To that line of thinking [cosmic fine-tuning] I [Sutter] have this response. We have but one universe for us to study; it is all we’ve had and all that ever will be. As peculiar as this universe of ours appears, we cannot access or interrogate other possibilities.Sutter is asserting that in order to say whether the fine-tuning of our universe is improbable we have to be able to compare our universe to other universes, but since there are no other universes (that we know of) such a comparison can't be done. His objection is not quite correct, however.
We do not know how special or generic this cosmos is, the same way you could not measure the probability of the Queen of Diamonds appearing in your hand if you did not know the contents of the full deck. That stark reality does not rule out divinity or exotic physics, but it also does not demand them. If you wish to believe in either of those, I will not begrudge you.
Some argue that the way the universe is constructed is a little too particular. That if any one small thing were to change, from the speed of light to the amount of atomic matter assembled during the big bang, life as we know it would be outright impossible.He then responds to the argument as follows:
Perhaps some other form of intelligence could rise up in that strange cosmos, shuddering at the impossible thought of creatures anchored to a planet and swimming in its water oceans. Perhaps not. Either way, it appears that our universe is especially tuned for the appearance of life as we know it, indicating either divine intervention or some conspiracy of physics too far beyond our comprehension to grasp.
To that line of thinking I have this response. We have but one universe for us to study; it is all we’ve had and all that ever will be. As peculiar as this universe of ours appears, we cannot access or interrogate other possibilities.In other words, Sutter is claiming that we can't conclude that our universe is improbable because it's the only universe we know anything about. We have nothing else to compare it to. Maybe there's an infinity of other universes out there, but we don't know. So without something to compare ours to we can't say whether ours is improbable or not.
We do not know how special or generic this cosmos is, the same way you could not measure the probability of the Queen of Diamonds appearing in your hand if you did not know the contents of the full deck. That stark reality does not rule out divinity or exotic physics, but it also does not demand them. If you wish to believe in either of those, I will not begrudge you.
Imagine that 100 percent of an entire town of 10,000 people got cancer within one year — a cancer cluster. It turns out the chemical plant in the town produces carcinogenic chemicals, so the townspeople sue the chemical plant.Read Luskin's whole piece at the link.
During the trial, the townspeople hire scientists as expert witnesses who testify that the odds of this occurring just by chance are 1 in 10^10,000. Under normal scientific reasoning, they argue, such low odds establish that chance cannot be the explanation, and that there must be some physical agent causing cancer in the town. In this case, the best explanation is that chemicals from the chemical plant caused the cancer.
The chemical plant has a lot of money, and they hire a wily defense attorney who invokes the multiverse defense, saying:
"Yes, 1 in 10^10,000 is a very low probability. But there could be 10^10,000 universes out there in the multiverse, and our universe just happens to be the unlucky one where this unlikely cancer cluster arose — purely by chance!
"You can’t say there aren’t 10^10,000 universes out there, right? That means you can’t conclude that my client’s chemical plant had anything to do with this — the whole thing could have happened as a chance occurrence!"
Should the jury trust the scientists and conclude the cancer cluster is highly improbable and caused by chemical plant, or should they trust the lawyer and invent 10^10,000 universes where this kind of cancer cluster becomes probable enough to happen by chance?
The shady attorney deflects criticism saying: “You can’t say there aren’t 10^10,000 universes out there, right?” Right — but that’s the point. There’s no way to test the multiverse, and science should not seriously consider untestable theories.
Multiverse thinking makes it impossible to rule out chance, which essentially eliminates the basis for drawing many scientific conclusions. What we have before us is a cancer cluster and a chemical plant, and that’s enough to make a sound scientific conclusion.
In the same way, Sutter doesn’t argue that there is necessarily a multiverse. Rather, he argues that if we can’t know that there isn’t a multiverse then we can’t draw a conclusion of design.
This isn’t all that different from the shady attorney who says, “You can’t say there aren’t 10^10,000 universes out there, right?” But as the hypothetical cancer cluster shows, we could extend multiverse logic and appeals to unknown causes to destroy virtually any scientific conclusion. But that’s not how science works.
What we have before us is a universe that is, to all appearances, finely tuned for life. That’s data, and that’s enough to draw a sound scientific conclusion: design.
[I]nvading Taiwan or mounting a successful blockade would be the most complex military operation in modern history, and China’s military has not fought a major war in more than seven decades.Read the rest at the link. It's a good response to claims that China will almost certainly invade Taiwan in the next couple of years.
To invade Taiwan, China would have to conduct an extraordinarily complex military operation, synchronizing air, land, and sea power as well as electronic and cyberwarfare.
The Taiwan Strait [which separates Taiwan from mainland China], over ninety miles wide, is incredibly choppy, and due to two monsoon seasons and other extreme weather events, a seaborne invasion is only viable a few months out of the year.
Transporting hundreds of thousands of soldiers across the Taiwan Strait would take weeks and require thousands of ships. Each crossing would take hours, allowing Taiwan to target the ships, mass troops on potential landing sites, and erect barriers.
Some questions remain about whether China has the naval vessels it would need to invade Taiwan successfully. China’s amphibious fleet is relatively small, and although Beijing will likely turn to civilian ships to sustain and supplement an invading force, those take longer to unload and would be more vulnerable to Taiwanese missiles.
Even if Chinese troops successfully cross the strait, few deep-water ports and beaches in Taiwan could accommodate a large landing force.
Beijing would also have to assume Taiwan could destroy its major ports at a conflict’s outset to prevent an invader from using them.
Taiwan’s west coast has shallow waters extending from most of its beaches, meaning they are not ideal for an invading force. Due to the shallow water, China would have to anchor ships far from Taiwan’s coast and move equipment to the shores slowly, making the ships vulnerable to Taiwanese missiles and artillery.
Taiwan’s east coast is lined by cliffs that are too steep for an invading force to scale. Moving to Taiwan’s major population centers is only possible via a few narrow passes and tunnels, which Taiwan can destroy or defend.
To prevent China’s military from seizing the capital [Taipei], Taiwan can choose to destroy the city’s major port and the tunnels and highways leading into the city.
What about God’s infinite knowledge — His omniscience? Philosophically, this presents us with no less of a conundrum.Atterton is here committing the fallacy of equivocation, slyly using the word "know" in two different senses.
Leaving aside the highly implausible idea that God knows all the facts in the universe, no matter how trivial or useless (Saint Jerome thought it was beneath the dignity of God to concern Himself with such base questions as how many fleas are born or die every moment), if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know.
But if He knows what we know, then this would appear to detract from His perfection. Why?
There are some things that we know that, if they were also known to God, would automatically make Him a sinner, which of course is in contradiction with the concept of God. As the late American philosopher Michael Martin has already pointed out, if God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust and envy.
But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect.
However, this [human free choice] does not explain so-called physical evil (suffering) caused by nonhuman causes (famines, earthquakes, etc.). Nor does it explain, as Charles Darwin noticed, why there should be so much pain and suffering among the animal kingdom.Actually, however, the Judeo-Christian theological tradition does explain it. According to this tradition the world and all that is in it was created good and given to Man as a gift for him to superintend, much like a husband might out of love build a house as a gift to his new bride.
I’d like to focus on a specific question: Does the idea of a morally perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing God make sense? Does it hold together when we examine it logically?Surprisingly, Atterton admits that there's a possible solution to the paradox, but why mention the stone paradox as an objection to the coherence of theism if there's a plausible solution to it?
You’ve probably heard the paradox of the stone before: Can God create a stone that cannot be lifted? If God can create such a stone, then He is not all powerful, since He Himself cannot lift it. On the other hand, if He cannot create a stone that cannot be lifted, then He is not all powerful, since He cannot create the unliftable stone. Either way, God is not all powerful.
The way out of this dilemma is usually to argue, as Saint Thomas Aquinas did, that God cannot do self-contradictory things. Thus, God cannot lift what is by definition “unliftable,” just as He cannot “create a square circle” or get divorced (since He is not married). God can only do that which is logically possible.Having answered his own argument Atterton then says that, well, there are other difficulties which make the concept of God incoherent:
[E]ven if we accept, for the sake of argument, Aquinas’ explanation, there are other problems to contend with. For example, can God create a world in which evil does not exist? This does appear to be logically possible.This is not much of an argument. It certainly doesn't show that there's a contradiction between God's attributes of omnipotence and goodness. Atterton is asking the question, if God could do something that He might've been expected to do, why didn't He do it? To which the answer is simply that He evidently had good reasons for not doing so.
Presumably God could have created such a world without contradiction. It evidently would be a world very different from the one we currently inhabit, but a possible world all the same. Indeed, if God is morally perfect, it is difficult to see why he wouldn’t have created such a world. So why didn’t He?
Let us first dispense with the absurd accusation that the United States of America is a xenophobic country or that it does not welcome immigrants. Every year since the millennium, between 703,000 and 1.2 million immigrants have been granted legal permanent residence, a process also known as getting a green card.One frightening aspect of the complete breakdown of border enforcement is the number of criminals who have come across. The number that have been caught give us an idea of how many have eluded our authorities:
Green-card holders are permitted to live and work in the country indefinitely, to join the armed forces, and to apply for U.S. citizenship after five years — three years, if married to a U.S. citizen.
No other country comes close to welcoming this many legal immigrants per year. The U.S. now has roughly 50 million immigrants, or foreign-born residents. The next-highest is Germany at about 15 million. In other words, we have welcomed 35 million more people from other countries than any other country on Earth. (Keep this in mind the next time you hear the accusation that U.S. does not accept enough refugees.)
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, since the beginning of the 2021 fiscal year (October 1, 2020), CBP has arrested 31,542 individuals who have been convicted of one or more crimes, whether in the United States or abroad, before their run-in with CBP. Out of that total, 3,834 had convictions for assault, battery, or domestic violence; 2,755 had convictions for burglary, robbery, larceny, theft, or fraud; 6,424 had convictions from driving under the influence; 1,191 were convicted of “sexual offenses” including rape; and 161 were convicted of homicide or manslaughter.Allowing these people in to our country where they may prey upon Americans is a dereliction of the duty of the federal government whose responsibility it is to protect American lives and property. There's more:
Of course, CBP can only measure the criminal histories of those it catches; since the beginning of the Biden administration, CBP sources have confirmed more than 1.7 million known “gotaways” at the southwest border — cases where a person illegally entering the country was spotted but not apprehended. In public testimony in March 2023, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol Raul Ortiz conceded that the actual number could be 10 to 20 percent higher than the official figures.
At U.S. land-border ports of entry, since October 1, 2020, 1,195 individuals stopped and detained by CBP were in the terrorist-screening data set, colloquially known as the terrorism watch list. Between ports of entry, since October 1, 2020, 336 individuals stopped and detained by CBP were on the terrorist watch list.What can be done? Geraghty cites the 2017 congressional testimony of Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council — the labor union that represents U.S. Border Patrol. Among his comments:
I want to emphasize first off, I will not advocate for 2,000 miles’ worth of border [wall]. That is just not necessary. But what I will advocate for is a border wall in strategic locations, which helps us secure the border. . . .When Trump proposed a border wall the Democrats complained of the expense. Geraghty puts the expense into perspective:
As an agent who worked in two of the busiest sectors in the history of the Border Patrol, I can personally tell you how effective border barriers are. When I got to the Tucson sector, we had next to nothing by way of infrastructure, and I can confidently say that for every illegal border crosser that I apprehended, three got away.
The building of barriers and large fences, a bipartisan effort, allowed agents in part to dictate where illegal crossings took place and doubled how effective I was able to be in apprehending illegal border crossers.
As an agent who has extensive experience working with and without border barriers and as the person elected to represent rank-and-file Border Patrol agents, I can personally attest to how effective a wall, in strategic locations, will be. . . .
With a barrier, it’s estimated that all we need is one agent per three, four linear miles. Without a barrier, I need one agent per linear mile. So, the cost effectiveness of a barrier in manpower is — it’s extremely successful. . . .
In addition to the 353 miles of primary fencing that we already have, we believe that we need an additional 300 miles of primary fencing. This fencing should be strategically placed in areas such as Del Rio and Laredo Texas and the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation in Arizona.
Back in 2017, the United States Government Accountability Office and the CBP estimated that average cost per mile for primary pedestrian fencing was $6.5 million, and $1.8 million per mile for vehicular fencing. In today’s dollars, that comes out to $8.21 and $2.27 million per mile.There's much more of interest in Geraghty's column and I urge anyone concerned about what's occurring on our southern border to check it out. The refusal to stop the flow of illegal immigrants is unconscionable, deliberate and criminal. Mayorkis deserves to be impeached. So does his boss.
For $2.4 billion, you could complete 300 additional miles of the primary fencing that Judd says the country needs and that would make CBP’s job much easier.
For perspective, the federal government spent $3.3 billion on office furniture during the pandemic. In the last three years, the U.S. government provided $3 billion in subsidies to one company to provide internet service to low-income households. This December, Nancy Pelosi boasted that she had secured $3.07 billion in federal funding to support construction of “a two-track electrified high-speed passenger rail line connecting the cities of Merced, Fresno, and Bakersfield.”
Wilder Penfield was a pivotal figure in modern neurosurgery. He was an American-born neurosurgeon at the Montreal Neurological Institute who pioneered surgery for epilepsy.There's more at the link. Egnor's argument boils down to this: If the material brain is sufficient to account for all of our cognitive experience but stimulation that normally triggers all sorts of "mental" activity never triggers abstract thinking, abstract thinking must arise from something other than the material brain.
He was an accomplished scientist as well as a clinical surgeon, and made seminal contributions to our knowledge of cortical physiology, brain mapping, and intra-operative study of seizures and brain function under local anesthesia with patients awake who could report experiences during brain stimulation.
His surgical specialty was the mapping of seizure foci in the brain of awake (locally anesthetized) patients, using the patient's experience and response to precise brain stimulation to locate and safely excise discrete regions of the cortex that were causing seizures. Penfield revolutionized neurosurgery (every day in the operating room I use instruments he designed) and he revolutionized our understanding of brain function and its relation to the mind.
Penfield began his career as a materialist, convinced that the mind was wholly a product of the brain. He finished his career as an emphatic dualist.
During surgery, Penfield observed that patients had a variable but limited response to brain stimulation. Sometimes the stimulation would cause a seizure or evoke a sensation, a perception, movement of muscles, a memory, or even a vivid emotion. Yet Penfield noticed that brain stimulation never evoked abstract thought. He wrote:There is no area of gray matter, as far as my experience goes, in which local epileptic discharge brings to pass what could be called "mindaction"... there is no valid evidence that either epileptic discharge or electrical stimulation can activate the mind....If one stops to consider it, this is an arresting fact.Why don't epilepsy patients have "calculus seizures" or "moral ethics" seizures, in which they involuntarily take second derivatives or contemplate mercy? The answer, apparently, is that the brain does not generate abstract thought. The brain is normally necessary for abstract thought, but not sufficient for it.
The record of consciousness can be set in motion, complicated though it is, by the electrode or by epileptic discharge. An illusion of interpretation can be produced in the same way.
But none of the actions we attribute to the mind has been initiated by electrode stimulation or epileptic discharge. If there were a mechanism in the brain that could do what the mind does, one might expect that the mechanism would betray its presence in a convincing manner by some better evidence of epileptic or electrode activations.[emphasis mine]
Thus, the mind, as Penfield understood, can be influenced by matter, but is, in its abstract functions, not generated by matter.
Jan Morris, in the opening lines of the only trans memoir written by an acknowledged master of English prose, puts it like this: “I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.”The second narrative, Hitchens claims, contradicts the first. This narrative...
This kind of story is compelling at an emotional level: It speaks to the universal feeling of dislocation, of alienation, of longing for completeness, and at the same time resonates with the hope of the oppressed for justice, with the sorrows of every human being denied true flourishing by prejudice and fear.
Call it the “wrong body” narrative.
asks whether maleness and femaleness are, in fact, real. It queries whether the kaleidoscopic diversity of human self-experience really can be squeezed into so restrictive a binary; it contends that language is always conditioned by the power structures of the day, that it rarely grasps life as it is actually lived; and it concludes that ultimately—to quote the very same memoir by Jan Morris—“there is neither man nor woman.”The first narrative holds that there are both males and females ("wrong body" narrative) while the second narrative ("skeptical" narrative) denies this.
This is the skeptical trans narrative which, of course, demolishes the “wrong body” one. If the ultimate reality has no place for gender, then Morris’s original epiphany was false: To “realize” that one has been “born into the wrong body” must be, not realization, but illusion.
I don’t know how much more plainly I can say it than this: If you believe that Donald Trump represents a unique threat to democracy — as Joe Biden and his team keep saying that they do — then you should not want Donald Trump on the ballot.I doubt that many Democrats really believe that Trump is "a threat to Democracy." I suspect that they're simply lying about it because the threat he poses is not to Democracy but to their power.
There are no exceptions to this rule. If Trump is the nominee, he has a chance of winning. If he is a threat to the republic, he ought not to be in a position from which he has a chance of winning.
The moment — the very moment — that you start muttering about jolts of energy to voters and donors, or about the best contrast to be drawn, or about motivators of Democrats, you have signaled that you don’t actually consider Trump to be the risk that you say you do.
Add into this mix that President Biden’s approval rating is in the low 30s, and the approach becomes even more inexplicable.
It is not the Democrats’ fault that Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican nominee. That honor goes to the party’s primary electorate, which, of its own free will, has made this call.
But it is the Democrats’ fault that so many within their party are asking the public to accept two contradictory messages at the same time. One cannot expect the electorate to believe both that the Republican candidate for president ought to be disqualified from consideration because he is an insurrectionist and that you hope he is the nominee because it helps energize your donors, voters, and volunteers.
That’s not “counterintuitive”; it’s deceitful. How many times, I wonder, does the party expect to play this game and get away with it?
I believe that the dream and the hope for Palestine from the River to the Sea and from the north to the south has been renewed. This has also become a slogan chanted in the U.S. and in Western capital cities, by the American and Western public.Why he thinks the Palestinians have a "right" to the land of Israel is a mystery. It has no basis in historical fact, but as Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air.com:
Palestine is free from the River to the Sea—that’s the slogan of the American students and the [students] in European capital cities. The Palestinian consensus—or almost a consensus—is that we will not give up on our right to Palestinian in its entirety, from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea and from Rosh Hanikra to Eilat or the Gulf of Aqaba.
It’s not as if Hamas has kept this ambition a secret. Its charter still proclaims that mission to this day, and its actions ever since its 2006 electoral win in Gaza continually prove it. They didn’t run for election to govern through the Oslo-based Palestinian Authority, Mashal explains, but to use it as a cover for its terrorist war to destroy Israel.Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Arabs Hamas represents will settle for a two-state solution. They want it all and will continue their war against Israel, encouraged by their supporters in the West, particularly university faculty and students, as long as they survive.
It’s difficult for Hamas to make this any clearer. They don’t want peaceful coexistence with Israel in a separate Palestinian state. And just to make that even more clear, Mashal also scoffs at an alternate plan of returning to the 1967 borders to determine the boundaries of a two-state solution.This is from the interview Mashal gave:
Why should Hamas accept 21% of ‘the Palestinian state’ when it can have 100%?
MASHAL: Why should the Palestinian agree to a fifth of Palestine, and accept it as a final solution?Morrissey asks why Hamas would accept President Biden's two-state solution when...,
Q: A fifth of Palestine is the 1967 borders?
MASHAL: The 1967 borders. The ’67 borders are 21%, a fifth of Palestine, so no.
Q: So what you are telling me is that after October 7th we don’t agree to ’67 borders? We want Palestine from the river to the sea?
MASHAL: No [i.e. they will not accept the '67 borders. They want 100% of Palestine].
...throngs of useful idiots in America mindlessly chant their genocidal slogans in support of Hamas terrorism? When the streets of London fill with Hamas fellow-travelers in terror to demand Israel’s surrender to Mashal?In case this hasn't penetrated the minds of some of the left-wingers demanding that Israel "negotiate" with these people, Morrissey cites Israeli journalist Hen Mazzig who tries to spell it out for "those still under the Hamas spell":
When the US and UK keep applying pressure on Israel to stop fighting back against Hamas and give them a sovereign base from which to continue their genocidal actions? Hamas went on a rampage of slaughter, rape, and kidnapping, and while it resulted in punishing losses in war, it has also bolstered their standing in the West.
Mashal’s not inaccurate in that assessment of the political outcome of October 7.
How many times must we tell you [Mazzig asks]: Hamas has one goal and that is the complete and utter destruction of Israel.Morrissey concludes,
When you scream “from the river to the sea,” you are chanting for the genocide, erasure, and ethnic cleansing of an indigenous people, the Jewish people, from their land.
You are siding with an evil that would not hesitate to do the same to you.
Indeed, and that’s literally true about America too. Hamas’ sponsors in Tehran routinely promise “death to America.” Only Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and their Obama-administration minders refuse to take that either seriously or literally.Why our leadership can't see what's so obviously the genocidal nature of Hamas is a question, I suppose, for psychologists to answer. Meanwhile, as has been said in a different context, negotiations with people like Hamas, or any of the similar groups in the region, is like four wolves negotiating with a sheep about what to have for lunch.
Respondents were asked a series of questions about their beliefs in religious, spiritual, and mystical entities: God, the devil, miracles, heaven, hell, reincarnation, ghosts, witches, and aliens.There's much more in her column. One rather surprising statistics that she cites is that, an overwhelming majority of all Americans – 94% – said they believe religious freedom is a fundamental human right. That figure is 10 points higher than those who view healthcare as a basic human right.
Of the topics listed, respondents were most likely to believe in God, with 85% reporting they believe in a creator, compared to just 15% who don’t believe. The exact amount – 85% – also reported a belief in heaven, with just slightly less – 83% – believing in miracles. Of those surveyed, 80% also reported that they believe “Jesus is God or the son of God.”
A smaller majority of those surveyed – 72% – say they believe in hell, while 70% report belief in the devil. “Self-reported belief in God is highest in the South, at 89%, followed by the Midwest (85%), Northeast (83%), and West (81%),” said Spencer Kimball, who directed the survey.
A solid majority of Americans surveyed – 58.3% – identified as Christian, with 36.3% saying they consider themselves Protestant and 22% identifying as Catholic. Americans who said they belong to other religions or were non-believers were all in the low single digits: 3.2% said they are Muslim; 2.9% consider themselves Mormon; 1.9% identified as Jewish; Buddhists made up 1.6%; and Hindus accounted for just 0.5%. Meanwhile, 3.8% reported they are atheist and 3.7% identified as agnostic.
If you ask students why they support Hamas’s call to eliminate Israel and murder Jews, many will deny—sincerely—that they are antisemitic. How is that possible? Some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may also sign statements condemning antisemitism and resent accusations that they hate Jews.Why not? Well, according to Morson it's because there are actually three types of antisemitism: The core type, which most people have in mind, is hatred of Jews simply because they are Jews. Reasons may be advanced, but the hatred isn’t based on reasons. Rather, the reasons stem from the need to justify the hatred. If one justification won’t do, another will be sought.
We can’t move them by showing the harm antisemitism has done because they don’t regard themselves as antisemitic.
[dividing] people into good and evil: racists and antiracists, victimizers and victims, colonizer and colonized. Once such thinking becomes routine, it is almost inevitable that opponents in any new conflict will be pigeonholed. And so Jews become colonizers and Palestinians, represented by Hamas, become their hapless victims.So the first type of antisemite hates Jews just because they're Jews. The second type hates Jews because they see them as oppressors. The fact that many Jews are white amplifies their culpability in the minds of the intersectional zealots.
Since one side is entirely evil, anything done to them is justified. One must prevail “by any means necessary.” That is why Hamas’s brutality can be accepted, even praised.
People who think this way believe they aren’t antisemitic because they didn’t start with some preconceived hatred. Rather, they applied a familiar, widely approved framework. Today the evil party is Israel; tomorrow another great Satan may be designated. Under different circumstances, Jews could have found themselves in the victim category.
In a third type of antisemitism, hatred is based on specific reasons, which aren’t merely excuses....if one really believes that the elders of Zion plot to enslave the world or that Jews have constructed a state based on apartheid and genocide, then militancy against Israel will seem rational.Morson asks rhetorically why these ignorant antisemites don't see the real facts. His answer is that they've simply shut themselves off from any source of information that doesn't support their ideological worldview:
These antisemites may really imagine they are drawing rational conclusions from the facts. The problem is that their “facts” are entirely spurious.
In [today's America] educated people voluntarily silo themselves. They close themselves off from any unapproved voice and commonly favor censorship of “misinformation.”It is, he asserts, willful ignorance.
An article at the leftist Vox site at the start of the year acknowledged that threats of violence “are coming from across the political spectrum.” It said, however, that “the most important ones … emanate from the MAGA faithful.”The above warnings notwithstanding, extremist, destructive behavior is much more likely to be a resort of the left than of the right. Yet the media seems oblivious, either willfully or otherwise, to this fact:
The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie ominously predicted last week that the former president might “use the threat of violence to make officials and ordinary election workers think twice about their decisions.”
On the same day, his neckbeard colleague David French claimed in a separate column that “while political violence is hardly exclusive to the right, the hostility and vitriol embedded in MAGA America is resulting in an escalating wave of threats and acts of intimidation.”
MSNBC’s Alex Wagner on Friday whined that Trump has “fanned the flames” of prior “acts of political violence.”
All of this immediately followed — purely by coincidence, no doubt — a series of public remarks by Joe Biden making a big show about how he strongly, seriously, emphatically condemns political violence....
The advantage Democrats have had in recent years is that, unlike independent and Republican voters, they know their activists put politics above everything else. For them, only one thing matters: getting their way. If that means destroying public property and private businesses, so be it. If a few people are hospitalized or die for it, that’s a price they’re willing to pay.He's correct, of course. He's also correct in his conclusion:
Intimidation and harassment are their default strategies. It’s their voters who screamed in the faces of perfect strangers for not wearing face coverings. It’s their voters who torched and trashed inner cities in the name of “racial justice.” It’s their voters who showed up to menace Supreme Court justices at their private residences.
It’s their voters ginning up a second Holocaust over a religious conflict between two nations 6,000 miles away.
If there has been any increase in violent threats from the right, Democrats have themselves to thank for it. They might do themselves a favor this time and knock it off before any of those threats are made good.If there is violence perpetrated by the right in 2024, one of the main catalysts for it will be breaking-point frustration with a judicial system that allows leftists to get away with it- and a media that excuses it - while transgressors on the right are punished to the fullest extent of the law.
The materialist conception of matter derives in part from Democritus and Lucretius (two ancient materialist philosophers), but I believe that the most cogent view of matter as held by modern materialists is that of Descartes.Of course, none of this explains what matter actually is. If it's "extended substance" then what kind of substance? And how can such a nebulous entity explain human cognition, human values, or any of the products of human consciousness? Egnor puts the question this way:
Descartes defined matter as res extensa — literally, substance extended in space. Matter, in the Cartesian view, is characterized by extension — length, width, and depth, and by associated properties such as mass that accompany extension in space. In the Cartesian view, all subjective mental properties, such as qualia and intentionality, were defined away — excluded — from matter itself. How, then, could the mind exist if subjective properties had no basis in matter?
In order to explain subjective experience and the mind, Descartes posited the existence of a second substance, res cogitans, which entailed subjective mental experience and which was [not] composed [of] matter in human beings. This was Cartesian substance dualism. The body and the mind were separable substances, each existing in its own right.
Furthermore, Descartes believed that only humans had minds. Animals were automatons, essentially mindless machines made of meat.
Modern materialists have ... discarded Cartesian mind but retain Cartesian matter.
To the modern materialist, what really exists is matter extended in space, tangible stuff, and all intangible stuff (like the mind) needs to be explained in terms of tangible matter.
How, from a materialist perspective, can we explain the laws of physics? How can we explain abstract things, like universals and mathematics, if all that exists is matter extended in space? How can the mind arise from matter — how can meat think? How can we square the materialist understanding of nature with quantum mechanics, which reveals very non-materialist properties of matter at its most fundamental level?Matter is a mystery and the belief that everything is made up of, and/or arises from, this mysterious substance is really nothing more than a prejudice that derives from a naturalistic worldview.
There are lots of theories on what the basis of the universe is. Some physicists say its subatomic particles. Others believe its energy or even space-time. One of the more radical theories suggests that information is the most basic element of the cosmos. Although this line of thinking emanates from the mid-20th century, it seems to be enjoying a bit of a Renaissance among a sliver of prominent scientists today.Indeed, which is why scientists committed to metaphysical materialism aren't eager to hop on board. The implications of the information hypothesis sound too much like what theists have been saying for centuries.
Consider that if we knew the exact composition of the universe and all of its properties and had enough energy and know-how to draw upon, theoretically, we could break the universe down into ones and zeroes and using that information, reconstruct it from the bottom up. It’s the information, purveyors of this view say, locked inside any singular component that allows us to manipulate matter any way we choose. Of course, it would take deity-level sophistication ....
The eminent John Archibald Wheeler in his later years was a strong proponent of information theory. Another unsung paragon of science, Wheeler was a veteran of the Manhattan Project, coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” helped work out the “S-matrix” with Neils Bohr, and collaborated with Einstein on a unified theory of physics.Scientists in Wheeler's camp argue that:
To look at information theory from a quantum viewpoint, the positions of particles, their movement, how they behave, and all of their properties, gives us information about them and the physical forces behind them. Every aspect of a particle can be expressed as information and put into binary code. And so subatomic particles may be the bits that the universe is processing, as [if it were] a giant supercomputer.All of which implies not only a mind on the receiving end but also a mind at the generating end. Information is not just recognized by minds, but is the product of a mind. If the universe really is, at bottom, information then there's very good reason to believe that there is a mind of incomprehensible computing power that has produced it. It's a breathtaking implication.
In the 1980s, [Wheeler] began exploring possible connections between information theory and quantum mechanics. It was during this period he coined the phrase “It from bit.” The idea is that the universe emanates from the information inherent within it. Each it, or particle, is a bit. It from bit.
In 1989, Wheeler produced a paper for the Santa Fe institute, where he announced "every it--every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself--derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely--even if in some contexts indirectly--from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits."
A team of physicists earlier this year announced research conclusions that would make Wheeler smile. We might be caught inside a giant hologram they state. In this view, the cosmos is a projection, much like a 3D simulation....
If the nature of reality is in fact reducible to information itself, that implies a conscious mind on the receiving end, to interpret and comprehend it. Wheeler himself believed in a participatory universe, where consciousness holds a central role. Some scientists argue that the cosmos seems to have specific properties which allow it to create and sustain life. Perhaps what it desires most is an audience captivated in awe as it whirls in prodigious splendor.
The German atheist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) spoke of the ramifications of ‘murdering’ God. In his Parable of the Madman, he wrote:Well, yes, there is, but only if there are objective moral values, and those can only exist if there is a transcendent moral authority which establishes them and holds human beings accountable to them.. . . All of us are his [God] murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.Nietzsche would have been aware that without God, humans are prone to the worst cruelty imaginable, even to our animal ‘friends’. It is alleged that after seeing a horse being whipped in the streets of Turin, Italy, he had a mental breakdown that put him in an asylum for the rest of his life. Nietzsche is reported to have run over to the horse and held it in his arm to protect it before he collapsed to the ground. Such cruelty, devoid of morality and human compassion, knows no bounds.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment similarly highlights the barbarity humans are capable of. The protagonist in the novel, Raskolnikov, has a glass of vodka, but he’s not used to drinking alcohol. He then staggers to a park and immediately goes to sleep. He dreams that he is back in his childhood, aged seven, and as he is walking with his father, he sees a drunk trying to make his old horse pull a wagon full of people.
When the crowd laughs at him struggling, the drunk peasant becomes furious and begins beating the horse so brutally that the others begin to do likewise by using crowbars and iron shafts. The old horse at first tries to resist, but soon it falls down dead. The boy in the dream, devastated and in great sorrow, throws his arms around the horse and kisses it.
All through the dream the owner of the horse is shouting that he can do what he wants with the mare because he owns her.
One would have to have a heart of freezing steel to not be deeply saddened by this poignant passage of human savagery, despite it being fiction. Anyone who hurts a human or animal for fun or pleasure is a degenerate psychopath.
But wait a minute: there is no psychopathy or degeneracy if the universe is made entirely of determined matter. All we are left with are chunks of atoms bumping into one another. And, on naturalism, some of these chunks end up shattering other molecules in motion in the chaotic maelstrom of the material universe spinning ultimately into oblivion: the final heat death of the cosmos.
In such a hellhole, there is no creator to save us—and no objective morals or values!
Nietzsche’s death of God also leaves us with no absolute truth, meaning, ... right or wrong. We are left rudderless trying to keep afloat in a sea of moral relativism with all its dire ramifications. Can any sane person really act as if atheism were true?
The late atheist scholar at Yale University, Arthur Leff, realising the ramifications of atheism and trying to justify morality, said:. . . As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: Napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved . . . There is in the world such a thing as evil.
January 8, 2024: The morale and willingness to fight among Russian troops continues to plummet. One reason for this is the heavy losses, about 350,000 dead, Russia has suffered in Ukraine so far.There's much more at the link. The Russians have superior numbers and firepower, but morale counts for far more than either of those. Troops who are hungry, cold and sick, fighting in a war that none of them really understands, aren't usually eager to give their all for a government which they have good reason to believe is betraying them.
Since late 2023 Ukrainian troops have increasingly encountered Russian troops who would surrender at the first opportunity and often do it in a dramatic fashion. This included dropping their weapons during their first encounter with Ukrainian soldiers. In other cases, Russian troops were encountered who had already dropped their weapons and were looking for someone to surrender to.
While troops can be motivated or compelled to fight, they are often ineffective. That means they suffer a lot of casualties while still unable to gain much ground.
Russian commanders are aware of this and had orders to do something to prevent these surrenders and efforts to avoid combat. That proved to be an impossible order to comply with. Physical punishments did not improve morale and willingness to fight.
The main problem was that troops had no confidence in their commanders (assuming they had any at all). These officers were often just as dismayed at the situations they faced on the battlefield. The government was often not supplying food, ammunition, and medical care for the troops.
It is now winter in Ukraine and once more the government has not supplied enough cold weather clothing and equipment for the troops. Worse, the clothes and equipment were often almost useless cheap imitations instead of purported standard issue.
Numerous veterans are no longer in the military because they refused to renew their contracts. Many more soldiers remained in the army but refused to return to Ukraine and got away with it.One wishes our administration would stop dithering on the matter of the kind and quantity of assistance we provide to Ukraine and enable them to drive the Russians back across their borders into Russia.
Putin ordered that these soldiers be officially described, in their military records and military ID, as unreliable and unwilling to fight. In any other country a soldier who refuses to fight during wartime is subject to severe punishment, often execution.
That still happens to reluctant Russian soldiers inside Ukraine where officers have the authority to shoot reluctant troops.
Initially, as Russian casualties grew and progress was nonexistent, some officers did shoot troops refusing to fight. That soon changed as the troops threatened to and sometimes did shoot back or, in at least one known case, ran over an insistent officer with a tank. Not to mention troops sometimes shooting undesirable officers first.
Ukrainian forces have provided additional confirmation of this violence and collapsing morale within Russian units. Many Russian troops will surrender to the Ukrainians at the first opportunity and admit it to Ukrainian, Russian, and foreign journalists. This prompted Ukraine to equip some of its quadcopters to notify and lead surrendering Russian troops safely to Ukrainian front-line forces.
Maria had hoped that her second marriage would make for a better future. Though born the daughter of a cook, she had dreams of being in high society. But at sixteen, she fell madly in love with a nobleman’s valet. When they married, she consigned herself to be dismissed as one of the serving class. After Maria gave birth to a son, her valet husband died. At age eighteen she was a grieving widow and a single mother. Not long after, her little boy died too.Maria's life, like that of so many others in her day and in ours, was tragic, yet out of her tragedy she gave the world a wonderful gift. Her son's symphonies, especially the fifth and the ninth, as well as many of his concertos, are marvelous, but his life, too, was tragic. He went deaf while he was still at the height of his powers, allegedly from beatings he received from his father as a child. Yet out of his sufferings he produced works of astonishing beauty.
Then she got a second chance at love [with a musician]. But when her young musician took her home to meet his prominent family, they looked down their haughty noses at this girl from the serving class. His father would ever after refer to her as “the chambermaid.” Her husband’s family would always view her as an inferior interloper. It was no wonder that Maria’s second marriage soon soured.
She later referred to her life as “a chain of sorrows.” The couple’s first child died six days after he was born. The “chambermaid” would bury five of her eight children. But her worst heartache was watching the decline of a husband who enjoyed the tavern more than practicing his music. If he wasn’t in a drunken stupor, he was with other women.
Then the beatings began. After he took advantage of her in one of his brutal rages, Maria discovered she was pregnant.
She determined that she wasn’t about to bring a child conceived by rape into her miserable world. She found her way to a woman who traded in concoctions that induced miscarriage.
Three drops of that deadly liquid would kill her baby. Any more might end her life too. She dumped it all into a cup of tea. But before she was able to drink it, the cup was accidentally knocked off the table. At first she was hysterical. Then she resigned herself to the fact that God must have a purpose for her unwanted child.
He turned out to be a strange little boy, often reclusive and unresponsive. But he did have his family’s love for music. When a local teacher took him on as a piano student, no one imagined that she was gaining a prodigy.
Maria was forty years old when Wolfgang Mozart allegedly declared that her son was destined for greatness. Two months later, the teenage prodigy rushed home to be at her deathbed. She told her son that giving birth to him was the best thing she ever did in her unhappy life.
We should all be grateful that Maria van Beethoven did not abort little Ludwig, a child of rape who would grow up to write the world’s greatest symphonies.
If the world is rationally organised and has meaning, then it must be the case [that there's an existence beyond this one]. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve not even 1/1,000th of it?His argument has Kantian resonances, and his basic reasoning makes sense. If the universe is rational then human life is rational. But human life cannot be rational if physical death ends it before it achieves anything meaningful. Thus, if the universe is rational, which he believed it certainly was, then physical death must not be the end of our existence.
What I name a theological Weltanschauung [Worldview] is the view that the world and everything in it has meaning and reason, and indeed a good and indubitable meaning. From this it follows immediately that our earthly existence Рsince it as such has at most a very doubtful meaning Рcan be a means to an end for another existence.Englert offers the reader much more insight into G̦del's reasoning, which the great logician elaborates over the course of several letters to Marianne, and there's a lot more analysis by Englert of the argument as well.
For a decade, they have been waging a civil war against the government of Sunni-majority Yemen, a conflict in which more than 150,000 people have been killed. A ceasefire between the rebels and the government has been in effect since 2022.That would mean directly punishing Iran which is the enabler of all these subordinate terror organizations. Such a measure carries the potential for a much wider conflict.
Just before leaving office, President Trump designated the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization.
Just after taking office, President Biden removed the Houthis from that blacklist. He also froze weapons sales to Saudi Arabia which had been leading an Arab coalition supporting the Yemeni government.
If [allied naval forces fail] to silence Houthi guns, President Biden will face a choice: Capitulate or escalate.
The latter would mean at least directing the Pentagon to eliminate Houthi weapons warehouses, the vessels and helicopters used for hijackings, and perhaps command-and-control centers.
But such a response would be only tactical. A strategic approach would focus less on the puppets and more on those pulling the strings of the Houthis – along with the strings of Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Shia militias.
In recent days, Iran’s rulers have increased their production of enriched uranium. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, they may now have enough to produce three nuclear bombs.The problem for Mr. Biden is that the longer he waits the more nukes Iran develops and the more cataclysmic war with Iran becomes. It seems that if we do nothing war with Iran becomes inevitable since they've promised that they'll use their nuclear weapons to destroy Israel.
A nuclear-armed regime in Tehran would be more difficult to contain and deter – and a more valuable partner for Beijing and Moscow.
President Biden, like his predecessors in the White House, has said that for Tehran’s jihadis to possess nukes would be “unacceptable.”
