Why He Did It

Dylann Roof did what he did for the same reason that James Holmes (Colorado movie murderer), Adam Lanza (the Sandy Hook school murderer), the Columbine school killers, and, before people get too far down the road of blaming white racism as uniquely responsible for Roof's atrocity, let's remember Colin Ferguson who murdered six and injured nineteen whites on the Long Island Railroad in Garden City, New York in 1993, whose motive was "black rage." These were people who, whatever their mental health might have been, were seeking to make themselves noticed, to attach some significance to their otherwise meaningless, pathetic lives.

As another mass murderer, serial cannibalist Jeffrey Dahmer, once said: "If a person doesn't think there's a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from slime. When we died that was it, there is nothing."

A society that has expunged God from its consciousness and rendered him irrelevant has also eliminated any hope for objective meaning and moral value. Everyone of these killers lived or lives a life empty of meaning and moral value because they had been raised without any sense of a relationship with, or a responsibility to, a transcendent, personal, moral authority.

Atheists get angry when it's suggested that atheism leads to the conclusions I've mentioned, but it's hard to avoid it and most thoughtful atheists admit it. An atheist can seek out subjective purpose or impose subjective moral duties upon himself, but there's no adequate objective basis for either. Atheist philosopher Julian Baggini wrote about this in a column in the Guardian a few years ago. He noted that:

The problem with the "atheist" moniker has been recognised for decades. It's too negative, too associated with amoral nihilism. It's understandable then that many would agree with Richard Dawkins that we need a word like "gay" which "should be positive, warm, cheerful, bright". So why not "bright"?

One reason, which I mentioned right at the start of this series, is that it sounds too smug. But there's an even more important reason why we should not choose a word that is "positive, warm, cheerful": although many atheists are all those things, atheism itself is none of them.

Atheism, in other words, gives no reason why anyone should be happy and pleasant aside from their inherent disposition to be so.

Given how the atheist stereotype has been one of the dark, brooding existentialist gripped by the angst of a purposeless universe, this is understandable. But frankly, I think we've massively overcompensated, and in doing so we've blurred an important distinction. Atheists should point out that life without God can be meaningful, moral and happy. But that's "can" not "is" or even "should usually be". And that means it can just as easily be meaningless, nihilistic and miserable.

Baggini is right to say that atheists can live happy, meaningful, moral lives. Indeed, they can live any kind of life they wish, but on atheism there's no ultimate meaning to anything we do. On the atheist view, we're all like the band on the Titanic continuing to play while the ship is sinking. It's a nice gesture but pretty meaningless, all things considered. Likewise, the atheist can be "moral" as well, but the point is that, on atheism, one has no duty to act in any particular way. If one works in a soup kitchen on behalf of the poor or massacres people in a Bible study it makes no moral difference.

Dylann Roof can be viewed as a modern embodiment of Camus' character Mersault in his novel The Stranger who gratuitously shoots a man on the beach. Whether he chooses to shoot the man or chooses not to it all means the same, absolutely nothing (in the words of The Cure's Robert Smith):

Baggini continues:

Anyone who thinks it's easy [on atheism] to ground ethics either hasn't done much moral philosophy or wasn't concentrating when they did. Although morality is arguably just as murky for the religious, at least there is some bedrock belief that gives a reason to believe that morality is real and will prevail. In an atheist universe, morality can be rejected without external sanction at any point, and without a clear, compelling reason to believe in its reality, that's exactly what will sometimes happen.

In fact, it's what would often happen if atheists were to follow their atheism to it's logical, nihilistic conclusions. We can be thankful that most atheists don't.

To answer the question implied in the title of this post in a slightly different way, one could say of Dylann Roof that he murdered those people because a) he desired to be significant, to achieve notoriety, b) because he could achieve his desire by committing an infamous atrocity and, c) if he was a young man without God, he had no moral duty not to.

Telling it Like it Isn't

Theologians discuss a doctrine called creation ex nihilo according to which God created the cosmos literally out of nothing. Such a feat is incomprehensible to our finite minds, but perhaps we may resort to a mundane example of creation out of nothing which can help us get a mental handle on the concept. The example I have in mind is the ability of our president to conjure up facts ex nihilo. It's sort of the same thing, and just as one stands in awe of the power of God to create a universe from nothing, so, too, does one stand in awe at the skill of Mr. Obama to fabricate facts out of empty space.

For instance, as David Harsanyi at The Federalist notes, President Obama's statement in the wake of the Charleston church mass murder included, if taken literally, a fact created out of the thinnest of air. The president said:

Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun....We as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.

That second sentence contains a claim that the president concocted out of an epistemic vacuum. Perhaps he didn't intend to be taken at face value and is merely guilty of sloppy rhetoric. Given his history this is not an implausible hypothesis, and charity might demand that we give him the benefit of the doubt, but if he really did mean to be taken literally then he simply has either a very short memory or an uncertain relationship with the virtue of truth-telling.

Harsanyi does some fact checking and reminds us of the Charlie Hebdo murders in France in January, the murders of 69 school children in Norway in 2011, the murders of nine people in the Czech Republic last February, the murders of 13 teachers, two students and a policeman in Germany, and similar episodes in Serbia, Russia, England, Brazil and China in the last few years. He also reminds us that it wasn't too very long ago that one of the most advanced nations in history was throwing people into ovens by the millions, and the enlightened Soviet Union was deliberately starving its citizens to death by the millions. But maybe the president doesn't regard any of these countries as "advanced." This, too, is not implausible since he was, during his candidacy for the White House, under the impression that there were 57 states in the country he sought to govern.

In any case, Harsanyi adds this:

The idea that violence is uniquely American is best left to fringe leftists on college campuses. Moreover, as The Associate Press reported in 2012, many experts contend that mass shootings are not growing in frequency at all. One has data that shows that mass shootings reached their peak in 1929 and have declined steadily since. Overall, gun violence has also been declining since 1993.

Nor is this the first time Mr. Obama has made such a disparaging claim about the United States (can anyone recall when he has ever praised this country for anything?). Last year he stated that:

My biggest frustration has been that this society has not been willing to take some basic steps to keep guns out of the hands of people who can do just unbelievable damage. We are the only developed country on earth where this happens. And that it happens now once a week. And it’s a one day story.

Each of Harsanyi's claims in his essay is linked to a source if you'd like to check his veracity.

Perhaps Mr. Obama only meant that these terrible atrocities happen more often in this country than elsewhere (Harsanyi considers that possibility), but that's not what he said, and if what he said is not what he meant then we're forced to conclude that this man, whom we were assured was one of the most brilliant thinkers ever to occupy the Oval Office, a man whose towering intellect was truly Olympian, is also very careless with his words, even on occasions on which we might expect him to be especially careful in communicating the message he wants to send.

On the other hand, perhaps the message he sends is precisely the message he wants to send.

The Astonishing Fit of Mathematics

There's a cool video at New Scientist for all you math types.

Musician Michael Blake has composed a piece of music based on the Golden Ratio. The Golden Ratio is an irrational number whose decimal places go on to infinity. It has fascinated mathematicians, architects, artists, and musicians for two thousand years.

Blake assigned a musical note to each of the first fifteen digits and as the music plays he adds instruments to the composition producing a beautiful melody. Here it is:

Isn't it a rather startling fact that the mathematical structure of the universe should be musical? How did that happen? For that matter, isn't it astonishing that mathematical concepts fit the universe we live in and describe it so elegantly and precisely? That's really quite amazing. In 1960 physicist Eugene Wigner marveled:

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.

Elsewhere he used the word "miracle" again to describe the awe-inspiring fit that mathematics has with the physical structure of the cosmos:

It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of laws of nature and of the human mind's capacity to divine them.

Scientists have been profoundly moved over the last thirty years by the discovery of how precisely calibrated the forces and parameters of the universe must be, and are, for conscious beings to exist anywhere in it. These phenomena have been referred to as "cosmic coincidences." The fact that the mathematics we can dream up in our minds can be used to describe that universe is surely another breath-taking example of a cosmic coincidence.

The Cable Has Snapped

Rush Limbaugh spent most of his show on Monday ruminating about why the culture seems to have fallen so far so fast. It's an interesting question, but I don't think he ever hit upon the correct answer to it, at least not during the snippets I heard (If you catch any fifteen minute segment of his show on any given day you've pretty much heard the whole show. He repeats himself a lot.). As far as I could tell Rush seems to think that the country is in the grip of a mass delusion wherein traditional values are stood on their head, ridiculed, and dispensed with, while the Republicans, to his great dismay, seem reluctant to resist.

As an example of Republican acquiescence he cited the demand by some big Republican donors that GOP candidates just ignore social issues and concentrate their campaigns on economic and foreign policy matters. Of course, many Republicans don't need encouragement to shy away from the social issues because when they do talk about them they flounder about, sounding timid and muddled. Too few of them seem able or willing to articulate a cogent case for traditional values.

In my opinion, the reason for this, and for the cultural decline it abets, is the fact that we've lost the ability to talk about right and wrong, much less normalcy and perversity. Having been cowed by the secular left into accepting the exclusion of religious belief from the public square we're like passengers in an elevator whose cable has snapped. We're in moral free-fall, helpless to do anything to arrest the fall. Lacking any moral brakes or solid ground, or at least lacking a willingness to stand on such ground, Republicans are unable to mount a moral case for traditional values, and so the left closes in for the kill, picking off any Republican who dares to venture an opinion which sounds at all traditional. As the left attacks, the Republicans, like those Iraqi soldiers who heavily outnumbered their ISIS foes but who nevertheless threw down their weapons and ran because they had no leadership, the Republicans flee from the battle out of fear of being abandoned by their fellows and mocked to death in the media for their opinions.

Too many, it seems, believe that if they oppose gay marriage, abortion on demand, transgenderism, transracialism, or assert that single motherhood is less than an ideal environment for raising a child, not only will they be called haters, but they'll be roundly criticized for "injecting morality and social issues into politics," as if it's they who're introducing the issues in the first place. The left has been for a hundred years merrily intent on undoing 2000 years of moral experience and tradition, and if today anyone demurs, if anyone suggests that this might not be a good idea, they're condemned for trying to resist "progress." Like a man being repeatedly slapped in the face who raises his hand to ward off the blows, the traditionalist (dirty word, that) is faulted for trying to defend his values.

In the current moral free-fall anyone who holds views that almost everyone took for granted for 2000 years until the day before yesterday is considered to be on the "fringe," an extremist, a bigot. In the contemporary climate not only must you tolerate activities you might believe to be socially harmful, but if you're a preacher you also must not speak out against them, if you're a politician you must approve of them, and if run a business you must participate in them.

The left at some level understands that personal destruction of those who refuse to go along with the program is really their only effective weapon. They have no rational arguments on their side, if they did they'd use them instead of employing emotional appeals and vitriolic moral opprobrium. Indeed, having banished the use of any religious grounds for moral judgment the left has no basis for their own moral self-righteousness, but that doesn't stop them from resorting to moral rhetoric when it's useful. Nor do the Republicans fail to let them get away with their baseless moral denunciations because the Republicans themselves have accepted the same secular premises as the left. Either that, or they lack the sophistication to highlight the absurdity of the left's strategy of denying any basis for moral judgment to the right while indulging in an orgy of moral judgmentalism themselves.

So, the answer to Rush's questions about how we've come to the place in our society where no one is allowed to openly state and practice their moral convictions without being subjected to vile and vicious hatred from the left is two-fold. First, the folks holding traditional views lack either the political and philosophical sophistication to defend those views in the public square, or they lack the willingness to do so, or, more likely, both. Second, like many others in our culture they've abandoned the only basis anyone can have for declaring that something is wrong or perverse, a belief in the Judeo-Christian ethic rooted in the existence of the Judeo-Christian God.

Philosopher W.T. Stace foresaw the consequences of what Richard Neuhaus later called the naked public square. In 1948 Stace wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly in which he claimed that one result of the purge of belief in final causes, i.e. God, from human activity was that:

…The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world….

The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends - money, fame, art, science - and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center.

Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions.

Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative.

It's depressing to contemplate, but in a world where this is the unspoken assumption of most of our academics, media, and political class there's no way to halt the slide into moral chaos except for individuals to educate themselves as to how they can defend their convictions and to refuse to surrender. If enough people do that Republican politicians and maybe even some Democrats will be encouraged to stand against the tide of moral anomie washing across our culture.

Homeland Insecurity

Jim Geraghty writes in his Morning Jolt column about the almost complete lack of media outrage and national concern over the fact that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) had the data on over four million federal employees hacked, apparently by the Chinese.

It is indeed astonishing that Americans, or at least the American media, don't seem to care much about this. How many other bureaucracies have been similarly penetrated? Who is going to be held responsible for the failure to protect American citizens from having their personal information stolen? Americans seem to yawn at the questions, and at least 40% of those who vote for the next president in 2016 will still vote for a woman who kept classified data on her personal server in her basement which was almost certainly hacked. There seems to be an utter indifference to matters of national security both in many quarters of this administration, in much of the media, and in a sizable segment of the American public.

Geraghty goes on to list the appalling bureaucratic and security failures of this administration. He writes:

The story of the Obama era is the story of one colossal federal-government train wreck after another. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms shipped guns to Mexican drug cartels in Fast & Furious.

Recovery.gov, allegedly designed to promote openness and accountability, ended up filled with bad data.

The stimulus “was riddled with a massive labor scheme that harmed workers and cheated unsuspecting American taxpayers.”

The president stood in front of the White House, urging the American public to use Healthcare.gov when it wasn’t working.

The U.S. Secret Service, which began the Obama presidency by allowing the Salahis into the White House and stumbled through one humiliating scandal of unprofessional behavior after another.

The Obama administration toppled the government of Libya -- without any supporting act of Congress -- then sent Americans there and ignored the security requests from our ambassador.

The NSA hired Ed Snowden and gave him the keys to the kingdom after a month.

Veterans died, waiting for care, while the branch offices of the VA assured Washington everything is fine.

We traded terrorists for a prisoner, sealing the deal with an assurance to the public that Bowe Bergdahl “served with honor and distinction.”

The IRS data breach. The postal-service data breach. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hack. The data breach at federal contractor US Investigations Services, which performs background checks on DHS, ICE and border-patrol units.

And now, the epic OPM hack.

We are governed by progressives who have an infinite faith in the federal government’s ability to manage enormously complicated tasks and almost no interest in ensuring the government actually does those tasks well.

He might also have listed the disturbing failures of the TSA to prevent dangerous items from being smuggled onto planes in government security tests.

If there's one lesson to be learned from the last seven years of the Obama administration it's that there's very little that big, centralized government does well. It's unfortunate that so many people are nevertheless convinced that the answers to whatever problems that face us lie in expanding government even more.

If there's a second lesson to be learned it's that people are simply foolish to vote for a presidential candidate who has absolutely no qualifications for the job, and whose image, like the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, is all there is to him. To vote for a man simply because he's black is as unwise as, well, voting for a candidate simply because she's female.

P.S. on the Dolezal Affair

Regarding the Rachel Dolezal affair about which I posted earlier, a friend of mine also wrote on the topic at his blog Thought Sifter (which I highly recommend) and said this:

I had been tempted to make a post about Jenner’s liberation from masculinity. But since it’s been one of the main headlines in the news, that typically means there are a number of other issues that are far more worthy of our attention. But even so, I had thought of commenting on how ironic it is that Jenner would be praised for his courage and bravery for doing something that would bring instant praise and adoration from millions of people.

I also thought of writing about how frightening and demoralizing it is that the President of the United States would commend someone for doing something that, in any sane society, would warrant a diagnosis of a profound psychiatric disorder. I also thought about speculating whether or not in ten or fifteen years the science of gender transformation will have developed enough to liberate people from the prison of being one gender and allow them the freedom to impregnate themselves, and how this might lower the divorce rate and benefit kids in making it easier for them to spend more quality time with both parents.

I thought this whole passage was very incisive and the last line very clever.

The Incredible Blackness of Rachel Dolezal

Perhaps by now you're tired of the Rachel Dolezal brouhaha, but perhaps, on the other hand, you have no idea what the Rachel Dolezal brouhaha is all about. If the latter is the case then read on.

Rachel is a white woman who has for years claimed to be black, and even rose to the presidency of a local NAACP chapter before being "outed" by her parents who revealed that she's actually as white as the driven snow. This has created some credibility problems for Rachel, as you might imagine, and also gives cause for concern about her mental health. For that reason we should have compassion for her.

The episode, though, has led to an interesting question, a question that some in the progressive left are angrily denouncing.

The impertinent question is this: If Bruce Jenner can claim he's a woman, and we must all ooh and ahh at the wonder and beauty of transgenderism, should we not also embrace Rachel Dolezal's claim to be black? If Bruce was a woman trapped in a man's body, why not acknowledge that Rachel is a black woman trapped in a white woman's body? She claimed to be black because despite having white parents she just felt black. If that's enough to make Jenner a woman why isn't it enough to make Dolezal black? This is thought to be an insulting question to ask largely, it seems, because those who wish to affirm Jenner's "courage" in coming out as a woman have no good answer to it.

It will not do to reply that transgendered people like Jenner aren't lying about their identity as Dolezal did. That's beside the point. The question is, how does Dolezal see herself? If she sees herself as black then she's black according to those who think that truth is whatever the individual has been conditioned by her society to fervently believe. It's her truth and who are we to question it?

Unfortunately, to call this nonsense and to assert that she's deluded about her blackness is to imply that Jenner is also deluded about his femaleness, and that all of his enthusiastic supporters are equally deluded. So, the progressives resent being confronted with the question and take the well-traveled road of calling people who insist on raising it unhinged. As the always insightful Robert Tracinski puts it in summing up his excellent column on Bruce (Kaitlyn) Jenner "[I]n an era when the insane are normal, the normal are insane."

Yet, despite the outrage of those who think that the two cases should not be compared, as far as I can see the parallels between them are substantial, and I haven't seen any argument, as opposed to simple demands that people shut up about it, that would show that the question is unreasonable. What's unreasonable, of course, is the post-modern view of truth progressives often embrace that says that despite having male plumbing and male accoutrements a man is a woman if he thinks he is. But then why couldn't Michael Jackson be white if he thinks he is or Rachel Dolezal be black if she thinks she is? It's all very puzzling.

Liberals are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to avoid admitting the two cases are basically equivalent. I heard one fellow on tv argue that the cases are different because race is a social construction whereas gender is biologically determined (or was it the other way around? It was hard to tell.), but then he seemed to realize that, if that's so, there's no way he could think that Jenner was female since his biology determined his maleness whether he liked it or not. And, the tv fellow had to admit, if race is socially constructed and we're whatever race others see us as, Dolezal could be black despite not having a single drop of African blood in her whole lily-white body. It was all as amusing as it was confusing.

A couple of short articles on the contretemps over Ms Dolezal that are especially good are one by Mollie Hemmingway and another by Sean Davis, both at The Federalist, and a longer one by JazzShaw at Hot Air.

Perhaps this incident will help us get over the silly notion of the relativity of truth and admit that maybe there are objective facts about human nature after all, facts both about race and gender.

Fast Track

Yesterday the House of Representatives voted to reject the attempt by the Republican Congress and President Obama to massively increase the power of foreign governments over Americans' lives by turning down a bill that would have allowed for the president's secret Pacific Rim Trade deal to go through.

House conservatives are joining with House liberals (When candidate Obama said he wanted to fundamentally transform the country who thought this would happen?) to block it. Conservatives and liberals have different reasons for their opposition, of course, but they agree that this is a very bad bill. Nevertheless, Speaker of the House John Boehner and House Finance Committee Chairman Paul Ryan aren't giving up, which is very disappointing, and are rescheduling another vote for Tuesday.

My chief objection to the trade bill is that the House will vote on very important legislation that the American people are not permitted to see. Ryan, apparently unaware of how much like Nancy Pelosi he sounded, said that after the bill is passed we'll be able to see what it says. That's what Pelosi told us about Obamacare, and it's not good enough for a free people living in a democratic republic.

Moreover, according to Breitbart, there's a lot in the bill that would essentially give Mr. Obama the ability to dictate immigration policy (See here). Whatever the case, here's Republican senator Jeff Sessions, who opposes the bill, explaining why it's a very bad piece of legislation for the American people:

It appears there will be another attempt by Tuesday to force through new executive powers for President Obama. A vote for TAA next week is a vote to send fast-track to the President’s desk and to grant him these broad new executive authorities. If that happens, it will empower the President to form a Pacific Union encompassing 40 percent of the world’s economy and 12 nations—each with one equal vote. Once the union is formed, foreign bureaucrats will be required to meet regularly to write the Commission’s rules, regulations, and directives—impacting Americans’ jobs, wages, and sovereignty. The union is chartered with a “Living Agreement,” and there is no doubt it will seek to expand its membership and reach over time.

Fast-track will not only apply to the Pacific Union, but can expedite an unlimited number of yet-unseen international compacts for six years. There are already plans to advance through fast-track the Trade in Services Agreement, the goal of which includes labor mobility [i.e. immigration] among more than 50 nations, further eroding the ability of the American people to control their own affairs.

Americans do not want this, did not ask for it, and are pleading from their hearts for their lawmakers to stop it.

The same people projecting the benefits of leaping into a colossal new economic union could not even accurately predict the impact of a stand-alone agreement with South Korea. The latter deal, which promised to boost our exports to them $10 billion, instead only budged them less than $1 billion, while South Korea’s imports to us increased more than $12 billion, nearly doubling our trading deficit. This new agreement will only further increase our trading deficit: opening our markets to foreign imports while allowing our trading partners to continue their non-tariff barriers that close their markets to ours.

If we want a new trade deal with Japan, or with Vietnam, then they should be negotiated bilaterally and sent to Congress under regular order. Under no circumstances should the House authorize, through fast-track, the formation of a new international commission that will regulate not only trade, but immigration, labor, environmental, and all manner of commercial policy.

What American went to the polls in 2014 to vote for fast-track and a new global union? Can anyone honestly say that Congress is trying to ram this deal through because they think their constituents want it?

While elites dream of a world without borders, voters dream of a world where the politicians they elect put this country’s own citizens first.

The movement among Americans toward a decent, honest populism — toward a refocusing on the needs of American citizens and American interests — grows stronger by the day. Every vote to come before Congress, beginning with the next fast-track push, will face this test: does your plan strengthen or weaken the social and economic position of the loyal, everyday working American?

If you're opposed to being told that you can't see this agreement until after it's passed; if you're opposed to giving this president the power to unilaterally decide who crosses our borders and to place our national sovereignty in the hands of leftists in the Obama administration who don't think much of the idea of national sovereignty in the first place, call your congressperson's office this weekend and register your concern.

On Being Consistent

We live in an age in which people think we can dispense with belief in God and everything will go on as before, or even better than before. Very few who embrace atheistic naturalism give serious thought to what it entails and very few of those who do give it thought find that they can live consistently with those entailments. From time to time, however, one comes across an atheist who is clear-eyed and honest about what it is he or she is accepting.

One such is a fellow who posted a comment a year or so ago at a blog called CrossExamined.org. The author of the blog, J. Warner Wallace, by way of introducing the commenter's submission, said this:

Several weeks ago, a gentleman (we’ll call him “John”) replied to a blog I posted at CrossExamined.org. As a skeptical non-believer, John wasn’t responding to what I had posted, but to fellow atheists who had been interacting with Christians in the comment section. John’s post was controversial but honest. In fact, he clearly delineated the problem of atheistic moral grounding. While the comments on the blog aren’t typically all that courteous, John complained they were too courteous, especially given the atheistic worldview of the people who were posting. Here’s what John had to say:

“[To] all my Atheist friends.

Let us stop sugar coating it. I know, it’s hard to come out and be blunt with the friendly Theists who frequent sites like this. However in your efforts to “play nice” and “be civil” you actually do them a great disservice.

We are Atheists. We believe that the Universe is a great uncaused, random accident. All life in the Universe past and future are the results of random chance acting on itself. While we acknowledge concepts like morality, politeness, civility seem to exist, we know they do not. Our highly evolved brains imagine that these things have a cause or a use, and they have in the past, they’ve allowed life to continue on this planet for a short blip of time. But make no mistake: all our dreams, loves, opinions, and desires are figments of our primordial imagination. They are fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses for a moment in time. They served some purpose in the past. They got us here. That’s it. All human achievement and plans for the future are the result of some ancient, evolved brain and accompanying chemical reactions that once served a survival purpose. Ex: I’ll marry and nurture children because my genes demand reproduction, I’ll create because creativity served a survival advantage to my ancient ape ancestors, I’ll build cities and laws because this allowed my ape grandfather time and peace to reproduce and protect his genes. My only directive is to obey my genes. Eat, sleep, reproduce, die. That is our bible.

We deride the Theists for having created myths and holy books. We imagine ourselves superior. But we too imagine there are reasons to obey laws, be polite, protect the weak etc. Rubbish. We are nurturing a new religion, one where we imagine that such conventions have any basis in reality. Have they allowed life to exist? Absolutely. But who cares? Outside of my greedy little gene’s need to reproduce, there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife. Only the fear that I might be incarcerated and thus be deprived of the opportunity to do the same with the next guy’s wife stops me.

Some of my Atheist friends have fooled themselves into acting like the general population. They live in suburban homes, drive Toyota Camrys, attend school plays. But underneath they know the truth. They are a bag of DNA whose only purpose is to make more of themselves. So be nice if you want. Be involved, have polite conversations, be a model citizen. Just be aware that while technically an Atheist, you are an inferior one. You’re just a little bit less evolved, that’s all. When you are ready to join me, let me know, I’ll be reproducing with your wife.

I know it’s not PC to speak so bluntly about the ramifications of our beliefs, but in our discussions with Theists we sometimes tip toe around what we really know to be factual. Maybe it’s time we Atheists were a little more truthful and let the chips fall where they may. At least that’s what my genes are telling me to say.”

Several readers questioned whether John really was an atheist or just a theist posing as an atheist, so Wallace clarified:

Since posting this comment, I’ve been able to peek at John’s life in a very limited way, and I’ve had a brief interaction with him. He appears to be a creative, responsible, loving husband and father....When John first posted his comment many of the other atheists who post at CrossExamined were infuriated. Some denied John’s identity as a skeptic and accused him of being a disguised Christian. But in my interaction with John, he told me he was weary of hearing fellow atheists mock their opponents for hypocrisy and ignorance, while pretending they had a definitive answer to the great questions of life. He simply wanted his fellow atheists to be consistent. As it turns out, theism provides the consistent moral foundation missing from John’s atheistic worldview.

"John" is, of course, correct. Given atheism there's nothing morally wrong with doing any of the things he mentions because on atheism there are no objective moral duties, nor can there be. This outrages some atheists who think such a claim is tantamount to accusing atheists of being wicked or immoral, but this misses the point. A person can be kind and generous, and presumably many atheists are, but the point is that there's nothing in atheism that would make cruelty and selfishness wrong. On atheism no one has an objective duty or obligation to be kind rather than cruel. As "John" suggests above, the only constraint on anyone's desires is what that person can get away with. "John" is saying that a man who has the power to act with impunity is not violating any moral law by torturing children or shooting up a movie theater. For the man without God, might makes right.

The famous French writer Voltaire expressed it this way. He said, "I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants and even my wife to believe in God, because it means I shall be cheated, robbed, and cuckolded less often."

This is the theme I try to amplify in my novel In the Absence of God and also in my forthcoming novel Bridging the Abyss (about which more in a couple of weeks). Some have asked, essentially, so what? What's my point? The point is that very few people can live with the logical implications of atheism. They want to live as if the Christian worldview were correct while rejecting the Foundation for that worldview. To be consistent an atheist must either be a complete nihilist or, like "John," one must live by one's own predilections, recognizing that it's a purely subjective choice and that it's no better or worse, morally speaking, than any other choice. Moreover, one must forfeit the "right" to make any moral judgments of anyone else's behavior regardless how cruel or revolting it may be. Moral judgments imply an objective moral standard and atheism rules that out. The atheist who makes moral judgments of others, who condemns child abuse, racism, exploitation of the environment, or opposition to gay marriage, is living as if God exists while denying that he does.

Marco Rubio's Scandalous Extravagance

Michael Ramirez is probably the best political cartoonist in the field today. After the New York Times disgraced itself this week by trying to turn the accumulation of a number of traffic tickets, a home with an in-ground pool, and the purchase of a modest fishing boat by Florida GOP senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio into a major scandal, Ramirez illustrated the utter mindlessness of the Times' effort with this:

It really is true that a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, the unspoken words of Ramirez's cartoon describe the sheer tendentiousness and untrustworthiness of the New York Times' political reporting.

Here's a picture of Rubio's "luxury boat." For comparison sake, this craft cost $80,000. John Kerry's yacht cost $7 million. I wonder how many stories the Times did on Kerry's extravagance when he ran for president in 2004.

For a picture comparing Rubio's home in Florida with that of, say, Hillary Clinton's humble bungalow on Chappaqua, visit the story linked to above.

Deals Done in Secret

It's distressing that the Obama administration, which boasts that it's the most transparent in history, is negotiating and presenting to Congress a trade bill they refuse to let the American people see. It's distressing that such a bill has passed the Senate (controlled by Republicans, no less), and it's distressing that the House (also controlled by the GOP), which will vote on it as early as tomorrow, may pass it.

Regardless what's in it, as a matter of principle no legislation should be voted on by any member of Congress that the American people are given no opportunity to review. Word should go out to every member of the House of Representatives that anyone who votes for this secret trade bill will forfeit the support of that voter in the next election.

But as bad as voting for a bill that hasn't been publicly debated is, it turns out that things are even worse. Thanks to Wikileaks we learn that this bill would greatly increase Mr. Obama's authority to control, or decontrol, immigration, essentially nullifying existing immigration law. Breitbart has the story:

Discovered inside the huge tranche of secretive Obamatrade documents released by Wikileaks are key details on how technically any Republican voting for Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) that would fast-track trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal would technically also be voting to massively expand President Obama’s executive authority when it comes to immigration matters. The mainstream media covered the Wikileaks document dump extensively, but did not mention the immigration chapter contained within it, so Breitbart News took the documents to immigration experts to get their take on it. Nobody has figured how big a deal the documents uncovered by Wikileaks are until now.

The president’s Trade in Services Act (TiSA) documents, which is one of the three different close-to-completely-negotiated deals that would be fast-tracked making up the president’s trade agreement, show Obamatrade in fact unilaterally alters current U.S. immigration law. TiSA, like TPP or the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) deals, are international trade agreements that President Obama is trying to force through to final approval. The way he can do so is by getting Congress to give him fast-track authority through TPA.

TiSA is even more secretive than TPP. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill can review the text of TPP in a secret, secured room inside the Capitol — and in some cases can bring staffers who have high enough security clearances — but with TiSA, no such draft text is available.

Voting for TPA, of course, would essentially ensure the final passage of each TPP, T-TIP, and TiSA by Congress, since in the history of fast-track any deal that’s ever started on fast-track has been approved.

Roughly 10 pages of this TiSA agreement document leak are specifically about immigration.

“The existence of these ten pages on immigration in the Trade and Services Agreement make it absolutely clear in my mind that the administration is negotiating immigration – and for them to say they are not – they have a lot of explaining to do based on the actual text in this agreement,” Rosemary Jenks, the Director of Government Relations at Numbers USA, told Breitbart News following her review of these documents.

There's much more at the Breitbart link. Thankfully, the House Democrats are strongly opposed to this bill and there may be enough Republicans willing to buck their leadership to do the responsible thing and demand that the bill be given a thorough public airing. I never thought I'd say this, but thank goodness for those House Democrats. Gosh, thanking Wikileaks and Democrats in the same post; I need to go lay down.

If you're so inclined you can go here to find your representative's phone number to register your concern.

Does the Hiatus Exist?

A piece by Joe Romm at Think Progress confidently predicts, on the basis of a recent rejiggering of the global warming data by NOAA, that the warming of the planet is about to speed up:

In other words, the long-awaited jump is global temperatures is likely imminent. How big is the jump? As I reported in April, top climatologist Kevin Trenberth has said it would be as much as 0.5°F. Given that 2015 is crushing it for the hottest year on record, we appear to be already witnessing a big piece of that jump.

NOAA’s new study not only incorporates the latest global temperature data from 2013 and 2014. Their “calculations also use improved versions of both sea surface temperature and land surface air temperature datasets” (detailed here). The result, as NOAA explains, is that the new “study refutes the notion that there has been a slowdown or ‘hiatus’ in the rate of global warming in recent years.” In particular, the authors conclude bluntly:

Indeed, based on our new analysis, the IPCC’s statement of two years ago – that the global surface temperature “has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years” – is no longer valid.

Robert Tracinski at The Federalist explains why Mr. Romm's enthusiasm is at best premature.

The new adjustments are suspiciously convenient, of course. Anyone who is touting a theory that isn’t being borne out by the evidence and suddenly tells you he’s analyzed the data and by golly, what do you know, suddenly it does support his theory—well, he should be met with more than a little skepticism.

If we look, we find some big problems. The most important data adjustments by far are in ocean temperature measurements. But anyone who has been following this debate will notice something about the time period for which the adjustments were made. This is a time in which the measurement of ocean temperatures has vastly improved in coverage and accuracy as a whole new set of scientific buoys has come online. So why would this data need such drastic “correcting”?

In other words, NOAA adjusted the measurements which show a plateau in the global temperature readings and now, mirabile dictu, there's no longer any plateau.

Tracinski offers a lot of reasons to be skeptical of this adjustment, and, if he's right, it does sound very much like NOAA is trying hard to make the data fit the theory of anthropogenic global warming. Nevertheless, whether they are or not manipulating the data there is here an opportunity to see whether the skeptics or the alarmists are correct about what's happening climatologically. Romm says that the alleged "hiatus" never existed but that if it did it's over, that temperatures are about to soar.

Maybe so, let's see what the data show over the next few years. Not only do we have a prediction to test, we also have an opportunity to see whether people on either side of the debate are willing to have their beliefs about global warming falsified. If we're not willing to admit that a belief we hold is shown to be wrong by the evidence then our belief is not a scientific belief. This all assumes, of course, that one side or the other doesn't keep reinterpreting the data until they get the result they want.

The Demarcation Problem

An article by two physicists, Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser in the NYT, suggests that science is experiencing an identity crisis. It used to be assumed that what distinguished science from other disciplines was that science was based on testing predictions which were entailed by a theory. This was called the hypothetico-deductive method.

Unfortunately, it seems that some theories in physics and biology have reached the limits of testability. In particle physics, for example, in order to probe more deeply into the structure of matter we have to build particle accelerators that would circle the earth. Since this is economically and, presumably, technically impractical, particle physics may have reached a dead end. It's not that we know everything there is to know, it's that we may have reached a point where we know everything which can be known, at least about particle physics.

Rather than submit to this glum state of affairs, however, some scientists want to expand the definition of legitimate science to include metaphysical speculation. The problem of discerning what to count as science is called by philosophers the Demarcation Problem and the tendency to blur the lines between science and philosophy (metaphysics) is especially prominent among string and multiverse theorists. Here's part of what Frank and Gleiser have to say about this:

A few months ago in the journal Nature, two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, published a controversial piece called “Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics.” They criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today’s most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are “sufficiently elegant and explanatory.” Despite working at the cutting edge of knowledge, such scientists are, for Professors Ellis and Silk, “breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical.”

Whether or not you agree with them, the professors have identified a mounting concern in fundamental physics: Today, our most ambitious science can seem at odds with the empirical methodology that has historically given the field its credibility.

How did we get to this impasse? In a way, the landmark detection three years ago of the elusive Higgs boson particle by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider marked the end of an era. Predicted about 50 years ago, the Higgs particle is the linchpin of what physicists call the “standard model” of particle physics, a powerful mathematical theory that accounts for all the fundamental entities in the quantum world (quarks and leptons) and all the known forces acting between them (gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces).

But the standard model, despite the glory of its vindication, is also a dead end. It offers no path forward to unite its vision of nature’s tiny building blocks with the other great edifice of 20th-century physics: Einstein’s cosmic-scale description of gravity. Without a unification of these two theories — a so-called theory of quantum gravity — we have no idea why our universe is made up of just these particles, forces and properties. (We also can’t know how to truly understand the Big Bang, the cosmic event that marked the beginning of time.)

This is where the specter of an evidence-independent science arises. For most of the last half-century, physicists have struggled to move beyond the standard model to reach the ultimate goal of uniting gravity and the quantum world. Many tantalizing possibilities (like the often-discussed string theory) have been explored, but so far with no concrete success in terms of experimental validation.

Today, the favored theory for the next step beyond the standard model is called supersymmetry (which is also the basis for string theory). Supersymmetry predicts the existence of a “partner” particle for every particle that we currently know. It doubles the number of elementary particles of matter in nature. The theory is elegant mathematically, and the particles whose existence it predicts might also explain the universe’s unaccounted-for “ dark matter.” As a result, many researchers were confident that supersymmetry would be experimentally validated soon after the Large Hadron Collider became operational.

That’s not how things worked out, however. To date, no supersymmetric particles have been found. If the Large Hadron Collider cannot detect these particles, many physicists will declare supersymmetry — and, by extension, string theory — just another beautiful idea in physics that didn’t pan out.

But many won’t. Some may choose instead to simply retune their models to predict supersymmetric particles at masses beyond the reach of the Large Hadron Collider’s power of detection — and that of any foreseeable substitute.

Implicit in such a maneuver is a philosophical question: How are we to determine whether a theory is true if it cannot be validated experimentally? Should we abandon it just because, at a given level of technological capacity, empirical support might be impossible? If not, how long should we wait for such experimental machinery before moving on: ten years? Fifty years? Centuries?

Consider, likewise, the cutting-edge theory in physics that suggests that our universe is just one universe in a profusion of separate universes that make up the so-called multiverse. This theory could help solve some deep scientific conundrums about our own universe (such as the so-called fine-tuning problem), but at considerable cost: Namely, the additional universes of the multiverse would lie beyond our powers of observation and could never be directly investigated. Multiverse advocates argue nonetheless that we should keep exploring the idea — and search for indirect evidence of other universes.

Similar dead ends seem to be looming in cosmogeny (the study of the origin of the universe), origin of life, and origin of consciousness studies, all of which raises a question. If scientists yield to the desire to include in the discipline of science explanatory theories which are inherently untestable and which are essentially metaphysical, on what grounds can anyone argue against allowing the teaching of Intelligent Design in public school science classes?

Worst President Ever

Who would you say is the worst U.S. president ever? I suspect that liberals asked that question would answer George W. Bush or maybe Richard Nixon. Conservatives might respond with Barack Obama or Lyndon Johnson, but according to Robert Merry at the National Interest it's none of these, although in his mind Bush comes close. In fact, his answer will perhaps surprise most readers, but here's a hint: It won't surprise faithful listeners of Glenn Beck's radio program.

Here's how Merry begins his very interesting column:

If you wanted to identify, with confidence, the very worst president in American history, how would you go about it? One approach would be to consult the various academic polls on presidential rankings that have been conducted from time to time since Harvard’s Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. pioneered this particular survey scholarship in 1948. Bad idea.

Most of those surveys identify Warren G. Harding of Ohio as the worst ever. This is ridiculous. Harding presided over very robust economic times. Not only that, but he inherited a devastating economic recession when he was elected in 1920 and quickly turned bad times into good times, including a 14 percent GDP growth rate in 1922. Labor and racial unrest declined markedly during his watch. He led the country into no troublesome wars.

There was, of course, the Teapot Dome scandal that implicated major figures in his administration, but there was never any evidence that the president himself participated in any venality. As Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, put it, “Harding wasn’t a bad man. He was just a slob.”

The academic surveys also consistently place near the bottom James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania. Now here’s a man who truly lacked character and watched helplessly as his country descended into the worst crisis of its history. He stepped into the presidency with a blatant lie to the American people. In his inaugural address, he promised he would accept whatever judgment the Supreme Court rendered in the looming Dred Scott case. What he didn’t tell the American people was that he already knew what that judgment was going to be (gleaned through highly inappropriate conversations with justices). This is political cynicism of the rankest sort.

But Buchanan’s failed presidency points to what may be a pertinent distinction in assessing presidential failure. Buchanan was crushed by events that proved too powerful for his own weak leadership. And so the country moved inexorably into one of the worst crises in its history. But Buchanan didn’t create the crisis; he merely was too wispy and vacillating to get control of it and thus lead the nation to some kind of resolution. It took his successor, Abraham Lincoln, to do that.

That illustrates the difference between failure of omission and failure of commission—the difference between presidents who couldn’t handle gathering crises and presidents who actually created the crises.

So who does Merry consider to be the worst? I'm afraid you'll have to go to the article itself to see, but while you're there read the whole thing. It's worth the time.

Fracking's Effect on Drinking Water: Nil

The debate over fracking is not likely to end anytime soon, but the Obama administration's EPA has just dealt a hard blow to the opponents of the process by releasing a report that finds that fracking has no significant impact on drinking water quality. According to the report:

We [the EPA] did not find evidence that these [fracking] mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. Of the potential mechanisms identified in this report, we found specific instances where one or more of these mechanisms led to impacts on drinking water resources, including contamination of drinking water wells. The cases occurred during both routine activities and accidents and have resulted in impacts to surface or ground water....

The number of identified cases where drinking water resources were impacted are small relative to the number of hydraulically fractured wells. This could reflect a rarity of effects on drinking water resources, or may be an underestimate as a result of several factors.

The Pennsylvania EPA came to similar conclusions a few years ago. If the EPA in this administration can't find a serious problem with fracking it should give confidence to everyone of good will on both sides of the issue that fracking is a safe way to extract energy from the ground. Nevertheless, the battle will doubtless continue because just as the Keystone Pipeline isn't the real target of the more fanatical environmentalists, fracking, in my opinion, isn't what those environmentalists are out to stop. Their real goal is the elimination of the use of fossil fuels altogether, and their opposition to fracking is based, again in my opinion, on the fact that the process undermines a couple of their chief arguments.

Many environmentalists claim, for instance, that fossil fuels are becoming scarce so we need to move to alternative sources of energy, but the fracking process has opened up vast new reserves of oil and gas that could last until the end of the century. They also claim that dependence on foreign oil makes us vulnerable to the instabilities in the Middle East and north Africa, but fracking is rapidly making us energy independent of these troubled regions. Thirdly, environmentalists object to fossil fuels because they're dirty to produce and dirty to consume, but fracking is relatively clean and so is the natural gas that it produces.

As time goes on we'll probably see fewer demonstrations like this one and more people, especially the poor who won't have to pay so much for everything they buy, singing the praises of fracking technology:

Democrat Disillusionment

It's a regrettable fact of human nature that ridicule often works so well against one's opponents. Ridicule sounds cool and sophisticated to the masses, it saves the ridiculer the trouble of formulating arguments and saves his audience the trouble of thinking. That's why Karl Marx (and, sadly, Martin Luther in his later years) used it with great gusto against his opponents, it's why Saul Alinsky recommends in Rules for Radicals that it be used against one's political foes, and why Richard Dawkins calls for atheists to use it against Christians.

It's also a fact of political science that when the entertainment media starts making fun of a political figure, using ridicule against him or her, that figure is pretty much done for. Until relatively recently President Obama has had the media breezes at his back. Like the legendary dolphin ferrying the drowning child to safety, the media has carried Mr. Obama on its shoulders throughout his presidency, protecting him from scandal after scandal and blunder after blunder. No Republican would ever have gotten such deferential treatment and such uncritical press as has this one.

This, though, seems to be slowly coming to an end. Disillusionment seems to be growing among Democrats, who, like a young maiden awaking on the morning after a drunken seduction, are beginning to realize they've given themselves, body and soul, to someone who, had they been sober, would never have been allowed to first base.

The tip of the spear of ridicule, or it's less unkind cousin, satire, is often late-night television, and there President Obama is starting to feel the barbs. Jimmy Fallon's joke is funny but the reaction of the audience should be very disconcerting to the White House:

Actually, the growing disenchantment among rank and file Democrats is not just with the president, but with the party as a whole. A black Chicago pastor, admittedly a conservative but the leader of a large, mostly black congregation, recently made this observation:

We have a large, disproportionate number of people who are impoverished. We have a disproportionate number of people who are incarcerated, we have a disproportionate number of people who are unemployed, the educational system has totally failed, and all of this primarily has been under Democratic regimes in our neighborhoods. So, the question for me becomes, how can our neighborhoods be doing so awful and so bad when we’re so loyal to this party who is in power? It’s a matter of them taking complete advantage of our vote.

Nor has it been lost on people that cities like Baltimore, Detroit, New York, Chicago and numerous others, cities fraught with corruption, violence, decay and joblessness, have all been run for generations by Democrats. Apparently, more and more African-Americans are beginning to ask how much worse the Republicans can be than the Democrats who have given their communities little more than drugs, high murder rates, poverty, poor schools, and family disintegration.

The Dying of Academic Freedom

Someone once said that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged. Professor Ed Schlosser is not a conservative but he certainly sounds like a disillusioned liberal in an article at Vox. He admits to being very scared of his liberal students, not for his physical safety but rather for the safety of his career. Liberal students, he claims, have a much different view than earlier generations of what should and should not be said in the classroom by the professor. Here are a few excerpts of what is a fairly long piece:

I'm a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious; I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students.

Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.

I am frightened sometimes by the thought that ... a student [might accuse] me not of saying something too ideologically extreme — be it communism or racism or whatever — but of not being sensitive enough toward his feelings, of some simple act of indelicacy that's considered tantamount to physical assault. As Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis writes, "Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated." Hurting a student's feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.

This shift in student-teacher dynamic placed many of the traditional goals of higher education — such as having students challenge their beliefs — off limits. While I used to pride myself on getting students to question themselves and engage with difficult concepts and texts, I now hesitate.

Commentators on the left and right have recently criticized the sensitivity and paranoia of today's college students. They worry about the stifling of free speech, the implementation of unenforceable conduct codes, and a general hostility against opinions and viewpoints that could cause students so much as a hint of discomfort. It's not just that students refuse to countenance uncomfortable ideas — they refuse to engage them, period.

Engagement is considered unnecessary, as the immediate, emotional reactions of students contain all the analysis and judgment that sensitive issues demand. As Judith Shulevitz wrote in the New York Times, these refusals can shut down discussion in genuinely contentious areas, such as when Oxford canceled an abortion debate. More often, they affect surprisingly minor matters, as when Hampshire College disinvited an Afrobeat band because their lineup had too many white people in it.

This sort of perspective ... was born in the more nihilistic corners of academic theory, and its manifestations on social media have severe real-world implications. In another instance, two female professors of library science publicly outed and shamed a male colleague they accused of being creepy at conferences, going so far as to openly celebrate the prospect of ruining his career. I don't doubt that some men are creepy at conferences — they are. And for all I know, this guy might be an A-level creep. But part of the female professors' shtick was the strong insistence that harassment victims should never be asked for proof, that an enunciation of an accusation is all it should ever take to secure a guilty verdict. The identity of the victims overrides the identity of the harasser, and that's all the proof they need.

This is terrifying. No one will ever accept that. And if that becomes a salient part of liberal politics, liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.

I believe there are several reasons for the mind-set Professor Schlosser laments. One is that the left has given up on argument because they know, even if only subliminally, that most of their arguments are terribly unconvincing and that if they're forced to defend their views rationally they'll only be embarrassed. Better to resort to name-calling and insult or to simply shut down any expression of opposing views altogether so that they don't have to defend their own.

Another reason is that so many generations of students have absorbed a kind of epistemological relativism that says that all views have merit. Thus one's own view should be accepted for no weightier reason than that it's one's own view.

A third reason is that in the contemporary post-modern world truth is whatever you or your group believes fervently. Objective facts don't matter. Therefore, to have someone challenge what is true for you is at best impertinent and at worst insulting. It's offensive to have someone who knows nothing of the experience of someone of your gender, your race, your sexual orientation tell you that what you know to be true is perhaps not true. It's a kind of violence to your person, an assault, to be questioned in this way.

A final reason is that a lot of students are young narcissists who feel entitled to hold their opinions free of any challenge. People who've been told all their lives that they're special sometimes get angry at an authority figure like a professor who doesn't treat them with the deference they believe to be their due.

All these, ironically enough, are the fruit of the very liberalism Schlosser embraces. He's a man who has contributed to the creation of a species of academic viciousness and is stunned that it might be turned against him. Another irony is that, as he suggests in the article, he's placing his ultimate hope in a successful conservative push-back against the campus fascists and narcissists. He recognizes, evidently, that liberals, having created the monster, are poorly equipped to kill it.

Should Tsarnaev Be Executed?

Daniel Payne at The Federalist argues that there's no good argument for putting the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhohkar Tsarnaev to death and that it's "barbaric" to do so. I disagree with him on both counts. Here are a few of the salient passages from his article:

Upon the recent announcement that Dzhohkar Tsarnaev received the death penalty for his crimes in Boston, we were treated to a great many opinions that what would happen to this 21-year-old man was good, and justice: he had killed people, so now he will be killed. “What a relief,” everyone seemed to say. “Now the score will finally be settled.”

I confess to being baffled by this line of argument, chiefly because it seems to have no grasp on the workings of either scores or settling. To settle the score between Tsarnaev and the public — to put everyone back at square one — is not a matter of killing the murderer but raising his three victims from their graves.

I confess to being baffled by this as well. I never heard or read anyone say the things Payne claims "everyone seemed to say." I know of no one who thinks that killing Tsarnaev will "settle the score," and I suspect that Payne doesn't either. I wonder if he's not simply erecting a straw man. Anyway, there are more substantive claims laying ahead of us. He writes:

Tsarnaev should not be put to death. There is no satisfactory reason to execute him, and I am not positive than anyone who supports executing him can articulate a coherent reason for doing so. This is not to say that supporters of the death penalty are arguing in bad faith, only that they are arguing with bad arguments. Payne then goes on to outline some of the bad arguments.

The Catholic Church, which for centuries has acknowledged the legitimacy of the death penalty, has over the years approximated a rather stringent set of criteria for why we might execute a human being, and it is worth studying these to determine what we are going to do. According to the church, capital punishment can be justified on the grounds of either retribution, rehabilitation of the criminal, defense against the criminal, or deterrence of future criminals.

It seems needless to point out that Tsarnaev’s execution will satisfy none of these obligations and that killing him would thus be a pointless endeavor....

I am at a loss as to any other reasons one could give for killing this young man, other than simply out of spite....

There is no case to be made for killing Tsarnaev. Indeed, there was likely no case to be made for the other 1,408 inmates executed in the United States since 1976. The only reason we seem to have for executing another human being in cold blood is that doing so will make us feel a little bit better for a little while.

“What a relief,” people will say. Why?

I doubt many people will say "What a relief," but that aside, I think Payne is wrong to think he has exhausted all the reasons for invoking the death penalty. There's another which I think can be illustrated by the following example: A man attacks and rapes a woman and traumatizes her in the process. There's no doubt of his guilt, and when the sentencing hearing takes place the rapist is given the maximum sentence allowed by law - two months of community service.

If we were to discover that that was the maximum sentence in our society we'd doubtless be outraged at the leniency of it, but why? One reason, of course, is that it's a fundamental principle of justice that the severity of the punishment should be proportional to the severity of the crime, that the worse the crime, the worse the punishment, and that the very worst crimes deserve the very worst punishment.

A corollary to this, I think, is that our outrage at the relatively light sentence given to the rapist in our example is indicative of a lack of value society places on women. The sentence suggests that society believes that forcing women to submit to male sexual impulses is not such a big deal. A society which places a high value on the dignity and well-being of women would affix a severe punishment to the crime of violating them.

A similar argument can be made for the death penalty. Deliberately, maliciously, causing severe bodily injury and death to others is one of the worst crimes a man can commit. To impose anything less than the harshest penalty for doing it is to say, in effect, that the lives he ruined aren't worth taking his own life over.

In other words, contrary to what Payne apparently thinks, a society that refuses to exact the most severe punishment for the very worst crimes is essentially declaring that no one's life is so valuable that even if a murderer robs those we love of their lives the murderer should not be required to pay the ultimate penalty. It is, in fact, to place more value on the life of the murderer than on the life of the victim and is, for that reason, fundamentally unjust.

Rolling Back the Entitlement State

Robert Tracinski at The Federalist believes that reform of the welfare state is both necessary and possible but that it has to be replaced with something. We can't just eliminate things like the Affordable Care Act without giving people other options. Tracinski's essay outlines seven things a Republican administration and Congress can do to eliminate the welfare state and improve considerably the lives of all Americans. I list the seven here with a couple of sentences of explanation, but you'll have to go to the article to read his full defense of each.

What agenda for the right would really count as fundamental reform? What would help conserve the Constitution instead of conserving the welfare state?

I will take for granted all the reasons why we should fight the welfare state: its vast and unsustainable costs, its encouragement of dependency (and not just for the poor but for the middle class, which is less excusable), and particularly in the case of Social Security, its catastrophic diversion of money from private savings to government consumption.

Instead, I want to put forward some ideas on the how: specific political reforms that might actually be politically possible, and which would prepare the ground and build public support for a real scaling back of the welfare state.

1) Repeal ObamaCare
If we want to roll back the welfare state, we will never have any better opportunity to start than by repealing ObamaCare—a program that is relatively new, has never been popular, and is in a slow process of imploding. The latest reports: state insurance exchanges set up to implement ObamaCare are foundering, and insurers in these exchanges are filing requests for enormous increases in premiums. Why? Because “with a full year of claims data under their belt for the first time since Obamacare went into effect, they’re finding the insurance pool was considerably older and sicker than expected”—expected, that is, by everyone except ObamaCare’s critics. Meanwhile, ObamaCare has pushed a lot of people into high-deductible insurance plans that have made it harder for them to pay for health care.

But the point made by the reform conservatives is that we can’t just define our agenda in terms of what we’re against. We have to have a positive agenda, our own solution to the voters’ problems and concerns. Fair enough. A true reform agenda shouldn’t just be about knocking down failed entitlement programs. It should be about building up the alternatives to a massive federal welfare state. Hence the natural follow-up to a repeal of ObamaCare.

2) Health Savings Accounts
Scrapping ObamaCare would be a natural opportunity for Republicans to propose their own free-market health-care reforms. The centerpiece of that alternative should be Health Savings Accounts, which make it easier for individuals to save money in tax-free accounts which they can use for medical expenses. They were popular and worked well (I used to have one) before ObamaCare put the squeeze on them, because God knows we wouldn’t want people thinking that it’s possible to just pay for their own health care expenses.

Or maybe we would. That’s precisely the model for how to get from here to there: to make it easier for people to accumulate private savings for the things they’ve been encouraged to rely on government to provide. We can do similar things for other goods like education and retirement savings, where IRAs and 401(k)s perform that function (and are, naturally, under attack from the left).

3) Means-test Social Security
Social Security is already a bad deal for the middle class, since the benefits are already skewed in such a way that they are equivalent to a tiny return, between one and two percent annually, on what might have been a private investment. By contrast, long-term returns on the stock market are about seven percent annually. And in order to make Social Security sustainable, it will have to become a much worse deal.

A recent survey found that “41 percent of Americans think there will be no Social Security benefits for them when they retire and nearly a third expect reduced levels of benefits.” In other words, almost three quarters of the public already thinks they have no real stake in Social Security. They think they’re going to get milked their whole lives to pay for it and get little or nothing in return.

4) Restart economic growth
Since the financial crisis, the United States has slipped into the Obama rate of growth, a permanent state of semi-stagnation. We’ve been through market crashes and recessions before, but usually after a year or two of pain, we get a strong burst of growth to make up for it. This time, we’re in the long twilight of a non-recovery recovery. The economy is technically growing again, but at such a feeble rate that it hardly feels like it. It’s the kind of economy in which the unemployment rate falls, not because the long-unemployed are all getting jobs again, but because so many people are dropping out of the workforce altogether.

This low rate of growth makes the burden of the welfare state greater, because we can no longer grow our way out from under its expenses. At the same time, it makes the welfare state harder to get rid of. You can’t just tell the unemployed to go out and get a job when the economy is still flopping around and gasping like a fish in the bottom of a bass boat. If we’re going to expect people to be more self-reliant, they must also have a sense of economic hope.

5) Re-reform welfare
Never letting an opportunity go to waste, the Obama administration has used the recession to gut the welfare reform of the 1990s, extending unemployment benefits and loosening work requirements.

More broadly, it has rejected the whole spirit of welfare reform, which was to devise ways to move people away from dependence on government and toward work and opportunity and self-reliance. Instead, the administration has used the state for the opposite purpose: to push people from self-reliance into dependence.

Consider the food stamp program, which was rather unconvincingly renamed SNAP in an attempt to escape its well-earned stigma. (Eventually, they’ll need a euphemism for the euphemism, and they’ll have to change the name again.) The USDA has been spending millions of dollars advertising food stamps in an attempt to increase the program’s enrollment. Advertising for welfare. That says it all, doesn’t it? And it has worked. The Daily Caller notes that “In the 1970s, one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today one out of every seven receive the benefit.” The program has doubled under Obama’s watch.

6) Save the cities
This year’s riots in Baltimore reminded us of a central irony of American politics: the centers of economic inequality and racial conflict—the key issues on which Democrats always campaign—are places that are the sole property of Democrats, owned and run by them for about as long as anyone can remember.

On the right, we’ve gotten used to ignoring the failure of the cities and the Democrats’ tired, predictable excuses for failure. (It’s all the fault of slavery!) That’s because we’ve gotten used to writing off the cities as Democratic Party territory, so their failure is not our business. Long since, the respectable middle class (both white and black) voted with their feet, decamping to leafy suburbs with safe streets, affordable real estate, and halfway decent schools. We left, in part, so we wouldn’t have to worry about the perpetual dysfunction of the cities any more.

But the riots in Baltimore are a reminder that this is our business, after all. We have an interest in arresting the failure of the cities because they are the big remaining engine of social strife in America, the festering centers of class warfare and racial conflict. To the extent that there are still large numbers of people in this country who live in hopeless poverty and grow to resent the giant gap they can see between themselves and wealthier people who live in the next neighborhood over—they are mostly in the cities. To the extent there are people whose daily life reinforces the notion that America is systematically racist and the police are the enemy, they are mostly in the cities.

If we want less class and racial conflict, if we want more people moving up into the middle class and no longer feeling the need for government support, if we want to compete for the vote in what are now deep centers of political support for the left—then we need to start targeting the cities for basic reforms that will improve the quality of life there and bring back the middle class.

7) Federalism
Part of the reason we have such a bloated welfare state is because every decision in Congress has to be a compromise between “blue state” politicians who want more and more and more government and “red state” politicians who usually claim they want less. Hence my modest proposal that we kick these decisions back down to the state level, which is where they were always intended to be. This is not a foolproof solution, because we’ll still occasionally get local handouts like ObamaCow. But the general idea is that we can let New York and California set up more generous welfare states—if they want to pay for them. And they should let the hinterland scale back welfare. Then the states can compete to see whose approach is more successful and how many people vote with their feet for the small government model. Even now, the results on this are encouraging, with low-tax, low-regulation states experiencing huge increases in population.

Tracinski concludes with this: "The audience is there for a real reform agenda. We just have to find the right people and the right message to connect to it."

Butterfly Metamorphosis

A couple of short videos excerpted from Illustra Media's film titled: Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies shows the incredible difficulties metamorphosis pose to any account of the process which insists that its genesis be completely unguided and naturalistic. Why such a process would have ever evolved in the first place and how it could have done so are questions for which the standard Darwinian model has no answer.

There is a bit of overlap in the two videos but not much:

Speaking for myself, the idea that such a process evolved seems possible, maybe even plausible, but the idea that such a process evolved unaided by any intelligent, purposeful guidance seems to me quite literally incredible.

What Does it Mean to Know?

Ernest Sosa, a philosopher at Rutgers, offers us a quick lesson in basic epistemology for the layman at The Opinionator. Epistemology is the (surprisingly, perhaps) fascinating study of the nature of knowledge and belief. Most of us think we know something if we are certain that it's true, but things are much more complicated than that. The classical definition of knowledge is that whatever it is we claim to know must be true, we must believe it's true and we must have good reasons for believing it's true.

Unfortunately, there are difficulties with this definition lurking in the philosophical weeds and Sosa points out the biggest of them, something called the Gettier Problem. He writes:

What is it to truly know something? In our daily lives, we might not give this much thought — most of us rely on what we consider to be fair judgment and common sense in establishing knowledge. But the task of clearly defining true knowledge is trickier than it may first seem, and it is a problem philosophers have been wrestling with since Socrates.

In the complacent 1950s, it was received wisdom that we know a given proposition to be true if, and only if, it is true, we believe it to be true, and we are justified in so believing. This consensus was exploded in a brief 1963 note by Edmund Gettier in the journal Analysis.

Here is an example of the sort used by Gettier to refute that theory. Suppose you have every reason to believe that you own a Bentley, since you have had it in your possession for many years, and you parked it that morning at its usual spot. However, it has just been destroyed by a bomb, so that you own no Bentley, despite your well justified belief that you do. As you sit in a cafe having your morning latte, you muse that someone in that cafe owns a Bentley (since after all you do). And it turns out you are right, but only because the other person in the cafe, the barista, owns a Bentley, which you have no reason to suspect. So you here have a well justified true belief that is not knowledge.

Sosa then goes on to discuss a modern formulation of the definition of knowledge, which, for what it's worth, I don't think is much of an improvement, but read the article and judge for yourself.

Are Miracles Impossible?

A common objection to the possibility of miracles is that such prodigies as a man rising from the dead, for example, would entail a series of violations of the laws of nature, specifically the conservation laws, and that, as David Hume put it, it's been the "uniform experience" of mankind that nature's laws suffer no such violations. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga explains in this 11 minute video why, even if the laws of nature were inviolable, even for God, it's a mistake to think that a miracle violates them. Whether the laws are Newtonian or quantum mechanical the occurrence of a miracle is not ruled out by them:

The only way the claim that miracles are impossible can be true is if the universe is closed, i.e. if there's nothing beyond it that can act in it. In other words, miracles are impossible only if there's no God or anything else of a purposeful nature which transcends the space-time universe. If it's possible that God exists then it's possible that miracles occur. Since it is possible that God exists any report of a miracle must be assessed on the evidence for it and not on the apriori assumption of atheism.

Privilege

Should people feel guilty that they're better off because of the efforts of their parents and grandparents than those whose parents and grandparents couldn't, or wouldn't, pass on the same benefits to their progeny? Some liberals seem to think so. A British sociologist went so far as to claim that parents who read bedtime stories to their children should feel guilty that they're probably conferring an unfair "privilege" on their children over their peers whose parents don't or can't spend such time with their kids.

Robert Tracinski at The Federalist will have none of this nonsense and has some fine things to say about "Privilege." Here are a few:

I have two young kids. And I am working my tail off to give them as much “privilege” as humanly possible.

As if the good things you do for your own kids constitute actual harm for the children of others.

I want my kids to start their adult lives with a laundry list of advantages: I want them to be bright, literate, skilled, capable of self-discipline, athletic, with good taste and manners and grooming, maybe a little bit of money, and heck, even a few family connections—enough to get their feet in the doors of whatever careers they choose. I had some of these things, mostly a good education, and undoubtedly more than most people. I want my kids to have even more. Why? Because that’s my job as a parent: to give my kids the best start in life possible—and better than mine.

Precisely. Liberals survey society and see many parents who are essentially letting their kids raise themselves. This, naturally, puts those kids at a severe disadvantage in life, so the liberal solution is to level the playing field by criticising parents who want for their kids what Tracinski wants for his instead of criticising parents who don't do the things Tracinski does. Bringing the bottom up is hard. It's much easier to achieve the egalitarian nirvana by reducing everyone to the same miserable level. That's the liberal worldview in a nutshell.

Tracinski is careful in his essay to distinguish "privilege" from "entitlement:"

Privilege is not the same thing as “entitlement.” Entitlement means taking one’s advantages in life for granted, as if they are part of the normal order of things, and not realizing where they came from or what made them possible. Which usually means frittering away all of those advantages by failing to take the initiative to accomplish anything of your own.

In fact, one of the most important advantages you can give your kids is a lack of entitlement, the ethos of knowing that he has to work for what he wants in life. One of the great secrets of the middle class strivers is that they realize lack of entitlement is a “privilege” that will give their children a leg up on the spoiled rich kids.

There is one kind of privilege which far more parents, rich and poor, black and white, could confer on their children if they wished. It's perhaps the most effective thing they could do to insure their child has a modicum of advantages in life. It is to get married and stay married:

Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution discovered that the likelihood of a child raised by [unmarried] parents born into the lowest income quintile moving to the top quintile by the age 40 was a disastrous 3 percent. Worse, 50 percent of those children stay stuck in the bottom quintile. And the outlook for the children of those marriage-less children is equally stark....But Reeves discovered a silver lining while crunching the data: Those children born in the lowest quintile to parents who were married and stayed married had only a 19 percent chance of remaining in the bottom income group. Reeve’s study revealed that this social-mobility advantage applied not just to the lower class: The middle class was impacted, too. The study revealed that children born into the middle class have a mere 11 percent chance of ending up in the bottom economic quintile with married parents, but that number rises to 38 percent if their parents are never married.

This is not a finding likely to be trumpeted by the liberal media which, judging by the policies they endorse, seems to be more concerned with breaking families up than with building them up.

Tracinski closes his article with this:

I’ve always loved an old quote from Henry Ford: “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” The same thing goes for “privilege,” which is really just a disparaging term for “opportunity.” In this white-collar era, it doesn’t necessarily come dressed in overalls any more. But it still looks like work.