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.

Is Our President a Sociopath?

On both ends of the political spectrum commentators are dismayed by Mr. Obama's seeming detachment from the concerns and issues confronting the American people. Even when he addresses those concerns, as he did the beheading of James Foley, he seems only perfunctorily engaged with them. After delivering a bland condemnation of Foley's murder he drove immediately to the golf course to yuk it up with Alonzo Mourning and other fat cats. This was certainly unseemly, reminiscent of the "selfie" episode at Nelson Mandela's funeral, only worse, and observers, even among those who supported him in the past, were left to wonder what it is about this president that seems so out of synch with how normal people would behave.

Chris Matthews on MSNBC, the same man who once said that Obama gave him "a thrill up his leg," was almost apoplectic at the president's insouciance about the Foley execution and the banality of his words at the press conference.

Maureen Dowd writes about the peculiar behavior of Mr. Obama in an essay in the New York Times in which she describes a man emotionally disconnected from people:

When Barack Obama first ran for president, he theatrically cast himself as the man alone on the stage. From his address in Berlin to his acceptance speech in Chicago, he eschewed ornaments and other politicians, conveying the sense that he was above the grubby political scene, unearthly and apart.

He began “Dreams From My Father” with a description of his time living on the Upper East Side while he was a student at Columbia, savoring his lone-wolf existence. He was, he wrote, “prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions.” When neighbors began to “cross the border into familiarity, I would soon find reason to excuse myself. I had grown too comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew.”

His only “kindred spirit” was a silent old man who lived alone in the apartment next door. Obama carried groceries for him but never asked his name. When the old man died, Obama briefly regretted not knowing his name, then swiftly regretted his regret.

Perhaps Dowd is saying something revealing about Mr. Obama's psyche which I'll return to in a moment. She goes on to write:

The extraordinary candidate turns out to be the most ordinary of men, frittering away precious time on the links. Unlike L.B.J., who devoured problems as though he were being chased by demons, Obama’s main galvanizing impulse was to get himself elected.

Almost everything else — from an all-out push on gun control after the Newtown massacre, to going to see firsthand the Hispanic children thronging at the border, to using his special status to defuse racial tensions in Ferguson — just seems like too much trouble.

For my part, Mr. Obama more and more reminds me of Meursault, the main character in Albert Camus' novel The Stranger. Meursault was a narcissistic sociopath, he developed few emotional connections to others, he was indifferent to what others thought and apathetic about much that normal people would have been interested in. His only moral rule was to do whatever gave him pleasure in the moment.

Dowd's description of Mr. Obama in the paragraphs cited above sounds very much like such a man.

The Urban Dictionary offers a summary of the characteristics displayed by sociopaths:

A sociopath is often well liked because of their charm and high charisma, but they do not usually care about other people. They think mainly of themselves and often blame others for the things that they do. They have a complete disregard for rules and lie constantly. They seldom feel guilt or learn from punishments.

Psychology Today lists a number of traits to look for in identifying a sociopath, among which are:

• Superficial charm and good intelligence
• Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking
• Absence of nervousness or neurotic manifestations
• Unreliability
• Untruthfulness and insincerity
• Lack of remorse and shame
• Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior
• Poor judgment and failure to learn by experience
• Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love
• General poverty in major affective reactions
• Specific loss of insight
• Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations

Do these descriptions fit our president? The reason it seems he's detached from the grief the nation felt at the horrific execution of James Foley might just be that, in fact, he is. Like Meursault who felt nothing for anyone besides himself Mr. Obama likewise seems to feel nothing for others. He seems to lack the ability to empathize. Whether it was the death of the little old man whose name he never bothered to learn, the attack on the Benghazi consulate when he absented himself during the entire tragedy, or the grisly murder of James Foley, he seems to think that there's no sense getting emotionally involved when one has a fundraiser or a tee time to think about.

Maybe all this amateur psychoanalysis is unfair. Maybe Mr. Obama is just a stoic who stifles his affections and internalizes and suppresses the urge to express certain feelings. Maybe, but what appears to be stoicism in people can also be a pathological inability to feel emotion or concern.

Whatever the case, I'm not the first to point out that this man is certainly an odd duck, and more and more observers, even among Democrats and other liberals, seem to be dancing close to the conclusion that what we've seen of him over the last six years bears an uncanny correspondence to how the Urban Dictionary and the Psychology Today checklist describe a sociopath.

The Worst Religious Persecution in History

Mark Movsesian at First Things accuses both the Obama administration and, to some extent, the Bush administration of having a moral blind spot when it comes to the horrors being visited upon Christians by Muslims around the globe. This is doubtless the worst persecution in history for Christians and possibly the worst persecution of any religious group ever (I omit the Jewish holocaust inasmuch as that was an ethnic more than a religious persecution).

Whatever the historical facts may be, Christians around the globe are experiencing unprecedented suffering and much of the traditionally Christian West seems to be alarmingly indifferent.

Here's Movsesian:

In planning and delivering assistance to Iraqi refugees, the West—and particularly the United States, which has taken primary responsibility—should not ignore the plight of Christians. It may seem odd to voice this concern. After all, President Obama specifically mentioned Christians in his statements about American action. But Mideast Christians are often an afterthought for the United States, and it seems they are in this situation again.

A Wall Street Journal report, which quotes unnamed members of the Obama administration, indicates the threat of genocide against Yazidis was the primary factor in the American decision to intervene. “This was qualitatively different from even the awful things that we’ve confronted in different parts of the region because of the targeted nature of it, the scale of it, the fact that this is a whole people,” the official said.

That is a rather myopic view of the situation. We’re offering assistance to 40,000 Yazidi refugees whom ISIS has driven from their homes and threatened to slaughter. Great—we should. But in the weeks before ISIS turned on the Yazidis, it had displaced more than 100,000 Christians from their homes and driven them into the desert.

ISIS eliminated major Christian communities in Mosul and Qaraqosh, and the U.S. responded only with a concerned statement from its U.N. ambassador. And this is to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of Christians who have become refugees since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. If genocide correctly describes what threatens the Yazidis, it also describes what’s happening to Iraqi Christians. Indeed, many of these Christians are the descendants of people who suffered genocide at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Movsesian piece is helpful overall, but it also strikes a false note or two. Like so many people who are reluctant to appeared biased in favor of one political side or another and who wish to be even-handed in their criticism, he says something I think to be just plain silly:

There are reasons why America tends to treat Mideast Christians as an afterthought. Mideast Christians lack a natural constituency in American public life. They are, as one commentator observed, too foreign for the Right and too Christian for the Left.

The notion that Mideast Christians don't get attention from the Right because they're too foreign is simply nonsense. Conservatives have been screaming for people to pay attention to this for several years now, but until recently, neither Washington nor the major media seemed interested. Whether it was because it was Christians who were being persecuted or some other reason I can't say, but the fact is that conservatives have repeatedly raised this issue, sometimes stridently, so often that I wonder if Movsesian just hasn't been paying attention.

In any case he continues:

Most of our foreign policy elites have a blind spot about them. And I don’t mean to single out the Obama administration. Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute has recounted her attempts to get the Bush administration to focus on the plight of Iraq’s Christians, only to be told by Condoleezza Rice that assistance for Christians would make the United States appear sectarian.

It's astonishing that Rice was afraid to address the plight of Iraq's Christians because it would give the impression that we care more about Christians than about others. It seems that neither Rice nor Obama would have come to the aid of the refugees on Mt. Sinjar had they been Christians rather than Yazidis because that would've sent the message that we're partial to Christians. Is there something about Washington that makes it impossible to see people as people rather than as members of some identity group? Movsesian writes:

[I]n the Middle East and around the world, Christians are often targeted for persecution in particularly severe ways, and the human rights community often seems not to notice. Indeed, as Pope Francis explained in remarks at a conference...in Rome this summer, Christians suffer perhaps the largest share of religious persecution in the world today.

[The Pope said this]:

It causes me great pain to know that Christians in the world submit to the greatest amount of such discrimination. Persecution against Christians today is actually worse than in the first centuries of the Church, and there are more Christian martyrs today than in that era.

If we stand by and do nothing, say nothing, and act as if there's nothing we can do about these slaughters since they're happening over there, then what's the difference between us and the German citizens who knew the holocaust was occurring and did nothing? They, at least had reason to fear for their lives. What do we have to fear?

And if we ignore them simply because they are Christians who are suffering then we are despicable.

And if we ignore them because we simply don't want to be bothered then we deserve the same fate.

It's Not Over

President Obama declared mission accomplished in northern Iraq proclaiming that the Yazidi's had been rescued, a humanitarian disaster averted and that American forces would be withdrawn from the region before his leftist base gets too outraged by American use of force. However, according to a Reuters report the crisis created by ISIS's genocidal terror against religious minorities continues apace. Hot Air's Noah Rothman summarizes:

Just minutes after Obama spoke, however, independent relief organizations and even the United Nations warned that the Yazidis’ ordeal was not yet over. Several thousand remained trapped on Mt. Sinjar and those who had managed to escape were far from safe.

Less than a week after the conclusion of that mission, Reuters reported that many Yazidis still face the threat of ISIS’s horrors. Reporters related stories of militants digging graves in which they would bury civilians alive, women and children executed en mass for refusing to undergo religious conversion, and a general sense of hopelessness among those who have been abandoned by their countrymen and the world.

“They put women and children under the ground. They were alive. I still hear their screams,” one 26-year-old Iraqi Yazidi told Reuters reporters. “They were trying to keep their heads up to keep breathing.”

“They tied the hands of one woman to the back of a car and her legs to another car and they split her into two,” another said. “Have you seen anything like this? This is all because she is not Muslim and did not want to be converted.”

Other reports indicate that the Islamic State has captured up to 3,000 Yazidi women and children, all of whom will be sold or are to be forced to serve as servants and wives to their captors.

“She said she is going to be sold as a slave this afternoon, for $10,” one Yazidi man said of his captured daughter last week. “The world needs to know that is where our women are, where they are being enslaved, young and old alike.”

Will the man whom Hot Air has dubbed our "semi-retired president" try to stop this barbarism or will he tear himself away from the golf course only when the plight of these people is so much in the news that he can no longer ignore it without appearing cold and insensitive?

One thing that the Western world needs to understand. This threat will not go away. These people are determined to visit these very same atrocities on us and our children, and unless we stop them they will eventually succeed, just as the surf eventually succeeds in wearing down the rock against which again and again it hurls itself.

Simplifying the Complexity

A friend questioned whether I was not missing the complexity of black dysfunction in a recent post titled Blaming the Victim? Yes. He felt that the causes of the dearth of stores and businesses in predominately black communities was a complicated matter which I over-simplified by attributing it to the reluctance of businessmen to invest in high crime areas.

I guess the reason I simplified this and the larger issue of black dysfunction is that I think the cause of the latter is, at bottom, fairly simple. I explain why in my reply to my friend which went something like this slightly edited version:

At the risk of sounding simplistic I don't think the problems in the black community are all that complex. I think they stem from government policies and cultural influences that have led to the disintegration of the black family. I don't think racism has played anything more than a minor role. The black crime rate, for instance was far lower in the 1950s than it is today, but surely racism was more virulent fifty years ago than it is today. The salient difference between then and now is that back then there were far fewer blacks growing up in fatherless homes and far fewer welfare programs providing disincentives for parents to stay together.

In fact, I think the reason the media has blown the events in Ferguson into a wall-to-wall coverage event is that they (at least the liberal media) are desperate to find a case of white on black crime that confirms the narrative of ubiquitous white racism. It's actually very hard to find a significant example of white racism that's more than just someone saying something insensitive that a black overhears. The overwhelming majority of interracial crime is black-on-white and the overwhelming majority of murders in which the victim is black are perpetrated by other blacks.

Given that the facts belie the liberal narrative, cases like the Zimmerman/Martin shooting or the one in Ferguson are magnified out of all proportion to their actual significance and are portrayed, whether the evidence supports it or not, as a confirmation that America is still a virulently racist country.

And the reason this is done is to somehow excuse the failure of the mass of blacks which, having been given historically unprecedented opportunities to better themselves, still languish in poverty. If that failure can be blamed on racism then blacks can be absolved of responsibility for their predicament. If racism is not a significant factor then blacks are at fault, and this leads to the conclusion that maybe there's something wrong, either with black people themselves, or with the welfare state and its effect on the character of people who live under it.

Neither alternative is appealing to liberals so they're desperate to avoid having to face either of them. Their best option, they've apparently concluded, is to show that blacks still suffer from white hatred and oppression and that all of their problems stem from white contempt rather than any inherent flaw either in the black psyche or with the welfare state that white liberals have promoted for the last fifty years.

As long as they cling to this myth, the situation of black people in this country will continue to stagnate because we'll never adequately address the real cause of the problems in black communities.

Should We Use Violence Against ISIS?

An essay in by Derek Flood Sojourners titled Is There a Non-Violent Response to ISIS? holds out the promise of an answer to the question posed in the title.

I have enormous respect for many of the people who share Flood's desire for a non-violent world because many of them practice what they preach and are deeply committed to living a life of peace-making and non-violence. So what I hoped for in Flood's piece was some insight by an advocate of non-violence into what should be done right now about the plight of the Yazidis on Mt. Sinjar and Christians everywhere in Northern Iraq.

I thus found Mr. Flood's column disappointing since his answer to the question posed in the title of this post was "no, but maybe."

Mr. Flood delayed an answer to whether violence should be used to stop the horrors perpetrated by ISIS in Iraq (and Syria) till near the end. Most of his essay was given to urging policy-makers to think long term and plan for 40 to 50 years down the road.

This is sound but trivial advice that any American foreign policy-maker should heed, but it doesn't answer the question what we should do at this moment about the genocidal threat that ISIS presents to the Middle East in the immediate future.

Here's an excerpt from the Sojourners article:

Let me therefore begin by saying that I agree that we cannot stand by and do nothing. The practice of nonviolence and enemy-love cannot entail accepting abuse. It cannot entail neglecting to protect ourselves or our loved ones from harm. This is where we must begin. The goal of nonviolence is to stop violence and abuse, not tolerate it.

Okay, but how do we stop it in the specific case of a terror army beheading, crucifying, and burying religious minorities alive? Mr. Flood offers us nothing concrete:

What's crucial to understand is that nonviolence is not simply a refusal to add to harm (whether that harm is physical or spiritual/emotional), but more importantly it involves acting to restore, heal, and make things right. So in the case of the Islamic State, the question we need to ask is: What can we do to make things right? What can we do to protect the vulnerable? What can we do to stop the violence?

Jeremy Courtney, who started the hashtag #WeAreN — which became a symbol rallying cry worldwide expressing solidarity with their brothers and sisters in suffering Iraq — had this to say in an interview with with Huffington Post's religion editor Paul Rauschenbush:

We need a long-term plan, not just a short-term fix. There are agencies helping Christians, Yezidis, Turkmen, Shabak and others, and those services are necessary. But this isn't only about what Obama or Maliki must do now. The Christian church needs to reconsider its relationship with violence; that is part of what has landed us and others in this dire situation. We cannot carp about Christian persecution and not talk about violence and our use of violent solutions. We need a 40- to 50-year plan so that when the time comes to overthrow the next dictator, we are not as blind to our own complicity and stuck with short-term gains.

Yes, but telling this to the people hiding their children from ISIS is to tell them, in essence, that they're on their own. I'm sure that neither Mr. Flood or Mr. Courtney would state it this way because it sounds pretty callous, but that's what their counsel amounts to.

Mr. Flood then persists in avoiding the central issue:

The fact is, there may not be a good short-term solution to a situation that has gotten so out of hand that people are describing it in terms of Frankenstein monster, but what we need to face is our complicity in creating that monster. The fact is, violence has not only failed to create stability, in many ways it has acted to exacerbate the situation of instability and injustice which fuels terrorism. Violence does not stop violence, instead it causes it to escalate like a wildfire burning out of control.

This last sentence is simply silly. It was the violence employed against the Japanese and Germans in WWII that stopped the violence they were perpetrating on the Chinese and the Jews. It's the violence employed by armed citizens and police officers against would-be mass murderers who stop the violence of these psychopaths. It's absurd to say that violence does not stop violence. Surely what Mr. Flood intended to say is that violence does not always stop violence, but then this would be to acknowledge that there are some uses of violence that are warranted and proper, an acknowledgement which Mr. Flood is doubtless loath to make.

So what can we do?... If we truly wish to find a way out of the escalating cycle of violence we are caught in, we need to start at the roots and we need to think long term. We need to deal with our complicity in creating the mess and work toward making it right — not with bombs and drone strikes, but by working long term toward humanitarian goals such healthcare, poverty, and education, which work to create stable and safe societies.

Yes, yes, but what do we do now? While ISIS continues their gruesome slaughters we need to work on long term peace-making? Are we to say that those who are fleeing for their lives even as you read this are simply out of luck and shouldn't look to us for help because we deplore the use of violence to save innocent people's lives?

Mr. Flood persists in ignoring the crisis at hand and continues his focus on the long term by urging that we adopt the following three "commonsense pathways" to long-term peace:

So thinking long term, what can we do to prevent the next ISIS or al Qaeda from being born out of the soil of violence? Erin Niemela proposes these three commonsense pathways to peace:

1) Immediately stop sending funds and weapons to all involved parties.

Another way of saying this is, stop giving the Kurds and others the ability to defend themselves against those who will butcher their children, sell their women into sex slavery, and behead and crucify them. I'm certain Mr. Flood is not so cold as to stand by while such horrors happen and tell the victims that we can't rescue them because we have to make things more peaceful a century from now, but, on the other hand, that's what he is saying.

2) Fully invest in social and economic development initiatives in any region in which terrorist groups are engaged.

What social and economic development initiatives in northern Iraq should we be investing in? How can we do any investing at all while ISIS is murdering every non-Sunni who shows himself? Moreover, we can get an idea of how economic aid is put to use by these people by looking at how Hamas used their social and economic development aid in Gaza. Forty percent of it was spent on building tunnels into Israel and most of the rest was spent on weapons. Giving aid to people like this doesn't seem to be an effective way to promote peace.

3) Fully support any and all nonviolent civil society resistance movements. Whoever is left - give them whatever support is needed the most.

I wonder if the editors at Sojourners just missed the terrifying irony of this statement. "Whoever is left"?! Is the non-violent response to wait until the genocide is over and then move in and offer any survivors the promise of our full support? This sounds like something from a Monty Python skit.

Flood goes on to quote from a study that shows that from 1900 to 2006 non-violent resistance campaigns were nearly twice as successful as their violent counterparts. He links to the study in his column, and although I haven't read the study I wonder how many of the successful exercises of non-violent resistance it cites occurred in situations where the oppressing government was that of a Western nation with a long Christian tradition of democratic tolerance and human rights (like the civil rights movement in America, or Ghandi's pacifist resistance to the British in British-run India) and how many of them took place in countries where the oppressing power embraced a vicious genocidal ideology like Naziism or a mutant form of Islam. It makes a difference, I should think.

At any rate, having said all of this, having avoided the relevant question which is what to do in the short term, Mr. Flood one vague bow toward the question almost in passing. He writes:

This is not to categorically rule out the use of violence in the short term, although we certainly do need to be careful that in using violence we do not act to make things worse than they are.

He doesn't seem to realize that that one sentence completely undoes everything else he has said. The gravamen of his piece is what non-violent people should do about ISIS now. His answer appears to be: Maybe they should use violence.

What a reader might have been hoping for was a treatment of the principles governing when a fundamentally non-violent person would be justified in using violence, or answers to questions like: What makes the use of violence acceptable in this situation and not, say, in 2003 when Saddam Hussein was seeking to exterminate the Kurds and his own people? Or, would it be acceptable to supply weapons to the Ukrainian military? Or, is it acceptable to use violence in Africa where non-Muslims are being exterminated? Or, if force is justifiable against ISIS to what extent should it be used? Or, should we seek to totally eradicate this plague? Or, what if American bombing kills a couple thousand ISIS fighters and no Americans are killed, will the people at Sojourners complain about the disproportionality of the casualties?

These are questions that anyone who adopts the non-violent stance, a stance I would sincerely wish to be sympathetic to, needs to answer. Mr. Flood's decision to avoid addressing them in an essay whose title implies that they would be answered is disappointingly unhelpful. It's also a tacit admission that absolute non-violence is an unrealistic aspiration for those who choose to live in the modern world.

Blaming the Victim? Yes.

From time to time we hear the lament that our inner cities are food deserts because grocery stores have abandoned the area, we're also told that there are no job opportunities for young people in our urban areas because businesses won't open in African-American communities. The lack of stores and jobs are both attributed, of course, to white racism.

Perhaps a better explanation is to be found in the dysfunctional community that is Ferguson, MO which might be viewed as a general type that's all too common in the U.S.

A store owner is robbed by an African-American thug, the robber is subsequently shot by police in what are still murky circumstances, the other young thugs in the town seize upon the episode as a pretext for rioting and proceed to burn and trash dozens of shops in the neighborhood.

If you were a businessman trying to eke out a living would you want to open a business in this neighborhood? Of course not. So more stores, including food stores, will decide it's just not worth the risks one must incur to operate in such places, and urban blight and abandonment metastasize.

And, we may count on it, the cause of the exodus of businesses from the neighborhood will be said by such luminaries as Al Sharpton to be the racism of whites who don't want to live and do business in black neighborhoods. Maybe it would be good for African-Americans to stop blaming whitey, to ignore the demagogues, to reject the liberal nostrums which have gotten the mass of blacks nowhere in the last fifty years, and start looking at themselves for the source of their problems and for the solutions to them.

Liberals will say - they always do - that this is just blaming the victim. Perhaps, but sometimes the "victim" is truly at fault, and sometimes the victim is victimized by himself.

The Blurred Line

The consensus among conservative pundits is that the police in Ferguson, Missouri have conducted themselves abysmally since the shooting by an officer of an unarmed black teenager. I don't know the facts on the shooting, so I have no opinion on it.

The point is that no one else in the country knows the facts either, including the African American community in Ferguson, which makes the violent disturbances there, as opposed to the peaceful demonstrations, intolerably thuggish.

I do agree, however, with the column in Time written by Rand Paul, the Republican junior senator from Kentucky, in which he raises a very disquieting concern. He (and many others) are very troubled about the increasing militarization of our local police forces. Police are not supposed to be military units, and as they evolve into that the specter of a tyrannical, totalitarian police state looms more ominously in our future.

Here are some excerpts from Paul's column:

The outrage in Ferguson is understandable—though there is never an excuse for rioting or looting. There is a legitimate role for the police to keep the peace, but there should be a difference between a police response and a military response. The images and scenes we continue to see in Ferguson resemble war more than traditional police action.

The Cato Institute’s Walter Olson observed this week how the rising militarization of law enforcement is currently playing out in Ferguson:

Why armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb? Why would cops wear camouflage gear against a terrain patterned by convenience stores and beauty parlors? Why are the authorities in Ferguson, Mo. so given to quasi-martial crowd control methods (such as bans on walking on the street) and, per the reporting of Riverfront Times, the firing of tear gas at people in their own yards? (“‘This my property!’ he shouted, prompting police to fire a tear gas canister directly at his face.”) Why would someone identifying himself as an 82nd Airborne Army veteran, observing the Ferguson police scene, comment that “We rolled lighter than that in an actual warzone”?

Olson added, “the dominant visual aspect of the story, however, has been the sight of overpowering police forces confronting unarmed protesters who are seen waving signs or just their hands.”

How did this happen?

Not surprisingly, big government has been at the heart of the problem. Washington has incentivized the militarization of local police precincts by using federal dollars to help municipal governments build what are essentially small armies—where police departments compete to acquire military gear that goes far beyond what most of Americans think of as law enforcement.

This is usually done in the name of fighting the war on drugs or terrorism. The Heritage Foundation’s Evan Bernick wrote in 2013 that, “the Department of Homeland Security has handed out anti-terrorism grants to cities and towns across the country, enabling them to buy armored vehicles, guns, armor, aircraft, and other equipment.”

When you couple this militarization of law enforcement with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury—national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, pre-conviction forfeiture—we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands.

The militarization of our law enforcement is due to an unprecedented expansion of government power in this realm. It is one thing for federal officials to work in conjunction with local authorities to reduce or solve crime. It is quite another for them to subsidize it.

Hot Air also has a good piece on this topic which can be read here. Burgeoning government such as is envisioned by liberals need not necessarily entail militarized police forces, I suppose, but it certainly seems that as our government becomes increasingly more expansive, our police are becoming increasingly more like our Marines and the line between them has been blurred. I don't think that's good for communities nor for the relationship of the police to the citizenry. It's certainly not good for our liberties and rights.