Shorter Michael Medved

Respecting - And Recognizing - American D.N.A.

As a recently hired fellow of the stridently anti-Social Darwinist Discovery Institute, I present you with this forthright advocacy of Social Darwinism.

Shorter Brian C. Melton

Human Origins and a Side of Fries: Refuting a Popular Neo-Darwinian Position

The lack of positive scientific evidence for Intelligent Design is an excusable side-effect of scientists being a lot of stubborn atheist doodie-heads.

[Hat Tip: Catshark]

Musical Taste: Faith No More

I discovered Faith No More in an odd way. I’ve been cultivating a goatee most of the time since I was about 16, and not long after I started doing it did a high school peer tell me something to the effect of “Dude, you look just like Mike Patton from Faith No More!” After I saw pics, I discovered he was completely wrong, I look absolutely nothing like Mike Patton. However, I did discover that Faith No More was the shit. Here are a couple personal favorites, the first being Ashes to Ashes and the second untitled Epic.

David Brook’s Magical Thinking

Via IOZ, I see that David Brooks has penned a column singing praises of the rise of “spiritualism” in neuroscience. I have long been of the opinion that the next big battle between the scientific worldview and received religious tradition would take place on this front, and Brooks seems to agree with me. He’s on the opposing side though, and we see him extrude the standard mystical gibberish of those of his persuasion. Like this for instance:

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

That’s classic magical thinking. We hear from Brooks that the brain seems less like “a cold machine” and that it doesn’t “work like a computer” (an odd implication, since just about every consumer level PC requires cooling systems to prevent it from overheating). Instead, we hear about some vague, quasi-mystical series of events that somehow renders unto the brain properties that distinguish it from mundane machines. Top-down thinking comes so naturally to us that peripheral and ambient effects among distributed interacting agents look magical, but there is no compelling reason to actually assent to such a belief. It is what Daniel Dennett calls an “intuition pump”, one which confers an intuitive misunderstanding. Distributed and parallel processing are certainly not alien to computer scientists, especially those who work in graphics. There is nothing inherently mysterious about how triangles, polyhedra, lighting, etc. arise from stream processors on a GPU, and there is no reason to assume, even in the absence of a unified scientific explanation of such, that a similar process among neural networks is magical.

The Progressive Agenda of Stopping the Inevitable

I usually don’t read DailyKos, mostly because I’m annoyed by the self-congratulation and pretentiousness found routinely at it and other “netroots” headquarters. The sight of its members patting themselves on the back for being at the helm of a glorious revolution toward “people powered politics” usually has me wondering how anyone can stomach such bullshit. But every once in a while, you find an interesting and telling post amongst all the noise. On exhibit today is this post reviewing the latest treatise on American income inequality and its political effects, summarizing several “surprising” statistics from the tome. It’s telling because, if pwogs are genuinely surprised by any of them, it goes a long way in explaining their persistent political failure. Along the way we see that Americans are incurably atomistic, base much of their political opinion on fantasies of future wealth and status, hold contradictory opinions and, also, that the affluent generally have disproportionate influence on political dynamics and tend to elevate the importance of “social issues” over “economic” ones. Oh yeah, and “politics matters” is the apparent capstone of the whole piece. Freaky.

As the corollary to the latter observation, the often ignored reality on the part of most of the pwogs is that systematics matters. America has inherited it’s basic political machinery from its roots as a genocidal slave republic, a system that, if we are to believe its chief architects from the revolutionary period, was designed specifically to edify an oligarchic power structure. A few things have changed, such as the fact that we are now allowed to “choose” which of two upper-class individuals, almost invariably of the dominant ethnic group (white) and sex (male), get to serve a term in our higher federal legislative chamber. Generally, we live in what can only be described as a partially reformed caste system. It is why few things in this country make you more a pariah than being a genuine leftist of any sort, much like being a classical liberal would have you on the outs in the former Soviet Union (though in far more savage ways, no doubt).

We are not on the cusp of any kind of revolution, the basic character of the American system will persist due to the sheer inertia of its attendant power centers. Yes, the excessive system is cumulatively reaching critical mass, but most sectors of the American lobbocracy could care less about long term disaster. This election is not about who is going to seize the reigns of power and turn everything around, it’s more about who is going to be head of the executive branch when the whole thing finally comes crashing down on top of us. The only reason I support Obama over McCain is that I would rather have Mikhail Gorbachev there than Leonid Brezhnev, not that such matters for shit.

Shorter John West

Richard Dawkins Compares Rabbi to Hitler, Then Refuses to Apologize

I must inform the demon Richard that flagrant comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis are our exclusive pedigree.

UPDATE: This may be a good time to clarify that the purpose of the shorter, at least as I use it, is not so much to endorse any particular person or position as to mock stupidity. In this case the stupidity would be the hollow ostentations tossed by people like West and Boteach at the sight of their opponents invoking Hitler when they regularly employ such a tactic themselves in their inane (not to mention ahistorical) diatribes against modern science. As far as Richard himself goes, he should have known better than to go there. One can land the point about Boteach being a vapid gasbag and a bellowing demagogue without using such over the top rhetoric as a Hitler comparison.

Working My Way Up to Demonhood

The American Life League apparently went hunting for some demonization fodder to secure support for their ridiculous “killer pill” campaign, and decided to link to a grab-bag bloggers. I’m happy to report that I’m explicitly mentioned in the email that is circulating, albeit not named (grumble):

In just 2 days, “pro-choice” bloggers have filled the blogosphere with their vitriol and Culture of Death rhetoric. In fact, one blogger went so far as to state his hatred for babies, while a comment on another blog indicated a desire to show up to a designated protest area to “mess with” us.

I suppose it’s a bad time to let people know that I’m also for legalizing fetal farming for the purposes of recreational abortion.

Insight to Imperialism

James Wolcott has an interesting post on the frequent bashing of imaginary beasts among liberal foreign policy commentators:

Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution takes note of how even liberal-minded bright lights cast aspersions on pacifism and its inhibiting sway, conflating it with non-interventionism. After quoting from Matt Yglesias’s new book Heads in the Sand–”In a world where one conservative author’s proposed response to Islamic violence is to “invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity” and a non-trivial number of people are committed to blanket pacifism, the middle ground turns out to be an extraordinarily broad patch of terrain” (Yglesias), Schwarz retorts:

To begin with, the ritualized execration of the Dirty Fucking Hippies is gross. But what’s worse is that it’s completely untrue that “a non-trivial number of people are committed to blanket pacifism.” Or at least it is if words have any meaning.

What interests me is how the faintest whiff or whisper of the pacifist creed rides the nerves of even those not clanking around in Victor Davis Hanson Roman Centurion armor on Halloween.

I would only say that, after a while, certain things cease to be interesting. Yglesias is predictably faithful to the liberal “internationalist” template, as anyone who has read his blog for any length of time knows. He and his type are emblematic of a new generation of Michael Kinsleys, self-styled liberal “contrarians” who decry the excesses of flagrant “unilateralism” or, if they dare be honest, “imperialism”, but are always sure to balance out their criticism with a reciprocal blasting of the “pacifist” strawman. It’s the same high moderation horse that irritates me so thoroughly about many critics of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, etc., who constantly blast away at an imaginary “blinkered worldview which places religion at the root of all the world’s evils.” Just like even avowed atheists like Michael Ruse frequently dangle unkind things they’ve said about the demon Richard to prove that they’re not some Stalinist hell bent on annihilating religious people, liberal “internationalists” can be found offering their support of, e.g., NATO’s blitzing of Belgrade to prove that they’re not some faggot Chomsky/Zinn/Zunes fanboi and really do occasionally approve of militarism when the appropriate sounding rationalizations are feasible.

After some discussion of Nicholson Baker’s recent revision treatise on World War II, Wolcott hits on this insight:

No, the smallest squeak or spark of pacifism must be stamped out, not to preserve the honor of the Good War or Winston Churchill (could Churchill’s standing be any higher?), but to ensure that present and future wars can be waged with full-throated bluster and fist-clenched resolve. Not even imaginary opposition must be allowed to impede and tarnish our glorious mission!

Which is pretty much exactly right, although I would prefer that more commentators on this topic point out that it is hardly an exclusive trait of the punditocracy (as seems implicit in Wolcott’s comments). What is at the root of America’s militarist consensus is the violent colonialist mindset of the American people, for whom, even in “war-weary” times, 4000 dead uniformed and armed military personnel is seen as far more of a tragedy than a few hundred thousand (at least) dead Iraqi civilians. Until broader cultural changes happen in America, bullshit like this is going to continue indefinitely. Electoral success on the part of the Democrats won’t change shit, what must be done is to fiercely oppose the flagrant apologetics for America’s expansionist past. Only when the left stops bending over backwards to accommodate nationalist vanity will anything change.

Friday Morning Irony

Those close to Huffington said the word inside NBC was that the unofficial boycott stemmed from the fact that her new book, Right is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe, takes long, page-after-page jabs at NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert, portraying him as a hapless, “conventional wisdom zombie.” And that it was because of Russert’s bruised ego that the company’s anti-Huffington edict was issued.

– Eric Boehlert

I could give 0.5 shits about the subject of the article in the first place (Tim Russert has an ego and influence within NBC, color me shocked). I could not however resist commenting on the sheer irony of the apparent fact that Ariana Huffington called someone else a “conventional wisdom zombie”. Coming from a party-line center-left Democrat who regularly shills for rich, white, male conservative candidates providing they have D’s next to their name and make even the most milquetoast noises about Iraq, that takes some muchos cojones grandes.

UPDATE: Man, oh man, just take a look at that comment thread! I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen that grand a conglomeration of pwoggie crybabies in my entire life, constantly chanting the same paranoid ramblings about how both HuffPo and NBC have been conspiring to destroy St. Clinton the martyr. Even former chum Keith Olbermann is now on their shit list for his Hillary bashing. Never mind that Hillary Clinton is appreciably to the right of even the milquetoast center-left mainstream of the Democratic Party, an allegedly “progressive” web community is behind her in perfect delta formation. This is yet another confirmation of what those on the indie-left, like myself, have known for years: the Democratic Party is not the American left, it’s a fragmented cult of various personalities.

Well, He Got it Right About the Babies…

Via John Lynch, I have discovered a new chick tract where the main heathen antagonist shares my first name. In all fairness I must say that part of his screen shot is actually partially correct, I really do hate babies. Other than that, it’s just another piping hot batch of fundagelical nutbaggery:

I gotta love this new meme catching on in the anti-evolution crowd, that Darwinism is bad because it inexorably leads to racial or whatever variety of supremacist thinking. Here we have a belief system that proclaims a singularly unique act of zombification absolves those who believe in its beneficiary of the inherently wretched nature of mankind, and those who fail to assent to such nonsense are condemned to be tortured for eternity. No way that sort of belief system can lead to notions of inherent exceptionalism and superiority. [/snark]