Not to be Taken Seriously

The Washington Free Beacon informs us that according to Johns Hopkins University 503,804 Americans have died from COVID since President Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021. That is almost 100,000 more than the number of Americans who died from COVID under former president Donald Trump.

On average, more than 1,300 Americans have died from COVID every day that Mr. Biden has been president.

I for one am not going to blame these deaths on the president. There's not much he could've done to prevent them.

Nevertheless, in October 2020, when roughly 200,000 Americans had died from COVID, then-candidate Biden declared that any leader who presided over that many deaths "should not remain as president of the United States of America."

So, over twice the number of Americans have died since Mr. Biden unfairly blamed 200,000 deaths on Mr. Trump. Moreover, Mr. Biden has had at his disposal to fight the virus vaccines developed under Mr. Trump's direction which Mr. Trump did not have.

If Mr. Trump did not deserve to be president, does Mr. Biden? If Mr. Trump was actually responsible for these deaths, as Mr. Biden implied, how much more should Mr. Biden hold himself to account for over twice the number of deaths?

Of course, the media also are culpable. If things were reversed, had Mr. Trump said about someone what Mr. Biden said about him, the media would be harassing every administration spokesperson who dared to show his or her face in public demanding that Mr. Trump live up to his own standard and resign.

As it is our supine media can't be bothered to hold Mr. Biden accountable for anything, fixated as they are on the only thing they can talk about which doesn't make Mr. Biden look bad, the January 6th riots.

It's hard not to conclude from this that neither the president nor the progressive media are to be taken seriously by serious people.

Flores' Complaint

Former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores is suing the NFL, claiming it's racist because the percentage of black head coaches and front office personnel does not approximate the percentage of players in the league.

Since 70 percent of NFL players are black, and anywhere between 3 percent and 34 percent of coaches and executive personnel are black, Flores believes that constitutes prima facie evidence that the league is “racially segregated.”

But if an underrepresentation by blacks in the head coaching ranks and management is evidence of racism, doesn't it follow that an underrepresentation of whites on the playing field is also evidence of racism? Shouldn't the numbers of white and Hispanic players be proportional to their numbers in the general population?

If the answer is that sports are a meritocracy and blacks are over-represented on the playing field because they've demonstrated superior ability in the skills required to play the game, why can't the same argument be made for the higher percentage of whites in coaching and management?

Why should performance on the field be a meritocracy but the grueling, pressure-packed work of being a head coach be subject to racial quotas?

Moreover, since head coaches are usually hired out of the assistant coaching ranks, Flores himself has contributed to the problem he deplores since 75% of the assistant coaches he hired while coaching the Dolphins were white.

Perhaps the NFL needs to be more punctilious in striving for racial equity, but why stop at racial equity? Why not consider gender equity as well? Is it not overwhelming evidence of sexism that NFL coaches and players are 100% male? Why should that be tolerated?

All of these questions and others have been raised by numerous observers, including Jake Bequette at The Federalist.

Flores seems miffed that he was fired by the Dolphins who made him a millionaire for his services. It might be worth mentioning, by the way, that the man who fired him, general manager Chris Grier, is himself black. In fact, as The Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley, who I suppose I should note, though I shouldn't have to, is also black, notes (paywall) that:

It’s certainly possible that the Dolphins organization is guilty of discriminatory hiring practices. But is it plausible? “Dolphins owner Stephen Ross ran the ‘blackest’ organization in the NFL,” sportswriter Jason Whitlock observed in a recent column. “At one time, his head coach, general manager, assistant general manager, defensive coordinator, and several members of his ownership group were all black.”

At what point did Mr. Ross become a bigot? When he decided to fire Brian Flores?

Bequette asserts that the racial disparity that Flores' is upset about results, at least in part, from the league's imposition of the "Rooney Rule," which requires teams to interview at least one black candidate for any major coaching or executive vacancy:

The absurdity of this practice can be illustrated by simply applying it to NFL roster vacancies. Imagine if every NFL team were forced to invite a white cornerback into training camp every season. No NFL team has started a white cornerback since Jason Sehorn in 2002.

A white cornerback who fulfilled a team’s obligation under a “Sehorn Rule” would feel insecure and teammates would feel resentful, even if the player was qualified for the position and seriously considered for the job.

Riley also makes the point that, if Flores' goal is to get more blacks hired as head coaches then his lawsuit is surely counterproductive:

In a statement released by his lawyers, Mr. Flores said the lawsuit is not about “my personal goals.” Rather, “my sincere hope is that by standing up against systemic racism in the NFL, others will join me to ensure that positive change is made for generations to come.”

Maybe, but the reality is that lawsuits such as this one could hamper efforts to increase the number of black coaches in the NFL. Teams might be less likely to hire someone they can’t fire without being labeled racist.

A similar phenomenon played out in faculty hiring at colleges and universities after affirmative action was implemented in the 1970s. Schools were reluctant to hire a professor who might not make tenure, lest they be accused of discrimination and face expensive lawsuits and unfavorable press.

Unlike among white academics, only the sure things got job offers, which reduced the overall number of minority faculty hires.

Like others who invoke “systemic racism,” Mr. Flores and his supporters point to statistical disparities as proof of discrimination, and progressives, both black and white nod in agreement, but why assume that disparity is prima facie proof of racism? Why not assume that there are other factors involved, like interpersonal skills, education, etc.

Riley adds that,

Progressive icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent 27 years on the Supreme Court while hiring only one black law clerk. Was she guilty of discrimination, or was she simply choosing from a pool of candidates that, for whatever reason, included relatively few blacks?

Head coaches in the NFL more recently have tended to follow a certain career path. An insightful article last month by the sportswriter Shalise Manza Young noted that, since 2016, three-quarters of the 40 head coaches hired had worked as offensive coordinators. In 2021 only seven of the league’s 33 offensive coordinators were black.

Ms. Young then pointed to another potential factor in the racial makeup of pro football coaches: old-fashioned nepotism. “By the NFL’s own data for its 2020 diversity and inclusion report, nine of that year’s 32 head coaches were related to a current or former coach in the league, whether by blood or marriage,” she wrote.

The same applied to the league’s 63 coordinators and position coaches, 53 of whom were white.

Bequette concludes his piece with this:

The league brought this upon themselves when they jumped in bed with the social justice radicals after the Kaepernick saga and doubled down after the George Floyd/BLM riots. They deserve this lawsuit and everything that’s coming to them.

The rest of America would do well to abandon the obsession with racial optics and skin-deep assessments of our fellow countrymen, or we’re heading toward the all-out racial conflict that the radical left seems obsessed with fomenting.

Racial bean-counting and pandering in the NFL, like Mr. Biden's declaration that he will appoint only a black woman to the Supreme Court rather than the best qualified candidate that he can find, whether male or female, black or white, guarantees that whoever is selected will be suspected of having been selected not because the selectee was the most brilliant and best qualified individual for the job but because the individual had the requisite skin color and anatomy.

We'd doubtless be upset to learn that our local hospital hired its surgeons this way, why should we think that Supreme Court justices or NFL coaches should be?

Rules for Thee but Not for Me

In the midst of the pandemic I had a conversation with a friend who was upset that some people weren't social distancing or masking up in our little corner of the world. He couldn't figure out how people could be so inconsiderate and reckless.

I replied that I thought part of the reason was that so many of our elected leaders, especially Democrats who tended to be the most adamantine social distancers and mask mandaters, were themselves showing the public by their personal behavior that they didn't think these rules were all that important, at least not for them.

More than a few of them threw social distancing to the winds when the opportunity arose to march arm in arm with protestors during the summer of 2020, and even more of them were caught partying, maskless, while at the same time insisting that the common people had to forgo social gatherings and wear masks when around others.

The Washington Free Beacon has come up with ten examples of our political leaders flouting their own rules about social distancing and mask-wearing and the dumb reactions they gave for doing so.

I encourage you to go to the link where the Free Beacon posts photos of the offenders en flagrante. Here are the ten with a bit of context courtesy of the Free Beacon:

10. "I should have been more astute to the specifics of the regulations." Sam Liccardo, mayor of San Jose

Liccardo hosted a large Thanksgiving dinner party in violation of state health guidelines limiting the number of households at private gatherings. On the same day his violation was exposed, Liccardo posted a tweet urging constituents to "cancel the big gatherings this year and focus on keeping each other safe."

9. "I am human." Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D., Mich.)

The governor has repeatedly violated her own state-imposed mask guidelines in Michigan, and once flouted the Washington, D.C., mask mandate at a crowded bar near the White House. After being photographed in East Lansing at a large maskless gathering in violation of a Michigan Health Department order, Whitmer claimed to be "human," which is why she neglected to "stop and think about" the importance of rules.

8. "Don't be ridiculous." Muriel Bowser, mayor of Washington, D.C.

Bowser accused "right-wing nuts" of "spreading disinformation" after she was photographed without a mask at a wedding reception just days after imposing an indoor mask mandate throughout the district. The mandate included an exemption for individuals who were "actively eating or drinking." Bowser was not, but implied that she was, and called her critics "ridiculous."

7. "Everyone feels traumatized." Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago

That's how Lightfoot, a frequent violator of state and local mask mandates, defended herself for shouting into a bullhorn amid a crowd celebrating Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election. "There are times when we actually do need to have … relief and come together, and I felt like that was one of those times," she said. "This has been a super hard year on everyone. Everyone feels traumatized."

6. "I was feeling the spirit." London Breed, mayor of San Francisco

Despite issuing one of the strictest masks mandates in the state of California, the mayor was defiant after being photographed dancing at a jazz club without a mask. "I got up and started dancing because I was feeling the spirit and I wasn't thinking about a mask," Breed said. "I was thinking about having a good time."

5. "Homophobia." Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D., N.Y.)

Maloney's spokesman blamed "disappointing" "homophobia" after the Free Beacon reported that the congressman was cavorting around Europe with his husband (often without a mask) in defiance of U.S. State Department travel guidelines.

4. "It was a setup." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.)

Pelosi was photographed getting her hair done in San Francisco despite local and state health orders preventing hair salons from opening. She claimed to have been duped by the salon's nefarious owner. "It was a setup," said Pelosi. "I take responsibility for falling for a setup."

3. It's "shameful" to criticize me during Black History Month. Stacey Abrams, gubernatorial candidate.

Abrams, who continues to believe she "won" the 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia, bared her face in front of a group of masked children last week during a visit to Glennwood Elementary School. She proceeded to denounce her "shameful" critics for launching a "false political attack" during Black History Month.

2. "I hold my breath" during photos. Eric Garcetti, mayor of Los Angeles

Garcetti was caught on camera mingling with maskless billionaires and celebrities during the NFC Championship game in Los Angeles. "There is a zero percent chance of infection from that," Garcetti insisted. Medical experts immediately debunked the scientific misinformation.

1. "Republicans are mad they can't date me." Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (D. NY)

The celebrity congresswoman lashed out at sexually frustrated Republicans for being "mad they can't date me" after she was spotted enjoying herself without a mask in Florida, where citizens are free to go maskless.

If you wonder why people are fed up with our political elites, why the Canadian truckers are protesting, why political science experts are expecting Democrats to get slaughtered in the November elections, and why President Biden's poll numbers continue to sink like a cannonball in water, the arrogance of those who think the rules don't apply to them might provide a clue.

Something From Nothing

Contemporary naturalistic scientists have a problem. It's very hard to explain in naturalistic terms how the universe could have come into being from nothing, which is what the standard Big Bang model entails.

As an article at Mind Matters puts it:

It does not appear that the Big Bang had a natural beginning. It was the beginning. Before it, there was nothing at all, which is a hard concept for us to grasp. In a debate with naturalist philosopher David Papineau, theistic neurosurgeon Michael Egnor described it as an effect with no physical cause.

For some scientists the solution to the puzzle of how a universe could come from nothing is to redefine what's meant by "nothing."

Physicist Lawrence Krauss, for example, argued in his book A Universe from Nothing, that the "nothing" out of which the universe arose actually included the laws of physics and the quantum foam.

This elicited a lot of pushback from philosophers who argued, rightly, that "nothing" doesn't mean a state where there are only some things like physical laws and the quantum foam existing. Rather "nothing" means "not anything at all."

But how did we get a universe out of "not anything at all"?

The Mind Matters piece discusses some attempts to explain this. One attempt involves the claim that there were brilliant aliens from another universe who somehow constructed our universe out of the seeming void of nothingness:

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, argued in Scientific American last October that advanced aliens engineered the Big Bang and that, when we humans are sufficiently advanced, we will create other universes as well.

Thus, according to Loeb, there must have been some sort of intelligent agents who designed our world in the midst of nothingness.

Neurologist Steven Novella offers another approach. [He] outlines a theory by which the universe could have come about from nothing without a beginning by asking us to reimagine what “nothing” means. Perhaps there can’t be [real] “nothing,” but the fact that the universe is expected to wind down until it undergoes heat death may be, he considers, a way out:

Perhaps the laws of reality ... simply do not allow for a state that we would understand as completely nothing. We think of nothing as simply the absence of stuff, of matter and energy, but perhaps it’s more complicated than that. It may simply be impossible for there to be truly nothing in that simplistic sense.

But where, we might ask, do the "laws of reality" come from? Novella, however, ignores this inconvenient speed bump:

What if the maximally expanded and cold universe mathematically approaches the identical state as the singularity that resulted in the Big Bang? Again, our human minds ... cannot wrap around this concept, but we can crunch the numbers. At some point the heat death universe becomes a singularity, and then starts another cycle of the universe.

Maybe Novella's math can explain how the "heat death" universe is identical to the singularity that produced the universe at its origin, but it's hard to see how. A singularity is a point of zero volume and infinite density. The universe as it dies a heat death expands to an infinite volume and almost zero density. How are these two states identical?

The article continues:

If you want to really blow your mind, some physicists even speculate that this would be the same universe. Not another version of the same matter and energy, but the actual same universe in space and time. Essentially the end of the universe and the beginning of the universe are the same moment in time, the universe loops back in on itself in one giant self-contained temporal cycle.

This sounds a lot like Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence or the Hindu idea of cyclical time. The universe simply repeats itself over and over, forever. This is an idea which is probably deadly to science, which assumes a linear time, and which also leads to fatalism - the notion that no matter what we do the future is inevitable and ineluctable.

The best analogy is a ring, we just keeping going around the ring forever, but there is no true beginning or end. In this concept there is no beginning or end, there is no before, there is just a bound infinite loop.

This idea of a temporally infinite universe falls afoul of two additional philosophical difficulties. One is the set of problems and paradoxes entailed by positing an actual infinite and the other is the difficulty of explaining how we could ever traverse an actual infinite if such a thing could exist. These are serious problems which beset any theory based on infinity.

This solves the “something from nothing” problem, because the universe did not come from anything, it just always was. This still leaves us with the deeper question – why is there something instead of nothing, but that may not be a useful line of inquiry.

In other words, the question why anything at all exists is not "useful" because no naturalistic theory can answer it.

None of these theories, though adduced by scientists, are scientific theories. They're all metaphysical speculations and they're all attempts to explain the origin of the universe without invoking the God of theism.

Even so, whether we're talking about intelligent agents from another universe, or some preexisting laws that somehow formed the universe, most of these speculations seem to ultimately involve a mind of some sort. It's as if these thinkers are trying to attribute the universe to something that has the properties of God but isn't God.

One wonders why there's such desperation to avoid the conclusion that the origin of the universe seems to be the product of either God or something very much like God. Perhaps that's a question for psychologists.

Flexible Principles

GoFundMe stirred up a controversy recently when they decided that the Canadian truckers protest in Ottawa violated their principles. They claim that they'll refuse funding to anyone who breaks the law and uses violence, and they espied such behavior among the truckers.

In a recent press release they state:

We now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity.

The truckers protest against onerous vaccine mandates had won the support of donors all over North America, but GoFundMe originally intended to divert the contributors' donations, some $10 million, to charities approved by the truckers but relented after considerable pushback. They then decided to refund the money to the original donors.

As Elle Reynolds at The Federalist points out, GoFundMe's stance against violence and law-breaking seems a bit skewed. According to Reynolds, GFM has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for law-breakers and individuals accused of violence. For example:

• One GoFundMe fundraising campaign entitled “CHARGED WITH BANK ROBBERY DURING GEORGE FLOYD RIOT” is seeking bail money for Dominique Maxey, who was arrested in May 2020 and charged with bank larceny.
• In another listing, Raven S. is seeking $2,000 to help pay fines after, as she wrote, “on November 13 I was arrested and detained for trying to assist a man being wrongfully assaulted by police.”
• A woman named Stephanie has raised nearly $3,000 for her daughter who was arrested in conjunction with a riot in 2020. “Tia Pugh, a 21 year old resident of Mobile, was arrested for alleged criminal mischief and inciting a riot while attending a George Floyd protest the Sunday prior; two municipal misdemeanors. She was then arrested for federal felony civil unrest for the same incident,” she wrote.
• After three suspects were arrested for vandalizing the home of a defense witness in the Derek Chauvin trial, leaving his home “smeared with animal blood” with “a severed pig’s head dumped on the front porch,” GoFundMe enabled the three self-described “community activists” to raise more than $10,000 for legal fees.
• GoFundMe allowed a campaign called “PDX Protest Bail Fund” to raise nearly $1.4 million for arrestees.
• The fundraising site has also enabled CrimethInc. to raise nearly $60,000, despite the group’s promotion of violence to an extent that even Facebook banned it.
• After Alissa Azar was indicted on a felony riot charge and multiple misdemeanor charges, including one relating to the use of tear gas and pepper spray against another person, GoFundMe helped her raise more than $6,000 for legal defense.
• When “comrades” “reclaimed” (read: took over) a hotel in Minneapolis, GoFundMe enabled the trespassers to raise more than $245,000.
• GoFundMe itself donated $500 to the Riot Kitchen, a pro-riot food truck. Eight “Riot Kitchen” members were arrested in August 2020 near Kenosha, Wis., after filling numerous gas cans and attempting to escape after police confronted them, according to law enforcement. Police also reported “helmets, gas masks, protective vests, illegal fireworks and suspected controlled substances” in the vehicles.
• GoFundMe also took to Twitter to promote a fundraiser for farmers inside Seattle’s “Capitol Hill Occupational Protest,” in which rioters overtook a police precinct and set up their own lawless compound for weeks. (Contrast that to what GoFundMe’s leftist allies are calling an “occupation” in Canada.)

There's much more at the link, but these examples amply illustrate GFM's failure to live up to its own stated principles.

Perhaps if generous donors, informed of a GFM effort on behalf of a worthwhile cause, simply found alternative ways to channel their money to the cause, GFM would realize that their pretentious and hypocritical leftist moral preening was counterproductive and just stop it.

The Beauty of American Freedom

The last couple of days the theme here at Viewpoint has been freedom, especially freedom of speech. I urge you to watch this video featuring a young North Korean woman who managed to escape from North Korea.

Listen to her description of the hellish country in which she was born, the further hell she had to endure in China in order to get to the West, and the appreciation she has for the United States. Listen, too, to her criticism of the progressive left which seeks to turn the U.S. into a replica of the countries - North korea and China - from which she managed to free herself.

Her name is Yeonmi Park, she's amazingly well-educated and articulate, especially considering that most, if not all, of her education came after she escaped the concentration camp that is North Korea.

She tells her story in an eleven minute video that you can find only at the above link to Prager U. It's not on YouTube, and if there's a way to embed it in a VP post, I haven't found it yet.

Anyway, Ms. Park does a marvelous job of expressing the beauty of the American people, a beauty we Americans often consider to be a matter of course. If you watch her tell her story I promise you you'll be glad you did.

Bolstering Free Speech

Yesterday I mused on why today's university administrators don't have the same courage to guarantee on their campuses freedom to both speak and hear opinions unpopular with the left as both the mayor of Syracuse and the owner of the venue at which Frederick Douglass was to speak demonstrated in 1861.

Coincidentally, a business professor at Georgetown named John Hasnas provides us with an answer in Monday's Wall Street Journal (paywall).

Hasnas explains that his university actually violated its own rules concerning free expression when they put newly hired administrator Ilya Shapiro on leave for his criticism of President Biden's declaration that he will only appoint a black woman to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court.

He writes that:

Georgetown’s policy states that speech “may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or ill conceived.”

Yet suppression is exactly what happened:

Mr. Shapiro tweeted that the candidate he viewed as “objectively” most qualified for the Supreme Court “alas doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.” The dean of Georgetown Law, William Treanor, announced that Mr. Shapiro’s comment was “at odds with everything we stand for at Georgetown Law” and ordered “an investigation into whether he violated our policies and expectations on professional conduct, non-discrimination, and anti-harassment.”

Hasnas wonders rhetorically why universities make "grandiloquent commitments to freedom of speech, then fail to honor them?" The answer, he avers, is that they have every incentive to do what they do.

University administrators get no reward for upholding abstract principles. Their incentive is to quell on-campus outrage and bad press as quickly as possible. Success is widely praised, but there is no punishment for failing to uphold the university’s commitment to free speech.

In other words, it doesn't cost the university anything to throw free speech overboard, but it could cost them plenty to protect it. Thus, university administrators, whose only principle is protecting the bottom line, will almost always take the easy route.

This pathetic state of affairs has a remedy, however, and Professor Hasnas outlines it:

The solution is to create an incentive for schools to protect open inquiry—the fear of lawsuits.

First, universities should add a “safe harbor” provision to their speech policies stating: “The university will summarily dismiss any allegation that an individual or group has violated a university policy if the allegation is based solely on the individual’s or group’s expression of religious, philosophical, literary, artistic, political, or scientific viewpoints.”

This language would be contractually binding.

Second, free-speech advocates should organize pro bono legal groups to sue schools that violate the safe-harbor provision. This would make it affordable for suppressed parties to bring suits over the violation of their contractual rights.

This sounds very appealing, but I see a problem. Why would weak-kneed administrators already inclined to cave at the slightest pressure from the left make it harder on themselves to capitulate by implementing the "safe harbor" provision? Isn't that a bit like telling a cowardly soldier that he should make it harder for himself to avoid the battle?

Anyway, Hasnas closes with this:

In the absence of damage awards, university administrators won’t act against their own interests merely to uphold an abstract commitment to free speech. The threat of such awards would make universities like Georgetown put their money where their mouths are.

It'd be marvelous if universities followed Professor Hasnas' recommendation, but it would take both courage and wisdom to do so, so I'm not optimistic.

Frederick Douglass and Cancel Culture

In his new book The President and the Freedom Fighter (Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass) author Brian Kilmeade describes an event involving Douglass in the midst of the Civil War. Douglass was invited to Syracuse New York to give a speech which was expected to be critical of President Lincoln's early reluctance to emancipate the slaves.

Lincoln was afraid that if he did that the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia would secede and join the Confederacy, but Douglass saw this as unconscionable dithering.

Kilmeade writes:

[Douglass'] harsh criticisms of Lincoln's border state policy certainly angered a great many people. When he arrived ... to lecture in Syracuse, New York, he saw advertisements supporting his speeches - but side by side were handbills that called him "Thief!", "Rescal," "Traitor!!!" - and worse. It invited all comers to "give him a warm reception at this time for the insolence he deserves."

Reading this brought to mind the many times speakers invited to speak at university venues have been threatened with disruption and violence by those who fear ideas, including, incredibly enough, university professors.

Regrettably, pusillanimous university representatives often simply cancel the event, giving the intellectual thugs a victory over the freedom to speak and the freedom of others to listen.

But that's not what happened in Douglass' case:

The owner of the theater rejected calls from his neighbors to close the doors to his hall. When he was reminded that "Frederick Douglass was a Negro," he replied that his [the theater owner] principles of freedom applied to humanity, not to color."

Would that our universities and social media giants were so principled and courageous. But that's not all. Kilmeade tells us that:

The mayor reached into the city coffers and came up with three hundred dollars to pay for regular police and a special fifty-man security force.

Additional recruits were summoned. They marched into Syracuse, where they guarded the theater entrance, bayonets fixed on their rifles. When Douglass arrived, the mayor locked arms with Douglass, endangering his own safety to shield his guest from mob violence.

How many university presidents or provosts are willing to brave violence to ensure that someone whose opinions may be unpopular among the professoriat and their students has the right to address their student body? How many universities are willing to hire extra security to defend free speech? How many instead utter weaselly bromides like, "We can't guarantee the safety of those involved so we're cancelling the event"?

Denying the other side the opportunity to speak, shouting them down and threatening violence are tactics that fascists have used for a hundred years to stifle and suppress all opposition to their tyrannical goals. It's a tactic used by the Nazi brownshirts in Germany and the Bolshevik communist/fascists in Russia and everywhere else where totalitarians seek to seize power over peoples' lives.

It'd be a tragedy if the institutions entrusted with upholding the basic principles of freedom let them win here, too.

Aristotle and Nietzsche

Most ethical systems in our contemporary world can probably be subsumed under the names of either Aristotle or Nietzsche. Aristotle thought that human beings had a telos. There was something that man was for, a purpose or an end, for which he was on the earth.

Virtuous acts were those which help men achieve their telos. The good life was a life which conformed to the cardinal virtues - prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice - which were objectively right to live by.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, denied that there was any overarching purpose to being human and thus there was no objective moral right or wrong. Morality was all a matter of perspective. It's a matter of how we see things, a matter of individual subjective preference.

Thus the ubermensch or overman creates his own values. He rejects the "slave moralities" of theism and embraces the "master morality" of the Promethean man. This is what makes men great, and great men define their own good.

Neither Aristotle nor Nietzsche believed in the existence of a personal moral law-giver which fact makes for an odd state of affairs. Aristotle's telos makes no sense unless the purpose or end of mankind is somehow conferred upon man by a transcendent moral authority. Otherwise, where would such a purpose come from? But if there's no personal law-giver or telos-giver then neither humanity nor individual men have any purpose, and the "virtues" are just arbitrary conventions.

Nietzsche is right that in the absence of a transcendent, personal law-giver what constitutes a virtue is just a subjective choice. On Nietzsche's subjectivism the virtues extolled by the Nazis are no more wrong nor right than those embraced by St. Francis of Assisi. They're just different.

If theism is correct, however, if there actually is a God who creates man and endows him with a telos, then the moral law and the classical virtues really are objective and obligatory.

So, the way the theist sees it, Aristotle, by denying a transcendent, personal God, was inconsistent but nevertheless correct about there being objective moral duties, and the atheist Nietzsche was consistent but nevertheless incorrect in his denial of objective moral right and wrong.

The Next Taboo

Recently I speculated on VP as to which would be the next taboo to fall in our culture, a culture which seems determined to topple every taboo, especially sexual taboos, that it can find.

I suggested it would be the taboo against incestuous marriage, but mentioned that the taboos against polyamory (group marriage) and pedophilia (sex with children) are also good candidates.

As if the folks at The Federalist were reading VP (They're smart people so maybe they are!) a piece appeared soon thereafter by Spencer Lindquist introducing us to the thinking of a SUNY Fredonia professor named Stephan Kershnar.

Professor Kershnar is an apologist for pedophilia, and he's not the only one in academia who harbors his perverse views. He may, though, be one of the most outspoken.

Lindquist posts a Twitter video in which Kershnar makes the claim that, as Lindquist describes it:

an adult male having sex with a 12-year-old girl is not obviously wrong, and that calling it wrong is a “mistake.” In the same clip, he refers to pedophilic rape as “adult-child sex,” another euphemism that, just like “minor-attracted person,” is being used in an attempt to run cover for evil.

Lindquist adds that,

It gets worse. Twelve isn’t young enough for Kershnar. He continues to defend pedophilia, remarking “The notion that it’s wrong even with a one-year-old is not quite obvious to me.” He goes on. “I don’t think it’s blanket wrong at any age.”

Kershnar even argues that children can consent to sex with adults, comparing it to a child willfully engaging in kickball or participating in bar mitzvah lessons.

What are the legal ramifications of such an unspeakably vile perspective? Kershnar lays it out. Since he’s not sure if raping infants is good or bad, “the thumb on the scale should go to liberty.” Liberty for who? Moral monsters who want to rape infants.

Kershnar is open to the idea that pedophilia is deeply harmful to victims, but he just can’t put his finger on why. He thinks it could be because of bigots like you and me, who go “berserk” when pedophiles rape kids.

He even argues that we often make children do things they don’t want to do, like “go to church” or “go to temple” or “go to their sister’s ballet recital.”

There's much more about this at the link, including a discussion of other attempts, both subtle and unsubtle, to normalize pedophilia and three things those who see this as an evil, which it surely is, can do to fight it.

I'd like to pose this question, though: How can people in a secular society, a society that has abandoned all objective moral authority, call this, or anything else, evil?

How can one who believes that we're simply the product of blind, impersonal forces plus chance, declare Kershnar to be morally reprehensible? Where does moral right and wrong come from in a Darwinian world?

Secular folk might find what Kershnar is advocating to be distasteful, of course, but why, exactly, is it immoral? What makes it morally wrong?

The secular man has no good answer to these questions. Hemingway expressed the secular, naturalistic view this way: "Right is whatever you feel good after. Wrong is whatever you feel bad after."

In the absence of God, Hemingway is correct, and if a pedophile feels good after molesting a child then there's nothing wrong with it.

If one is a secularist and one finds child molestation morally abhorrent then one has two options: Either shed your abhorrence or shed your atheism. You can't have both and claim to be rational.

If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now

A team of scholars at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise conducted a review of the relevant literature on Covid lockdowns and found that government imposed lockdowns enacted to mitigate the spread of Covid not only don't work, they're positively harmful.

A lot of people have been saying this for two years, and some of them have been kicked off social media platforms for expressing that opinion.

Now, however, with the publication of this authoritative study from Johns Hopkins, maybe the twenty somethings who decide who'll be allowed to say what on social media, along with our political and public health officials, will realize, even if they don't admit it, that the lockdowns they imposed and supported were a mistake.

As one example of how mistaken they were, researchers led by Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College of London predicted in 2020 that a suppression strategy based on a lockdown would reduce COVID-19 mortality by up to 98%.

It turns out that, according to the Johns Hopkins study, that prediction was wildly incorrect.

Here are some slightly edited excerpts from the study:

While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.

We use “NPI” (Nonpharmaceutical interventions) to describe any government mandate which directly restricts peoples’ possibilities. Our definition does not include governmental recommendations, governmental information campaigns, access to mass testing, voluntary social distancing, etc., but does include mandated interventions such as closing schools or businesses, mandated face masks etc. We define lockdown as any policy consisting of at least one NPI as described above.

We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality. There is some evidence that business closures reduce COVID-19 mortality, but the variation in estimates is large and the effect seems related to closing bars.

There may be an effect of mask mandates, but just two studies look at this, one of which one only looks at the effect of employee mask mandates.

We find no clear evidence that SIPOs (Shelter In Place Orders) had a noticeable impact on COVID-19 mortality.

Studies examining the relationship between lockdown strictness find that the average lockdown in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% (cf. the 98% prediction mentioned above) compared to a COVID-19 policy based solely on recommendations. Shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs) were also ineffective. They only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 2.9%.

Unintended consequences may play a larger role than recognized. We already pointed to the possible unintended consequence of SIPOs, which may isolate an infected person at home with his/her family where he/she risks infecting family members with a higher viral load, causing more severe illness.

Lockdowns often have also limited peoples’ access to safe (outdoor) places such as beaches, parks, and zoos, or included outdoor mask mandates or strict outdoor gathering restrictions, pushing people to meet at less safe (indoor) places.

Indeed, we do find some evidence that limiting gatherings was counterproductive and increased COVID-19 mortality.

The evidence fails to confirm that lockdowns have a significant effect in reducing COVID-19 mortality. The effect is little to none.

However, lockdowns during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic have had devastating effects. They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy.

These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best. Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument (Italics mine).

Maybe the next time we're visited by a pandemic or a resurgence of Covid, our political and public health leaders will actually follow the science instead of depriving people of their livelihoods, education and psychological well-being.

The Worst Enemy of Black People

As we embark upon Black History Month it might be of interest to reprise a piece written several years ago based on an article by the late Walter Williams titled The Worst Enemy of Black People. Here's the post:

A short piece by economist and syndicated columnist Walter E. Williams appeared recently in The Meridian Star and is getting a lot of play on social media.

The essay is titled The Worst Enemy of Black People and it starts off recounting how, despite his very controversial legacy, Malcolm X is very much respected in the African American community.

Malcolm has been called one of the most influential black Americans and schools and streets bear his name in cities across America. Yet despite the homage he has received over the years since his assassination in 1965, Williams writes, there's one thing he strongly believed that has been quietly ignored.

(Remember as you read this that as Williams, who is himself black, notes, during the 1960s the word "Negro" was still a respectable term for, and among, blacks.)

Malcolm X said: “The worst enemy that the Negro has is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems.

I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man.”

Williams goes on to cite some deeply troubling facts:

Malcolm X was absolutely right about our finding solutions to our own problems. The most devastating problems that black people face today have absolutely nothing to do with our history of slavery and discrimination. Chief among them is the breakdown of the black family, wherein 75 percent of blacks are born to single, often young, mothers.

In some cities and neighborhoods, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births is over 80.

Actually, “breakdown” is the wrong term; the black family doesn’t form in the first place. This is entirely new among blacks.

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year only 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. As late as 1950, female-headed households constituted only 18 percent of the black population. Today it’s close to 70 percent.

In much earlier times, during the late 1800s, there were only slight differences between the black family structure and those of other ethnic groups. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were two-parent households.

Welfare has encouraged young women to have children out of wedlock. The social stigma once associated with unwed pregnancy is all but gone. Plus, “shotgun” weddings are a thing of the past. That was when male members of a girl’s family made the boy who got her pregnant live up to his responsibilities.

The high crime rates in so many black communities impose huge personal costs and have turned once-thriving communities into economic wastelands. The Ku Klux Klan couldn’t sabotage chances for black academic excellence more effectively than the public school system in most cities.

Politics and white liberals will not solve these and other problems. As Malcolm X said, “our problems will never be solved by the white man.”

Indeed, liberal policies and attitudes are largely responsible for the erosion of the black family. Every urban region with a substantial black population is governed by liberal Democrats, nowadays often black but nevertheless supported by the larger white liberal consensus in the Democratic party.

Liberalism has done nothing to reverse the decline of the family in general and the black family in particular and has, on the contrary, done much to accelerate it.

Malcolm X and Walter Williams, saw this clearly, but unfortunately too few African Americans see it at all today (although there are signs that that's changing).

The Amazing Ant

One part of a larger interview at Mind Matters with Eric Cassell, the author of Animal Algorithms, focusses on the navigational abilities of an ant that lives in the Saharan desert.

Cassell starts off talking about airplane navigation systems which he worked on for 40 years.

When you talk about sophisticated navigation systems like those used by modern aircraft, these are highly engineered systems. Typically, you know, commercial aircraft have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lines of code in their navigation and flight control systems. So they’re highly complex.

And there’s a number of aspects of the engineering that’s involved when you build systems like that. One is, they’re highly integrated. So you have to match up not just the software, but the hardware, the sensors, the flight control system, et cetera. And then all of this has to be done in a coherent manner.

And it turns out, surprisingly — not just to biologists, but to those of us that are engineers as well — when you start examining some of these systems in animals, they exhibit the same kind of principles that we use in developing man-made navigation systems.

My favorite example is actually a desert ant that resides in deserts in Africa. These ants actually employ several different types of navigation centers. They use a sun compass, a polarized light compass. They have an odometer, they do chemotaxis, in other words with sensing chemicals. And then they use all that information too, in an integrated manner.

And they actually do what biologists call path integration, what us engineers would typically call inertial navigation — basically the same thing, where they integrate all this information and then are able to navigate accurately.

One of the amazing things about this is that according to Darwinian theory all these systems evolved in the brain of this insect, a brain that has only a few hundred thousand neurons, purely by chance. Systems that took intelligent engineers decades to build, or, if we go back to primitive humans, thousands or millions of years, evolved in ants by pure dumb luck.

There's more, of course:

But one of the unique things about it is, whenever they go on a forging excursion from their home nest, they can go on a very circuitous path away from the nest, turning a number of times in different directions. But then when they go to return home, they are able to actually compute a direct path from wherever they are back to their home nest.

Again, it’s based on this inertial navigation type of system. It’s very surprising that such a system exists in an ant.

When Cassell says it's "very surprising" he's understating how utterly astonishing this is. The capability he refers to actually requires the ant to perform trigonometry, a skill that many intelligent students whose brains contain 100 billion neurons, have difficulty with. Here's a short BBC video that shows this:

Cassell adds:

And we are just now catching up technology-wise with what many animals have been doing for thousands or millions of years. Our human ability to navigate long distances didn’t really become a reality until sometime in the 1700s with the development of accurate clocks that could be used on ships.

Prior to that, ships had a lot of trouble navigating very long distances because they couldn’t determine longitude in an accurate way.

And finally, with GPS, we have a system that actually starts to mimic what many animals have been doing for a long time.

It takes a prodigious exertion of blind faith, it seems to me, to force oneself to believe that this ability evolved independently of any guidance from an intelligent Mind.

The co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA Francis Crick once wrote that "Biologists must constantly remind themselves that what they see was not designed but evolved."

I'll bet they do have to constantly remind themselves of that. It must be like trying to constantly remind oneself that 2+2=7.

A Form of Madness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disagreeing in Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What'll Be the Next Taboo to Fall?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Crisis in Ukraine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walt explains:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientism and Self-Refutation

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

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

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

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

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

There are at least three things wrong with scientism:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Information Storage System Ever

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

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

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

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

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

Are Whales Designed?

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

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

Enjoy the video:

Who Are the Real Authoritarians?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Do Our Rights Come From?

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

Goldberg goes on to say that,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Over His Head

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

He goes on to list eleven examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free Will Is Nonsense?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Biden Morphing into Trump?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just so long as that president is their guy.