Launch Date for the New Blag

Exactly three weeks from now on December 7th., 2009. It’s arbitrary, but it will work for me.

Antiquation

This is nonsense. Conservatism these days is little more than a bizarre hodgepodge of law of the jungle economics and nostalgia for the patriarchy, not to mention a mess of contradictions. It lionizes wealth while condemning the “elitism” of the professoriate and intelligentsia. It showers praise upon technological innovation and entrepreneurship while condemning most of the socio-cultural changes that such progress has engendered, and scolds cultural depravity while celebrating the free-for-all consumerism that gives rise to it. It insists upon high cultural standards while appealing to the most crass anti-intellectualism among rednecks. So on and so forth.

To the extent that conservatism is a coherent political ideology at all, it is marked by the desire to maintain existing power structures. Which is why it has been funny over the years to see the attempt to repackage conservatism as something subversive. Rebel against the media! Piss of the intellectuals! Scream your lungs out against “tax and spend” policies while the spending overwhelmingly benefits you and while the articulated tax policies of modern conservatism in all likelihood actually increase the burden on you. It’s a mess, but it’s entertaining.

[Via IOZ.]

HELP! Again

I’m looking for any (good) material on estimating phylogenies, not necessarily computational but if it’s computer specific that’s a plus. If you have anything, dump it in the comments. And link to me elsewhere if you see open threads so that others may help as well if they are so inclined.

Also, if you know of open access articles (or better yet, entire journals) on the subject, those would be MUCH appreciated.

Gainfully Employed

“David Nutt, recently departed chair of the current Labour government’s drugs council, has long argued strenuously and colourfully for the declassification of narcotics like ecstasy and cannabis. The scientific side of the argument is quite strong though given the taboos and mysteries that surround ordinary drug use, there is always room to doubt the reliability of what we know.”

– Steve Fuller

Might I remind everyone that Steve Fuller is employed in a sociology department, so the “taboos and mysteries that surround ordinary drug use” would seem to fall squarely into his territory. Our ignorance of such matters would seem to be the fault of people like him, who’d rather gibber about how science is nothing more than some Hermetically sealed institution of social elites than do any worthwhile and productive investigation.

To all the good sociologists who might read this blog entry, be sure to detail in the comments any relevant research on the matter you might know about. I suspect that Fuller’s familiarity with this subject is about as erudite as his understanding of biology.

EDIT: Forgot that I know a guy specifically studying drug issues. Paging DuWayne Brayton!

How Right I Can Be

At Jason’s blog the other day, I left a comment on Michael Ruse’s most recent abortion in the pages of The Guardian. After Ruse said this:

I have written that The God Delusion made me ashamed to be an atheist and I meant it. Trying to understand how God could need no cause, Christians claim that God exists necessarily. I have taken the effort to try to understand what that means. Dawkins and company are ignorant of such claims and positively contemptuous of those who even try to understand them, let alone believe them.

I said this:

That Ruse thinks the idea that “God exists necessarily” is some kind of profound philosophical insight pretty much wipes out any credibility he might have had with me. It’s not an insight, it’s question-begging attempt to define God into existence.

As if on cue, Clive Hayden comes in at Uncommon Descent to provide us with a clear example of what I was talking about:

Indeed, it is an uneducated question that Ruse is right to point out. It is based on the assumption that everything, even supernatural things, need a first cause. Natural things do need a first cause, but I don’t see how we could logically apply natural rules to supernatural things. Yet Dawkins is so steeped in materialism, that I presume he smuggles in material necessities, such as the necessary first cause argument, even when thinking about the immaterial and supernatural.

I’m reminded of H.L. Mencken’s famous aphorism that theology is the attempt to explain unknown in terms of the not worth knowing. The argument here amounts to saying that God doesn’t need a cause because God is magic, and magic things don’t need causes because that’s just what magic is. It’s a perfect example of reasoning from your conclusion to your premise rather than the other way around.

After some embarrassing salad tossing by Allen MacNeal in that thread, we see the exact same kind of statement from some guy using the ‘nym “avocationist”:

Anything which exists by its very nature and has no prior cause, being therefore the source of existence, is by definition, God.

This is your brain on theology.

Let’s ignore the negligence of stochastic processes implied by the claim that all material events have causes. Just solving a problem by inventing definitions shouldn’t count as deep philosophical thinking and Dawkins should hardly be lambasted for not taking such gussied up handwaving seriously.

Some Things Can Still Make Me Happy

Make no mistake about it: I’m depressed as hell that my state became the 31st. state to vote down gay equality last night. But the result in NY23 is at least moderately good news, since it counts as a setback for the emergence of a real-life Christian nationalist party in this country. Seeing a statement like this from Michelle Malkin makes me just a little bit less depressed:

One thing is guaranteed at the conclusion of the NY-23 special congressional election: The Beltway Republicans who endorsed radical leftist Dede Scozzafava are going to have indelible egg stains on their faces. And GOP establishment fund-raising organizations will be the poorer for it.

Uh, yeah Michelle. You took a district that has been reliably Republican for 100 years and turned it Democratic, costing your party yet another seat in an already Democratic dominated congress, and in the process wasted a whole bunch of money, all in a boneheaded attempt to purge your party of everyone to the left of Augusto Pinochet. And it’s the GOP establishment that has egg on their faces. Yeah, whatevah.

Michelle Malkin isn’t alone. The guys at Red State are busy trying to spin this loss into a victory as well. The capacity for utter delusion on the right never ceases to amaze me.

Why This Rugby Video is Retarded

Click here, I can’t embed the fucking thing. WP sucks dick.

This video is a bunch of out of context bullshit. To a first approximation, at least two thirds of the shit shown is illegal and probably resulted in penalties. I count at least three scenes where a tackling player spikes an offensive player (i.e., turns them over onto their head), which is probably the most stringently prohibited move in the sport. There are also countless upper-body tackles, whereas anything above the sternum is off limits to rugby tacklers. The video also shows lots of NFL style blocking and obstruction of players not in possession of the ball, also illegal in rugby. And last but not least, the video shows random fights that break out between players and injuries…which happens in, oh, just about every sport ever played. Yet this bullshit video makes it all look like a normal part of the game.

This is mostly a message to all you Eurofags who like to pretend that your precious rugby is just as hard-hitting and intense as American/Gridiron football. It isn’t, American politics may be stupid as fuck but our football is better. Suck it.

Steve Fuller is Also a Pig Fucking Shitlord

Everybody remind me to piss all over Steve Fuller’s grave when he croaks (which would ideally occur due to some lulzy an hero). Fuller’s only substantive criticism of the recently deceased Norm Levitt appears to be that the latter had little academic distinction. However, in comparative terms this criticism is meaningless, since Levitt’s academic specialty (topology) requires more than a pulse to successfully publish in, as opposed to Fuller’s (cf. Alan Sokal). And in what can only be a deliberate attempt to provoke more lulz, he calls Levitt a “cyber-fascist” and compares himself and his intellectual cohorts to the European Jewry. Some argue that Juden like Fuller deserve it anyway. However, whether Steve Fuller’s indisputable status as a pretentious cock warrants a final solution in immaterial, as Norm Levitt was at least 100 times the intellectual Fuller ever was or will be. May the man rest in peace.

I’m Down But Not Out

I lied my ass off earlier, I am going to write about biology again. In fact, I’m going to devote an entire blog to the subject. More on that in the next paragraph. Of course, I’ll probably never get over the shame of epically failing against the efforts of Casey Luskin. But the desire to redeem myself will be a major motivation from here on out. Simply put, you fucking niggers better believe that I’m gonna learn this shit if it kills me. More than that, I’ll master it. I’ll mount its ass and thrust away until it submits. Then I’ll tell it to march its ass into the kitchen and make me a sandwich. Then after it hands me the sandwich I’ll punch it in the face and knock it out for making it wrong. I love myself.

Anyway, I’m gonna start a new blog on scientific computing in the context of biology. Not just molecular biology, but also more general shit like estimating phylogenies. I’ve mostly taken an interest in biology in light of the unique computational challenges it presents, requiring programmers to utilize statistics and combinatorics and heuristic search techniques and all kinds of nifty shit that I love anyway. That blog will also be free of the politfaggotry you find here, it will be exclusively devoted to good science, except the occasional bashing of pseudoscience. I hope you both decide that reading it would be worthwhile.

And no, this is not the SOMETHING BIG I mentioned in the other thread. That’s not quite something else entirely but it is a distinct project.

Hasty Generalization

IOZ points me to la Rana’s excoriation of libertarians praising the work of recent Economics Nobel winner Elinor Ostrom as if it were a confirmation of libertarianism. It is rather obvious that her work actually undercuts a good deal of libertarian theory, given that the “tragedy of the commons” she’s challenging has long been a major libertarian argument for privatizing everything.

What I should stress is that while Elinor Ostrom has done interesting empirical investigations of things that orthodox economics doesn’t predict, she still seems to be analyzing exceptions to the rule. We know, from lots of evidence, that tragedy of the commons scenarios emerge all the time. Radio frequencies, when unlicensed, threaten to overuse transmitters. Overfishing in any body of water reduces fish stocks to below acceptable levels. There are plenty more examples.

The point of all this being, don’t make hasty generalizations from Ostrom’s admittedly interesting findings.