A Form of Madness

The latest attempt to shut someone down for voicing opinions the left doesn't like is the effort to force Ilya Shapiro out of his position at Georgetown University for a pair of innocuous tweets criticizing the president for basing his forthcoming Supreme Court nomination on the candidate's race and sex.

The attempt to destroy someone's career over such a frivolous matter is as cruel as it is absurd.

Federalist Senior editor John Daniel Davidson offers a few insightful comments on this most recent manifestation of the "cancel culture":

Let’s get something straight: there was absolutely nothing racist or sexist about a pair of tweets by Ilya Shapiro last week criticizing President Biden for his blatantly racist and sexist decision to consider only black women for nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Every single person who saw them knows that — especially the people who immediately tried to get Shapiro fired for it.

That’s really what this is all about. The feigned outrage over Shapiro’s tweets is nothing more than a pretext for trying to get him run out of his new job at Georgetown Law School, where this week he’s supposed to begin as executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. The left thinks it owns places like Georgetown, and for the most part it does.

The message of this coordinated campaign to cancel Shapiro is simple: if you’re right-of-center, stay out of academia because it’s ours.

It's ironic that the left conjures racism out of a tweet that condemns racism while having nothing to say about Mr. Biden's own history of both selecting his vice-president on the basis of race and sex and voting against black female judicial candidates:

Biden’s race-based and sex-based criterion is how we got Kamala Harris as vice president, a woman who isn’t remotely qualified and never should have been chosen for the post. The only reason it ended up being her is that Biden pledged to nominate a black woman — not a particular black woman, just a black woman.

For Biden, checking a diversity box and appeasing the far-left wing of the Democratic Party was more important than picking the right person for the job. Again, everyone in America understands this perfectly.

Of course, the left is only using race as a pretext for smearing people. If the race of a candidate for a judgeship is "correct" but their ideology is conservative then blocking their careers is an end that justifies any means:

If a person happens to fit Democrats’ race and sex requirements but has the wrong political beliefs or background, then they must be stopped. That’s why Biden and a host of his erstwhile Senate colleagues filibustered and tried to block the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown, a black woman, to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2005.

That’s why Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and a dozen of his fellow Democratic senators opposed the nomination of Judge Ada Elene Brown, a black woman and a citizen of the Choctaw Nation, to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in 2019. Democrats do this all the time, and have been for years.

If ... Shapiro loses his new gig at Georgetown over this, understand that that was the purpose of the outrage and the smear campaign against Shapiro. They don’t want someone like him at Georgetown, not because he’s a racist but because he’s not a leftist. And they will say and do anything, including launch an entire smear campaign based on a lie, to get him out.

The left's appetite for destroying the lives of people whose ideas they find disagreeable raises an interesting question. How did a movement which started out in the sixties promoting free speech and free thought gradually morph into the intolerant, narrow-minded bunch of ideological prudes they are today?

It was largely the influence of Marxists of the German Frankfurt school of critical theory, most notably Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), that has been responsible for this evolution. In his essay in Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965) Marcuse advocated what he called "Repressive Tolerance."

He wrote:

The tolerance which enlarged the range and content of freedom was always partisan - intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo....Can the indiscriminate guaranty of political rights and liberties be repressive? Can such tolerance serve to contain qualitative social change?....

When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted....

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.(Italics mine)

In other words, any ideas, or people, seen as inimical to the left must not be tolerated. If that means shouting them down, beating them up, destroying their livelihoods, whatever it takes, they must be suppressed.

As Marcuse's idea of repressive tolerance percolated through the academy in the decades following the sixties it informed the thinking of two generations of leftists and is today manifesting itself in what's called cancel culture which is a form of Marcusan repression.

Those who participate in the destruction of people with whom they disagree are hostile to individual freedom, they're hostile to any common sense notion of justice and to any morality based on treating people with dignity, respect and kindness.

Cancel culture is a form of madness, and one can only hope that it exhausts itself before it achieves its aim of tearing this country apart.

Disagreeing in Love

Why is it that we can't have disagreements about politics, religion, whether to get vaccinated or not, climate change, evolution or a host of other topics without people losing their tempers, and not uncommonly, their minds? Why is it that disagreements ruin friendships and split families?

I know of married couples who've divorced over political disagreements, and I'm sure there are couples who've experienced serious tension in their marriage over religion.

It seems that it'd be good for those of us who enjoy the to and fro of engaging with friends, family and acquaintances around ideas that are important to us to keep in mind that there are more important things than proving ourselves right on this or that issue.

It would be good to keep in mind that those who disagree with us will not be won over to our way of seeing things if our demeanor is arrogant, scowling and angry. They certainly won't find our opinions compelling if we resort to insulting them or their ideas.

The most effective way to disagree is with a humble attitude, acknowledging to ourselves and to the other person that we could be wrong about whatever it is we are discussing. A winsome approach, full of humility and humor, is likely to be far more persuasive than pummelling one's interlocutor with polemical body blows.

In almost every instance, it'll be more important that we love the person we're engaged in conversation with than that we win an argument with them. After all, as an old aphorism has it, "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

If the other person gets angry and insulting then it's better that we change the subject to something less contentious. What good can come of continuing it under those circumstances anyway?

If we can love those with whom we disagree, if we can say, "I don't think you're correct, but you're more important to me than my being right," I think we'll be much more attractive to those who differ with us and much more effective in presenting our views and gaining them a hearing.

Political, philosophical and religious differences are important, in many cases extremely so, but they're not the most important thing. The most important thing is that we treat each other with dignity, respect and kindness.

Folks on social media often won't treat each other that way, but we should.

What'll Be the Next Taboo to Fall?

Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s those of a certain age have witnessed one taboo, one traditional moral value after another collapse with astonishing suddenness. Like dominoes, it seems an inevitability that eventually they'll all fall until nothing whatsoever is considered wrong.

Assuming that the dominoes will continue to fall we might ask what will be the next one to pass into the boneyard of historical fossils? Three obvious candidates are to legal constraints against pedophilia, polyamory and bestiality.

The taboo against bestiality will probably survive for a while simply because most people still consider sexual congress with animals to be exceedingly "yucky." Not morally wrong, mind you, just very, very distasteful.

The taboo against pedophilia is a more likely candidate to give way soon because throughout history effete elites have been sexually attracted to children, both of the opposite sex and of the same sex. There are organizations today, like NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association, quietly lobbying to make such relationships legal.

The one impediment, however, that still stands in the way of the legalization of pedophilia (and bestiality) - indeed the only impediment in a secular society that has abandoned Judeo-Christian sexual morality - is the child's inability to give informed consent. But consent is actually less an impediment than a speed bump.

After all, the reasoning goes, we don't require a child's consent to get them vaccinated, make them eat their spinach, go to bed at a certain time, do their chores or go to school. Why then should informed consent be a barrier to allowing adults to engage in sexual activity with children?

There is, in a secular society, even less reason to prohibit polyamory, i.e. group marriage, since everyone in the relationship is presumably a consenting adult. In a society that has abandoned any solid basis for assessing moral right and wrong there's certainly no obvious reason to forbid it.

Marriage had traditionally been a union of one man and one woman, but with the Obergefell decision in 2015 legalizing gay marriage, the Supreme Court decided that the sex of the participants in a marriage no longer matters. On what logical ground, then, can we say that the number of participants matters? There simply is none. The only impediments to polyamorous marriages, seem to be practical or legal - matters such as inheritance and property rights, etc. - but these, though they may be complicated, can be worked out just as they are in large families.

So polyamorous marriage may well be the next domino in the row, but there's one other candidate that we might keep on our radar screen.

The next taboo to fall in the left's inexorable march to banish all traditional sexual customs in our culture may well be incestuous marriage. Incest taboos arose to prevent intermarriage because children born to such unions were often deformed or in some way incapacitated.

Modern technology and contraception, however, can obviate this concern so why should society prevent two people who love each from expressing their love just because they may be biologically related to each other? It may be objected that not many people would want to marry their cousin or sibling or certainly not their parent, but all it takes is one couple to appeal their case to the Supreme Court and what grounds would a post-Obergefell Court have for denying them relief?

When a pilot in zero visibility weather disdains his flight instruments, his objective guides, and tries navigating by what feels right to him he may fly straight and level for a few seconds, but very soon vertigo sets in and he ultimately winds up in a death spiral, corkscrewing himself into the earth.

In its hubris, our society has disdained its traditional moral instruments. It's momentum has carried it on for a time, but now we're trying to navigate a lot of issues according to what feels right to us, and we're becoming completely disoriented.

The Obergefell decision opened a Pandora's box, and now we might rightly wonder how long it will be before our entire culture corkscrews itself into the ground.

The Crisis in Ukraine

Fears are growing that there’ll soon be war in Ukraine. Russia has massed a powerful military force on Ukraine's borders and appears determined to impose it's will on the former Soviet country.

I'm certainly no foreign policy expert, but frankly I’ll be surprised if Vladimir Putin does decide to invade because there appears to be very little upside to it.

If he invades, his military will suffer horrendous losses against a well-armed, well-trained Ukrainian military fighting on its home turf, the economic cost of war would be high and the economic sanctions the West could impose would be catastrophic to the Russian economy.

Moreover, although experts expect the Russian military to ultimately prevail, once they capture the country they'd have to hold it against an insurgency comprised of a Ukrainian citizenry which is itself heavily armed. As more troops come home maimed or dead from IEDs, snipers and ambushes, domestic pressure will grow for Putin to get out.

It seems more likely that, rather than suffer these calamities, Putin will resort instead to destabilization efforts like cyber attacks to shut down the Ukrainian banking, health care, transportation and communications systems which, if successful, would throw the country into chaos and precipitate some sort of surrender.

In any case, we’ll probably know what the Russians are going to do soon after the Winter Olympics in Beijing conclude next month.

Meanwhile, someone who is a foreign policy expert, Stephen M. Walt, has a very insightful column at Foreign Policy in which he explains the history behind the current crisis in Ukraine.

According to Walt, the present tinderbox has resulted from both a deeply flawed American policy as well as Putin's own behavior. The U.S. made several mistakes over the last several decades, chief among which was a failure to accept that Russia regards an ever-expanding NATO with the same alarm that the U.S. would regard, and has regarded, Russian expansion into the western hemisphere.

Walt explains:

Although Moscow had little choice but to acquiesce to the admission of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO, Russian concerns grew as enlargement continued. It didn’t help that enlargement was at odds with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s verbal assurance to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 that if Germany were allowed to reunify within NATO then the alliance would not move “one inch eastward” — a pledge Gorbachev foolishly failed to codify in writing.

(Baker and others dispute this characterization, and Baker has denied that he made any formal pledges.)

Russia’s doubts increased when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 — a decision that showed a certain willful disregard for international law — and even more after the Obama administration exceeded the authority of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 and helped oust Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi in 2011.

Russia had abstained on the resolution — which authorized protecting civilians but not regime change — and former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates later commented that “the Russians felt they had been played for suckers.”

Compounding the error is NATO’s repeated insistence that enlargement is an open-ended process and any country meeting the membership criteria is eligible to join .... [O]penly proclaiming an active and unlimited commitment to moving eastward was bound to further heighten Russian fears.

The next misstep was the Bush administration’s decision to nominate Georgia and Ukraine for NATO membership at the 2008 Bucharest Summit. Former U.S. National Security Council official Fiona Hill recently revealed that the U.S. intelligence community opposed this step but then-U.S. President George W. Bush ignored its objections for reasons that have never been fully explained.

...[O]ther NATO members opposed including [Ukraine]. The result was an uneasy, British-brokered compromise where NATO declared that both states would eventually join but did not say when.

As political scientist Samuel Charap correctly stated: “[T]his declaration was the worst of all worlds. It provided no increased security to Ukraine and Georgia, but reinforced Moscow’s view that NATO was set on incorporating them.” No wonder former U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder described the 2008 decision as NATO’s “cardinal sin.”

There's more on how the U.S. might've done things differently in Walt's article, but as maladroit as our policy regarding NATO's expansion may have been, Putin's was worse:

It is commonplace in the West to defend NATO expansion and blame the Ukraine crisis solely on Putin. The Russian leader deserves no sympathy, as his repressive domestic policies, obvious corruption, repeated lying, and murderous campaigns against Russian exiles who pose no danger to his regime make abundantly clear.

Russia has also trampled on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which provided security assurances to Ukraine in exchange for its relinquishing the nuclear arsenal it inherited from the Soviet Union.

These and other actions have raised legitimate concerns about Russian intentions, and the illegal seizure of Crimea has turned Ukrainian and European opinion sharply against Moscow. If Russia has obvious reasons to worry about NATO enlargement, its neighbors have ample reason to worry about Russia as well.

Walt's essay is very informative and anyone curious as to how the current situation evolved in and around Ukraine would do well to read it.

Scientism and Self-Refutation

Philosopher J.P.Moreland has written a fine book titled Scientism and Secularism (2018) from which some of what follows has been borrowed.

Scientism is not to be confused with science, but scientists, particularly naturalist or materialist scientists, are often proponents of scientism. Scientism is actually a philosophical view which holds, paradoxically, that science is the only reliable means of apprehending truth.

The late cosmologist Stephen Hawking famously declared in a book he co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow titled The Grand Design (2010) that "philosophy is dead" and that all the answers to life's important questions, at least those that can be known, are to be answered henceforth by science.

Hawking is here giving expression to his scientism, the view that all the important questions can either be answered by science or not answered at all, and that the methodologies of science are the only valid path to truth and knowledge. All other ways of knowing must give way to the supreme authority of science, especially the natural, or "hard" sciences like physics and chemistry.

Scientism is a common view, but not only does it have some serious liabilities, the notion that science supersedes philosophy is surely false.

There are at least three things wrong with scientism:

1. It's self-refuting.
2. It's false that science is the only sure way of knowing truth.
3. It's false that philosophy is dead. If it were then science would be impossible.

Scientism is self-refuting because the claim that only what is testable by the methods of science can be trusted to be true is itself not a scientific claim but a philosophical assertion. It's not a claim that can be tested through the methods of science. Thus, the foundational claim of scientism itself must be false.

Nor can science be the only way of knowing since there are many other things we can know with at least the same level of certainty as we know any of the deliverances of science.

For example, which do you know with stronger certitude, that atoms are the basic building blocks of matter or that torturing children for fun is evil? The latter is not a scientific claim at all, it's a metaphysical claim, yet most of us are far more sure of its truth than we are of the truth of the claim about atoms.

There are other examples of things we know that do not lend themselves at all to scientific demonstration. For example, I can know that I took a walk on my last birthday, that I hold certain beliefs about science and philosophy, that I have an itch in my foot, that sunsets are beautiful, that justice is good; and I can know the basic laws of math and logic, e.g. I know that 2 + 2 = 4, and I know that if a proposition (P) entails another proposition (Q) then if P is true so must Q be true.

Not only do we all know such things, we know them with far more certainty than we know the truth of the claims of scientists about, say, global warming, atomic theory or Darwinian evolution.

Moreover, science depends for its very existence upon a series of assumptions, none of which are themselves scientific. All of them are philosophical, so if philosophy is dead where does that leave science?

Here are some examples: The law of cause and effect (Every effect has a cause), the law of sufficient reason (everything that exists has a sufficient explanation for its existence), the principle of uniformity (The laws that prevail in our neighborhood of the universe prevail everywhere in the universe), the belief that explanations which exhibit elegance and simplicity are superior to those which don't, the belief that the world is objectively real and intelligible, the belief that our senses are reliable and that our reason is trustworthy. All of these are philosophical assumptions that cannot be demonstrated scientifically to be true.

Scientism is a bid by some materialists to assert epistemological hegemony over our intellectual lives and especially over the disciplines of philosophy and theology. However, just as similar attempts in the 20th century, such as positivism and verificationism, fell victim to self-referential incoherence, so, too, does scientism.

The claim that science is uniquely authoritative and that we should all recognize and bow to its supremacy is quite simply false.

Best Information Storage System Ever

One of the marvels of DNA, the material in every nucleus in every cell in our bodies that carries the genetic instructions necessary for forming and maintaining our bodies, is the amazing compactification that allows so much of it to be stored.

There are six feet of DNA in every nucleus. Those nuclei are 40,000 times smaller than a pinhead - so small that they can only be seen with powerful microscopes and there are at least 3 trillion nucleated cells in the human body. This means that packed into every person are 18 trillion feet of DNA. That's an astonishing fact.

There's no information storage system designed by man that comes close to being able to store as much information in as small a space as can DNA.

Darwinian materialists assure us that blind, purposeless processes could have produced such a marvel, given enough time, although they have no idea how those processes ever managed to do what they claim they did.

Watch this video by the John 10:10 project to get a sense of how astounding DNA is.

Are Whales Designed?

The John 10:10 project has released an 8 minute video that examines the likelihood that whales could have evolved from terrestrial ancestors by undirected, mindless processes like darwinian evolution.

If the anatomy and physiology of an organism like whales appears to be engineered for the environment in which they thrive, perhaps that's because they were, in fact, engineered.

Enjoy the video:

Who Are the Real Authoritarians?

My grandson was telling me recently that he has a prof at the college he attends who's a liberal Democrat who tells his students that the Republican party is the party of authoritarianism.

There may be some authoritarians in the party, of course, but generally speaking the professor's claim is manifestly untrue.

If "authoritarian" is defined as an individual leader or party which seeks to arrogate for itself more power than the constitution allows, if an "authoritarian" is one who seeks to bypass the representatives of the people and impose mandates and policies by fiat, then surely Republicans are the least authoritarian players on today's political scene.

Indeed, Democrats, at least since Barack Obama, have repeatedly used executive power to circumvent the legislature and increase the power of the federal government in our lives. Republicans, including Donald Trump, have used it largely to limit federal power and get the government out of our lives.

In fact, this may be the root of so much of the seemingly irrational hatred for Trump during his presidency. Those who desire an overweening, centralized regulatory state which intrudes itself dictatorially into every nook and cranny of our lives were appalled that Trump was so successful in unravelling much of the "progress" they had made over the last fifty years in realizing their dream of an all-powerful federal government.

The truth is that, so far from governing like an authoritarian statist, Trump, for the most part, governed like a small-government libertarian.

An authoritarian, after all, does not appoint strict constitutionalists to the federal bench and Supreme Court. An authoritarian does not seek to give back to the states the authority to set their own laws on matters like voting regulations and abortion.

An authoritarian does, however, seek to expand the reach and power of the federal government, to impose onerous mandates on businesses and individuals, requiring them, for example, to wear useless masks or to get vaccines they don't want. An authoritarian does place unnecessary burdens on private enterprise, seek to restrict freedom of speech and religion and the right to bear arms, and to dictate what children will be taught and exposed to in schools, even against the will of those paying the bills for their schools.

Those who wish to maximize individual freedom are not authoritarians, those who wish to minimize it are. In our contemporary politics, it is conservatives who wish to maximize individual freedom and progressives who wish to constrict it.

Like my grandson's prof, progressives sometimes seek to deflect attention away from this fact by accusing conservatives, i.e. Republicans, of being the very thing they themselves are.

Where Do Our Rights Come From?

Jonah Goldberg reminds us that in his infamous speech in Georgia last week President Biden made the startling claim that “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.”

Goldberg goes on to say that,

This is a common view, and one that Biden has subscribed to for a while.

As vice president in 2015, he issued a statement on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act: “Voting is the engine that drives all civil rights, all human rights, and all economic rights in this country. It’s the right from which all other rights flow.”

Robert Kennedy said the same thing a half-century ago.

But whether Mr. Biden says it or RFK says it, it's a very misleading, if not entirely false, assertion.

Goldberg has an interesting discussion of where our rights come from in his column, and after considering several candidates for sources of our rights he ultimately lands on the right one:

Then there’s the philosophical argument. This is a bit of a misnomer because it can rightly be called a theological argument as well. It’s pretty straightforward. We are created by God. Our rights derive from this fact, and it is the job of the state to protect those rights.

Some atheists and humanists don’t like this formulation for some obvious reasons (and some exhaustingly obscure ones). But the simple fact is that without the essentially Judeo-Christian view of humans as being equal in the eyes of God, we wouldn’t have the idea of inalienable rights today.

This is so obvious that one would think it's a point that hardly needs making. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams surely thought it was obvious when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, which asserts that our rights are given to us by God, and it's hard to see how there can be inherent human rights, as opposed to arbitrary legal rights, if they're not ordained by God.

Our rights are based on the uniquely Judeo-Christian idea that all men and women are created in the image of God and are loved by Him. That conviction leads to the idea of human equality, that all men and women are equal in the eyes of God.

Apart from the historic influence of Judeo-Christianity in the Western world those ideas would never have taken hold. Or, if they did, they would've soon collapsed for want of a substantive foundation.

Nowhere else in the world over the last two millennia has the idea of human equality arisen, except in areas where Judaism and Christianity had become established.

If we are not created beings, if God did not fashion mankind in His image, then we're the product of impersonal, mindless processes like chance and fortuitous natural selection.

If the latter is true, if we're the product of eons of evolutionary struggle, where does the idea of human equality come from? It's certainly not necessary for survival of the species, nor would it be rooted in any biological fact about humanity since biology knows nothing of equality.

Moreover, if the belief in equality arose through a mindless evolutionary process why should anyone feel any obligation to reverence it any more than they have an obligation to reverence the idea that might makes right?

It's just silly to claim, as Mr. Biden does, that human rights are derived from the right to vote. Human rights are an endowment from our Creator and apart from a Creator human rights are nothing but a happy fiction.

In Over His Head

Jim Geraghty at National Review writes a devastating assessment of the Biden presidency one year into his tenure. Geraghty states that the president, "makes promises that he doesn’t know how to keep, wildly overestimates his own persuasiveness, denies problems are problems until it’s too late, and offers excuses and points fingers when he fails."

He goes on to list eleven examples:

• Biden promised that he was going to “shut down the virus.” But he hasn’t.
• Biden promised that, “This winter, you’ll be able to test for free in the comfort of your home and have some peace of mind.” But you couldn’t.
• Biden promised that he was going to make Covid treatments widely available. But he hasn’t.
• We allocated them more than $4.5 trillion in Covid relief, but schools are still shutting down, workers are not in the office, and medical workers are burning out. Biden now wants another “substantial” Covid-relief supplemental-spending bill. We spent $1.9 trillion ten months ago! What the hell did we do with all the money that was already spent?
• Biden insisted that inflation wasn’t really a problem and wouldn’t be unchecked. But it was, and it is.
• Biden insisted that the wave of migrants at the border was just the usual seasonal pattern. But it wasn’t.
• Biden insisted that regarding the supply chain, “The much-predicted crisis didn’t occur.” But Americans are still seeing long backlogs at ports, empty shelves in stores, and long waits for usually readily available products.
• Biden insisted that he was going to get tough on China. He hasn’t.
• Biden insisted that he was going to get tough on Russia.
• Biden pledged that he was going to get Americans and Afghan allies home from Afghanistan. He didn’t.
• Biden pledged to ISIS, “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” And then the U.S. military killed seven children and an aid worker in a drone strike.

He adds that "...this isn’t even counting the legislative fights that Biden chose, knowing the extraordinary difficulty of passage with a small majority for House Democrats and a 50-50 Senate: Build Back Better, a federal takeover of election administration, and creating at least a carve-out of the filibuster if not eliminating it entirely."

There's much else in Geraghty's column that's worth reading, but I'll just add some quotes he cites from other columnists:

• Jonah Goldberg: “Biden’s presidency is spiraling into abject failure.”
• Peggy Noonan, assessing Biden’s “Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” tirade in Atlanta: “The speech itself was aggressive, intemperate, not only offensive but meant to offend. It seemed prepared by people who think there is only the Democratic Party in America, that’s it, everyone else is an outsider who can be disparaged. It was a mistake on so many levels.”
• The New York Times' David Brooks: “Today is the day for Biden to begin revamping his presidency in a more centrist direction. There’s no path forward for a leftish agenda.”
• Mike Allen headlines an article in his newsletter: “Biden’s Epic Failures.”
• The Washington Post’s David Ignatius: “Biden has been losing his way politically. As he chases support from progressives in his own party, he has failed to craft versions of his social spending package and voting rights legislation that he could pass with fragile majorities. He’s been spinning his wheels.”

In a speech yesterday the president touted his 1.9 trillion dollar stimulus bill and his 1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill as successes, but many economists believe that the former was one cause of our current inflation and that the benefits of latter will not be seen for years.

All in all, it's hard to disagree with Geraghty's assessment that Mr. Biden is in over his head.

UPDATE: In today's column Geraghty discusses the many lies and the complete incompetence on display in Mr. Biden's Afghanistan debacle. Check it out.

Free Will Is Nonsense?

Last week I featured a video by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder on Superdeterminism and mentioned that although she thinks free will is nonsense, she also thinks, contrary to many physicists and philosophers, that Superdeterminism has no bearing on the question of whether we have free will.

I thought it might be interesting to philosophically-minded readers of VP to see her defense of her belief that free will doesn't exist.

Much of what she says in the video is inarguable, but her whole case is based on a single a priori metaphysical assumption. If that assumption is false, as I believe it is, then her argument collapses.

Her basic assumption is that naturalistic materialism (or physicalism) is true. She never explicitly states this in the video, or argues for it, but it undergirds pretty much everything she says.

Naturalistic materialism is the view that nature is all there is and that everything within nature is reducible to material stuff. Physicalism is the belief that everything we observe in the universe - and in the present instance, in the brain - can be explained in terms of physical laws and processes.

None of these - naturalism, materialism or physicalism - are scientific. Their truth cannot be demonstrated by scientific inquiry. They're often embraced by scientists like Hossenfelder, but they're both fundamentally metaphysical or philosophical hypotheses.

However, if they're false and if human beings do have an immaterial mind or soul which is not subject to physical laws, then no materialist or physicalist argument, like Hossenfelder makes, proves anything. Her argument is cogent only if one is inclined to accept her metaphysical assumptions.

Anyway, here's the video in which she presents her argument:

Is Biden Morphing into Trump?

One of the ironies of our current political situation is that many voters pulled the lever for Joe Biden for no other reason than they found Mr. Trump's personality to be insufferable, but as evidenced in last week's Georgia speech Mr. Biden seems to be very much like the man he and his supporters abhorred.

Both Peggy Noonan and Kimberley Strassel make this point well in two excellent columns at the Wall Street Journal (paywall).

In this post I'll quote from Ms. Strassel's column. She writes:

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Joe Biden is an admirer of his immediate predecessor. The president’s Georgia speech was as close as they come to a Donald Trump special.

Mr. Trump went to Georgia just over a year ago to rally voters for the Senate runoff elections. In a rant of a speech, he made false claims about the electoral system, accused Democrats of undemocratic aims, and attacked the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Mr. Biden this week went to Atlanta to rally support for two federal voting bills. In a rant of a speech, he made false claims about the electoral system, accused Republicans of undemocratic aims, and pre-emptively attacked the legitimacy of the 2022 election. Now who’s the wrecking ball?

When Trump made specious claims some of the media, as well as some of my acquaintances, were outraged by his mendacity, citing fact-checks, tut-tutting and in general castigating Mr. Trump for his dishonesty.

Well, the dishonesty needle on our political lie-detector is hovering in the red since Mr. Biden's speech, but I've heard few complaints from those who thought Mr. Trump's lack of integrity disqualified him to be president:

Mr. Biden ... baldly claimed Georgia Republicans enacted an election law designed purely to put up “obstacles” to voting. He said the law made it “harder for you to vote by mail” and limited “the number of drop boxes and the hours you can use them.”

These changes, he asserted, were designed to create “longer lines at the polls,” causing hungry voters to give up. He promised the state GOP would “subvert” future elections with a provision allowing it willy-nilly to “remove local election officials” it doesn’t like.

The law overall, he claimed, enables Republicans to get “the result they want—no matter what the voters have said, no matter what the count.”

Each of these claims, Ms. Strassel notes, is false:

The Georgia law leaves in place no-excuse absentee voting—and actually makes it stronger, by getting rid of signature matching. It expands weekend early voting and sets minimum Election Day voting hours. It enshrines in law the use of absentee-ballot drop boxes—which didn’t exist in Georgia before their temporary pandemic use.

Yes, the state Legislature can remove officials, but only after proving “malfeasance” or “gross negligence” over at least two elections. And Georgia’s broader electoral safeguards remain in place—the exact checks and balances in place when Mr. Biden carried the state last year. The president’s claims are straight-up fiction.

Mr. Trump was roundly criticized for casting doubt on the integrity of our election process, and Mr. Biden has followed his predecessor's example:

Mr. Biden ... bluntly told his followers that if his bills failed, “your vote won’t matter,” because Republicans will simply “disenfranchise” you. Just as Mr. Trump in Georgia accused “left-wing, socialist, communist Marxists” of “stealing” an election so as to impose “unchecked, unrestrained, absolute power” over Americans, Mr. Biden branded Republicans segregationists, traitors, and domestic “enemies” while predicting national collapse if he doesn’t get his way.

The coming vote on his federal election takeover would mark no less than a “turning point in this nation’s history,” the choice between “democracy” or “autocracy,” and whether the GOP obtained the “kind of power you see in totalitarian states.”

A lot of Biden voters who are paying attention are learning that what they actually voted for was a man who actually shares many of Mr. Trump's personal flaws without sharing any of Mr. Trump's policy virtues.

Ms. Strassel concludes her column on Mr. Biden's Trumpian rhetoric in Georgia with this observation:

Mr. Biden ran on a promise to lower the temperature, and what a joke that has been. It turns out Democrats and the media have no real problem after all with a hyperbolic, name-calling, factually challenged president.

Just so long as that president is their guy.

MLK or BLM

Today we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, a man whose vision of racial comity has unfortunately been betrayed by the progressive left as Robert Woodson and Joshua Mitchell argue in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Woodson is a veteran of the civil rights movement and author of several books. Mitchell is a professor of political theory at Georgetown University and author most recently of American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time. They write:

King’s words and actions glorified America by transfiguring its racial wound and revealing its redemptive promise. Yet today many black leaders have lost sight of King altogether and are aiding and abetting the crucifixion of their own people. Rather than hope, they see despair; rather than the Easter Sunday of true liberation, they offer the bleak Good Friday of never-ending misery.

Black Americans, the authors assert, have historically followed three paths in coping with slavery and the subsequent period of Jim Crow. There were blacks who called for their fellow blacks to leave the U.S. altogether (Exit), there were those who called for resistance, either armed or vocal (Voice), or both, and there were those who called for loyalty to the principles upon which the country was founded (Loyalty).

They state that King offered an inspiring combination of the strategies of loyalty and voice, and that it cost him dearly:

King paid a heavy personal price for his hope that America was redeemable. Twice his home was bombed; once, his wife and daughter were nearly killed. Surrounded by hundreds of angry, armed black men after that bombing, he discouraged retaliatory violence. He was assaulted several times, and jailed as well, but he remained steadfast in his commitment to nonviolence.

He united black Americans behind the proposition that racism is evil in itself, not simply because white people visited it upon blacks, and that all must unite to combat evil. He warned us about the self-destructive path of violence, not only for blacks but for the whole nation.

And, of course, he was ultimately murdered on April 4th, 1968. Woodson and Mitchell cite the belief of many pro-slavery whites that "blacks were morally inferior and thus incapable of self-government," and point to the irony that many blacks today acquiesce to this argument when made tacitly by both black and white leftists:

Today many black leaders defer to angry white progressives who make the same arguments about blacks’ lack of moral agency, reject the country’s founding principles, and seek to undermine its institutions. For months, the radical left has been exploiting the country’s genuine concern for fairness to keep blacks in a constant state of agitation, anger and grievance, urging them toward behavior that lives down to the slanderous stereotypes of white supremacists.

The leaders of these movements insist that every inequity suffered by blacks is caused by institutional and structural racism, that they have no power to liberate themselves, and that they will remain oppressed until white people change. Even to raise the issue of what role self-determination plays for blacks earns you the label of “racist.”

In other words, blacks are implicitly taught that whatever progress they might make depends not on their own effort but on the noblesse oblige of whites. Woodson and Mitchell go on to level particular scorn at Black Lives Matter for their advocacy of counterproductive policies and measures:

For every unarmed black American killed by the police, hundreds are killed in neighborhood homicides....Those who call for the defunding of police departments, such as leaders of the official Black Lives Matter organization, are silent about this inconvenient truth. They have a narrative and cannot let the facts get in the way. Their story is that the whole of American history is stained and the whole of America must be overthrown.

When citizens declare that they support Black Lives Matter, do they share its opposition to the nuclear family, its objective of abolishing the police, and its view that the Christian cross is a symbol of white supremacy? These positions of the organization — language that has largely been scrubbed from its website — in no way improve the lives of black Americans.

Black Americans have only one way forward that has any chance of long-term success:

Like all Americans, blacks have triumphed over their circumstances only when they have adopted bourgeois virtues such as hard work, respect for learning, self-discipline, faith and personal responsibility.... There would have been no civil-rights movement without this. But radical progressives now insist that such virtues are the legacy of white supremacy, colonialist values that reflect the continuing bondage of blacks to oppressive Western culture.

The only “authentic” expression of blackness in America, they claim, is the opposite of bourgeois self-restraint and discipline — indulging in the passions of the moment, whether anarchic rioting, insulting teachers or other unsalutary forms of expression.

The radical left — disdaining exhortations toward work, family and faith as “respectability politics”—argues that blacks should feel free to indulge their “true” nature, echoing the age-old white-supremacist notion that said nature is violent, lascivious and incapable of self-restraint.

The left masquerades as the messiah to blacks, but its policy nostrums are perhaps even more toxic for blacks than they've been for people everywhere else in the world they've been implemented. The left's call for the abolition of the family and religion and the obscuring of our nation's history (except for the troublesome parts), combined with the economic socialism they advocate and the constant hectoring of white America for its alleged racial sins, is a recipe for cultural and social disaster.

Progressives are either ardent for that disaster or they deny that it'd be the inevitable result of their policies, but it's hard to see how it could be avoided or how blacks wouldn't suffer worse from it than anyone else.

After all, the poor, whether black or white, are still very much reliant upon a prosperous America. To the extent they depend upon tax revenues and charitable donations for their health care, transportation, housing, food, schools, police, and so on they need America to be prosperous.

The left's desire to make everyone "equal" is, in effect, an attempt to make almost everyone (except themselves) poorer which would be a calamity for those dependent on a relatively wealthy and generous middle class for the resources that help make their lives less painful and which help them rise out of poverty if they're motivated to do so.

Woodson and Mitchell finish with these words:

We must turn away from the present course, which preaches despair rather than hope. Black achievement must be glorified. The crucifixion of black America by the radical left must halt. There is a grander, more fruitful future for us all.

There is, but it will only be achieved by embracing King's dream of a colorblind society rather than by wallowing in the rhetoric of those obsessed with exacerbating our social frictions and keeping us divided along racial lines.

Superdeterminism and Free Will

Michael Egnor has an interesting piece at Mind Matters based on a video featuring a talk by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. In the video Hossenfelder discusses something called Superdeterminism, the view that everything that happens in the universe is the inevitable consequence of prior causes.

She believes, contrary to many of her colleagues, that this determinism holds everywhere, even at the quantum level.

Many physicists have for the last century argued that quantum events, events involving sub-atomic particles, were indeterministic, that there was no way we could predict them because they essentially had no physical cause. One reason this view of quantum mechanics was popular was because it allowed room at the quantum level for free will.

If Superdeterminism was true, many physicists believed, there'd be no way to hold on to free will and the philosophical consequences of abandoning the notion that we are somehow free to choose are extensive, including the loss of moral obligation, human culpability, and human dignity.

Here's Egnor explaining this:

The conventional view of nature held by materialists, who deny free will, is that all acts of nature, including our human acts and beliefs, are wholly determined by the laws of nature, understood as the laws of physics. We cannot be free, they assert, because all aspects of human nature are matter, and the behavior of matter is wholly determined by physical laws.

There is no “room” for free will.

It’s noteworthy that physicists who have studied determinism in nature (specifically, in quantum mechanics) have for the most part rejected this deterministic view [at the quantum level] and implicitly (if not explicitly) endorsed the reality of free will. There are two reasons for this.

First, experiments that have followed from the research done by Irish physicist John Bell (1928–1990) in the 1970s have shown that determinism on a local [or quantum] level is not true. The theory and the experiments are subtle, but suffice to say, detailed and quite rigorous experiments have shown that the outcomes of quantum processes are not determined locally.

That is, there’s nothing “baked in” inanimate matter that determines the outcome of the quantum measurement. Nature is not locally deterministic.

The second reason that physicists have rejected determinism relates to the theory of Superdeterminism. Superdeterminism posits that, while inanimate matter is not locally determined, the entire universe — including the thoughts and actions of the experimenters who are investigating nature — is determined as a whole.

The experiments based on Bell’s theorem have disproven local determinism but they do not disprove Superdeterminism.

The problem with Superdeterminism from the perspective of most physicists is that it seems to invalidate the process of science itself. That is, if the scientists’ own thoughts, ideas, and judgments are just as determined as the behavior of inanimate matter, then science itself has no claim to seek or find the truth.

...If all of nature is an enormous robot, then it makes no sense to claim that tiny parts of the robot are seeking or have found the truth. Because Superdeterminism seems to obviate the very scientific method used to investigate it, physicists have generally rejected Superdeterminism.

Recently, however, several physicists have suggested that Superdeterminism is a quite plausible way of solving the measurement problem in quantum physics so it seems to be having a bit of a resurgence.

Ms. Hossenfelder is one of the latter. She thinks Superdeterminism is true and although she herself doesn't believe that we have free will, she nevertheless doesn't think that Superdeterminism really has anything to do with whether we are or are not free.

Here's her video on the subject:

Egnor agrees with Superdeterminism but also believes we are free to choose. He reconciles Superdeterminism and free will by positing a "block" universe in which past, present and future all exist simultaneously. This idea, as counterintuitive as it may seem, is actually a consequence of Einstein's theory of Special Relativity.

I'm not sure Egnor's argument rescues free will from Superdeterminism, but you can decide for yourself by reading his argument at the link.

Brutal Poll Numbers

The most recent Quinnipiac poll is not good news for team Biden. In fact it's brutal. The President's approval numbers are about the same as President Trump's rating after the January 6th Capitol Hill riot.

According to the poll, which was published January 12th, only 33 percent of Americans approve of President Joe Biden's job performance. The results would be even uglier if Democrats were bracketed out. His approval rating is just 25 percent among independent voters and 28 percent among Hispanics.

Even among Democratic voters, where his support is still fairly strong, his rating has declined from 87 percent in November to just 75 percent today.

On specific issues Mr. Biden's support is no less anemic. He has 34 percent approval on the economy and 35 percent approval on his conduct of foreign policy.

He was elected in part on his promise to "shut down" the Covid pandemic, but despite inheriting vaccines and therapeutics that Mr. Trump did not have until the last months of his presidency, more people have died during Mr. Biden's year in office (430,000) than died before he was inaugurated.

Consequently, only 39 percent of the people surveyed approved of his handling of the pandemic.

Mr. Biden was also elected because voters hoped he'd unite the country, but according to the poll, 49 percent of Americans said he's "doing more to divide the country," compared with just 42 percent who said he's "doing more to unite the country."

The number of people who think he's uniting the country is not likely to be helped by his recent rhetoric in Georgia where he compared those who oppose the Democrats' voting rights bill to segregationists and defenders of slavery. Speaking to those senators who must vote on the bill to impose federal regulations on voting laws of all the states, Mr. Biden asked whose side these senators wanted to be on:

Do you want to be ... on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?

Not only does such a comparison reflect an ignorance of the reasons for opposing the bill, it's politically clutzy. It's certainly not a helpful way to fulfill his promise of uniting the country.

Much can happen between now and 2024, of course, but Mr. Biden is proving himself to be a very unpopular president which is why some in his party are casting about for someone else to run in the next presidential election. But who is there among Democrats who would make an attractive candidate? Might we anticipate the resurrection of a Hillary candidacy in 2024?

Lucky Guess?

In a piece at Evolution News Casey Luskin lists a dozen of the parameters of the universe that must be fine-tuned in order for the universe to be life-permitting:

• Strength of Electromagnetic Force: 1 part in 25
• Strength of Strong Nuclear Force: 1 part in 200
• Mass of Quark: 1 part in 10^21
• Value of Gravitational Constant: 1 part in 10^35
• Value of Cosmological Constant: 1 part in 10^90
• Ratio of the masses of a neutron to the proton: 1 part in 1000
• Ratio of the Weak Nuclear Force to the Strong Nuclear Force: 1 part in 10,000
• Ratio of the Electromagnetic Force to Gravity: 1 part in 10^40
• Cosmic Mass Density at Planck Time: 1 part in 10^60
• Initial Expansion Rate of the Universe: 1 part in 10^17
• Initial Density of the Universe: 1 part in 10^24
• Initial Entropy of the Early Universe: 1 part in 10 to the power of 10^123

Is it just a coincidence that these parameters have precisely the values that allow for the existence of a universe that can sustain life? Unimaginably minute changes in some of these (especially the last) would've resulted in either no universe at all or one in which living things were impossible.

In their book A Fortunate Universe, from which Luskin got many of these values, Geraint Lewis and Luke Barnes use this analogy: A bank vault is robbed. The armored door was opened without force; the robbers used the access code which is a twelve digit number. The police arrive on the scene.

One officer says, "Maybe they guessed the code." The second replies, "No way. There are a trillion combinations. The system shows they entered the code correctly on the first attempt. Surely the odds against that are astronomical." The first then says, "But it's still possible, right?"

Yes, it's technically possible but what rational person would think that a lucky guess is the explanation for how the thieves got into the vault?

The obvious conclusion is that the robbers somehow knew the code. No reasonable person would think they guessed it on the very first attempt, or that they would've guessed it no matter how many attempts they made.

The analogy to the fine-tuning of the universe is this: Of all the possible combinations to the vault only one would allow access. Of all the possible values for the twelve parameters Luskin lists, only the values they actually have, or values exceedingly close to the actual values, will allow for a life-permitting universe.

Believing that our universe is nevertheless the accidental, coincidental product of mindless forces is like believing that the robbers accidentally, coincidentally guessed the combination to the vault.

Yet it seems like the alternative is to assume that the universe is the product of an intelligent creator, an alternative repugnant to those who adamantly cling to a naturalistic worldview.

So, are there other plausible options or is an intelligent creator the best explanation for cosmic fine-tuning? Luskin looks at the plausibility of other options in his article which I encourage you to read if this topic interests you.

Wilson's Incoherent Naturalism

The famed entomologist E.O. Wilson passed away last December 26 at the age of 92.

Wilson, whose specialty was ants, was a seminal figure in the development of what's called Sociobiology, the theory that our behavior is fundamentally determined by our genes which have evolved to induce behaviors that make it more likely that our genes will be propagated into the next generation.

E.O. Wilson

Richard Weikart critiqued Wilson's views on human nature, morality and religion in his book The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life some of which is excerpted here. On Wilson's view of free will Weikert writes:

Wilson claims that ultimately every phenomenon in the cosmos can be reduced to physical laws, so the human mind is simply physical brain activity, and humans have no free will.

[He] argues that all animal behavior, including that of humans, is controlled by material processes in the brain that evolved through natural selection.

If Wilson is correct about material processes producing all our thoughts then he's also correct that we have no free will, and if he's correct that we have no free will then he's also correct when he states that morality is just an illusion.

As he states in an article co-authored with philosopher Michael Ruse in 1985, “Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate.”

Weikert also describes Wilson's view of the meaning or purpose of human life:

In [his book] Sociobiology he stated that “in evolutionary time the individual organism counts for almost nothing.” The only significance of an individual organism is to reproduce: “the organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA.”

In The Meaning of Human Existence (2014) Wilson explains that there is no ultimate meaning or purpose in life. Rather, he asserts, the only meaning we have is that we are the product of mindless evolutionary processes. He states,

We were created not by a supernatural intelligence but by chance and necessity as one species out of millions of species in Earth’s biosphere. Hope and wish for otherwise as we will, there is no evidence of an external grace shining down upon us, no demonstrable destiny or purpose assigned us, no second life vouchsafed us for the end of the present one.

We are, it seems, completely alone. And that in my opinion is a very good thing. It means we are completely free.

Wilson argues that all organic processes — and here he clearly includes human behavior — are ultimately reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry. For Wilson evolution has clearly replaced religion as the source of answers about the purpose and destiny of life.

He asserted, “The great questions — ‘Who are we?’ ‘Where did we come from?’ and ‘Why are we here?’ — can be answered only, if ever, in the light of scientifically based evolutionary thought.”

And here is where the great scientist runs completely off the rails. What does it mean to say that we have no free will but then insist that we are completely free? Weikert states that "Wilson explains that this freedom gives us options that 'empower us to address with more confidence the greatest goal of all time, the unity of the human race.' ”

But if morality is an illusion why should we care about the unity of the human race? On what is this expression of Wilson's moral sensibility based? Why, if the whole raison d'etre of human existence is to promote the survival of one's DNA, should anyone care about anything other than one's own welfare?

And if our death is the end of our existence, if our lives have no real meaning, why should people care about the unity of the human race after they're dead?

Wilson evidently wants to believe at one and the same time that we have no free will, but also that we're completely free; that life has no meaning - that we are nothing more than the result of mindless material processes - but also that the "great questions" are nevertheless somehow important; and that morality is an illusion but also that we should care about our fellow man and strive for the unity of humanity (whatever that means).

If Weikert's excerpts from Wilson's writings are a fair representation of Wilson's thought then it seems obvious that like so many others who embrace naturalistic materialism, Wilson could not avoid philosophical incoherence. He evidently found it impossible to maintain philosophical consistency in his worldview, which causes one to wonder why he persisted in it.

An Immigrant's Perspective

Columnist Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) recently wrote a piece about an immigrant from Jordan named Amjad Masad who came here in 2012 at the age of 24.

In the column, titled Ten Things I Love About America, she outlines Masad's background and writes this:

On Tuesday afternoon Mr. Masad, who became a citizen in 2019, thought about the 10th anniversary of his arrival. He was so grateful for three things: a company, a family, a house. He and his wife and business partner, Haya Odeh, also from Jordan, started talking about America. At 3:56 p.m. ET, he posted a Twitter thread.

Here's what Masad says on his Twitter:

I landed in the United States 10 years ago with nothing but credit card debt. After one startup exit, one big tech job, and one unicorn, I genuinely believe that it wouldn’t have been possible anywhere else in the world. Here are 10 things that I love about this country:

1. Work Ethic. First thing I noticed was that everyone regardless of occupation took pride in doing a bang-up job, even when no one looked. I asked people: ‘why do you pour everything into a job even when it is seemingly thankless?’ And it was like asking fish ‘what is water?’

2. Lack of corruption. In the 10 years in the US, I’ve never been asked for a bribe, and that’s surprising. When you know that you predictably get to keep a sizeable portion of the value you create and that no one will arbitrarily stop you, it makes it easier to be ambitious.

3. Win-win mindset. People don’t try to screw you on deals, they play the long game, and align incentives in such a way that everyone wins. This is especially apparent in Silicon Valley where you can’t underestimate anyone because one day you might be working for them.

4. Rewarding talent. From sports to engineering, America is obsessed with properly rewarding talent. If you’re good, you’ll get recognized. The market for talent is dynamic—if you don’t feel valued today, you can find a better place tomorrow.

5. Open to weirdos. Because you never know where the next tech, sports, or arts innovation will come from, America had to be open to weirdness. Weirdos thrive without being crushed. We employ people with the most interesting backgrounds—dropouts to artists—they’re awesome!

6. Forgiveness. Weird and innovative people have to put themselves out there, and as part of that, they’re going to make mistakes in public. The culture here values authenticity, and if you’re authentic and open about your failures, you’ll get a second and a third chance.

7. Basic infrastructure. Americans take care of their public spaces. Parks are clean, subways and busses run on time, and utilities & services just work. Because life can be livable for a time without income, it was possible for us to quit our jobs and bootstrap our business.

8. Optimism. When you step foot in the US there is a palpable sense of optimism. People believe that tomorrow will be better than today. They don’t know where progress will come from, but that’s why they’re open to differences. When we started up even unbelievers encouraged us.

9. Freedom. Clearly a cliche, but it’s totally true. None of the above works if you’re not free to explore & tinker, to build companies, and to move freely. I still find it amazing that if I respect the law and others, I can do whatever I want without being compelled/restricted.

10. Access to capital. It’s a lot harder to innovate & try to change the world without capital. If you have a good idea & track record, then someone will be willing to bet on you. The respect for entrepreneurship in this country is inspiring. And it makes the whole thing tick.

Noonan adds that she thought this was just beautiful.

So much on the list is what I see. Hardworking: In my town everyone from bicycle deliverymen to masters and mistresses of the universe work themselves like rented mules. And, somehow most moving, that we’re open to weirdos: We always have been; it’s in our DNA; it explains a lot of our politics and culture; it’s good that it continues. “This Is Us.”

At the end Mr. Masad said he was speaking generally, that character limits [on Twitter] don’t invite nuance, that there’s no call to sit back self-satisfied, that everything can be made better.

But he added a warning: “Many of the things that I talked about are under threat, largely from people who don’t know how special they have it. America is worth protecting, and realizing that progress can be made without destroying the things that made it special.”

Masad has received a lot of feedback, he told Noonan who contacted him by phone, most of it overwhelmingly positive and most of "the real positive, heartwarming, excited feedback has been from other immigrants. They add to the list what they appreciate.”

Noonan concludes with this thought:

The past few years, maybe decades, we’ve become an increasingly self-damning people. As a nation we harry ourselves into a state of permanent depression over our failures and flaws and what we imagine, because we keep being told, is the innate wickedness of our system, which keeps justice from happening and life from being good.

Maybe we got carried away. Maybe we have it wrong. Maybe those who are new here and observe us with fresh eyes see more clearly than we do. As long as our immigrants are talking like this, maybe we’ve still got it goin’ on. What a welcome thought.

Thank you, Amjad Masad.

Elections and Insurrections

One nefarious tactic employed by the media to discredit their opponents on the right is to ask them whether they believe Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president. If the person being asked the question answers in the negative but is unable to point to any specific illegality involved in the 2020 election then he or she is portrayed as some kind of kook.

It's a tactic that works splendidly since casual listeners often don't think to ask why this same question is never asked of Hillary Clinton or Stacey Abrams, neither of whom were willing to grant that they legitimately lost their elections in 2020.

In any case, the question of the legitimacy of Biden's election is a red herring. The problem with the 2020 election is not that anything done was technically illegal, although perhaps some things were, the problem was with how rules were altered and how lies were perpetrated, both to the detriment of Donald Trump.

The rule changes may have all been done legally, the lies themselves may not have been "illegal," but the result certainly cast suspicion on the fairness of the election.

Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist offers a few thoughts on the reasons for this suspicion:

The 2020 presidential election was unlike any in American history.

Hundreds of laws and processes were changed in the months leading up to the election, sometimes legally and sometimes not, creating chaos, confusion, and uncertainty.

Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, spent $419 million — nearly as much as the federal government itself — to interfere in the government’s management of the election in key states.

Powerful tech oligarchs and corrupt propaganda press conspired to keep indisputably important news stories, such as allegations of corruption regarding the Biden family business, hidden from voters in the weeks prior to voting.

Information operations were routinely manufactured about President Trump in the closing months of the campaign, including the false claim that Russians paid bounties for dead American soldiers and Trump didn’t care, and that Trump had called dead American soldiers losers, disputed by dozens of on-the-record sources.

Effective conservative voices were censored by the social media arms of the Democrat Party. And all this was done after the establishment spent years running an unprecedented “Resistance” that falsely claimed Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

The term "stolen" may not be technically accurate, but given these machinations there's no surprise that many Republican voters believe the election was indeed "rigged."

With the exception of a single Time Magazine article admitting there was a “conspiracy” by a “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” who worked to “change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,” to create a “revolution in how people vote,” corporate media have largely kept silent about or downplayed how the establishment secured its victory for their man Joe Biden.

Time’s article didn’t come out until February 4, 2021, but in the months prior to its publication, Republicans grew increasingly concerned that the rigging it described had, in fact, happened.

Their desire for free and fair elections they could trust, elections that “well-funded cabals of powerful people” weren’t able to rig, resulted in mass protests following the November election. The fact that the election was exceedingly close didn’t help matters.

Media and other left-wing pollsters had put out preposterous suppression polls to help Joe Biden get over the finish line. For example, the Washington Post’s final poll claimed Biden would win the swing state of Wisconsin by 17 points, indicating a nationwide blowout of historic proportions. (He won it by seven-tenths of a percent.)

The actual outcome took weeks to calculate and came down to just 43,000 votes across three states, even closer than Trump’s close victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Nor does it help change Republican voters' minds about the integrity of the election when common sense measures to secure voting integrity are strenuously opposed as "attacks on democracy," when the media is relatively silent on the effect that millions of mail-in ballots had on the fairness of the system or merely shrugs at Mark Zuckerberg's $419 million dollars targeted at getting out the vote for Biden.

Hemingway goes on:

The media and other Democrats have used the January 6 riot at the Capitol as a way to ignore legitimate concerns about what they did to the election system, and as a way to continue the assault on election security.

As part of their political operation, they have used a propaganda technique of redefining efforts to secure the integrity of elections as attacks on democracy.

The 2020 campaign to destroy election security by flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots was run by Marc Elias, a braggadocious Democrat attorney and former general counsel for Hillary Clinton who also ran the Russia collusion hoax that seriously damaged the country. In fact, one of his partners in the scheme was recently indicted by prosecutor John Durham for lying about his role in the hoax.

Elias and his “well-funded cabal of powerful people” are hoping to make permanent or even expand the weakening of election security.

The propaganda press have also downplayed Zuckerberg’s staggering $419 million expenditure, or falsely presented it as non-partisan help to voters. Independent researchers have shown that the funding dollars overwhelming poured into blue counties, and particularly blue counties in swing states.

The money was used to enable the private takeover of government election offices, erasing the bright red line between campaign operations and government administration of elections.

The massive grants were used to run Get Out The Vote operations through these government offices, in a manner that benefited Democrats in overwhelmingly disproportionate ways. The funds were used mostly to register Democrats to vote, encourage Democrats to vote, harvest Democrat ballots, cure defective Democrat ballots, count Democrat ballots, etc.

No right-wing billionaire could have gotten away with even thinking about such an operation, but had he, the media would be all over it. A few hundred thousand dollars in Russian Facebook ads for both Clinton and Trump generated years of hysterical media coverage from the corrupt press.

Yet Zuckerberg funding the private takeover of elections to secure Democrat victories has barely been mentioned — much less obsessed over — by most of corporate media.

Meanwhile, the media has certainly obsessed over the January 6th, 2021 riot on Capitol Hill, insistently labelling it an "insurrection." Yet in the year since, with all of the investigations that have ensued from this shameful and tragic event, not a single person among the 725 people who've been arrested has been charged with any crime connected to "insurrection."

An insurrection that involved no firearms among the insurrectionists and no suppression by the military is not much of an insurrection. It was indeed a riot, however, and the rioters need to be held accountable, but the media is loath to call it a riot, perhaps because they'd then have to explain why the riots that beset our cities in the summer of 2020 were "understandable" but the January 6th riots were not.

All of this - the hyperbolic labelling, the attempt to portray the riots as something much worse than riots - appears to be a cynical, disingenuous ploy to discredit and malign Donald Trump and his supporters as treasonous because they fear that he'll run again in 2024.

Hemingway concludes:

The media and Democrats’ J6 hysteria is meant as a distraction to keep Americans from properly dealing with the very real problems with how the 2020 election was overseen.

The future of the country rests on the ability of both winners and losers to trust our elections, to make it easy to vote, but difficult to cheat, and to have some reasonable level of confidence that voting is conducted privately and without coercion, harvesting, or undue third-party influence.

The media and other Democrats are cartoonishly overhyping the J6 riot to avoid being held accountable for the many ways in which they destroyed election integrity in the months and years leading up to November 2020.

Wise people are not fooled by their distraction attempt.

Let's hope that there are a lot of wise people.

Soft Totalitarianism

In his book Live Not By Lies Rod Dreher makes a plausible case that the U.S. is moving toward a kind of soft totalitarianism in which individual freedoms will be sharply curtailed and in which "deviants" will suffer social punishments like loss of jobs and access to medical care, the inability to shop or travel, etc.

Indeed, this is already happening with people being fired from their jobs for holding incorrect political opinions, declining vaccinations and other recalcitrant acts frowned upon by our elites.

Dreher gives a succinct summation of the theme of his very important book in this short video from Prager U. It's worth checking out:

Why I Am a Christian (Pt. II)

Yesterday I sketched some of the reasons that I remain a theist. Today I'd like to do the same for why I remain a Christian theist. Or, better, following the 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, why I continue to strive to become one. Although there are more than six reasons, here, in brief outline, are six reasons why I embrace Christianity:

1. The beauty of the story. The Christian account of history is a beautiful love story that recounts how, moved by love for mankind, God gave Himself to ransom His beloved and to share eternity with "her" together. It's the greatest love story ever told. If it's not true it should be. We should all want it to be, and I marvel that so many want it not to be true.

2. The beauty of the lives of those who have taken the teaching of Jesus seriously. Cardinal Ratzinger, later to become Pope Benedict, has said that,“I have often affirmed my conviction that the true apology of Christian faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth…are the lives of the saints and the beauty that the faith has generated.” When Ratzinger mentions the lives of the saints he's talking about men like Maximilian Kolbe and women like Mother Teresa.

He's talking about the people George Eliot mentions in her novel Middlemarch when she has a character observe that, "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

It is because of 2000 years of anonymous people trying to live as Jesus enjoined us to live that we have hospitals and clinics, orphanages and schools, charitable organizations and so much more. Atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas acknowledges this when he writes that, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

3. The beauty of grace. Author Philip Yancey wrote that he left the Christian faith as a young man because there was so little grace in his very strict church. He eventually came back to the faith because he could find grace nowhere else. It's certainly not found in today's secular progressive PC Cancel Culture where people get reported by interns to their employer's Human Resources department for wishing co-workers a Merry Christmas.

Christianity, properly understood, is a way of life teeming with forgiveness and reconciliation, i.e. grace, among ourselves and between God and us. Grace is enormously attractive, and it's the essence of Christianity.

4. The beauty of the moral core. Christianity (or more accurately, Judeo-Christianity) is based on two "laws": Love God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself. There's nothing simpler, more elegant or more beautiful. The whole moral teaching of the Bible is summed up in those two rules. To love others is to do justice and to display compassion - for the poor, for those with whom one deals in business, for our co-workers and our neighbors.

5. The fact of the Resurrection of Jesus. Skeptics have tried for centuries to explain it away, but every attempt to provide a naturalistic interpretation of the historical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus as found in the New Testament sounds more fantastic than that a miracle actually did occur and that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead. The Resurrection of Jesus is the keystone in the arch of Christianity. It is the confirmation that everything Jesus taught about Himself, this life and the next is true.

6. The beauty of the hope of eternal life. Some folks are content to accept physical death as the end of their existence, but this, for me, is difficult to understand. It's difficult to understand why we continue to invest enormous resources in extending human life through medical technology and do so much to extend our own individual lives through healthy living but care so little about life that we're indifferent to the possibility of enjoying it forever.

To have loved family and friends, to have loved life, and not be thrilled with the hope that there's an even richer, more wonderful existence beyond this one, an existence which we might share with those from whom we've been separated by death, an existence in which those who have suffered will be rewarded and those who caused their suffering will be held to account, strikes me quite frankly as perverse.

For these reasons and others, especially the simple but paramount fact that I believe Christianity is true in all its essential aspects, I remain committed to it.

Why I Am a Christian (Pt. I)

In 1927 British philosopher Bertrand Russell gave a talk titled Why I Am Not a Christian in which he laid out the reasons why he was, in fact, not a Christian. The talk was subsequently published as a pamphlet and then a book and has become prescribed reading among secularists throughout the Western world. It's really quite peculiar that it achieved the popularity that it did given the fact that the reasons Russell adduces for his atheism are, for the most part, singularly unconvincing.

In any case, I thought I'd like to compose a Viewpoint post on the topic Why I Am a Christian. To be sure, these aren't the reasons why I became a Christian but rather some of the reasons why I have remained one.

First, though, let me briefly sketch some of the reasons why I remain a theist.

There are two live options in the contemporary Western world, theism and naturalism (atheism). Agnosticism is sometimes considered an option, but agnosticism is simply atheism by another name. Atheists are persons who consciously or willfully lack belief in a God, and, since agnostics lack a belief in God, agnostics are atheists, albeit of a softer variety than those who explicitly deny that God exists.

Between atheism and theism, then, which best explains the facts of our experience of the world and life? For me there's no contest. The best explanation, as I see the world, is that a personal, moral Being exists and has created the cosmos. I hold this opinion because there are numerous facts about the world and human life that seem to me far more plausible or probable on theism than on atheism. Consider the following ten examples:

1. Human rights - Why, on naturalism, should anyone think that humans have rights that others are obligated to respect? Why think that tyranny or the holocaust are evil? Why think that we have a duty to do justice to others? On a naturalistic explanation of human existence the notion of human rights is nothing more than a comforting fiction. Only theism gives us a sound basis for them as Thomas Jefferson noted in the Declaration of Independence where he affirmed that our rights come from our Creator.

2. Human equality - What, on naturalism, provides grounds for thinking that humans are in some sense equal or should be treated as such? We have no reason for cherishing the notion of gender or racial or legal equality on a naturalistic understanding of the origin of our species, but, on theism, we're all equally loved by God who requires us to value and love each other in the same way.

3. Meaning or significance - If the cosmos as a whole has no meaning what meaning can anything in it have? Is the meaning of our lives something we just make up, like children conjuring an invisible friend to salve their loneliness? Human life can only mean anything if humans have a telos or purpose, and that telos can only be given to us by God. Nothing in nature can confer significance or meaning upon human beings.

4. Consciousness - How do matter and energy, mere electrochemical reactions in the brain, give rise to sensory experiences like sweetness, fragrance, pain or color? What are these sensations anyway? Where does the meaning of the sound of a siren or the flashing lights at a railroad crossing come from? What enables these physical events to be invested with a meaning and how does mere matter create their meaning? These phenomena strongly suggest that the material self is not all there is to us, but if we are possessed of immaterial minds it's difficult to see how they could be the product of a physical process like evolution. It seems more plausible to believe that such entities trace their provenience back to an original Mind.

5. Objective morality - Why think that it's wrong to just live for oneself or to adopt an attitude of might makes right? Why think that it's wrong to adopt a survival of the fittest attitude toward the poor? Why believe that it's objectively wrong to be cruel to children and animals? If we believe that these things are wrong, as I do, then we must conclude that there are objective moral rights and wrongs, but that can only be the case if there's an objective moral standard. No such standard exists in the naturalistic worldview. Only theism offers such a standard: the moral character of a perfectly good God.

6. Human free will - How, on naturalism, do we justify the powerful conviction that we have free will? How can mere matter, if that's all we are, be free to override or circumvent the laws of physics? We can't live consistently with the belief that we're not free, but the naturalistic worldview entails that free will is merely an illusion. A worldview with which it's so difficult to live consistently is profoundly at odds with itself.

7. Biological information - Living things are brimming over with information. Everything in an organism - molecular machines, mitosis, metabolism - is governed by information. It seems to me much more probable that libraries of information such as exist in every living cell are the result of an intelligent Mind than that they're the result of mindless, purely random accidents in nature.

8. Cosmic fine-tuning - The universe is comprised of dozens of constants and forces whose strengths are set to exceedingly precise values. Had those strengths deviated from their actual values by unimaginably tiny amounts, in some cases by one part in 10^120, either the universe would not exist or life in it would be impossible. Thus, the existence of a life-sustaining universe is extremely improbable and the existence of no universe or one that's life-prohibiting is astronomically more likely. It seems to me, then, that it's more probable that such precision is the product of intelligent, purposeful engineering than that it's the product of an incomprehensibly improbable fluke.

9. Mathematical structure of nature - The universe is not only explicable in terms of math, it appears to many scientists to actually be mathematics. It seems to me more probable that the mathematical nature of the universe is attributable to a Mind than to sheer dumb serendipity.

10. The origin of the universe - The universe evidently came from nothing, at least nothing that's allowed in a naturalist ontology. How does something come from nothing? How does something begin to exist and remain in existence uncaused? It seems more reasonable to me to think that the universe has a cause that's not part of the aggregation of contingent things that comprise it. Thus, the cause of the universe would be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, very powerful, very intelligent and possess necessary being (since were it contingent it'd be part of the universe).

In sum, theism seems to me to be a much more plausible explanation for the existential facts of life as well as for the nature of the world in which we live.

Whenever I'm beset by doubts about the existence of God I reflect on the above facts and am reminded that it seems far more probable that the world and human experience are the product of a personal intelligence than that they're the product of nothingness plus chance.

But even if there is a God why think that Christianity is true? Why not just hold to a bare theism? Why embellish it with the narratives found in the New Testament gospels? I'll attempt an answer to that question tomorrow.

Spooky Action

The universe is a very strange place, stranger than we can imagine. One of the strangest things about it is something Albert Einstein once referred to as "spooky action at a distance."

In quantum mechanics there's a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. No one knows how it works, no one really understands it, but every time it's been tested it's been shown to exist, and it's absolutely bizarre.

Here's the nutshell version: Two subatomic particles, e.g. electrons, can be produced from the disintegration of another particle. These daughter particles then travel at enormous velocities away from each other, but they somehow remain connected such that if a property of one of them is changed the same property in the other one changes simultaneously even though any signal sent from one to the other would have to travel at infinite speed to affect the other.

This, though, is impossible, so how does the second electron know what's happened to the first? No one knows the answer to this, which is why Einstein, who could never accept the idea of entanglement, called the phenomenon "spooky."

An excellent 15 minute video featuring physicist Brian Greene explains this quantum weirdness:

An article at Nature discusses a recent test that pretty much clinches the theory that somehow particles that are widely separated from each other, even at opposite ends of the universe, are still in some mysterious way connected so that they can communicate instantaneously with each other:

It’s a bad day both for Albert Einstein and for hackers. The most rigorous test of quantum theory ever carried out has confirmed that the ‘spooky action at a distance’ that the German physicist famously hated — in which manipulating one object instantaneously seems to affect another, far away one — is an inherent part of the quantum world.

The experiment, performed in the Netherlands, could be the final nail in the coffin for models of the atomic world that are more intuitive than standard quantum mechanics, say some physicists. It could also enable quantum engineers to develop a new suite of ultrasecure cryptographic devices.

“From a fundamental point of view, this is truly history-making,” says Nicolas Gisin, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

In quantum mechanics, objects can be in multiple states simultaneously: for example, an atom can be in two places, or spin in opposite directions, at once. Measuring an object forces it to snap into a well-defined state. Furthermore, the properties of different objects can become ‘entangled’, meaning that their states are linked: when a property of one such object is measured, the properties of all its entangled twins become set, too.

This idea galled Einstein because it seemed that this ghostly influence would be transmitted instantaneously between even vastly separated but entangled particles — implying that it could contravene the universal rule that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

He proposed that quantum particles do have set properties before they are measured, called hidden variables. And even though those variables cannot be accessed, he suggested that they pre-program entangled particles to behave in correlated ways.

The recent experiments cited in the Nature article are said to show that Einstein was wrong and that entanglement exists. The universe is indeed a very strange place.

One possible explanation for the instantaneous "communication" between particles light years apart could be provided by the 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley. Berkeley believed that the ultimate reality was not matter but mind. If he was right, and if the universe is as he and others have suggested, a kind of idea in the mind of God, then a change in one particle could be instantly perceived and transmitted to the second particle.

In other words, the laws of physical nature are not the ultimate laws but are based on higher laws grounded in a non-physical mind.

This may sound very bizarre to many, but it's no more bizarre than the quantum phenomena themselves, and those seem undeniable.