Update on the War in Ukraine

Strategy Page has a good summary of developments in the war in Ukraine as of ten days ago.

I've included a map at he bottom to help us understand what's going on and where.

Ukraine launched a series of offensive operations that started on August 29th in the south. This was no surprise and Russia had moved a lot of troops from the north to block any Ukrainian attacks in Kherson province or Donbas to the east.

All this turned out to be a deception and on September 6 Ukraine launched a more powerful surprise offensive in the northeast (Kharkiv province). Many Russian units panicked and fled when they realized they might be surrounded. This included units falling apart with troops abandoning tanks and other major items of equipment.

By the 11th Russia announced it was withdrawing from Kharkiv province.

The offensive spread to Donbas, causing a retreat from several towns that had come under Russian control in 2014. The offensive kept going in Kharkiv province with Ukrainian troops reaching the Russian border in many places.

Meanwhile the southern (Kherson province) offensive began on August 29th as a distraction, then expanded as Russian units panicked when they realized that Ukrainian HIMARS vehicles carrying GMLRS guided missiles were destroying the remaining bridges on the Dnieper River and trapping thousands of Russian troops.

The Ukrainian missiles also hit Russian supply storage sites leaving the trapped troops without ammunition, fuel and other supplies.

Ukrainian forces are now attacking on a broad front and expect to control all of Kherson province by the end of the year. This means major losses for the Russian in terms of troops captured or driven out of the area.

In addition, Ukraine will control most of the water supply for the Crimean Peninsula and control territory close enough to the Kerch Strait bridge to damage or destroy it with missiles or airstrikes. The Kerch Strait bridge was completed in 2014 at a cost of nearly four billion dollars. It is the main supply route between Russia and Crimea.

The only other rail line runs from Donbas to Crimea and is under attack by Ukrainian partisans.

Russia troop losses are another problem. Russia is unable to recruit enough troops to replace losses and a recent leaked report from the Russian Ministry of Finance completed in late August gave the Russian army’s “special military operations” in Ukraine some death toll numbers.

According to this report, the Russian government needs to allocate 361 billion rubles for the pensions of the fallen Russian troops, an average of about 7 million rubles per person, and a total of 48,759 dead.

Ukrainian military intel currently puts the Russian dead at about 54,000, a number many Westerners dismiss as inflated. Another Russian weakness that is largely ignored by Western media is the degree of corruption in the Russian military.

This has led to chronic shortages of essential supplies and equipment for the troops. This was particularly the case with thousands of Russian “reserve” troops recruited and financed by individual provinces. The central government ordered this mobilization but many provinces were unable to comply.

Those that did sent volunteers who were too old or out of shape for military service.

These men were attracted by the high bonuses and monthly pay promised. Those that survived their two months in Ukraine found that the money has not been deposited in their bank accounts as promised.

Conscripts are banned by law from serving combat outside Russia. Conscripts have also learned to avoid the deceptive offers to become a better paid contract soldier because it would make them eligible for service in Ukraine.

All this means Russia cannot obtain enough new troops to replace heavy losses in Ukraine. Ukrainian and NATO electronic monitoring of Russian communications confirms that replacements are lacking for troops lost (killed, wounded or captured) in combat.

Russian commanders are also concerned about their supply situation. They are not receiving enough ammunition, especially artillery shells and rockets. Food, clothing and medical supplies are inadequate, especially now that winter is coming and most of the troops will be at the front, not in barracks or other housing.

Hunger, cold and a lack of fire (artillery) support makes troops more willing to desert or surrender at the first opportunity.

Since this report Putin has issued orders to mobilize 300,000 men to serve in the military. The order has resulted in numerous protests and a mass exodus of young men fleeing Russia. Few want to fight in Putin's quixotic war.

There's more information at the link. Here's a map that shows the status of forces as of 9/21:

A Proposal for Deterrence

As his troops suffer battlefield defeats, poor morale and disarray, and as his critics in Russia have suffered a sudden outbreak of falling out of windows, heart attacks and other unfortunate accidents, Vladimir Putin has not-so-subtly threatened to resort to nuclear weapons to salvage some semblance of victory from his ill-conceived invasion of Ukraine.

Determining what would deter a desperate Mr. Putin is a difficult undertaking, but a retired Navy captain named Jerry Hendrix offers a persuasive proposal at National Review.

He argues that any effective deterrence requires the threat of the use of force and that it must be made unequivocally clear to Mr. Putin that,

The West should respond together in a clear NATO declaration: Any introduction of nuclear weapons, or for that matter any weapons of mass destruction, on the European plain will result in a full response from the alliance. NATO aircraft will not just establish a no-fly zone, but rather instantly come to the aid of Ukrainian forces and go on the offensive against Russia.

NATO ships will quickly move to sink any Russian ships at Ukrainian ports or operating in the Black or Baltic Seas. Likewise, it will blockade any ships in Russian ports.

Meanwhile, NATO troops, who have been quietly pre-positioned in the east over the past seven months, will enter Ukraine.

Lastly, key Russian military positions — including command-and-control nodes, fuel dumps, and ammunition depots that sit on the Russian side of the Ukrainian border — will be eliminated.

Only by being this stark can we hope to deter a panicked man at the end of his rope.

It must be made “clearer than truth” — as the great Democrat secretary of state Dean Acheson said at the beginning of the Cold War — to those near and around Putin, that should they choose wholesale war, what follows automatically will be upon their heads.

The big question is whether Mr. Biden would have the kidney for such measures and, if so, whether Congress would endorse them.

Commitment to America

One of the criticisms that Democrats have employed against Republicans is that they have no platform, no ideas, going into the November elections.

Notwithstanding, the Democrats' platform is itself pretty thin. They seem to be running on three issues, none of which is very important to most voters - abortion on demand, climate change and January 6th.

In fact, some Democrat candidates are actually running against the policies of their own president. John Fetterman, running for the Senate in Pennsylvania, has an ad out in which he says we have to do something about inflation and high middle class tax rates, both of which are a consequence of Mr. Biden's policies.

Other Democrats are complaining about the situation on the border and the threat posed by China.

Unfortunately, should these candidates win in November, House and Senate leadership will cudgel them into line, and the concerns expressed in the campaign will almost certainly be shoved down the memory hole.

In any case, the GOP leadership has just released their platform, which they call a "Commitment to America." Here's a synopsis:

First, the “Commitment to America” addresses the number one issue facing the American people — the economy. Its plan will reduce inflation. It will make our country energy independent again and lower the cost of gas.

It will strengthen our supply chain by bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. and putting American workers and businesses first. It will counter the genuine threat posed by Communist China.

Second, “The Commitment to America” will make our towns and communities safer. It will support and fund our police against the radical Left’s “Defund the Police” movement. It will stand against woke prosecutors who put violent criminals back onto our streets.

It will secure the border, finish the wall, and stop the flow of fentanyl, drugs, and gangs into our country through the southern border. It also renews America’s commitment to our men and women in uniform and reaffirms our commitment to “peace through strength.”

Third, “The Commitment to America” upholds the ideals of our Founding Fathers that America is a country built on freedom. That includes the freedom of parents to know what’s being taught in their children’s schools.

The freedom to ask whether American history is being taught correctly. And the freedom of every American to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech and not be censored by big tech leftist billionaires and their mainstream media liberal mouthpieces.

Finally, “The Commitment to America” will return our nation to the concept that government is to be of the people, by the people, and for the people. Gone will be the days when people who question school boards are branded as threats. Gone will be the time when the government is weaponized against its own people.

We will drain the swamp. We will strengthen the integrity of our elections, so it is easy to vote and hard to cheat. And we will strengthen Social Security and Medicare, so no one will question whether those programs will be there for them when they retire

. This is an attractive framework, but it's just a framework. The difficulties are in the details. It'll be interesting to see exactly how the GOP will execute these proposals, especially since even if they win control of both the House and the Senate, Mr. Biden can, and probably will, veto most or all of it.

The question is, why would he want to?

The Astonishing Stork's Bill

The John 10:10 Project has produced some wonderful videos, beautifully shot and compelling in the case they make for a mind behind the universe and life.

The short video below is no exception.

It illustrates the mechanism by which seeds of a flower called the stork's bill burrow into the soil.

That may sound simple, but when you realize how many adaptations must have occurred in this one species to enable this "behavior" to occur, and when it's remembered that naturalistic evolution is an unguided process that has no goal in mind, it seems incredible a plant would evolve this means of propagation when it could have distributed its seeds just like any other flowering plant does.

In other words, there's no particular survival need for this very complex mode of reproduction, so how did it arise? How did the mindless process of mutation and natural selection produce it?

Think about those questions as you watch.

Male/Female Equality

There's a kind of thinking prevalent in our contemporary culture which might be called "egalitarian absolutism." It goes something like this:

Men and women are equal, therefore men and women are not different in any significant fashion. Therefore, there's no justification for discriminating between men and women so there's no justification for segregating them by sex.

Thus, women and men should be given equal access to the same public spaces like rest rooms and locker rooms.

And, since men and women are equal, what's true of men is also true of women and vice versa. Therefore, if women can get pregnant then so can men, and if men don't get pregnant as often as women it's unfair to women so women should be allowed to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

And, since men and women are equal, they should have equal opportunities. There's no justification for preventing women from participating in men's sports and also no justification for preventing men from competing in women's sports, and it's sexist to think that women can't do just as well as men in athletics.

The absurdity of all of this, one might think, should be obvious but apparently it's not.

The absurdity arises out of two assumptions: First, that gender equality is pretty much the same as racial equality and second, that "equality" means "the same in all aspects of life."

Neither assumption is true, but the ideologues who promote these ideas are invariably simplistic thinkers. For them, the concept of "equal" means "equal in everything," regardless of the facts.

It should go without saying, for example, that anyone who has ever participated in athletics knows intuitively and as a matter of empirical observation that men and women are not physically "equal," but a couple of Duke University researchers nevertheless took the trouble of compiling the data.

Their research confirms what anyone not completely in thrall to a mindless progressive ideology would already anticipate. The authors, Doriane Lambelet Coleman and Wickliffe Shreve, write:

If you know sport, you know this beyond a reasonable doubt: there is an average 10-12% performance gap between elite males and elite females. The gap is smaller between elite females and non-elite males, but it’s still insurmountable and that’s ultimately what matters.

Translating these statistics into real world results, we see, for example, that: Just in the single year 2017, Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Tori Bowie's 100 meters lifetime best of 10.78 seconds was beaten 15,000 times by men and boys.

The same is true of Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Allyson Felix’s 400 meters lifetime best of 49.26. Just in the single year 2017, men and boys around the world outperformed her more than 15,000 times.

This differential isn’t the result of boys and men having a male identity, more resources, better training, or superior discipline. It’s because they have an androgenized body.

The very best female athletes, given the best training resources and economic support, were outperformed thousands of times not only by adult males but by non-elite high school males.

For example, in 2017 the best time ever recorded by an elite female runner in the 400 meter run was bested by 285 boys under the age of 18 at least once.

Of course, men over 18 did even better. In the same year, 4,341 men beat the best time ever recorded by a female in the 400 meter run at least once.

The figures for other track and field events are similar. I encourage interested readers to peruse the charts that Coleman and Wickliffe include in their report.

Some might find the numbers shocking since they completely undermine the sort of propaganda about sex and gender that we often hear, but they're really just what common sense would lead one to expect.

What the response of those who insist that women can compete against men in athletics will be is hard to predict, but it wouldn't be surprising if they start demanding that if women are not athletically equal to men then any sport in which the disparity is a factor, like track and field or basketball, should be abolished since it's discriminatory and sexist.

That's how these folks evidently think.

Repressive Tolerance

A friend wrote recently quoting a VP post from a couple of years ago and it occurred to me that the post is as relevant today as it was then. So, here it is, slightly updated:

There's lots of talk nowadays about "tolerance," although the conversation has morphed quite a bit from what it was just a couple of years ago. It used to be that we were enjoined by progressives to be tolerant of those who disagreed with us, who held political or religious opinions at variance with our own or who adopted a lifestyle that others may have thought immoral.

Now the talk in progressive circles is all about what Herbert Marcuse back in the 60s was promoting as "repressive tolerance."

Marcuse argued that tolerance and freedom of speech should not extend to those who hold retrograde political views, views that other groups find offensive or harmful. He insisted that freedom of speech was a subterfuge that elites employed to enable them to maintain power and as such should not be accorded the cherished status that has traditionally been conferred upon it.

In the educational sphere, in particular, Marcuse wrote that measures of repressive tolerance,

...would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.

In other words, if you believe in maintaining a strong military defense, if you believe that America is the greatest country ever to grace the planet, or if you think it's absurd to suggest that men can get pregnant or should be able to use women's rest rooms, you should be denied the ability to voice your views.

This, in good Orwellian fashion, Marcuse labels genuine freedom of thought. He goes on to write that,

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.

And when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual...the efforts to counteract his dehumanization must begin...with stopping the words and images which feed his consciousness.

To be sure, this is censorship, even precensorship, but openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship that permeates the free media.

So, if tolerance means that people should be allowed to argue against what Marcuse thought to be a better form of life, in his case Marxism coupled with sexual freedom, then those arguments should be repressed. People must not be exposed to well-reasoned arguments if those arguments may be so cogent as to persuade the hearer to reject the ideology of the left.

Marcuse made this case in 1965 in an essay titled Repressive Tolerance, but it's bearing fruit today in social media, the academy, and news organizations like the New York Times where any opinion that wanders beyond the bounds of acceptable progressive orthodoxy is quashed.

One of the arguments that the progressive left makes in support of "repressive tolerance" - which is, ironically, a fascist notion - is based on a misuse of a footnote in philosopher Karl Popper's famous 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies. John Sexton at HotAir.com cites a footnote in the book that some leftists have seized upon to promote repression of deviant ideas and street violence. Sexton explains:

[Popper's] idea was pretty simple: If society is completely tolerant, then the intolerant will rule society because there will be no one willing to stand up to their intolerance. Therefore, it is sometimes necessary for a tolerant society to be intolerant toward those who are themselves intolerant....

You can probably see how this plays into certain Antifa arguments about “punching Nazis” and using street violence against the intolerant.

Popper called this the paradox of tolerance: "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

Popper added, however, that,

In this formulation, I do not imply...that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.

In other words, as long as people are willing to debate and discuss and have conversations about their disagreements, as long as they don't seek to impose their views by violent means, we must insist on tolerance and the free and unfettered exchange of ideas.

It's only when people opt for violent coercion that tolerance comes to an end.

Here's Popper:

But we should claim the right to suppress them [those who eschew dialogue and resort instead to force] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

The fascist left, including Antifa, seizes on this as a justification not only for suppressing contrary ideas but also for violence, yet it's pretty clear that Popper was claiming that resort to violence is justified only when the other side refuses to engage in fair debate and chooses instead to substitute "fists and pistols" for reason and logic.

It's also pretty clear that it's the extremists on both left and right in our current social landscape who fit the profile of those of whom Popper was speaking.

The extremist rejects argument because at some level he knows that neither facts nor reason are on his side. He senses the rational inadequacy of his position so he rejects reason and rationality rather than give up his position or subject it to rational scrutiny.

The only truth he recognizes is whatever he feels most strongly to be true, and since his feelings are self-authenticating and self-validating there's no point in debating them. He needs only to force you to accept his "truth," and if you refuse then you must be compelled, with violence, if necessary, to submit.

After all, if you disagree with the progressive left then you must be a racist bigot, and you should be silenced or have your face smashed. If you disagree with the extremist right then you must be part of the conspiracy to undermine America and you deserve to get stomped on.

That's unfortunately where we are today in America.

Machines Will Never be Human

In a post on Artificial Intelligence last July I wrote that:

A lot of people do believe that computers will one day surpass human beings in terms of what they can do and will, in fact, be superhuman. Computer engineer Robert J. Marks explains why this concern is misguided in his very interesting book Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will.

According to Marks computers will never be human no matter how impressive their abilities may be. No machine will ever be able to match what humans are capable of.

Computers can impressively manipulate facts. They have knowledge, but as Marks explains on page 16 there's a difference between knowledge and intelligence:

Knowledge is having access to facts. Intelligence is much more than that. Intelligence requires a host of analytic skills. It requires understanding: the ability to recognize humor, subtleties of meaning and the ability to untangle ambiguities.

He writes:

Artificial Intelligence has done many remarkable things....But will AI ever replace attorneys, physicians, military strategists, and design engineers, among others?

The rest of the book is an entertaining explanation of why the answer is no.

In short, computers can only do what they're programmed to do and programs consist of algorithms developed by human agents. No one, however, can write an algorithm for the host of qualities and capabilities that humans have. They're non-algorithmic and thus non-computable.

See the post linked above for a partial list of what humans can do that machines will never be able to do.

Now the Discovery Institute has come out with a ten minute video as part of their Science Uprising series that's based on Marks' book and features him reiterating this same important point.

If you haven't seen any other videos in the series you might wonder about the Guy Fawkes mask worn by one of the characters. The masks have come to symbolize those who rebel against the current Zeitgeist, which, in the case of the Science Uprising series, is naturalistic materialism.

Here's the video:

True for Me but Not for You

Perhaps the most calamitous of the casualties of our postmodern age is the loss of belief in objective truth.

The notion that all truth, except, perhaps, for mathematical truths, is conditioned by race, gender and economic class has become axiomatic in contemporary discourse. What's true for you, we often hear, isn't true for me. The underlying assumption is that truth is socially constructed and subjective, and that each of us possesses our own personal truth.

I ask students in my classes for a show of hands of those who believe that something can be true for them but not for me, and it frequently happens that over half the class raises a hand.

These students, I believe, are a victim of muddled thinking. When I then ask them to give me an example of something that's true for them but not true for me they'll often say something like, "I'm 19 and you're not," or "I was born in Europe, but you were born in the U.S."

What they don't see in the examples they give is that if it's true for them that they are 19 years old then it's true for everyone that they are 19 years old. How could it be true for Joe that he's 19 but not true for Mary that Joe is 19? How could it be true for Mary that she was born in Europe but not true for Joe that Mary was born in Europe?

As I said, this is muddled. If it's true that Mary was born in Europe then it's an objective truth. It's not just true for Mary, it's true for everyone.

What I think the students really mean to say is that there are things that are true about them that are not true about others. This, of course, is quite right, but it's an entirely different proposition.

Here's another illustration of the same confusion. Sometimes we hear people say, in a rather inchoate way, that, "It's true for Joe that God exists, but it's not true for me." But, if it's true for Joe that God exists, then it's true for everyone that God exists. How could it not be? God doesn't just exist for some people and not for others.

What the speaker is actually trying to say is that, "It's true that Joe believes that God exists, but it's not true that I believe that God exists." This might well be so, but it's a different claim altogether. Moreover, if it's true that Joe believes that God exists then it's objectively true for everyone that Joe believes that God exists.

God's existence or non-existence is an objective state of affairs. His existence is not contingent upon whether anyone believes or doesn't believe He exists.

The notion that everyone has his or her own truth is really quite absurd. All of us may have our own opinions, our own beliefs, our own memories or our own eye color, etc. but no one has his own truth. Whatever is true for any of us is objectively true for all of us, even if it's not true about all of us.

The notion that truth is subjective, that it's whatever we feel strongly, and that my truth isn't necessarily your truth is a product of intellectual carelessness foisted upon us by the postmodern embrace of subjectivity. The sooner we all get over it the better off we'll be for it.

November's Vote

A friend whose political views are almost diametrically opposed to my own wrote to me recently about the upcoming midterm elections. In the course of making some valid points against the Republican candidates for statewide office he said that,

I've never been a single issue voter but I am now.... I'd vote for almost anyone who is other than those who are typical Republicans these days. And would exhort others to as well.

By "others" I think he meant me. I don't know if I'm a "typical" Republican or what a typical Republican even is, but I thought I owed my friend an explanation for my particular preference in this election so I wrote him the following apologia.

You may agree or disagree with some or all of it. Feel free to express your thoughts (courteously) via email. Here's my reply (slightly edited):

It's hard to argue with what you wrote in your recent email. I appreciate the stance you articulated in your "rant." I agree, for instance, that Oz and Mastriano are both unfortunate nominees, I voted for neither of them in the primaries and was very disappointed that they both won.

So, rather than debate the points you make let me simply explain why I nevertheless have to vote for the Republicans in this, and every election in the foreseeable future, for the sake of the country.

The way our political system is constructed we don't vote for a person so much as we vote for a party. Individual politicians only matter insofar as they give their party a majority or are at least in positions of party leadership.

Set aside, for a moment, [Democratic senatorial candidate] John Fetterman's character. If he wins in November the Democrats stand a good chance of controlling the senate and that would be calamitous, in my view, for the nation.

President Biden would have a free hand in appointing radical judges and may even get select another Supreme Court Justice flummoxed by being asked to explain what a woman is.

The senate majority would be dominated by a party a large portion of which consists of those who believe that abortion should be allowed at any point up to birth and even afterward, that men can get pregnant, that children should be mutilated in order to satisfy their gender confusion, that drag shows for children are harmless fun, that matters of sexual expression and orientation should be taught to elementary school children, that young white children should be inculcated with the conviction that they're indelibly and irredeemably racist, that sexually explicit books belong in elementary school libraries, and that parents who complain to their school boards about any of this should be designated domestic terrorists by the DOJ.

It's a party which has devastated one of the best economies in history through profligate spending and regulation, and which is mortgaging our future in their myopic opposition to fossil fuels and nuclear power before green energy becomes available and cheap.

It's a party which has created chaos on our southern border - has essentially done away with the border altogether - and then lies to us about it, assuring us that the border is "secure."

It's a party which perpetuates poverty by forcing poor kids into miserable schools and denying them an opportunity to go to effective private or charter schools.

And it's a party that has sought at every opportunity to curtail the first amendment rights of free speech and freedom of religion as well as the second amendment right to protect ourselves from the army of criminals that they've allowed to take over our streets.

Electing someone like John Fetterman to that body would simply ensure that the rate of cultural and economic decline accelerates.

Fetterman is radically pro-choice, he's in favor of open borders, he opposes school choice for the poor even though he sent his own kids to private schools. He never had a real job until he was elected mayor of Braddock, PA, living off his parents' wealth for much of his adult life.

In an act reminiscent of the Ahmaud Abrery tragedy, he once grabbed a shotgun, jumped into his pickup and chased down an innocent black jogger who he mistakenly thought had fired a gun. He then held the man at gunpoint until the police arrived.

He accosted that particular man, evidently, for no other reason than that he was black. It would be interesting to hear his reply were he asked to tell us what he would've done had the jogger just ignored him and kept on running.

His plan to reduce the prison populations by a third shows the kind of judgment he has. He once promoted the release from prison of a man who brutally hacked another man to death with garden shears and who was subsequently given a life sentence.

Mr. Fetterman actually voted for the man's release when he chaired the Board of Pardons.

He supports increased funding of public schools but was delinquent in his own personal school taxes for years.

Woodland Hills School District, which serves the town of Braddock, placed nearly three-dozen tax liens against Mr. Fetterman totaling $18,692 for unpaid property taxes from 2006 to 2019.

Add to all that the complete irrelevance of some of his ads, like the one claiming that "Oz wouldn't last two hours in Braddock." So what if Oz isn't a tough guy like the hoodied Fetterman? What does that have to do with being a senator?

Say what you will about Oz, one thing he's demonstrated is that he's smart and has done a lot of good for people in his medical career. He developed several surgical devices used in cardio-thoracic surgery and has performed numerous successful heart transplants.

I don't know that Fetterman has ever accomplished anything comparable to what Oz has.

Finally (although I'm sure I'm leaving something out), Fetterman refuses to put himself in front of the public by debating Oz until well after a lot of mail-in ballots have already been cast. He and his people know he's a weak candidate, that a recent stroke has severely affected his ability to think and speak clearly, and are counting on the media to cover for his debility like they did for Mr. Biden's cognitive difficulties in 2020.

To be sure, Dr. Oz is a carpetbagger, a publicity hound and a political novice, but even so he's in my opinion an immeasurably better choice than Mr. Fetterman, and keeping the senate out of the hands of the progressive left is an outcome the good of which far outweighs all of Dr. Oz's faults.

The Political Spectrum

An important election is seven weeks away and we'll probably be hearing a lot of talk about liberals and conservatives, socialists and libertarians. Unfortunately for those new to the political scene or just casual observers the terms are rarely defined so their meanings are often poorly understood.

I thought it might be helpful to correct this lack of understanding by rerunning a post (slightly edited) that's been featured on VP during other election seasons, and which explains some basic differences between the various political ideologies:

Probably one reason a lot of people steer clear of politics is that they find the ideological labels (as well as words like ideological itself) to be confusing. Terms like left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, fascism, socialism, and communism are thrown around a lot by our punditry, but they're rarely accompanied by any explanation of what they mean.

This post will try to correct that omission so that as we get closer to the election readers might have a somewhat better understanding of what they're reading and hearing.

For starters, let's define a political ideology as the set of principles which guide and inform one's social, economic, and foreign policies. It's a kind of political worldview. All the terms listed above denote various political ideologies.

The following diagram will give us a frame of reference to talk about these terms:

Let's start on the right side of the spectrum and define the terms going right to left. Each of them expresses a different understanding of the role of government in our lives and a different understanding of the rights citizens possess vis a vis the state.

I have one quibble, though, with the diagram. I personally don't think either anarchy or mob rule belong on it since neither is a stable ideology. They both either evaporate or they morph into communism or fascism.

With that said, let's consider the remaining elements of the spectrum:

Libertarianism: This is the view that the role of government should be limited largely to protecting our borders and our constitutionally guaranteed rights. Libertarians believe that government should, except when necessary to protect citizens, stay out of our personal lives and out of the marketplace.

They are also very reluctant to get involved in foreign conflicts.

Senator Rand Paul is perhaps the most well-known contemporary libertarian politician. The late Ayn Rand (who wrote Atlas Shrugged and for whom Rand Paul is named) is a well-known libertarian novelist.

Conservatism: Conservatives tend to lean toward libertarianism in some respects, particularly in their belief in free markets, but see a somewhat more expansive role for government. The emphasis among conservatives is on preserving traditional values and the Constitution and also upon diffusing governmental authority from the federal government in Washington and giving it back to the states and localities.

They're reluctant to change the way things are done unless it can be shown that the change is both necessary and has a good chance of improving the problem the change is intended to address.

Conservatives take a strict view of the Constitution, interpreting it to mean pretty much precisely what it says, and oppose attempts to alter it by judicial fiat. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are judicial conservatives.

Conservatives also oppose government interference in the market by over-regulation and oppose high tax rates as being counter-productive.

They generally oppose illegal immigration and believe in a strong national defense, but, though more willing to use force abroad when our interests can be shown to be threatened, are nevertheless leery of foreign adventures. Senator Ted Cruz is a contemporary conservative politician, and the late William F. Buckley is a well-known conservative writer.

Moderates: Moderates tend to be conservative on some issues and liberal on others. They see themselves as pragmatists, willing to do whatever works to make things better.

They tend to be non-ideological (although their opponents often interpret that trait as a lack of principle). President George W. Bush was a moderate politician and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan would be an example of a moderate journalist.

Liberalism: Liberals endorse an expansive role for government. They take a loose view of the Constitution, interpreting it according to what they think the Founders would say if they wrote the document today.

They tend to think that traditional values shackle us to the past and that modern times and problems require us to throw off those impediments. They agree with libertarians that government should stay out of our personal lives, but they believe that government must regulate business and tax the rich and middle classes to subsidize the poor.

They tend to hold a very strong faith in the power of government to solve our problems, a faith that conservatives and libertarians think is entirely unwarranted by experience. President Joe Biden presented himself as a liberal in his 2020 campaign although he has moved considerably to the left since then.

Progressivism: Progressivism can be thought of as hyper-caffeinated liberalism. Most prominent members of today's Democratic party are progressives as are many in the mainstream media and on cable networks like CNN and MSNBC. Progressives often tend to see the Constitution as an obstacle to progress.

Whereas conservatives view the Constitution as a document which protects individual rights, progressives see it as an archaic limitation on the ability of government to promote social and economic justice. They tend to be indifferent to, or even disdainful of, traditional values and institutions such as marriage, family, and religion.

Progressives are essentially socialists who are reluctant, for whatever reason, to call themselves that. A humorous depiction of progressivism can be found here. Former President Barack Obama and former candidate Hillary Clinton are progressives as is current VP Kamala Harris.

Socialism: As stated in the previous paragraph, socialists are progressives by another name. Both progressives and socialists desire that power be located in a strong central government (they're sometimes for this reason referred to by their opponents as "statists.") and both wish for government to be involved in our lives "from cradle to the grave" (see this ad which ran in an earlier presidential campaign). They favor very high tax rates by which they hope to transfer wealth to poorer communities and reduce the disparity in income between rich and poor.

Perhaps one difference between socialists and progressives is that though both would allow corporations and banks to be privately owned, socialists would impose more governmental control over these institutions than progressives might. Senator Bernie Sanders is an example of a contemporary socialist and Venezuela is an example of a socialist country.

Fascism: Typically fascism is considered an ideology of the right, but this is a mistake. Fascism, like communism, is a form of totalitarian socialism. Indeed, the German Nazis as well as the Italian fascists of the 1930s were socialists (The Nazi party was in fact the National Socialist Party).

Fascism is socialist in that while fascists permit private ownership of property and businesses, the state maintains ultimate control over them. Fascism is usually militaristic, nationalistic, and xenophobic. It is totalitarian in that there is usually only one party, and citizens have few rights.

There is no right to dissent or free speech, and fascists are prone to the use of violence to suppress those who do not conform. Those on the far left on campus who shout down speakers and professors whose message they don't like are, unwittingly perhaps, adopting fascistic tactics.

Paradoxically, so is Antifa, which is shorthand for "anti-fascist."

Communism: Like fascism, communism is totalitarian and socialist, but it's a more extreme brand of socialism. Under communism there is no private ownership. The state owns everything.

Moreover, communism differs from fascism in that it is internationalist rather than nationalist, and it traditionally didn't promote a militaristic culture, although it certainly doesn't shy from the use of military force and violence to further its goals. Like fascism, communism does not permit free speech, and those who dissent are executed or cruelly imprisoned.

Few completely communist nations remain today, though throughout much of the twentieth century the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and many other Asian and African states were all communist. Today North Korea may be the only thoroughly communist nation.

Scarcely any contemporary politicians would admit to being communists though some of Barack Obama's close associates and friends over the years, such as Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, Van Jones, and mentor Frank Marshall Davis are, or were, all communists.

Senator Bernie Sanders denies being a communist but he has throughout his life been sympathetic to communist governments, even spending his honeymoon in the old Soviet Union.

I hope this rather cursory treatment of the various points on the political spectrum will be helpful as you seek to make sense of what you're seeing, hearing and reading over the next month and a half.

Sharpshooter

The 8:00 minute video below captures the amazing abilities of a fish known as the Archerfish.

As you watch the video ask yourself how many structural and behavioral changes needed to occur in order for this fish to be able to do what it does. How many algorithmic changes had to be made in the neural wiring in the fish's brain just to enable it to adjust for the refraction of the light coming from the prey or to adjust the stream of water to adjust for distance?

Could all of the necessary mutations in the organism's genome have occurred by serendipity or does the Archerfish's incredible ability not point instead to intentional design?

Ask yourself as you watch which is a priori (that is, setting aside any prior commitment one way or another) a more plausible explanation for this phenomenal behavior, chance or intelligent engineering and programming:

Hispanics Are Finding a Home on the Right

I made the claim on VP yesterday that those, like our vice-president, who cynically insist that the border is secure while allowing millions of immigrants to cross it illegally have one of two goals in mind.

Either they're counting on the massive influx to give the Democratic party a massive majority in perpetuity or their hoping that the sheer volume of immigrants will so overload our institutions - schools, hospitals, courts, prisons, etc. - that our system will collapse under the weight.

It's possible, of course, that some are hoping for both outcomes.

Anyone who is skeptical of the above might try a thought experiment.

Imagine that everyone of these immigrants has sworn to vote Republican. What do you think the response of congressional Democrats would be? Would they not be demanding that the flow of migrants be stopped by whatever means necessary?

Actually, the thought experiment may not be too far from reality as this Wall Street Journal article by Aaron Zitner and Bryan Mena suggests:

A WSJ analysis shows that Latino communities drifted toward the Republican Party in the last presidential election. If the trend continues, it could mark a dramatic change for America’s two major political parties.

Latino voters are among the fastest-growing groups in the electorate, accounting for some 16 million voters in 2020—or more than 10% of the voter pool. Once a solidly Democratic bloc, Latino voters are emerging as a swing group available to both parties, with its voting preferences splitting along economic and class lines.

In 2020, Latino voters who backed one of the two major candidates gave Mr. Biden 63% of their vote, according to a detailed analysis by Catalist, a Democratic voter-data firm. That was 8 percentage points lower than Mr. Biden’s party had won four years earlier.

The movement away from Mr. Biden’s party was even larger—some 11 points—among Latinos who are working class, commonly defined as those without a four-year college degree.

Voters and analysts say the economic boom during much of Mr. Trump’s presidency, as well as today’s high inflation under Mr. Biden, have continued to lead to a more favorable view of the Republican Party and helped change the perception in many families that it’s socially unacceptable to consider backing GOP candidates.

This is all bad news for Democrats. If Hispanics continue to move to the right it could mean the end of the Democratic party as a dominant national force since Hispanics and African-Americans are an essential part of the Democratic base.

“The feeling that the Democratic Party almost by default is going to have the Hispanic vote—it’s not like that anymore,’’ said Ally Magalhaes, a Brazilian immigrant and aesthetician who until recently ran a spa a few miles from the Oronoz family’s home. She backed Mr. Trump in 2020 after previously voting for Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Ms. Magalhaes said faith and family were important to her—areas where she feels more aligned with Republicans. “The Republican Party is the one that represents that strongly, and that’s who we are going to be sticking with, if the Democratic Party continues to impose their progressive agenda,” she said.

She moved her two children to a charter school after local leaders considered adopting a sex-education plan that she found too explicit.

In those neighborhoods where Latino residents account for 70% or more of the population, President Biden carried 75% of the vote, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of election results at the census-tract level. That was 7 percentage points less than Democrats had won in 2016.

A Wall Street Journal survey conducted in late August found that Latino voters would pick a Democratic candidate for Congress over a Republican by 11 percentage points. That’s a narrower lead than the 34-point advantage Democrats held in 2018, according to AP VoteCast.

The Journal poll also found that working-class Latino voters are more open to backing Republican candidates this fall than are those with college degrees. Latino voters without a four-year degree picked a Democratic candidate over a Republican by 6 percentage points, while Democrats led by 26 points among Latino voters with college degrees.

If the vote shift proves durable, it could undermine Democrats’ belief that the nation’s growing racial and ethnic diversity, along with the party’s gains among white voters with college degrees, would propel it to dominance in national politics.

For Republicans, big gains among Latino voters could help them accomplish a goal that many in the party came to embrace during Mr. Trump’s presidency: becoming a multiracial party of the nation’s working class.

So, since almost 100% of the Hispanic immigrants pouring across the border are working class, how long will the shift to the right among these people continue before we no longer hear calls for a "path to citizenship," and instead start to hear calls from Washington Democrats to seal the border?

The Border Wall Would've Been Cheap

During the last years of the Obama administration there were lots of arguments over whether we should or shouldn't build a wall on our southern border.

Opponents often said that walls don't work, or that they'd "send the wrong message" about "who we are," or that they'd be too expensive.

None of those arguments made sense. Israel's wall separating it from Gaza seems to be working just fine. Who we are and what message we should be sending is that we are a welcoming country to those who arrive legally and through the proper entry points.

No one thinks, after all, that you are somehow unwelcoming or uncompassionate because you lock your doors when leaving your home or your car. The only way "locking the doors" to the country is different is in terms of scale.

The argument that it would cost too much always seemed especially laughable given Washington's willingness to spend trillions on all sorts of things we don't need, won't help and only drive up inflation.

The "cost too much" argument just suffered another humiliating refutation with the release of data that show that since Mr. Biden took office, illegal immigration has cost taxpayers four billion dollars more than completing Mr. Trump's wall would've cost if Mr. Biden hadn't canceled it.

An article at HotAir cites a study done by The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) which found that the millions of new illegal aliens who have entered the country just since January of 2021 will place a more than twenty billion dollar burden on the system each year for the next ten years.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has crunched the numbers and calculated that,

The number of illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. since President Biden took office will cost the U.S. taxpayer over $20 billion each year, according to a new analysis by a hawkish immigration group.

The study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which advocates for lower levels of immigration overall, calculates that the illegal immigrants who have entered the U.S. since Jan. 2021 will add an extra $20.4 billion burden a year, in addition to the $140 billion existing illegal immigrants already cost.

The analysis is based on an estimated 1.3 million released into the U.S. by immigration officials, as well as approximately one million “gotaways” — or illegal immigrants who have slipped past overwhelmed agents.

FAIR calculates that each illegal immigrant costs $9,232 a year to support.

Aside from completing the wall, what else could that much money be used for? Here are some possibilities suggested in the article:

• Giving every homeless veteran in the U.S. $50K a year for the next 10 years.
• Hire 330,000 teachers
• Provide Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to more than 7 million extra families
• Provide every family earning less than $50K a year a $410 grocery voucher.

In any case, opposition to the wall makes very little sense. There seems to be only one reason that the left opposes it: If we open our southern border to everyone who wants to come in either one of two things will happen that'll please the left.

Either our institutions will be so overloaded by the demands placed upon them by millions of immigrants that they'll collapse bringing about the destruction of our semi-capitalist system and facilitating the shift to a socialist or communist takeover of our government, or all those immigrants will eventually be given citizenship and will reward the Democrat party by voting fo Democrat candidates, thus ensuring a permanent Democratic hegemony.

It's hard to come up with any other reason why the chaos, humanitarian tragedy and economic burden is allowed to continue.

Imprisoned in the Friend Zone

Hans Feine, writing at The Federalist a few years back, saw at the time a very serious social problem looming on the near horizon, and his solution is going to strike some readers as odd, maybe even comical, though he nevertheless makes an interesting point. It's a point also made by the famous writer C.S. Lewis.

First, the problem:

The latest numbers on American birth rates are in, and they yield only one reasonable conclusion: All of us need to start having more babies or else the upcoming demographic tsunami will consume our nation, cripple our social programs, and leave us with a future so bleak that our only source of joy will be the moment we’re chosen to receive the sweet, fatal kiss of the Obamacare Death Panels, the Trumpcare Firing Squads, or the OprahCare Hemlock Squadrons.

Perhaps I’m overstating the danger a bit, but the point remains: Americans need to raise our sagging birth rates. One of the best ways we can do so is by reversing the trend of Americans waiting longer to get married.

So, apart from tearing down America’s institutions of higher education, which tend to slow down the recitation of wedding vows, how do we do that? It’s quite simple. We tear down the Friend Zone.

So, what does Feine mean by the "Friend Zone"?

Every year, countless young men find themselves trapped in the Friend Zone, a prison where women place any man they deem worthy of their time but not their hearts, men they’d love to have dinner with but, for whatever reason, don’t want to kiss goodnight.

Being caught in the Friend Zone is an inarguable drag on fertility rates, as a man who spends several years pledging his heart to a woman who will never have his children is also a man who most likely won’t procreate with anyone else during that time of incarceration.

Free him to find a woman who actually wants to marry him, however, and he’ll have several more years to sire children who will laugh, create, sing, fill the world with love and, most importantly, pay into Social Security.

Feine then delivers himself of a claim that's going to strike many female readers as absurd although I think a lot of male readers might secretly agree with his defense of it:

Quite simply, for the sake of our future, the Friend Zone must be destroyed. For the Friend Zone to be destroyed, women must accept the following truths: you don’t have any guy friends and, in fact, you can’t have any guy friends.

Here's what he means by a "friend":

By “friends,” I don’t mean acquaintances or chummy colleagues you only see at work, or friends of friends that you don’t get together with outside of a group setting, or what I call buffer-zone friends—people of the opposite sex you can be friends with because there is a significant other in between to take the romantic element out of the equation.

Rather, by “friend” I mean someone you deliberately choose to spend one-on-one time with.

His argument is that guys who spend time with girls really, deep down inside, don't want to be "just friends." They want to date. Read the rest and see if you agree or disagree with Feine.

C.S. Lewis wrote in his book The Four Loves that men and women can't be friends without the relationship devolving (or evolving) into something more. He asserts that,

When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass - may pass in the first half hour - into erotic love.

Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other, or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later.

If you're interested in reading more about what Lewis says about friendship, some of which might sound painfully archaic to modern ears, see the series of VP posts from the archive dated 2/22/10, 2/23/10, and 2/25/10.

The Problem with Scientism

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 a philosophical claim. The claim itself is not subject to being tested through the methods of science. Thus, the basic 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, the law of sufficient reason, the principle of uniformity, 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 the belief 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.

Russian Humiliation

Last March an arrogant, amoral Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine. They thought it'd be a walkover, but they've come to realize how deeply mistaken they were.

Frustrated by a surprisingly competent Ukrainian military, trained and armed by the U.S. and other Western nations, the Russians were rebuffed, first in their attempt to take the capital, Kyiv, and then in their attempt to take eastern Ukraine.

Frustrated at their military impotence and incompetence they settled for artillery and aerial bombardments of Ukrainian cities and multiple atrocities visited upon civilians in the the towns they were able to capture.

In a U.N. report to journalists in Geneva, Switzerland it was stated that the conflict is now in its seventh month and there've been at least 14,059 civilian casualties to date, with 5,767 people killed and 8,292 injured.

These are lower estimates. The U.N. report stressed that the actual numbers are very likely to be considerably higher.

For its part, Russia has suffered approximately 80,000 casualties (killed or wounded), a catastrophic number that's more than half of the 150,000 men Russia deployed on the Ukrainian border in the February runup to the invasion.

Now the Russian army in the east seems to be collapsing under a rapid and withering assault by Kyiv's forces.

The WaPo reports that:

Ukrainian troops reclaimed more territory from Russia on Monday, pushing all the way back to the northeastern border in some places as part of a lightning advance that forced Moscow to make a hasty retreat from occupied land.

As blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags fluttered over newly liberated towns, the Ukrainian military said its troops had freed more than 20 settlements in 24 hours. In recent days, Kyiv’s forces have captured territory at least the size of greater London, according to the British Defense Ministry.

After months of little discernible movement on the battlefield, the momentum has lifted Ukrainian morale and provoked rare public criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war.

While Ukrainian cities began emerging from Russian occupation, a local leader alleged that the Kremlin’s troops had committed atrocities against civilians there similar to those in other places seized by Moscow.

Russian troop morale is doubtless abysmal, Russian military bloggers are furious at Russia's humiliation and amidst the Ukrainian jubilation at the comeuppance dealt to the Russians are fears of what a desperate and humiliated Vladimir Putin will do.

His only options at this point seem to be two: He can cut off all fuel exports to Europe and to try to subject NATO populations to a frigid winter to persuade them to stop helping the Ukrainians or he could resort to chemical and/or nuclear weapons.

If Putin decides to use low-yield tactical nuclear weapons or chemical agents, he will leave portions of Ukraine a devastated wasteland. If he employs an EMP weapon he will effectively destroy most electronic equipment in Ukraine.

The use of nuclear weapons would surely be a high risk gamble. Putin would chance mutiny among his own generals and security officials as well as guarantee that he'd be a pariah everywhere in the civilized world.

Yet, who knows what this man might do. I wrote back in February that I thought the costs of invasion would be so high that he ultimately wouldn't do it, but he did.

I'm thus very reluctant to say that he wouldn't use a nuclear weapon to try to salvage something from this unbelievably ill-conceived war, even if what he salvages is nothing more than revenge against those who have made him look like a fool and destroyed his reputation forever.

Does Science Lead to Atheism?

In an interview with philosopher of science Stephen Meyer some interesting statistics were cited.

Meyer noted that:

65% of professing atheists say that the findings of science make belief in God less probable. For agnostics, that number is in the 40s. 43% say that the findings of science make God less plausible.

And when we gave people a list of factors that were relevant in their decision to reject belief in God, the idea of undirected evolution was cited by 65% of the people who no longer believed in God, more than the number of people who cited pain, suffering, or disease.

Perhaps we might agree that if it could be shown that the universe was infinitely old and had no beginning, if it could be shown that the astonishing precision of the parameters, particles, force strengths, and constants that comprise the fabric of the universe were somehow necessitated by the Big Bang so that they couldn't be otherwise than what they are, if it could be shown that life could plausibly have emerged from non-life through purely natural processes unaided by intelligent agency, then the atheist might have some epistemic justification for his/her rejection of theism.

God might be seen, scientifically at least, as a superfluous hypothesis.

As things stand today, however, all cosmogenic theories posit a beginning to the universe and thus suggest a transcendent cause of the universe.

Also, no evidence exists for any explanation of the astronomical improbabilities of a universe emerging by chance with just the exact values for the forces, constants, subatomic particle properties, etc. that are necessary for a life-sustaining universe.

Moreover, no plausible explanation exists for how the enormous amounts of information required for the first living cell to appear could've come about through any purposeless, unguided process.

Thus, the hypothesis that the universe and life are the product of intentional, intelligent agency is at least as plausible, given the science that we have today, as the hypothesis that it's all a grand fluke.

Indeed, the fact that both fine-tuning and information are always, in our experience, the product of a mind, the existence of both of these in our universe points makes their origin in a mind an even more plausible hypothesis.

I wonder how many of those 65% of non-theists who believed that undirected evolution makes theism untenable are really aware of the science.

I wonder, too, how many of those who know the science still refuse to accept its implications because they simply don't want theism to be true.

A quote from philosopher Thomas Nagel comes to mind. Nagel wrote in his book The Last Word:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

For men like Nagel, belief in God is not a matter of evidence, it's a matter of one's will.

The Party of Science

Our Democrat friends often fancy themselves as members of the "party of science," waging battle against the forces of ignorance and superstition which they assume to abound on the right.

This charming conceit seems to be regularly refuted by facts but nevertheless persists as though it were impervious to any falsification.

The latest blow to the notion that Democrats are uniquely wedded to the hard realities of science comes in an online poll by WPA Intelligence conducted from August 22nd to the 25th. The poll found that 36% of white, college-educated female Democrats agreed with the statement that "Some men can get pregnant."

Overall, 22% of Democrats concurred.

This is astonishing. Over 1/5 of those who identify as members of the party of science are convinced that men can get pregnant even though such a prodigy has never been known to occur in all of human history, nor has anyone explained how it could occur.

It would be interesting to see the answers had the respondents been asked to outline the science behind their belief.

How, for instance, does a person without a uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries get pregnant? Has any male ever been born with this apparatus or had it transplanted into him? Do the 22% of Democrats think that these appurtenances are unnecessary in order to conceive a child?

Are they so biologically benighted that they think that all that's required for pregnancy is to somehow insert a fertilized egg into someone's abdomen.

The 22% are, in fact, exerting blind faith in an ideology that seeks to take the equality of the sexes to an absurd extreme. If men and women are "equal," the thinking evidently goes, then they're fundamentally the same, and if they're the same what's true of one must be true of the other.

Since it's true of women that they can get pregnant it must also be true of men that, despite the totality of scientific evidence to the contrary, they, too, must be able to get pregnant.QED

This is evidently the logic employed by over 1/5 of the members of the party of science.

I'm reasonably confident that many of these 22% of Democrats who insist that men can somehow, miraculously, conceive a child are secular folks who consider the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus to be absurd nonsense.

Miracles are apparently permitted in left-wing, secular progressive ideology, but it's completely unscientific and irrational to think that God could miraculously initiate a pregnancy.

It's very disconcerting to reflect on the fact that these people vote.

Update:

The Babylon Bee documents a case of a man who thought he was pregnant. Here's the video:

Understanding Naturalism (Part III)

This is the third and final installment in our series of reflections on Alex Rosenberg's essay entitled The Disillusioned Naturalist's Guide to Reality. Parts I and II can be read below.

In this section Rosenberg argues that naturalism entails that there is no need to posit the existence of a mind distinct from the brain. Mind is simply a word we use to describe the functioning of the brain, just as we use the word digestion to describe the functioning of the stomach.

This claim has some interesting consequences. If all we are is matter and the matter that makes us up is constantly changing, it follows that there is nothing about us that stays the same over time. In the final analysis human beings are reducible to little more than a constantly shifting and changing bundle of perceptions.

Here's Rosenberg:

Nevertheless, if the mind just is the brain (and scientism can’t allow that it is anything else), we have to stop taking consciousness seriously as a source of knowledge or understanding about the mind, or the behavior the brain produces. And we have to stop taking ourselves seriously too.

We have to realize that there is no self, soul or enduring agent, no subject of the first-person pronoun, tracking its interior life while it also tracks much of what is going on around us. This self cannot be the whole body, or its brain, and there is no part of either that qualifies for being the self by way of numerical-identity over time.

There seems to be only one way we make sense of the person whose identity endures over time and over bodily change. This way is by positing a concrete but non-spatial entity with a point of view somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears in the middle of our heads.

Since physics has excluded the existence of anything concrete but non-spatial, and since physics fixes all the facts, we have to give up this last illusion consciousness foists on us.

What are the consequences of denying that there is an enduring self? One consequence is surely the bizarre conclusion that we cannot be said to be the same person today that we were ten years ago. If we are in constant flux then we are a different individual than the one who went by our name in the past.

Now, if this is true it would be unjust to be held responsible for anything that other person did. In the same way that it would be unjust to expect you to keep the promises made by another person, it would be unjust to expect me to keep promises made years ago by a person who had my same name.

Marriage vows, for one example, would become worthless once people realized that it wasn't they who made them.

Furthermore, it would be unjust to punish criminals for a crime committed years ago because the person we're punishing is not the same person who committed the crime.

For those of you familiar with the movie Bourne Identity, we might ask this question: Is Jason Bourne responsible for the murder of that couple he killed in the movie if he has no memory of having killed them? Was it really he who killed them? Rosenberg would be hard pressed to explain how it would have been.

T.S. Eliot puts it like this: "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

This seems absurd, to be sure, but it is another of the consequences of naturalism that Rosenberg wants his fellow atheists to recognize and acknowledge. Little wonder that so many atheists are unwilling to stay with him on that metaphysical train all the way to it's logical endpoint.

They can see that the tracks logically terminate at a precipice and that the train is going to plunge over a cliff into the abyss of nihilism, and so, still clutching their naturalism, they jump off Rosenberg's train before it arrives at the cliff.

This is, of course, illogical, but perhaps the most illogical, irrational thing they do after having jumped off the train, after having made a completely arbitrary, unwarranted, and irrational leap in order to avoid hurtling over the cliff to which their logic leads them, they turn and point to the theists, particularly the Christian theists, whose worldview entails none of these problems, and tell them that it is they who have abandoned reason because they chose not to take the train at all.

One can only smile and shake one's head.

Understanding Naturalism (Part II)

This post is Part II (See Part I below) of our look at Alex Rosenberg's paper titled A Disillusioned Naturalist's Guide to Reality. In this section Rosenberg considers whether the universe and life reflect a purposeful design.

In other words, is there any purpose to either the cosmos or to human existence? Rosenberg's answer is, no:

[A]ll of the beautiful suitability of living things to their environment, every case of fit between organism and niche, and all of the intricate meshing of parts into wholes, is just the result of blind causal processes. It’s all just the foresightless play of [atomic particles] producing, in us conspiracy-theorists, the illusion of purpose.

He goes on to tackle the question whether morality can exist in a naturalistic world. He titles the section, Nice Nihilism: The Bad News About Morality and The Good News. I quote from it at length because it's unusual to find such an explicit statement of the consequences for morality entailed by atheistic naturalism:

If there is no purpose to life in general, biological or human for that matter, the question arises whether there is meaning in our individual lives, and if it is not there already, whether we can put it there. One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life.

People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours).

Besides morality as a source of meaning, value, or purpose, people have looked to consciousness, introspection, self-knowledge as a source of insight into what makes us more than the merely physical facts about us. Scientism [the belief that science can answer all life's important questions] must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why.

Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality.

There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon.

So, if scientism is to ground the core morality that every one (save some psychopaths and sociopaths) endorses, as the right morality, it’s going to face a serious explanatory problem.

The only way all, or most, normal humans could have come to share a core morality is through selection on alternative moral codes or systems, a process that resulted in just one winning the evolutionary struggle and becoming “fixed” in the population.

If our universally shared moral core were both the one selected for and also the right moral core, then the correlation of being right and being selected for couldn’t be a coincidence.

Scientism doesn’t tolerate cosmic coincidences. Either our core morality is an adaptation because it is the right core morality or it’s the right core morality because it’s an adaptation, or it’s not right, but only feels right to us.

It’s easy to show that neither of the first two alternatives is right. Just because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it right.

All this should be pretty disturbing to those atheists who want to hold on to moral obligation while denying any transcendent ground for it. It's also precisely correct given Rosenberg's atheistic starting point.

Thus far Rosenberg has drawn the proper conclusions from his naturalism, but then he says something odd. Having denied any ground for distinguishing between right and wrong, he says this:

This nihilistic blow is cushioned by the realization that Darwinian processes operating on our forbears in the main selected for niceness! The core morality of cooperation, reciprocity and even altruism that was selected for in the environment of hunter-gatherers and early agrarians, continues to dominate our lives and social institutions.

We may hope the environment of modern humans has not become different enough eventually to select against niceness. But we can’t invest our moral core with more meaning than this: it was a convenience, not for us as individuals, but for our genes.

There is no meaning to be found in that conclusion.

What does Rosenberg mean here by imposing a value on niceness, cooperation, and altruism? Would someone who was not nice or cooperative be wrong?

A naturalist like Rosenberg cannot say he would, nor do I think he would try to say that given that he has just asserted above that, "Just because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it right."

Such judgments of moral value are completely unwarranted in a naturalistic worldview except as expressions of personal taste.

Even more problematic is his claim that evolution has selected "in the main" for niceness, etc. I doubt that this is at all correct. Certainly this claim runs counter to human experience. There's just as much meanness and cruelty in the world as there is niceness.

That being the case, evolution must have selected at least as much for meanness as for niceness, and an atheistic naturalist simply has no grounds for saying that one is right and the other is wrong.

The most he can say is that he likes one more than he likes the other, but right and wrong are not established by our likes and dislikes.

More tomorrow.

Understanding Naturalism (Pt.I)

My classes are talking this week about the view of the world philosophers call Naturalism, so I thought it'd be good to repost a three part series on Naturalism that I wrote for VP few years ago. Here's Part I of the series:

Alex Rosenberg is an atheistic naturalist, a philosopher who holds that nature is all there is, there is no supernature. Rosenberg explains in an essay titled The Disenchanted Naturalist's Guide to Reality to provide an overview of what it is that naturalists believe.

He begins with this preface:

This is a précis of an argument that naturalism forces upon us a very disillusioned “take” on reality.

It is one that most naturalists have sought to avoid, or at least qualify, reinterpret, or recast to avoid its harshest conclusions about the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the significance of our consciousness self-awareness, and the limits of human self-understanding.

Rosenberg wishes to draw "the full conclusion from a consistently atheistic position," as Sartre put it in describing existentialism.

He will have none of the namby-pamby naturalism of those atheists, like Hitchens and Dawkins, who think they can reject God and still cling to belief that life is meaningful, that morality exists, and that truth can be known.

Rosenberg's is a full-blooded naturalism that recognizes that all of those things are contingent upon the existence of a transcendent moral authority. His essay is a call to his fellow atheists to "man-up" and disabuse themselves of their comfortable illusions.

No God, he avers, means no genuine meaning to life, no non-arbitrary morality, and no objective truth.

He divides his essay into eight topics, some of which will be addressed here at Viewpoint over the next couple of days. His first topic is an explication of "scientism," a term that is in some disrepute but which Rosenberg wants to resuscitate. Here's an excerpt:

We all lie awake some nights asking questions about the universe, its meaning, our place in it, the meaning of life, and our lives, who we are, what we should do, as well as questions about god, free will, morality, mortality, the mind, emotions, love. These worries are a luxury compared to the ones most people on Earth address.

But they are persistent. And yet they all have simple answers, ones we can pretty well read off from science....Scientism is my label for what any one who takes science seriously should believe, and scientistic is just an in-your face adjective for accepting science’s description of the nature of reality.

You don’t have to be a scientist to be scientistic.

Scientism is the view that answers to all important questions can be provided through scientific investigation. This is because everything that exists is simply some combination of matter and energy [This is a view called materialism].

Since science investigates matter and energy it will eventually find the answers to all our questions.

If one embraces naturalism [the belief that nature is all there is] then one is likely also to embrace scientism.

Rosenberg's claim here that science can answer all the important questions is surely wrong. It can't, for example, answer, or even address, the question whether we have a soul, whether there's life after death, whether altruism is morally superior to selfishness, whether God exists, what truth is, or a host of other very important matters which human beings frequently ponder.

In the next topic, titled The Nature Of Reality? Just Ask Physics Rosenberg gives a pretty clear statement of what materialists believe about the world:

What is the world really like? It’s fermions and bosons [subatomic particles], and everything that can be made up of them, and nothing that can’t be made up of them. All the facts about fermions and bosons determine or “fix” all the other facts about reality and what exists in this universe or any other if ... there are other ones.

Ideas have consequences. If Rosenberg is right in saying that all that exists is matter, energy and the forces between them then several conclusions inevitably follow. Those conclusions are the topic of the remaining sections of his paper.

We'll reflect upon them over the next several days.

The Art of God

Dante Aligheri, the author of The Divine Comedy, wrote that "Nature is the art of God."

It's certainly true that there's an astonishing degree of beauty in the natural world. In fact, there's so much in nature that's gorgeous, from microscopic diatoms to the exapnse of the Milky Way, that one wonders how it is, if we're simply the product of an evolutionary process that fits us for survival, we would have evolved such a keenly sensitive aesthetic sense.

If we're the products of a purely material evolutionary process why do we appreciate beauty? After all, an appreciation of beauty is hardly necessary for an animal to survive and produce offspring, so where does it come from? How did it evolve through some unintentional, mindless process?

No one seems to know.

Indeed, the fact that we do have an appreciation of beauty, beauty that often takes our breath away, points us, perhaps, to Dante's artist.

Here's a short video whose theme is the quote from Dante and which illustrates the beauty of the earth as seen from space. The photography is spectacular, and as you watch, and as you marvel at the stunningly glorious scenes, you might reflect on how your sense of beauty could've ever come about solely through unguided collisions of atoms.

Even the most thoroughly secular folks among us should at least contemplate the possibility that there's so much beauty on earth because the earth was painted, so to speak, by an incredibly talented artist, and we were designed to be able to appreciate the artist's work.

Raising the Minimum Wage

Note: This post is a rerun of one originally written just before the Covid-19 pandemic devastated the restaurant industry, but it's still relevant today:

On Labor Day perhaps it's appropriate to revisit the debate over raising the minimum wage.

On the surface raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour seems like a simple solution to help unskilled, poorly educated workers struggling with poverty, but, like most simple solutions, raising the minimum wage has unintended consequences that hurt the very people it's supposed to help.

An article by Ellie Bufkin at The Federalist explains how raising the minimum wage has actually harmed many workers, especially in the restaurant industry.

New York state, for example passed a law several years ago requiring that businesses offer mandatory paid family leave and pay every employee at least $15 an hour, almost twice the previous rate. The results were predictable and indeed were predicted by many, but the predictions went unheeded by the liberal New York legislature.

Bufkin uses as an illustration a popular Union Square café called The Coffee Shop which is closing its doors in the wake of the new legislation. The Coffee Shop employs 150 people, pays a high rent and under the Affordable Care Act must provide health insurance.

Now that the owner must pay his employees twice what he had been paying them he can no longer afford to stay in business:

Seattle and San Francisco led New York only slightly in achieving a $15 per hour minimum pay rate, with predictably bad results for those they were intended to help.

As Erielle Davidson discussed in these pages last year, instead of increasing the livelihood of the lowest-paid employees, the rate increase forced many employers to terminate staff to stay afloat because it dramatically spiked the costs of operating a business.

Understaffed businesses face myriad other problems [in addition to] wage mandates. Training hours for unskilled labor must be limited or eliminated, overtime is out of the question, and the number of staff must be kept under 50 to avoid paying the high cost of a group health-care package. 

The end result is hurting the very people the public is promised these mandates will help.

Of all affected businesses, restaurants are at the greatest risk of losing their ability to operate under the strain of crushing financial demands. They run at the highest day-to-day operational costs of any business, partly because they must employ more people to run efficiently.

In cities like New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco, even a restaurant that has great visibility and lots of traffic cannot keep up with erratic rent increases and minimum wage doubling.

When the minimum wage for tipped workers was much lower, employees sourced most of their income from guest gratuities, so restaurants were able to staff more people and provided ample training to create a highly skilled team. The skills employees gained through training and experience then increased their value to bargain for future, better-paying jobs.

Some businesses will lay off workers, cut back on training, not hire new workers or shut down altogether. A Harvard study found that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of any given restaurant folding. 

How does this help anyone other than those who manage to survive the cuts? 

When these businesses, be they restaurants or whatever, close down it's often in communities which are "underserved" to start with, and the residents of those communities wind up being more underserved than they were before the minimum wage was raised.

Moreover, raising the minimum wage makes jobs heretofore filled by teenagers and people with weak qualifications more attractive to other applicants who are at least somewhat better qualified.

Workers who would've otherwise shunned a lower wage job will be hired at the expense of the poorly educated and unskilled, the very people who most need the job in the first place and who were supposed to be helped by raising the minimum wage.

Despite all this our politicians, at least some of them, still think raising the minimum wage is a social justice imperative, even if it hurts the people it's supposed to help.

Or perhaps the politicians know it's a bad idea, but they see advocating a mandatory increase in wages as a way to bamboozle the masses into thinking the politician deserves their vote.