous!!!! we havent seen human compassion in yearsss!!! (lol spoken in a pompus english accent! ;)

    A CULT: Aimed purely at world peace, disguised as selfish help, teaching love thy neighbour, truth, offering endless support, changing people’s lives for the better? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.. p

    Perhaps…there’s worst things?

    :)

    (And I bet you’re wondering if I’ve actually attended this course….you’d be surprised by the answer :)

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