So What Is the Answer?

Jim Wallis at Sojourners writes that war in the Middle East is not the answer to the problem of radical Islamic barbarism. I wish he was right, but ironically, not even he thinks he's right. Here's Wallis:

I have always believed that any alternative to war must still address the very real problems at hand — just in a more effective way. To say that “war is not the answer” is not only a moral statement but also is a serious critique of what doesn’t work; wars often fail to solve the problems and ultimately make them worse. War has to answer to metrics, just as more peaceful alternatives do. The war in Iraq was a complete failure with enormous human and financial costs; ISIS is now one of the consequences.

Actually the war wasn't a failure. It didn't fail until President Obama decided to wash his hands of it, and, contrary to what we did after WWII and Korea, remove all of our troops from that country. That left a vacuum that ISIL predictably (George Bush predicted it) rushed in to fill.

Anyway, Wallis goes on to say that he thinks it's proper, sort of, to stop ISIL:

I agree with Pope Francis when he said it is legitimate to stop an unjust aggressor: "I underscore the verb 'to stop'. I am not saying 'bomb' or 'make war', but 'stop him.' The means by which he can be stopped must be evaluated. Stopping the unjust aggressor is legitimate."

This is sophistry. How does one stop ISIL if not by force? Does Mr. Wallis tell us how to stop them without using military force? Not really. Instead he just throws up a cloud of verbal octopus ink:

That the world, including the United States, needs to respond decisively to the real threats of ISIS is beyond dispute, but the practical and moral question is — how? Let’s remember the principle that alternatives to war must answer the questions that war promises to answer — but in a better way.

I give President Obama credit for wanting to respond in a “different way” than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His strategy will focus on air strikes but also relies on supporting and training Middle East partners on the ground, which will be necessary to defeat a force already as powerful as ISIS.

Well, this is disappointing. According to Mr. Wallis "the better way" than war is, in fact, to wage war by using other countries' soldiers. It seems Mr. Wallis' real objection is not that a military strategy might be employed, but rather he objects to a unilateral military effort. In other words, his objection is not moral after all, but rather tactical:

To forge solutions to conflict that are an alternative to the endless and failed habits of war demands a much stronger set of other strategies — which the White House has yet to fully understand or embrace. I applaud the president for seeking a multi-national coalition and a more international approach. But that could have begun with the United Nations, where the U.S. will chair the Security Council in just two weeks — rather than taking the American plan to the U.N. for support. Strong U.N. leadership could both recruit more Middle East partners and help take the United States out of the role of the most hated target of Islamic fundamentalism.

So war is the answer for Wallis, at least in the present circumstance, it's just that war fought under American auspices is, for some reason, not the best way to conduct it.

But what if no coalition could be formed? Would war against ISIL then be immoral or unwise? If ISIL is a threat to the U.S. shouldn't we stop them whether other countries join us or not? Moreover, Mr. Wallis' concern about incurring the hatred of Islamic fundamentalists seems naive. Islamic fundamentalists will hate us as long as we stand in the way of their dream of destroying Israel and creating a world under the boot of Sharia law. Pretending this isn't so won't make it less so.

Wallis then does what so many on the left do when discussing this question, he elides the whole question of what should be done in the short term and focuses instead on what should be done long term. He recommends cutting off cash flow to ISIL, an obvious measure which everyone has already said needs to be done, but then Wallis calls for a more draconian move:

Ultimately, we won’t see an end to our “war on terrorism” without dealing with the underlying causes, and not just targeting the consequences of growing terrorism. We must address the world of oil that the West has created, that has literally defined nations, changed geography, and institutionalized the injustices and hypocrisies that breeds the grievances of terrorism. Having justified the unjust structure of that oil world to accommodate our addiction to fossil fuels has produced both a profound threat to our planet and the rise of an angry terrorism that threatens our own children.

It would be helpful if Wallis backed up the claims of this last sentence with a few facts. It's not at all clear, for example, despite what the global warming people have alleged, that our use of fossil fuels is a "profound threat to our planet" nor is it clear that it has anything at all to do with "the rise of angry terrorism." Wallis just asserts these claims as if they're obvious, but they're not, at least not to anyone not already seduced by leftist rhetoric. He closes with this:

We must address the fact that 60 percent of the Middle East population is under 30 years of age, and many of them are unemployed, uneducated, aggrieved, and angry young men — too easily drawn to the rhetoric of revenge. To overcome terrorism we must address the grievances that give rise to it and are exploited by hateful extremists.

Wallis says something here most people can agree with, but it has nothing to do with the question whether we should go to war with ISIL now, nor does he offer any suggestions as to how we might address those grievances he talks about or even what those grievances are. His essay is just not very helpful.

The Twilight of Progressivism

In the wake of the 2012 election many in the media were quick to pronounce a renascent conservatism dead in the crib. The young had rejected it in favor of the progressive and charismatic Barack Obama and conservatism may not recover for generations. The thing about the youth vote, though, is that unlike older generations, the young haven't had time to actually develop ideological allegiances. Young people are politically malleable and their support, given today, can be rescinded tomorrow if their own life experience causes them to grow disenchanted with those upon whom they once bestowed their favor.

James W. Ceaser, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, thinks something like that is happening today, and not just among the young. A lot of Americans are coming to see that the liberal progressive leaders in whom they invested their hopes are, in a word, frauds. Ceaser writes in a piece for The Federalist that liberalism is facing the distinct possibility of collapse. The bad news for conservatives is that this doesn't necessarily translate into an increase in support for them.

Liberalism’s demise was unexpected. Healthy and vigorous until just recently, liberals were confident their cherished arc of History was at last bending in their favor. They imagined they would be dancing today on their opponents’ graves. Instead, they find themselves haunted by the prospect that the dry bones of their enemies might be reassembling. Liberals are at risk of incurring not just the usual electoral setback for the president’s party in a midterm election (which is traditionally more pronounced in an incumbent’s sixth year), but also a wound that touches the heart of the Progressive project.

For those unfamiliar with ideological taxonomy, a progressive is what a liberal calls himself when the word "liberal" falls into disfavor.

Progressives have ridden the horse of social justice for a hundred years and have managed to portray opposition as opposition to justice. It's a tactic which could only fool the uninformed, but there are plenty of uninformed folks out there who vote. Younger voters are still very concerned about social justice, of course, but the reason they're growing disillusioned with progressives is the failure of progressives to fulfill their promises:

Where liberalism has crossed a threshold, however, is in its repeated incapacity to achieve, by its own favored means, its highest priorities. From the farce of “shovel-ready” projects, to the disaster of the health care roll out, to the disgrace of mismanaging the socialized medical system for veterans, all but the most ideologically blinkered of liberals—which includes most in the media and academy—must have begun to experience doubts. If the smartest president ever, in consultation with the best experts ever, endowed with the most lavish resources ever, cannot get programs to operate, then, Washington, we have a problem.

Even among millennials, one of the progressives’ core constituencies, faith in the efficacy of government to manage complex affairs has plummeted. No wonder, then, that the idea of government administration no longer fires the imagination of today’s youth. Who among the talented next generation yearns to become a GS 15 in the Department of Health and Human Services?

It was the promise of intellectual brilliance and competent, efficient, honest governance that drew the young to Barack Obama - that plus the prospect of making history by voting for the first black president. Now a lot of people are asking themselves, like the guy awakening with a headache the morning after an alcohol-fueled binge, "what was I thinking?" Film-maker Michael Moore succinctly expressed the disillusionment many on the left are feeling when he said the other day: "A hundred years from now Mr. Obama will be remembered only for being the first black president."

Actually, I'm afraid he'll be remembered for far more than that, but that'll be the one good thing he's remembered for.

Ceaser continues:

Yet the greatest problem liberalism faces today does not result from doubts about government competence, but from a slowly dawning realization that liberals are increasingly disposed to sacrifice means to ends and impartiality to social justice. The result is repressive progressivism. Progressivism was born in a spirit of creating “good government,” which preached scrupulous fidelity to law, honesty, transparency, and separation of politicking from governing.

This concern was cast aside as naïve by Franklin Roosevelt and ignored by Bill Clinton, from whom no one ever expected more. Current liberalism, however, was supposed to return to its Progressive roots, and the public took Barack Obama at his word in his promise to do so. On every count, liberalism now disregards these procedures, whether in its routine presentation of erroneous or misleading facts, its outright lies, or its suppression of information. To see how certain agencies of government, beginning with the Department of Justice, treat whistleblowers, average citizens, or members of the media reminds one ever more of the behavior of authoritarian government.

Even worse is the tolerance, even coverup, of corruption and scandal. From Fast and Furious, to Benghazi, to the IRS, to the NSA, to the VA, to the lies and deceptions surrounding Obamacare and its implementation, as well as numerous lesser crimes, this White House has been the least transparent, most scandal-plagued administration in modern memory. Domestically, it has done little to improve the economy and much to thwart job growth. Abroad, after spending much of his career criticizing George Bush's foreign policy, Mr. Obama is adopting measures which look much like those Mr. Bush employed, and he's doing so on the basis of the same authorizations he criticized Mr. Bush for relying upon.

Ceaser ends with this: For the most part, accusations of abuse and irregularity are met with denials, which almost no one believes. Far more disturbing, however, is that these excesses are now tacitly justified by the argument that such measures now operate in the service of a higher cause and are excused by the existence of an emergency. “Emergency” is not used here in the usual sense of a threat of an imminent attack or of an impending economic crisis. It refers instead to the dangerous character of the opposition and to the possibility that the opposition might win power. Whether such ideas are limited to those who lead us today or have seeped down to become part of liberalism’s core is difficult to say. Either way, the prospect is frightening. The death we should fear most is not that of an ideology but of free government itself.

Why Was He Wrong?

There's one aspect of the Ray Rice contretemps that I find particularly interesting. Everywhere one turns the tv or radio tuner, at least everywhere there are people talking about news and/or sports, Rice is being roundly condemned, his behavior is deemed beyond despicable, and moral outrage fills the airwaves. Okay, but I have a question that no one in the media that I've heard has even attempted to answer. Why is what Rice did actually wrong?

Did he break a law? Yes, but people break the law all the time and the national media doesn't suffer collective apoplexy. Did he transgress some moral prohibition? Yes, but only if one thinks there are such things as moral prohibitions, and this is what I find interesting. So many of the people commenting on this matter simply assume that what Rice did to his wife was morally wrong, but no one I've come across has undertaken to explain precisely why. And for good reason. They can't.

Either they can't because to do so would be to introduce religious reasons into public discourse - i.e., reasons such as that people are made in the image of God and loved by God and therefore persons have dignity and worth and God demands that we not harm another on pain of divine sanction - but this is a serious no-no, a heretical transgression, in our secularized culture. Or, they can't because when they express their repugnance at Rice's behavior they're doing nothing more than emoting. They have no basis for saying that any behavior is morally wrong, but nevertheless they really don't like what he did, and they're so mad about it they could stamp their feet and spit, but, of course, not liking another person's behavior doesn't make it wrong.

This is the corner our culture elites painted themselves into when they abandoned traditional religious foundations for moral truth. They left themselves bereft of any grounds for making moral judgments. Of course, this doesn't deter them, they make judgments anyway, but they sound pretty silly when they do because they're hanging those judgments on philosophical skyhooks.

Earlier today I heard a news clip in which a bunch of media types were complaining about the fact that a lot of Baltimore Ravens fans, including a lot of women, were wearing Ray Rice jerseys at the game last night. The commentators were clearly flummoxed by this. They called the women "morons" and "idiots", but they never once tried to explain why these people were such odious human beings for supporting Rice.

They assume that their audience will just agree with them without the need for an explanation. At least that's their hope because if someone insisted they give an explanation they'd be unable to do it.

Is He Deliberate Or in Denial?

A friend sent me a link to an article at Capital Commentary by Bradford Littlejohn who argues that President Obama is taking some very unconservative criticism from conservatives for being too pokey in his response to ISIS. Littlejohn's point is that deliberateness is a conservative virtue and thus it's ironic that conservative Republicans are faulting him for dotting the i's and crossing the t's before taking action.

My friend asked my opinion on Littlejohn's piece, and I thought I'd share my thoughts on Viewpoint.

In short, I think Littlejohn misses the point. Conservatives aren't (for the most part) critical of Mr. Obama for being deliberate. They're critical of him for a foreign policy that's in shambles. Littlejohn's central passage is this:

the GOP has still lost no opportunity to excoriate President Obama’s dovish and slow-motion foreign policy. When he announced that “we don’t have a strategy yet” on how to systematically combat ISIS, some Republicans seized on the statement as more evidence of his incompetency and refusal to stand up to our enemies.

There are, in my opinion, at least five reasons for the GOP's frustration. Unfortunately, Littlejohn just ignores them.

First, Obama had been receiving regular briefings on ISIS for over a year. During that time he had every opportunity to formulate a strategy, but despite the recommendations of his military and intelligence people he dismissed ISIS as a "JV team" as recently as last January. There's a difference between being deliberate (which is good) and being in denial (which is bad). Mr. Obama has revealed himself, at least from outward appearances, to be the latter.

Second, the problem posed by the murderous savages of ISIS is largely one of his own making. He refused to insist on keeping American forces in Iraq, which he could've done, and was in fact anxious to assure everyone that he was going to pull them all out ASAP. Seventy years after WWII and Korea we still have forces in Europe and South Korea, but Mr. Obama couldn't wait to be seen as the president who got us out of Iraq. Now he's getting us back in. Had we never left it's doubtful that ISIS would have invaded Iraq. This is especially galling given his criticisms of Bush for warning seven years ago that everything that has come to pass would indeed come to pass.

Parenthetically, Bush's reason for going to war in Iraq was that he believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Obama thought that was insufficient reason to topple Saddam and he excoriated Bush for doing so. What, though, is Mr. Obama's rationale for bombing ISIS that did not also apply to Hussein?

Third, the president keeps insisting that our fight against ISIS is contingent upon the cooperation of other countries in the region. This is foolish. If ISIS is a threat to the U.S. we should do whatever it takes to end it regardless of whether other countries help or not. Is Mr. Obama saying that if no other nations assist us that we'll do nothing decisive to end the threat ourselves? He certainly seems to be, but then what's the point?

Fourth, Mr. Obama's record on foreign policy does little to warrant confidence in his leadership. He was largely responsible for the collapse of Mubarak in Egypt which precipitated the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood which, had the Egyptian military not intervened, would have been a disaster. He caused the fall of Qaddafi, and now Libya is in such a mess that we've had to abandon our embassy. He threatened to bomb Assad in Syria, declaring that Assad had to go, and now we're threatening to bomb Assad's enemies and save Assad's skin.

Meanwhile, Russia gobbles up Ukraine and Obama does nothing more than send the Ukrainian army food rations. His only success has been giving the "go ahead" to American forces to take out bin Laden, a mission he had nothing to do with, which he several times deferred from ordering, and finally signed off on. In other words, his only success was reluctantly signing his name to something that any other president would have done months earlier.

Finally, President Obama keeps telling us that there'll be no "boots on the ground" in Iraq. This reminds me of his guarantee that there was a Syrian "red line" which Assad better not cross. Why adopt a strategy that implicitly says to the world that if air power doesn't do the job of destroying ISIS we'll just go home and leave them to plan their attacks on our homeland? How does he expect to "degrade and destroy" ISIS without using American forces? Is he going to depend on the same Syrian "moderates" who only a few months ago he was deriding as "pharmacists and technicians"? Is he going to depend on the same Iraqi army that turned and ran when ISIS invaded leaving all their American weaponry for ISIS to confiscate?

And why tell your enemy what limitations you're placing on yourself in the first place? Why announce to the world that we're going to fight ISIS but we're going to tie one arm behind our back while we do it?

Machiavelli advised his prince that if you're going to attack your enemy you had better be sure to kill him. Otherwise, he will hate you all the more and be more resolved than ever to do you harm. Obama seems not to have learned that simple lesson.

So, contra Littlejohn, it's not Mr. Obama's deliberateness in formulating a strategy that concerns conservatives. It's the nature of the strategy which his policies have made necessary and which seems inadequate and unserious given the nature of the threat.

Convoluted Conflict

As a primer for the President's speech tonight on American strategy for dealing with ISIL here's an update on the state of things in Iraq courtesy of Strategy Page:

As of September 8 American air attacks have increased and put ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) on the defensive. There have been about 150 American air attacks since they began on August 8th and now occur everywhere ISIL has forces in Iraq. Thus in the last month ISIL has lost control of a major dam, a refinery and major oil fields around Kirkuk.

ISIL is also losing control of the oil smuggling operation it had established in Syria and western Iraq. The attack against the Haditha dam includes local Sunni tribal militiamen who have refused to join ISIL. Many Sunni tribes backed away from supporting ISIL or agreed to work with the government. Haditha is the second largest dam in the country in terms of hydroelectric power and water supply.

Kurdish troops, also backed by American air power (directed by American air controllers on the ground with the Kurds) are also taking back territory around Mosul. This is one of several operations in the last month where the Kurds have shown that, with the help of American air support, they are nearly invincible against ISIL forces. Even Iraqi Shia troops and Sunni militias have some success when aided by air support.

Most ISIL fighters now accept this new battlefield reality, but some less determined ISIL gunmen are discouraged and desertions are more common. There have also been several recent instances of ISIL gunmen fleeing after the first smart bomb or missile hits, not willing to shoot it out with the oncoming Kurds. This often involves abandoning vehicles, weapons, ammo and equipment.

More American and NATO trainers and advisors on the ground have helped reform the Iraqi security forces. There are now more Shia and pro-government tribal militias involved, but the most reliable local force remains the Kurds. However, most of the Kurdish troops are deployed on the border between Kurdish and Arab Iraq. The Kurds must continue to keep Arab Islamic terrorists out and that requires reliable troops. Thousands of Kurdish women have been mobilized for this, many of them combat veterans from past crises. The women generally take care of internal security to free up more men for duty on the border.

The U.S. is depending on the Kurds and Iraqi government to provide some help on the ground to identify targets in the urban areas (Mosul, Fallujah and Tikrit) the fighting is moving into. Out in the open it’s a lot easier to avoid civilian casualties since you can spot nearby civilians. In urban areas this is more difficult. The Americans want to avoid civilian casualties as ISIL can use this to generate media criticism of the military operations against the Islamic terrorists. The criticism causes political problems.

The American air strikes are expensive, costing about two million dollars each. The U.S. has managed to get nine other countries (Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Turkey, Italy, Poland, Denmark and Australia) to join an effort to destroy ISIL in Iraq and Syria. The coalition will provide more advisors, weapons, ammo and air power than the U.S. itself is currently providing. The Americans will probably continue to be the major contributor.

It also seems that American intelligence is providing intelligence on the location of ISIL commanders and troop concentrations to the Syrian air force, possibly via Iran. The Syrians have used this intel recently to target and kill a number of top ISIL commanders.

The world is certainly turning upside down if the U.S. is working with Iran to help Assad in Syria defeat the Islamists. Anyone trying to follow events in this region can be forgiven if they throw up their hands in despair at trying to figure out who the players are and what side they're on.

Who Would Pay a Materialist Ethicist?

A week or so ago Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent asked why anyone would hire a materialist (someone who believes that matter and energy are all there is) for a job as a professional ethicist, a post which has a median annual salary of about $68,000. Arrington wrote:

I can understand how a theist who believes in the objective reality of ethical norms could apply for such a position in good faith. By definition he believes certain actions are really wrong and other actions are really right, and therefore he often has something meaningful to say.

My question is how could a materialist apply for such a position in good faith? After all, when pushed to the wall to ground his ethical opinions in anything other than his personal opinion, the materialist ethicist has nothing to say. Why should I pay someone $68,584 to say there is no real ultimate ethical difference between one moral response and another because they must both lead ultimately to the same place – nothingness.

I am not being facetious here. I really do want to know why someone would pay someone to give them the “right answer” when that person asserts that the word “right” is ultimately meaningless.

Actually, it's not hard at all to understand why a materialist would apply for such a position inasmuch as, on materialism, there's nothing "wrong" with committing fraud since there's nothing "wrong" or "right" with doing anything. The real mystery is why anyone would actually pay a materialist to be an ethicist.

In any case, Arrington goes on in a follow-up post to quote philosopher Peter Singer in order to illustrate the incoherence of any attempt to ground a materialist ethics. Singer claimed that:

Whatever the future holds, it is likely to prove impossible to restore in full the sanctity-of-life view. The philosophical foundations of this view have been knocked asunder. We can no longer base our ethics on the idea that human beings are a special form of creation made in the image of God, singled out from all other animals, and alone possessing an immortal soul. Our better understanding of our own nature has bridged the gulf that was once thought to lie between ourselves and other species, so should we believe that the mere fact that a being is a member of the species Homo Sapiens endows its life with some unique, almost infinite value?

Why is this incoherent? For the same reason, Arrington explains, as the work of post modern deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida is incoherent. Derrida writes long books in which he insists that "long books have no intrinsic meaning."

Singer is asserting that once we stopped believing that individuals were created in the image of God and possessing an immortal soul we no longer had any grounds for thinking they were inherently valuable. Very well, but then it follows that Singer himself is just an animal and as such has no particular value, thus neither do his ethical pronouncements. Arrington writes that according to Singer:

People have no more intrinsic worth than pigs. Indeed, there is no such thing as “intrinsic worth,” because “worth” implies the “good” and the “good” does not exist. Everything is ultimately meaningless. But if that is true – and here’s where the branch sawing comes in – why should anyone care what a particularly clever hairless ape who goes by the name of “Peter Singer” says about anything? Are not his pronouncements as ultimately meaningless as everything else? Isn’t his solution to ethics as arbitrary as any other solution?

Here Singer is part of a larger post-modern tradition that I call the “except me” tradition. The post modern literature is full of long books by deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida who insist that long books have no intrinsic meaning (except books written by Derrida apparently). Similarly Singer insists that concepts like “good” and “evil” have no intrinsic meaning, except, apparently, when he says something is good.

It certainly seems foolish to assert that moral claims are meaningless while exempting one's own moral claims from that assessment, but it's even more foolish for the man who makes moral judgments while denying that there's any real ground for those judgments to then declare that a man who grounds his judgments in a divine law promulgated by a perfectly just and powerful God is behaving irrationally. Which is irrational, to ground moral judgments in the will of the transcendent source of moral value or to deny that there's any ground for moral judgments while making such judgments anyway?

Political Correctness and the NFL

It seems that the contretemps over the team name of the Washington Redskins has subsided, much to the chagrin of liberals who think it terribly insensitive that a pro football team would actually refer to itself by the name “Redskins” even though it has been painfully difficult to find any Native-Americans who were actually offended by it.

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We'll soon be heading into the month of October which means that all across the country, but especially in the NFL, football teams will be wearing those garish pink shoes and other paraphernalia in recognition of breast cancer awareness month. Isn't one Sunday a month enough to have to endure having one's aesthetic sense assaulted by the clash of team colors with pink accessories all so the NFL can claim to care about women? Couldn't they just hire a few more token side-line reporters instead?

And why is it only breast cancer about which the NFL is "raising our awareness"? Why is there no prostate cancer awareness month in the NFL, or, given the seriousness of head injuries in football, an Alzheimer's awareness month? I guess the reason is that these just wouldn't score points with women.

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Speaking of scoring points with women, Ray Rice was cut by the Baltimore Ravens for punching his fiance in an elevator. Very well, that's certainly appropriate. A business should not employ people who bring shame and discredit upon their organization. But my question about this is, had Rice punched some guy in a bar would the Ravens have cut him? What if the guy was some wimpy weakling no more able to defend himself than was Rice's fiance? Would there have been anywhere near the outrage over Rice knocking out another man as has been unleashed by the video of him punching his bride-to-be? If not, why not?

In other words, is Rice being punished more severely for hitting a woman than he would've been for hitting a man? How can a feminist justify a disparity in punishment? According to feminists gender shouldn't matter in how women are treated, and yet many feminists (rightly, in my view) believe that it's somehow more wrong to have punched a woman than a man.

Maybe they just don't really believe what they say they believe when they say that gender doesn't matter.

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When Michael Sam, the openly gay NFL draftee was released by the Rams the NFL was said to have intervened on his behalf to try to get another team to pick him up which the Cowboys ultimately did. Why did the NFL do that for Sam? Is it because he was gay? Aren't we told that a person's sexual orientation isn't supposed to matter? Isn't the NFL discriminating against the hundreds of players who fail to make a pro team but who do not have the league office seeking to secure them a position on another team? How is what the NFL did for Sam anything but preferential treatment for a man just because he's gay?

Did the NFL make similar efforts on behalf of Tim Tebow when he was cut? Well, someone might reply, that's different. After all, Sam is gay, a special class of person even though the class only makes up about 1.5% of the population. Tebow is overtly Christian and as such is an embarrassment to the league even though Christians of Tebow's stripe make up probably 40% of the population. The NFL apparently believes that it's appropriate to treat gays better than Christians. In the NFL some people are evidently more equal than others.

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I actually think it's too bad that the Cowboys signed Sam. I was hoping the Redskins would have picked him up just for the fun of watching the left squabble among themselves over whether to hate the Redskins for refusing to change their name or to praise them for signing a gay player.

Intelligently Designed Robots

Watch this video and marvel at the brilliance of the people who designed and built this robot which can assemble itself and then walk away:

Our sense of wonder is only heightened by the description given by Mariella Moon at Engadget. Or at least it would be if what she says weren't flatly contradictory. She writes:

Folding robots are nothing new, but scientists from Harvard and MIT have taken it to the next level, by designing one that assembles itself and walks away to do its job with zero human input.

How can there be "zero human input" if the thing was designed by scientists?

Anyway, she goes on to say that,

It's far from being perfect, though, and still has a ways to go before anyone can use it for a particular purpose. For instance, the assembly process is triggered by slotting a battery in, but the researchers plan to modify the robot so that it starts folding itself based on environmental cues like changes in pressure or temperature. Also, the mechanical critters could use a different polymer other than polystyrene, one that requires less heat to start folding. At this point in time, the prototypes are prone to bursting into flames, since they use so much energy -- in fact, just the assembly itself depletes a whole AA battery.

It's still amazing, of course, even if it's not perfect, but here's the thing. Structures somewhat similar to this one are found throughout the biological world and they are perfect, or close to it. A beetle can flawlessly fold and unfold its wings in highly complex ways, for example. Isn't it remarkable that we think it requires enormous intelligence and purposeful activity to design and manufacture a foldable robot - which is to biological structures what a paper airplane is to a fighter jet - yet a lot of folks think that the biological structures could have happened purely through the action of random chance and blind physical forces?

If foldable robots can only be created by intelligent designers, isn't it at least plausible to think that infinitely more complex structures also require an intelligent designer? If not, why not?

Barbarians at the Gates

This video documents an amazing story of survival and escape by a Shiite Muslim from the Sunni savages in ISIS. Part of the fascinating tale is that this man would not have survived had he not been helped by Sunnis who risked their lives to help him.

The video gives a sense of what ISIS has in store for anyone - Muslim, Christian, and especially Jew - who disagrees with their particular brand of barbarism.

This second video should be an object lesson for those who still believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the world is progressing toward increasingly higher levels of human moral behavior and civilization. In fact, a large part of the world is still living in the seventh century. If one needs further confirmation of the demonic nature of ISIS watch this shorter video put out by the State Department to dissuade American Muslims from signing up to join them:

What the fleeting pictures in the video show us of ISIS's evil is precisely what these cretins will do in Europe as soon as they get they chance and what they certainly wish to do throughout the world once the West, specifically the U.S., loses it's will to oppose them.

The Myth of the 10%

The movie Lucy, I'm told, is making a big splash in some pools this summer. The film pushes the idea that we only use about 10%-15% of our brain capacity. You've probably heard this claim somewhere along the line yourself, even if you haven't seen Lucy. It's one of those factoids we absorb in our childhood and grow up just accepting, especially since it gets reinforced by our experience with certain of our classmates when we get into high school.

But, although this claim certainly seems sometimes as though it's true of at least some people we know, scientists insist that actually it's one of those "facts" everyone "knows" but which turns out to be false:

I do have to wonder, though, about the speaker's comment that our whole brain is always "whirring and humming" with activity. Maybe so, but I'll bet that students who have a really boring 1:00 class after eating a big lunch are probably thinking that "whirring and humming with activity" is probably not the most accurate way to describe what their brain's doing during that hour.

Anomalous Data

In science, data that don't fit a widely-accepted theory are considered to be anomalous and swept under the rug, so to speak, until the lump under the rug gets so big that the data can no longer be ignored. Not everyone is at the "can no longer be ignored" stage but we seem to be rapidly heading there. The data to which I refer is cited in an article in the Australian Herald Sun.

The article cites a paper by a climatologist named Ross McKitrick who points out that the stasis in globally average temperatures has lasted now for almost twenty years, and even longer in the lower troposphere. In other words, the predictions of the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century that we were heading for runaway global warming have simply not been fulfilled. On the contrary, the globe in 2014 has about the same average temperature that it did in 1995.

This report comes on the heels of another report that shows that the predictions by Al Gore and others of rapidly melting Arctic ice sheets have also failed to be confirmed and that, in fact, the Arctic ice seems to be rebounding.

Here's a good rule of thumb. When scientists make predictions that have political implications take those predictions with a grain of salt. Some scientists are biased ideologues first and objective scientists second and they tend to see what their ideology makes them want to see.

The reliability of scientific theories is predicated on the theory's fruitfulness, i.e. its ability to generate confirmable predictions. So far, few of the predictions that have been served up about global warming have been confirmed. The warmists may still turn out to be right, something is happening to our glaciers, certainly, but as of now there's not much reason to think that whatever is causing the meltback has anything to do with rising global temperatures.

Preempting Disaster

Myron Magnet at City Journal asks what a responsible president would do, given the dangers that face us today:

When a British-educated Muslim terrorist beheads an American journalist to display the sentiments of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria toward the United States; when photos of a Chicago office building and the White House appear on social media with hard-to-deny evidence in the pictures that ISIS is here in our own country with ill intent; when a peace-preaching imam in Canada reports that ISIS is recruiting among his flock; when an experienced U.S. senator warns of ISIS plans to blow up an American city; and when a top ex-intelligence officer cautions that ISIS terrorists have “very likely” entered the United States along with the flood of illegal immigrants surging through our southern border, what would a responsible president do?

Surely, for starters, he would use the National Guard to seal the border with Mexico, as a matter of national security, let alone national sovereignty. He would surely order the Transportation Security Administration to stop at once allowing illegal aliens to board commercial airliners without the usual government-issued identification, as is now reportedly happening routinely, perhaps allowing terrorists to move freely throughout the nation. He would order the FBI to track down illegals who are already here, and at the very least deport the suspicious and the criminal, and he would aid and encourage local law-enforcement agencies to do the same thing, rather than hinder them.

He would insist that all legal roadblocks against scrutinizing jihadist websites and social media be cleared away, and he would then monitor vigilantly, sending investigators where appropriate. He would also encourage the efforts of local police and regional joint terrorist task forces to infiltrate mosques and campus centers, and to cultivate friendly Muslim informants, on the watch for jihadist recruiters.

The unspoken corollary to all this, of course, is that the current administration is doing none of these things.

At any rate, Magnet points out that Muslims in America are much more moderate than their co-religionists elsewhere in the world but that 1% of American Muslims think terrorism is often justified. This is alarming when one realizes that there are approximately 7 million Muslims in America, which means there are about 70,000 Muslims in this country who are potential terrorists. Pretty scary.

On a related topic, retired general Anthony Zinni made a very sensible observation regarding the need to eliminate ISIS on Sunday's Meet the Press:

“The boots on the ground question is always the toughest one,” Zinni said. “I wish we were not so paranoid about boots on the ground. We can’t even define it! There’s going to have to be special operations forces,” even with air strikes.

“Very simply put, if you put two brigades on the ground of U.S. forces, they would push ISIS back to Syria in a heartbeat and probably take less time, less cost, and I think in the long run fewer casualties overall.”

Every time someone talks about what we should do about ISIS they're quick to assure their listeners that they're not talking about putting "boots on the ground." It's like listening to people talking about race who always have to preface their comments by assuring us that they're "not racist, but."

If it takes infantry to destroy ISIS then send in the infantry. Mr. Obama seems determined not to arm the Kurds (or the Ukrainians) so that they can defend themselves so he leaves himself no other options but to do nothing (except air attacks when large numbers of civilians are in danger) or to insert American ground forces. Of course he's reluctant to do the latter because not only does it go against his normal aversion to the use of force, but it's also an admission of failure of his Middle East policy.

One objection to the assertion that we need to excise this cancer before it spreads is that raised by commentators like the estimable George Will who argue that the combined armed forces of Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq could easily overwhelm ISIS, so why should we sacrifice American blood to do it? Let the Arab countries take care of their own problems. This would be wise advice if ISIS were just an Arab problem, but it's not. ISIS is a threat to us, and eliminating them is not something we should do for the Arab world's sake, we should do it for ours. If the Arabs insist on doing nothing then we will suffer the consequences of an ascendent terrorist state of unprecedented violence and evil. It's galling that the Arabs are so feckless and cowardly, but to refuse for that reason to eliminate a clear and present danger to us would be folly born of spite.

The Left's Moral Cowardice

What happens when a society is so steeped in the dogmas of liberal multiculturalism that they're no longer willing to hold others to the same standard of behavior as everyone else because to do so, they fear, is to impose one's values on others, or to blame the victim, or to impose a tyranny of a majority over a minority, or to tacitly claim one's own values to be superior to those of other cultures, et cetera?

What happens when the authorities in a community are so morally pusillanimous that they recoil from making any judgments, moral or legal, about the behavior of members of other races or ethnicities? Where does such cowardice lead?

John O'Sullivan's article in National Review Online shows us where progressive multiculturalism has led the British. O’Sullivan writes:

Britain has felt real shock and horror over the report that 1,400 young women in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham had been groomed, raped, prostituted, trafficked, and brutally abused in almost every possible way by a criminal gang for the last 16 years. In addition, the authorities — which in this case are the local government authority, the police, and the child-protection services — had been repeatedly informed of these crimes but had dismissed the reports as false or exaggerated and taken no action to investigate, halt, and punish them.

O'Sullivan goes on to describe some of the horrors these young girls endured. He also says, as hard as it might be to believe, that despite having almost full knowledge of what was going on the authorities did nothing to stop it. Why? The reason lies in part in these two facts:

The 1,400 girls were all white and of Christian background and English ethnicity while all but one of their exploiters were Muslims of Pakistani heritage. (The report describes the men delicately as “Asians,” but so far no Hindus, Sikhs, or Hong Kong Chinese are among their number.) As in other recent cases, the men targeted the girls in large part because they were white Christians, culturally speaking, and thus “worthless.” They actually told the girls that this was so.

There's another relevant fact:

But what explains the silence, the acquiescence, even the cooperation of the authorities? Their motives seem to derive from the rich stew of progressive absurdities that constitute official attitudes in modern Britain. The first is the fear of being suspected of racism. Again and again the police and the social workers shrank from intervening or responding to complaints because to do so would invite the accusation that they were “racist.”

Most people in the Muslim community were unaware of this criminal conspiracy (and, shocked and horrified like everyone else, they now condemn it). But when it was brought to the attention of “community leaders,” they too played the race card to suppress further investigation. To uncover such scandal would be not only racist, it would commit a sin against the ideal of multiculturalism that now actuates much official policy.

The Labour member of Parliament for Rotherham from 1994 to 2012, Dennis MacShane, admitted yesterday that as a Guardian-reading left liberal, he had shied away from looking into such topics as the oppression of women in “bits of the Muslim community.” He ought to have done something about it, but, well, you understand . . . “I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat, if I may put it like that.”

So much for the progressive's professed concern for the oppressed. You can bet that had the rapists been white and the victims young Pakistani girls the leftists would've been marching in the street proclaiming their outrage, but it takes no courage to condemn the crimes of the majority or to enforce the law against them. Leaders of the white community would not have called the politicians and police racist for arresting white rapists. For the left, the rape culture is just part of the wonderful multicultural mosaic, as long as the perpetrators are minorities and the victims are white.

O'Sullivan describes some of the crimes committed by the liberal authorities:

Some of the examples of this depraved official indifference are barely believable. In one case, a girl was found drunk in the company of her exploiters and was arrested while the men were let free. In another, a father found his daughter, tried to rescue her, complained to the police, and was himself arrested while the authorities took no action on his complaint.

It is not as if this series of crimes was hidden or unknown. No fewer than three official investigations (prior to this one) looked into these crimes. They reported the broad truth that we now know and called for further investigations and arrests. The police and child-protection services did nothing whatever about them. Indeed, they quietly pigeonholed the findings with dismissive comments. The local councilors looked the other way or, on some occasions, intervened to discourage investigations by the police. Only the general public was innocently ignorant.

This is where multiculturalism combined with liberal progressivism leads. Some people just get a pass if they're members of a minority because to enforce the law against them is to be seen as culturally chauvinist racists, or whatever.

There's much, much more to this story, and I encourage readers to go to the link to get the full effect of the left's bigotry against the class - white, middle class, and Christian - the majority of these girls came from.

Every single person in a position of authority who knew about these crimes and didn't do anything about them but instead let these girls be terrorized for years should be sent to jail. The prison yard is an environment rich in opportunities for multicultural experiences. Liberal progressives would like it there.

Cruel Logic

I posted this last January, but, since the topic is coming up in my classes again this week I thought it'd be appropriate to post it again:

Here's the background. A professor has given a lecture this evening in which he claims that our behavior is the product of our genetic make-up. We don't really have free will. We're pretty much at the mercy of our genes which means that we're not really responsible for what we choose to do.

A psychopath has managed to kidnap the professor and challenges him to defend this thesis in the real world. The video, titled Cruel Logic, is pretty grim but as you watch it ask yourself, given the assumptions of the professor, what answer could he make to the psychopath's challenge.

If you were in the professor's position what could you say to save your life? Does the psychopath's behavior make sense if the professor is correct? If man truly is morally autonomous, if there is no objective standard of right and wrong, then what's actually wrong with the psychopath's behavior, beyond the fact that we're repelled by it? Does being repelled by something make it morally wrong?

The only way to resist the conclusion that there's really nothing wrong with what he's doing is to deny the premise that morality is a completely subjective phenomenon. But, in the absence of an objective, transcendent ground for moral behavior, there is no way to judge the psychopath's behavior as being wrong.

As philosopher Richard Rorty once said, the secular man has no answer to the question, why not be cruel. Ideas do indeed have consequences. If you believe that gratuitous cruelty is in fact wrong then you have to acknowledge that there's an objective standard of morality, but once you've taken that step, it's very hard to avoid the conclusion that there's a transcendent, personal, moral authority that has established that objective standard.

In other words, it's very hard to see how one can be a naturalist (i.e. an atheist) and also believe that what the psychopath in this video is doing is wrong.

No Strategy for Dealing with ISIS

In a press conference yesterday President Obama announced that he doesn't have a strategy yet for dealing with ISIS in Syria, and a lot of people are wondering why that is. The military, after all, spends countless hours working up detailed plans for every contingency. Surely they had a plan for dealing with ISIS long before anyone in the public ever heard of the group since our intelligence services have known about them for at least a year. For the president to sound as if ISIS just came along and now we have to come up with a strategy to address the threat they pose does little to bolster confidence in his leadership.

We can be assured that Mr. Obama would have no trouble coming up with a strategy for dealing with, say, John Boehner and the Republicans. I'm reasonably confident that he already has a strategy for dealing with the Republicans if they win the Senate in November, so why is it so hard to come up with a strategy for dealing with an army which everyone in the region despises and which has no air force.

Perhaps Mr. Obama's hectic schedule of sundry vacations, fundraisers, golf games and whatnot has made it difficult for him to sit down and actually pick one of those contingency plans to execute. Okay, but as the President eases himself into semi-retirement we can hope he soon comes up with a plan to neutralize the threat because it won't be long before these savages are doing to Americans here what they're doing to non-Sunnis in Iraq and Syria.

Robert Tracinski at The Federalist writes:

It has become obvious that the group that calls itself ISIS or just the Islamic State is the most serious terrorist threat to the United States since 9/11, and allowing its formation is the biggest mistake of President Obama’s administration.

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel recently called ISIS “a force and a dimension that the world has never seen before.” It is not just a terrorist group distinguished by its brutality and fanaticism. It is not just a group that has demonstrated its interest in killing Americans. Worst of all, this is a group filled with an unprecedented number of jihadists from Europe, and even a few from America—Western passport-holders who will almost certainly make their way back home. According to the group’s own threats, ISIS members or sympathizers are already here.

So it cannot be allowed to exist, not without courting the risk of another 9/11. But no one in the administration seems to have figured out what will be required to make that happen.

I don’t just mean the size of the effort, though that’s part of it. While it would be nice to rely on local proxies like the Kurds, it’s becoming clear that there is no one on the ground in Iraq and Syria who can defeat them. Eradicating ISIS—not just suppressing them or stopping their advance, which is all we’ve done so far—will require a much larger effort. I’m pretty certain it will require American boots on the ground.

I’m sorry if that makes you nervous or breaks a campaign pledge or means you have to turn your back on your dad’s anti-war rhetoric. Don’t want another 9/11? Then you’ve got to get serious about ISIS. Suck it up.

As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey has been telling everyone, taking down ISIS will also require intervening in Syria. And that’s the real problem, the one issue that no one seems to have thought through. If all we do is go after ISIS, we are acting as shock troops for Bashar al-Assad (By eliminating his biggest threat and allowing him to focus his fire on the more moderate rebel groups).

If it seems like a disaster that we’re being drawn into a wider war in the Middle East, the irony is that this is a consequence of the Obama administration’s attempt to withdraw from the region and leave it to its own devices. It turns out that we can’t do that. Aside from the strategic importance of the region’s oil, the Middle East is the center and homeland of Islamic jihadism, which sees us (correctly) as its antipode and seeks to do us harm. This is a threat that we can’t allow to grow, which is what 9/11 taught us.

The days when we could retreat behind two big oceans and hide our heads in the sand are over. The Islamists simply won't allow us that option. They want to kill us and we're only making it easier for them by refusing to get involved now while they're still acquiring their strength.

Meanwhile, if the president is entertaining ideas for an immediate tactic while he mulls over a long-term strategy at his next fundraiser perhaps he might consider putting enough air assets into place in both Iraq and in bases near Syria so that every time an ISIS member peeks out a window he beholds a missile hurtling at several hundred miles per hour directly toward his Adam's apple.

No thanks or remuneration from the White House for this suggestion are necessary.

Molecular Machines

There are three possible positions to take with respect to biological evolution. One can hold that (1) all of life arose by random, unguided processes driven by nothing more than chemistry and natural selection; or one can hold that (2) evolution never occurred at all; or one can hold that (3) to the extent that evolution has occurred it was somehow directed by an intelligent agent.

Watch the following video about a cellular nanomachine called kinesin, one of thousands of such tiny molecular machines in every cell of every living organism and ask yourself which of the above views seems intuitively most likely.

Not only is the work of this vanishingly small molecule itself amazing but remember that something must be directing it in the cell so that it transports its cargo to the proper location, so that the microtubule on which it "walks" gets constructed, so that it recognizes whether another kinesin needs help, so that its own construction is executed properly so that it functions effectively, and all of these directions require information that must somehow have arisen and is stored somewhere in the cell and accessed where and when needed. This is all nothing short of astonishing.

I don't know which of the alternatives in the first paragraph is the correct one, but I hope I'll be forgiven for saying that I have a great deal of trouble seeing how it could possibly be (1).

How Liberalism Stifles an Economy

Burger King is joining the growing list of corporations which are relocating their corporate offices outside of the country in order to avoid our onerous 35% corporate income tax. This is the highest tax rate in the developed world and since Mr. Obama took office in 2008 two dozen corporations have decided that the United States is simply too expensive to live in.

The flight to cheaper climes is called inversion and it's got a lot Democrats in a swivet which is ironic since deep down Democrats realize that taxes provide all sorts of disincentives for businesses, or at least they seem to since television commercials are running locally trying to persuade businesses to move to New York, a blue state, by offering tax breaks to businesses that come there.

Nevertheless, the Obama administration and others on the left refuse to change the U.S. rate and instead criticize and threaten corporations which participate in the exodus.

When businesses leave the country they not only pay less in taxes to Washington, they also take jobs with them which means more unemployment and even less tax revenue. The Obama administration is calling these corporations unpatriotic and threatening them with coercive sanctions to keep them here, a sort of economic Berlin wall, so to speak, to prevent corporations from going where they can thrive and prosper. It's the universal knee-jerk reaction of those with dictatorial inclinations to solve every problem by curtailing freedom.

Inversion is similar to the problem liberals have created in many of our urban areas. They tax those who pay taxes so heavily that anyone with money flees the city and all that's left are those too poor to leave and too poor to pay taxes. It's one reason why so many of our cities take on the aspect of a vast wasteland. High taxes drive out wealth.

What would happen, though, if congress decided to reduce the corporate tax rate to bring it in line with other countries in Europe and North America? What impact would that have on corporate investment, hiring, and retail prices. It sounds like it would be a boon to the economy which pretty much guarantees it won't happen anytime soon.

The Age of Atheism

Lincoln Mullen has a review in Books and Culture of Peter Watson's The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God.

Mullen makes a point which I think needs to be clarified. He writes that:

The most common charge that Christians level against atheists is that they have no morals.

He might be right that this is a common charge, but even so the moral problem that Christians (and theists in general) have with atheism is not that atheists don't have moral values but rather that they have no ground for making moral judgments beyond their own subjective preferences.

Take a concrete example. A tobacco company lies about the danger its product poses to the consumer. A theist would say that such deception is objectively wrong because it violates the will of the Creator who ordains that people be treated with dignity, respect, and kindness, a command that rules out lying in any way that harms people.

The atheist may also be outraged that the tobacco company has lied to people about the hazards of using its product, but the only reason there would be, if atheism is true, for condemning the company's behavior is that one simply doesn't like it. If an atheist were to respond that it's just wrong to hurt people, the question needs to be asked, "Why is it wrong?" If atheism is true then we are here as a result of a blind, impersonal, evolutionary process, and blind, impersonal processes cannot impose a moral duty on any one. Nor can such processes prescribe behavior, nor declare the behavior wrong in any meaningful moral sense.

Lots of thoughtful atheists recognize this. Consider the following quotes by thinkers all of whom are, or were, atheists:

• What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question. ~ Richard Dawkins
• What’s moral is what you feel good after and what’s immoral is what you feel bad after. ~ Ernest Hemmingway
• This philosopher (Joel Marks is speaking of himself) has been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…Thelong and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality…I experienced myshocking epiphany that religious fundamentalists are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality....Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of child molesting. They do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Joel Marks
• Morality is nothing but the sum total, the net residuum, of social habits, the codification of customs....The only immoral person, in any country, is he who fails to observe the current folkways. Margaret Sanger
• For the secular man there's no answer to the question, why not be cruel. Richard Rorty.
• The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower. Leo Tolstoy
• Communism abolishes all eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality. Karl Marx
• One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life…only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best. Charles Darwin
• As evolutionists, we see that no justification (of morality) of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends . . . In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding....Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place. E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse
• Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear – and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death....There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will.... Will Provine
• I would accept Elizabeth Anscombe’s suggestion that if you do not believe in God, you would do well to drop notions like “law” and “obligation” from the vocabulary you use when deciding what to do. Richard Rorty

So, the problem with atheism, as the theist sees it, is not that atheists can't choose to adopt the sort of values that the theist calls moral. Of course, they can. The problem is that they wouldn't be wrong in any meaningful sense had they chosen to adopt completely opposite values. Their choice is purely a matter of personal preference, like choosing to paint their house brown instead of green. So it's puzzling when atheists adopt the view that they hold to a superior morality than Christians as Mullen asserts in a later passage:

Listen carefully to the debate on contemporary issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and you will hear moral reasoning on both sides; when atheists, agnostics, or "nones" take a position, they do so out of a conviction that their morality is superior to that of traditional Christianity.

The most the atheist can claim is that, on Christian assumptions, the atheist's views on these issues are closer to what God wills than are the Christian's views, but in order to make this claim the atheist has to piggyback on a Christian moral understanding.

Moreover, the atheist cannot say that the Christian is wrong in holding the views on these issues that he does. The most he can say is that the Christian is being inconsistent with what he professes. And that may be true, but the atheist judges the Christian for inferior morality while adopting values himself that are grounded in nothing but his own tastes. They have no objective purchase at all.

This is the point I seek to make in my novel In the Absence of God. An atheist, if he's to be consistent, can either give up the pretense of holding to some non-arbitrary moral standard and admit that he's just making his morality up as he goes along, or he can admit that he believes that right and wrong are not just matters of taste but are real, objective features of the world. But if he admits that then, to be consistent, he'd have to give up his atheism and become a theist. He has to do one or the other, or he could simply do neither and admit that he prefers to live irrationally.

The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

It's almost unsporting to look for examples of hypocrisy among the hosts on MSNBC. One almost has to swerve to avoid the examples that litter the network landscape.

Nevertheless, some are too good to ignore. One such is provided for us by the host of MSNBC's "All In," Chris Hayes. Hayes was reporting live from Ferguson and some of the protestors threw rocks at him. He wasn't hurt, but his reaction is a great example of both the double standard liberals cling to and also the racist attitudes they hold to which even they seem completely oblivious.

The Washington Free Beacon has an excellent column on this by Larry O'Connor:

After witnessing the spectacle of MSNBC host Chris Hayes getting pelted with rocks by an angry mob in Ferguson, Mo., Monday night, I was struck by a feeling of anger and frustration. Not at the rioters. Rioters throw rocks. That’s what they do. My anger was at the despicable display of “tolerance” and “understanding” displayed by Hayes, as he lowered his expectations for civil behavior to accommodate his liberal need to be accepted by the mob.

Chris Hayes and his MSNBC colleagues Rachel Maddow, Laurence O’Donnell, Ed Schultz, Chris Matthews, and Al Sharpton, have spent hundreds of hours of air time explaining to the world how the grassroots conservative movement known as the “tea party” is the greatest threat to our democratic republic. Indeed, if Hayes or any of his colleagues were covering a tea party protest against Obamacare or big government spending and a stray rock was thrown his way, he would be suing everyone from Sarah Palin to Sean Hannity to Ted Cruz, and we’d be hearing all about the “violent extremists” on the right.

But, when multiple rocks are thrown at Hayes while reporting on a week-long riot, we are treated to this mind-numbingly stupid exchange:

HAYES: “People are throwing rocks at us”

RIOTER: “Y’all tell the true story!”

CRAIG MELVIN: “We ARE telling the true story!”

RIOTER: “Tell the true story!”

HAYES: “People are angry, man… they’re really angry.”

RIOTER: “Tell them what’s really goin’ on!”

HAYES: “We’re trying to… (To audience) A few rocks chucked at us. We’re fine, we’re fine!”

MELVIN: “This is something else we’ve seen a lot of tonight, Chris. People wearing masks.”

HAYES: ”Yeah.”

So, imagine if you will: The scene is a small town in Missouri and the tea party is holding a protest against high taxes, illegal immigration and Obamacare. Chris Hayes is reporting on the scene and conservatives wearing masks start throwing rocks at him and screaming at him to “tell the real story.”

Would Hayes’ response be “People are angry, man”?

Of course not. Why? Because Chris Hayes agrees with the rioter in Ferguson but not the tea party protester? I think there’s more to it than that. I think maybe it’s also because in Chris Hayes’ own arrogant, intellectually self-satisfied superiority, he actually expects less from the rock-throwers Monday night than he does other members of society. And that’s the real problem with progressivism.

I can't prove it but I think O'Connor is right. White liberals tacitly and subliminally assume that you cannot expect blacks to adhere to the same standard of civil behavior that they implicitly assume whites, especially white conservatives, should be held. If this isn't insulting to blacks, indeed, if this isn't racism, what is?

Of course, Hayes's assumption may be well-grounded. After all, as O'Connor notes, tea partiers are the people who, before leaving their protests, clean up whatever mess they've made. Such people don't throw rocks at people.

Thanks to Mary Katherine Ham at Hot Air for the tip. Ham's article is also well worth reading.

Compassionate Conservatism

Erick Erickson is one of the most well-known conservative bloggers, and his blog, Red State, is very popular on the right. He's also a Christian and deeply concerned that, based on some of the comments he gets on his blog from other conservatives, it's becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile some of what he hears from his fellow conservatives with what he believes his obligations are as a Christian. He's primarily dismayed with a strain of conservative troll, and even some more mainstream folk, that seems to be growing increasingly strident and uncharitable in their discourse.

What he's hearing may be an overreaction to the vitriol that has been thrown in the face of conservatives going back at least as far as the Bork confirmation hearings in the early 90s, and climaxing in the awful treatment administered by the left to George Bush, but no matter how understandable it is, it's nevertheless inexcusable, and conservatives should dissociate themselves from those whose contribution to the public discourse is informed more by hatred and bitterness than by cordiality and forbearance.

Erickson cites three recent issues in particular in which he has been disappointed by some of the commentary of some of his fellow conservatives. First, though, he offers a lament at having ever opened up his blog to comments in the first place:

Were I to recreate this site, I think it would have no comments section. Disqus is just horrible. I do not recommend it to anyone. And it just helps further what I see on so much social media these days. As much as the internet can bring people together of like mind, it also can help shrill minorities of people think their views are more mainstream than they are. That then emboldens them further.

This is one reason, by the way, why I never set up a combox for Viewpoint. There are too many people out there on both left and right who don't know how to disagree gracefully, and a combox is an invitation to these people to simply vent their obscenities and resentments in the ugliest fashion they can muster. The comment section of a blog seems to do for some people what getting behind the wheel of a car does to those with suppressed anger.

Anyway, Erickson continues:

In the past several months there have been three incidents that have solidified for me that my faith and my politics are starting to collide. While I am a firm believer in the idea of a conservative populism, I see a dangerous trend within the mix of unfortunate shrillness and hostility. That trend is playing out in the comments here at RedState and on social media.

To start, Christian conservatives were roundly assailed by other conservatives for daring to provide aid and comfort to children whose parents had shipped them across the border. Some could not distinguish between giving a child a teddy bear and supporting Mexican drug cartels. It was all one or all the other. In fact, many Christians, myself included, want expedited deportations and a secure border. But we also want to make sure the children, some victims of human trafficking, were taken care of, fed, and comforted.

But to some on the right, that is aiding law breakers. The anger and hysteria directed at conservatives engaged in private charity had all the makings of a leftist police state making us care about how we choose to spend our own money.

Glenn Beck and Ted Cruz both went to the border to express their concern for the children who were coming across and both were subjected to some awful criticism from the right. This was unconscionable. I certainly believe we need a secure border, and I deplore the Obama administration's apparent indifference to the problem of illegal immigration, but why anyone would blame the children who are being sent illegally into the country by adults is beyond me.

The second was bringing Dr. Brantly and his co-worker back to the United States. The number of angry calls into my radio program from well meaning conservatives, comments across social media, opinion columns, agreement thereto, etc. really boggled my mind. Here are two Americans risking their lives to help others and we are supposed to turn our back on them, leave them there, or criticize their decision to go in the first place? That’s not the America I know or love. The level of outright anger, fear, and bitterness over the decision to take care of American citizens and the lack of knowledge and understanding that formed the foundation for the anger, fear, and bitterness really left me wondering what is going on.

I heard Michael Savage and read Ann Coulter blast the decision to bring Kent Brantly back. Coulter even went so far as to call Brantly an "idiot" for going to Africa to practice medicine in the first place. It's despicable for Coulter who is not only a conservative but also a Christian to demean a brother for doing what Christ called his followers to do. It's hard to fathom why they think that Brantly, who has forgone a handsome living in a domestic practice in order to devote his life to helping those who suffer illness in places where medical care is scarce, should be left in Liberia to die an agonizing death when he could be safely helped here at home.

The last is the present situation in Ferguson, MO. The rush to win a fight and lay blame instead of mourning a loss and praying for a situation just leaves me perplexed. The rush to “change the narrative” with bad facts to replace bad facts by some folks who keep the ichthys on their car unsettles me.

I can't comment much on this last concern because I'm not sure that I've seen "the rush to change the narrative" that Erick mentions, at least not from conservatives (there's been plenty of it by liberals, of course).

Perhaps some conservatives are demanding that Officer Wilson be absolved of any wrongdoing before the evidence is heard, I don't know, but, if so, this is wrong. Conservatives should insist that Wilson be judged solely on the evidence, not exonerated just because he's a policeman and not inculpated simply because he's white and is ipso facto be found guilty and thrown in prison (or worse).

If the facts show that he deliberately, with malice, shot Michael Young then he should be convicted. If they don't, then he should be acquitted. Meanwhile, everyone would be wise to simply wait until the evidence is all released before making up their minds about Wilson's guilt or innocence. Isn't judging before the evidence is known the very definition of the word "prejudice"?

Speaking of already having one's mind made up, it was a shame that the Attorney General of the United States announced that he visited Michael Young's family but chose not to visit Officer Wilson's family. Why not? Is Wilson already guilty in his mind? Isn't Wilson's family living in fear of retribution by the anomic mob burning and looting the town of Ferguson?

I might add to all the above that it irritates me whenever I hear Rush Limbaugh disparage Michael Gerson's term "compassionate conservatism" which he wrote for George Bush. I know Limbaugh claims that the term is a redundancy, but why get upset about that? I've heard him complain that it implies that some conservatism isn't compassionate, but, in fact, there are some conservatives for whom compassion isn't high on their list of virtues, as Erickson's combox reveals. There are lots of liberals who seem to have a compassion deficit as well, mostly those on the secular left.

To be a Christian, though, obligates one to strive for a more irenic tone in one's discourse, and a compassion for those who suffer. This doesn't mean that a Christian should eschew criticism of our political leaders, nor does it mean that we shouldn't call foolishness, mendacity, hypocrisy, venality, and evil by their names. We should. What it means, though, is that we should rather forego criticism that is unfair, tendentious, and shallow and to refuse to engage in the sort of hurtful nastiness which does nothing but insult people.

Erickson closes by confessing that he sometimes may fall short of that standard, as I do, because he's a sinner, as we all are, but nevertheless that standard should be what we aspire to. The way Christian conservatives comport ourselves in the public square reflects not only on us but also upon the God we claim to follow, serve, and represent.