Shapiro on the Alt-Right

In the wake of Charlottesville Ben Shapiro fired off a series of tweets about the alt-right which I wish to almost completely affirm. Shapiro's tweets are in italics accompanied by my comments:

1. The so-called alt-right is an evil movement having nothing to do with - and actively opposing - Constitutional conservatism.

Any movement based on hatred is evil. The alt-right is not evil because they're nationalistic although that could be troubling. They're evil because they wear the mantle of the nazis and the nazi ideology of racial purity which leads almost inevitably to racial-cleansing.

2. They've done an excellent job, with the media's ignorant help, of portraying themselves as large and powerful.

I don't know how many of them there are, but I suspect there are many more who sympathize with them than actually belong to any organization.

3. And broadening their definition to include anyone who is anti-establishment .... That's not what they are.

This is one of the frustrating things about the progressive media. They constantly commit the fallacy of undistributed middle, i.e. they assume that because group A shares certain beliefs in common with group B that therefore the two groups are identical. It's like arguing that because dogs and cats both have four legs that therefore dogs are cats. The fact that conservatives favor some of the things the alt-right favors does not entail that conservatives are alt-right.

4. The alt-right has a very definite philosophy, articulated by people like Spencer, Taylor, and Vox Day. 5. And excused and popularized by people like Milo Yiannopoulos. They were successful online in convincing key figures that they were 6. An important constituency. Immoral politicians and advisors then made the conscious decision not to carve them off. 7. Yes, that includes Trump and Bannon.

This was indeed a mistake on Trump's part which it's not too late to rectify. Barack Obama stood by Rev. Wright for years until Wright's rhetoric made the association untenable. Trump should completely dissociate himself from any support alt-right individuals like David Duke may be giving him. If that costs him support in the polls, so be it. It's the right thing to do. It's perhaps worth noting that despite the awful rhetoric from some elements in the Black Lives Matter movement and the subsequent murders of police officers, the left never really pushed Obama to disavow BLM, but they're certainly critical of Trump for not more explicitly separating himself from the alt-right.

8. Three elements assure their continued growth: pandering politicians and media figures catering to or ignoring them [i.e. the alt-right], and 9. Left-wingers labeling all right-wingers alt-right and therefore leading innocent people to believe that alt-right Judy means right.

See #3.

10. And left-wing violent groups like Antifa that drive fools into the belief that anyone who fights Antifa is necessarily an ally [of the alt-right].

11. We're watching a tiny microcosm replay of brownshirts vs. reds in Weimar Germany. They're even carrying the same flags.

This is precisely right. There's no substantive difference between the alt-right and the far left. They're both steeped in hatred and both would impose a socialist totalitarian tyranny if they could. The only differences between fascists and communists is that fascists are more militaristic, racist and nationalist (blood and soil) while communists are less fond of overt military trappings, base their hatreds more on class and religion rather than race, and are more globalist. Otherwise, the neo-nazis in Charlottesville and the left-wing protestors in Hamburg and elsewhere are simply two sides of the same coin. They're equally noxious. Given power they would both oppress the groups they hate or, if history is a guide, seek to slaughter them.

12. And leadership in media and especially the White House must actively and thunderously condemn the evil we're watching metastasize.

Trump's response yesterday has been criticized because he didn't explicitly condemn white supremacists and other fascists. I think this is unfair, but even so, the Charlottesville marchers and their ilk, like their counterparts on the left, do need to be explicitly and specifically deplored.

It would be nice, though, if the people so outraged at Trump's measured response yesterday had been as critical of Obama for his disappointing unwillingness to call Islamic-inspired domestic terrorism by its name as well as his failure to dissociate himself from the hateful rhetoric of certain elements of BLM instead of inviting them to the White House.

A Few Rarities

Nature enthusiasts have been treated to several avian rarities in Pennsylvania this summer, and since it's been awhile since I've posted anything on birds I thought I'd share the news about these feathered visitors. None of the photos below are of the actual birds found in Pennsylvania this summer, but they are pics of birds of the same species.

The first is a Roseate spoonbill which inhabits wetlands along the coast in the southern states but rarely ventures as far north as the mid-atlantic region and even more rarely as far inland as Pennsylvania.

Even so, there were two of them present in the state last month within forty miles of each other. One of them is still here. Notice the oddly shaped bill which the spoonbill uses to push mud around as it probes for insects, worms, and other delicacies:

Roseate spoonbill

The second is a small heron that also is found along the southern coasts and very rarely inland this far north. Yet there was one, and maybe two of these birds in PA at the end of July as well.

It's called a Tricolored heron and the reason I said that there may have been two of them is that when one bird was no longer being seen a second one was discovered at a lake only about twenty miles away from where the first was originally found.

Tricolored heron

The third visitor is the most remarkable. It's called a White-winged tern and it's indigenous to eastern Europe and central Asia:

Yellow is its breeding range. Blue is where it winters

How this lovely bird found its way to a small lake in the mountains of north central Pennsylvania this week is a mystery, but its striking black and white plumage and extreme rarity (it may be the only Pennsylvania White-winged tern on record) have been delighting birders and photographers who've been making the trek to Tioga Co. to see it for several days now:

White-winged tern

The natural world is full of beautiful jewels, and birds are among its most gorgeous treasures. To see these creatures in real life can sometimes take one's breath away.

More on Purpose

A couple of days ago I did a post on materialism in which I argued that a materialist worldview empties the world and life of any genuine meaning despite the efforts of some materialists to salvage some measure of purpose in the fleeting ephemerata of human existence.

A friend wrote to respond to the post and add some thoughts of his own which I'd like to share. Here's the core of his response:

As is evident in the article you cite, the problem of materialists is that, no matter how hard they try, they can never fully jettison their human essence. Like C.S. Lewis says in Miracles, "While denying humanity, they all the while remain human."

Materialism is the immediate (and pitifully jejune) result of positivism. The materialist basically says, "I refuse to speculate about realities that can't be empirically verified. Prudence demands that I only give credence to what is posited to my senses--to what I know with certainty is actually there. Therefore, I reject any notion of inherent purpose and meaning.

But there are few things which are more empirically obvious than the existential reality of human beings for whom purpose and meaning are more necessary than food. As you likely know, this is the premise of Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning. Man's incessant search for meaning is an empirically verifiable, existential reality.

To fail to see this one would have to be as obtuse as the willfully blind fundamentalist Christian who refuses to consider any evidence that the earth more than 6,000 years old.

The materialist explanation that purpose is only for evolutionary "benefit" also exposes the reality they are trying to deny. Benefit necessarily implies purpose or telos--benefit means an advantage that contributes toward an end cause. But then having an end cause, like increasing evolutionary sophistication and functionality, requires an intent (aka "purpose") and the concept of intent is nonsensical apart from a will and a mind which does the intending.

It's hard for a materialist to write two sentences without asserting some kind of value attribution. But, as you have so keenly pointed out, like purpose and meaning, according to them, there can be no inherent value in anything.

All is an illusion, but then that can't even be said without a value assertion; either an illusion is "bad" because it keeps us from what is real and true, both of which have inherent value, or illusion is "good" because it enables us to gratify ourselves in some way, but then apart from sheer, visceral itch-scratching, "gratifying" one's self smuggles in notions of individual happiness and fulfillment, which are inherently valuable and thus constitute an important purpose.

To paraphrase Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, "Nothing makes a man look less like an animal than assuming he is one."

Quite so. The materialist, in my opinion, is living in a state of metaphysical tension. He realizes that human life requires meaning, significance and purpose and realizes at the same time that any genuine meaning, significance and purpose are extremely difficult to reconcile with the tenets of his materialism which reduces everything to the chaotic swirl of leptons and baryons.

Yet he soldiers on, clinging to his materialism, his desire to embrace a metaphysics which allows him to avoid a confrontation with God evidently outweighing his desire for a meaningful life. One might well wonder why.

Eight Myths about War with North Korea

Fears of war with North Korea have been exacerbated recently by the rhetoric coming from North Korea's psychotic leader Kim Jung Un who keeps threatening the United States with destruction as he pursues his quest for nuclear missiles.

Given his homicidal temperament and history and his repeated vows to launch nuclear war against American citizens, the White House can't afford to allow him to obtain the weapons that will give him the means to carry out his threats. Diplomacy has so far failed to deter him, however, and it looks as if war is a real possibility.

The consequences of actual war with North Korea would indeed be grim but, according to an article at RedState, have been largely exaggerated by our media. We've been told that the South Korean capital of Seoul with it's population of 25 million people would be levelled by North Korean artillery and that thousands of American troops based in South Korea would be targeted before they could be safely moved.

Neither of these claims is true, according to the author of the piece, a writer who goes by the name Strieff. His column debunks the claim that North Korea has the ability to inflict the damage and carnage the media tells us will ensue if war breaks out and discusses eight myths that have been circulated about such a conflict. The alleged myths are these:

1. Seoul is within easy artillery range of North Korea.
2. All of these long range pieces are within range of Seoul.
3. North Korea will use all of its artillery to target Seoul.
4. North Korean artillery will be able to hit Seoul even if it is in range.
5. North Korean artillery will shoot thousands of rounds at Seoul.
6. Neither the US nor ROK (South Korea) Air Force or artillery will engage North Korean artillery.
7. The ROK army won’t cross the border to clear out North Korean artillery.
8. Seoul will suffer massive civilian casualties.

Streiff refers to the following map which accompanied a piece in yesterday's WaPo (of which he's critical) in his response to the first two "myths":

Of the first myth he says this:

This is simply not true. Thirty miles is extreme range for tube or rocket artillery. The entire North Korean Army has, at a high end estimate, a max of 500 artillery systems and 200 rocket systems that can range Seoul’s northern suburbs and Seoul from what is now North Korea. Only one-third of Seoul can be hit by any type of tube artillery.

The drawing of a 44-mile circle and implying that there are hundreds of artillery pieces which can range as far as the heaviest North Korean rocket systems is just dishonest in the extreme.

Of the second myth he writes:

Dispersion between artillery systems is going to be at least 50 meters. Math alone tells you once you start dispersing that you quickly run out of usable real estate. Why disperse? The blast radius for a 500-lb bomb (the B-2 carries 80 of these) is 50 meters. That means it will kill 50% of everyone within that zone. Even troops in bunkers will be killed or injured by the combination of overpressure and vacuum rupturing hollow organs.

If you drop 1000-lb bombs, increasingly the weapon of choice, the 50% lethality radius exceeds 200 meters. If you want your artillery to survive more than the first air strike you will want them dispersed and in hardened positions. While the 44 mile radius on the map is cute, many of these weapons will be out of range of Seoul because clustering dozens of pieces up on the DMZ within easy range of ROK infantry and armor doesn’t make sense.

You'll have to read the rest at RedState. It's an interesting counterpoint to the catastrophic consequences we've been told would follow an attempt to take out the barbaric regime in Pyongyang.

Streiff closes with this:

...the fact is that the assertion that Seoul is going to be flattened by North Korean artillery is simply false and can easily be proven false.

None of this is to say a war with North Korea would be easy and that it wouldn’t result in widespread destruction in the northern 10% of South Korea, but don’t be fooled. The stories of an Armageddon in South Korea are simply not true. The ROK Air Force and ROK Army are not going to sit on their thumbs and allow Seoul to be pulverized. Neither will American forces.

Just like we spent a lot of effort hunting SCUDs in both Gulf wars, the artillery that can shoot at Seoul will be quickly and ruthlessly hunted down and silenced.

Of one thing there can be no doubt. North Korea simply cannot be permitted to go on building nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. They must be stopped, and if diplomacy continues to be unproductive then, it seems, Streiff's analysis will be put to the test.

A Purposeless Universe

Joseph P. Carter is a doctoral student in ancient Greek philosophy at the University of Georgia and a materialist who believes that matter and energy is all there is. On the materialist view there's nothing that cannot be reduced to material stuff - no immaterial mind, no soul and, usually, no God.

Carter writes about human purpose from a materialist perspective at the NYT's The Stone, and his conclusions, though somewhat subtly stated, are pretty bleak. Here are some excerpts which will help illustrate the gravamen of his argument:

Purpose is a universal human need. Without it, we feel bereft of meaning and happiness....

But, where does purpose come from? What is it? For over two millenniums, discerning our purpose in the universe has been a primary task of philosophers....

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us that our purpose is happiness or eudaemonia, “well-spiritedness.” Happiness is an ordered and prudent life.

I’m certainly no Aristotelian. Not because I reject happiness. Rather, as a materialist, I think there’s nothing intrinsic about the goals and purposes we seek to achieve it. Modern science explicitly jettisons this sort of teleological thinking from our knowledge of the universe. From particle physics to cosmology, we see that the universe operates well without purpose....

What follows from this, whether Carter intends it or not, is that whatever means we employ to achieve happiness are justified if they enable us to successfully attain it.

In other words, on materialism there are no intrinsically right or wrong means, only those that work and those that don't. If it brings happiness someone to rape, pillage and murder such behaviors aren't wrong because the universe knows nothing about value judgments.

Just as the temperature of the coffee and air equalizes, the Earth, our solar system, galaxies and even supermassive black holes will break down to the quantum level, where everything cools to a uniform state.... Eventually everything ends in heat death....

What’s the purpose in that, though?

There isn’t one. At least not fundamentally.... [T]he universe as we understand it tells us nothing about the goal or meaning of existence, let alone our own. In the grand scheme of things, you and I are enormously insignificant.

But, Carter stresses, we're not completely insignificant. We can invent pretend purposes and meaning that occupy and divert our attention enough to enable us to stave off nihilism and existential despair.

We can be important to each other, he insists, we can do things that give us the incentive to get out of bed in the morning, we can even believe there's real purpose to our lives even though we know there isn't because evolutionary benefits accrue to those who make themselves believe it.

This is a depressing recitation, but it's really all that materialism can offer. A materialist can either accept that his life is nothing more than a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", or he can reject materialism. What he can't do is remain a materialist and pretend that somehow life matters.

Jean Paul Sartre observed that "Life ceases to have any meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal." Or, to put the same thought differently, unless what we do matters forever it doesn't really matter at all.

Carter, as one would expect, disagrees with this assessment:

An indifferent universe also offers us a powerful and compelling case for living justly and contentedly because it allows us to anchor our attention here. It teaches us that this life matters and that we alone are responsible for it. Love, friendship and forgiveness are for our benefit. Oppression, war and conflict are self-inflicted.

This seems to me to be a case of whistling past the graveyard. What an indifferent universe does is impress upon us the fact, contrary to Carter's assertion, that there is no compelling case for living justly if living unjustly confers upon us the pleasures and other desiderata of life that we seek. It tells us that we are just dust in the wind and nothing we do will last or matter ultimately. It tells us that love and the rest are merely chemical reactions in our brains and that though they may benefit some people, others may benefit just as much from oppression, war and conflict.

Atheist materialist Richard Dawkins famously wrote that the universe exhibits no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Just blind pitiless indifference. In such a universe right and wrong, good and bad, are entirely subjective. What's right and good for one person may be wrong and bad for another.

When we ask what’s the purpose of the recent gassing of Syrian children in the Idlib Province or the torture and killings of Chechnyan homosexual men, we ought not simply look to God or the universe for explanations but to ourselves, to the entrenched mythologies that drive such actions — then reject them when the institutions they inform amount to acts of horror.

Notice Carter doesn't say we should judge these acts to be evil. On the materialist's view there is no genuine moral evil. Carter avers instead that we can "reject" them, but why, on materialism, should we reject these acts if they bring us happiness? Why is it wrong for men to treat other men cruelly if they believe it advances their well-being and flourishing? It's hard to see how a materialist would answer that question.

He concludes his article with these words:

One day I will die. So will you. [Everything in the universe] will decay ... as the fundamental particles we’re made of return to the inert state in which everything began.

Perhaps so, but if that's true then nothing we do on this tiny speck of a planet in the extraordinarily brief moment of time we spend here really matters.

Materialism offers no hope, no meaning, no basis for moral action, no reason for enduring the pain and suffering of life. To insist otherwise, as Carter does, is to indulge in make-believe.

No Surprise

The French News Agency AFP recently ran a story about a study that showed that people are more likely to assume that a hypothetical "vile deed" was more likely inflicted by an atheist than by a theist.

This isn't an especially newsworthy finding, I wouldn't think, given all the anecdotal evidence out there, but AFP thought it was because the study revealed that even atheists held this view about their fellow atheists:

An unusual social study has revealed that atheists are more easily suspected of vile deeds than Christians, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists -- strikingly, even by fellow atheists, researchers said Monday.

This suggests that in an increasingly secular world, many -- including some atheists -- still hold the view that people will do bad things unless they fear punishment from all-seeing gods.

The results of the study "show that across the world, religious belief is intuitively viewed as a necessary safeguard against the temptations of grossly immoral conduct," an international team wrote in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. And it revealed that "atheists are broadly perceived as potentially morally depraved and dangerous."

Participants were given a description of a fictional evildoer who tortured animals as a child, then grows up to become a teacher who murders and mutilates five homeless people.

Half of the group were asked how likely it was that the perpetrator was a religious believer, and the other half how likely that he was an atheist.

The team found that people were about twice as likely to assume that the serial killer was an atheist.

"It is striking that even atheists appear to hold the same intuitive anti-atheist bias," study co-author Will Gervais, a psychology professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, told AFP.

There are more details at the link. I'm not sure, though, why Gervais is surprised by this result. How many of the mass murderers in the U.S. were either atheists or Islamic terrorists? I would venture to guess that the number is close to 100%. Moreover, those who were not atheists or Muslims I would venture to guess are only nominal theists who at best hold very tenuous, inchoate views about God.

There are two different reasons, in my opinion, why perpetrators of mass evil, at least in this country, are likely to be either atheists or Muslims. In the latter case it's because the perpetrator is convinced, not unreasonably, that the religion to which he is devoted actually encourages the murders of infidels, apostates, Jews, and those who dishonor the family name.

In the former case the reason is not so much that the perpetrator lacks a belief in Divine punishment, although that may be part of it, but rather that an atheist perpetrator has no good reason for thinking that any deed he might perform is morally evil in the first place.

If atheism is true then we're all just highly evolved animals, and there's no moral evil among animals. When a cat kills a mouse, even if the killing is simply gratuitous and unrelated to acquiring food, it's not doing evil. It's just doing what cats do. So it is with human beings. When one man slays another he's just doing what humans have been doing to each other ever since Cain and Abel.

Morality, on atheism, is simply something humans have devised to help them live together in society and avoid constant conflict, but if someone violates society's moral conventions they're not doing something wrong in any ultimately meaningful sense. They're just doing something that other people don't like.

When we condemn a mass killer all we're doing is expressing our disapproval of what the killer did, sort of like when fans at a baseball game boo the umpire, but the umpire who makes a bad call hasn't done anything immoral and neither has the killer. For the killer's act to be immoral he must be accountable to a higher law and a higher judge than merely the laws and judges of human society.

Thus, the presumption that someone who does evil is likely to be an atheist is a perfectly rational surmise, and the study simply shows that reflective atheists, just like most others, recognize the fact.

A theist, if he's genuinely committed to his belief, knows that if he does a horrible deed he's doing something deeply and genuinely wrong and is betraying both the faith he professes to hold and the God he professes to love. When an atheist does something horrible he has no reason to think he's doing anything wrong or betraying anything at all.

Between the two, then, who is more likely to wreak evil upon others?

GOP Tartuffery

Politicians who say one thing and do another are not difficult to find, but even so the recent senate vote on repealing Obamacare was a bonanza for connoisseurs of political tergiversation.

Seven GOP senators who had on previous occasions - when it was certain that any repeal bill would be vetoed by Mr. Obama and no danger of the law actually being undone could be espied - stoutly insisted that for the sake of the country, for the well-being of the people, the ACA had to be demolished, root and branch. But when repeal loomed as a real possibility last month these august senators' memories of their previous asseverations were evidently beclouded, and they voted against a bill that would have eliminated the law for which they had previously expressed such strenuous opposition.

Here's what each of the seven Republican senators who voted late last month against repealing Obamacare has said about it in the past:

LISA MURKOWSKI (R-AK): “This law is not affordable for anyone in Alaska. That is why I will support the bill that repeals the ACA and wipes out its harmful impacts."

SUSAN COLLINS (R-ME): "I believe that we made - that Congress made - a real error in passing Obamacare, we should repeal the law so that we can start over."

JOHN McCAIN (R-AZ): “It is clear that any serious attempt to improve our health care system must begin with a full repeal and replacement of Obamacare.”

DEAN HELLER (R-NV): "The repeal of this law will not only reduce federal spending, but it will also allow Congress to address problems within the current health-care system.”

SHELLEY MOORE CAPITO (R-WV): "I have consistently voted to repeal and replace this disastrous health-care law, and I am glad that a repeal bill will finally reach the president’s desk."

LAMAR ALEXANDER (R-TN): "Obamacare was an historic mistake, and should be repealed and replaced with step-by-step reforms that transform the health-care delivery system."

ROB PORTMAN (R-OH): “[Obamacare] is fundamentally flawed. I do think we ought to delay ... and then we’ve got to repeal this thing and start over."

Actually Murkowski, Collins and McCain achieved summa cum laude honors among Washington hypocrites by actually voting against both full repeal and the so-called "skinny repeal" which would have repealed the law but kept it in place until a satisfactory substitute was found.

If there's a Hall of Fame for political tartuffery surely these three deserve immediate induction.

Viva la Revolución!

During the recent G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany leftists from across Europe protested violently against the evils of global capitalism. The "protestors" were presumably young socialist/communists who ought to be taken aside and asked what, exactly, is their vision of a socialist future?

Is it, say, Venezuela which was at one time in the not too distant past the fourth richest nation in the world on a per capita basis, but which, since adopting socialism in the "Bolivarian Revolution" of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro, finds that it can no longer feed or provide basic services for its people? Socialism has brought this once-prosperous nation to the cusp of civil war as Rich Lowry explains in a column at the New York Post.

Lowry writes:

Venezuela is a woeful reminder that no country is so rich that it can’t be driven into the ground by revolutionary socialism....

A country that has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia is suffering shortages of basic supplies. Venezuela now totters on the brink of bankruptcy and civil war, in the national catastrophe known as the Bolivarian Revolution.

The phrase is the coinage of the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, succeeded by the current Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro.

The Chavistas have worked from the typical Communist playbook of romanticizing the masses while immiserating them. Runaway spending, price controls, nationalization of companies, corruption and the end of the rule of law — it’s been a master class in how to destroy an economy.

The result is a sharp, years-long recession, runaway inflation and unsustainable debt. The suffering of ordinary people is staggering, while the thieves and killers who are Chavista officials have made off with hundreds of billions of dollars. At this rate — The Economist calls the country’s economic decline “the steepest in modern Latin American history” — there will be nothing left to steal.

Any government in a democratic country that failed this spectacularly would have been relegated to the dustbin of history long ago. Maduro is getting around this problem by ending Venezuela’s democracy.

This has been the standard modus operandi of the far left for the last one hundred years. Leftists exploit democracy to gain power and then eliminate democracy in order to consolidate that power. Finally, they employ their power to impose a violent tyranny while at the same time turning their country into an economic basket-case.

The history of Africa in the 20th century is full of case studies, and closer to home Cuba is a notable illustration of this same pattern, a pattern that George Orwell limned so charmingly for readers of his novel Animal Farm.

Lowry concludes his piece with these thoughts:

Denied the ordinary means of dissent via the press and elections, the opposition has taken to the streets. Already more than 100 people have been killed in clashes over the past several months.

Worse is yet to come. Lacking legitimacy and representing only a fraction of the populace, the Maduro regime will rely on the final backstop of violent suppression. It is now the worst crisis in a major country in the Western Hemisphere since the heights of the Colombian civil war in the 1990s and 2000s.

In the meantime, the Bolivarian Revolution is proceeding according to its sick logic — and there will be blood.

Alas, there often is. Once a government extinguishes freedom and seeks to impose a socialist economy by force, bloodshed, often massive as in Cambodia, China and the U.S.S.R., is the not uncommon result.

So, too, is economic wretchedness.

RAISE

By now you've no doubt heard of the RAISE Act (Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act) that has been introduced into the Senate by Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue and endorsed by President Trump. Predictably media liberals are attacking it and Trump's supporters are delighted with it, but what would the act actually do? What are it's strong and weak points and how can the weaknesses be strengthened?

Immigration expert Lyman Stone has a fine piece at The Federalist that summarizes the act and answers those questions. Here's the summary:

First, the RAISE ACT would eliminate “Diversity Lottery Visas,” a program that gives 50,000 visas to countries that send few immigrants to the United States in the name of, well, diversity.

Second, it would limit the number of refugees given permanent residency to 50,000 per year.

Third, it would eliminate the ability of immigrants to sponsor visas for extended family members and adult children.

Fourth, it would restructure the employment-visa system into a points system akin to those used by Canada or Australia, prioritizing young-ish immigrants with good English, high-paying job offers, and other markers of achievement.

Stone goes on to explain a bit about each of these. The points system in particular would look like this:

[E]ach person applying for immigration authorization is awarded points based on various characteristics on a 0 to 100 basis. If you get fewer than 30 points, you are ineligible for immigration.

Practically speaking, nobody except Olympic athletes, wealthy investors, or Nobel Prize winners gets a score over 45 points. For most immigrants, points come from age (26-31 is the sweet spot, earning 10 points, while over-50s get zero points, with various gradations in between), education (a bachelor’s degree earns you 5 or 6, a STEM masters 7 or 8, a STEM PhD 10 or 13), English-language skills (the top 10 percent of test-takers using a standardized test get 12 points), and salary offered (5-13 points depending on how far the wage is above median wages).

Many countries use points systems because these are easy to understand for voters, bureaucrats, and immigrants. Voters feel like they understand how they’re being governed, bureaucrats don’t have to make as many subjective choices, and immigrants have clear goals and benchmarks. The United Kingdom adopted such a system in 2008. Australia’s system is widely seen as a model for such systems. You can easily look up Canada’s scoring system online.

Like any legislation RAISE probably needs to be tweaked. Stone discusses some pros and cons:

A focus on skills is long overdue. Even as low-skilled workers in the United States may face competition from cheaper immigrant labor, high-skilled employers continue to complain that they can’t find enough workers. Shifting away from kinship-based visas that encourage immigrants to bring over lower-skilled relatives towards a system that zeroes in on skilled workers would simultaneously reduce the pressure on working-class wages while making it easier for advanced companies to hire the best and brightest from around the world.

Indeed, it actually makes it harder for companies to poach talent from abroad by creating additional barriers, such as English fluency or certain age brackets, that were not previously necessary. Say you’re an advanced polymer manufacturing company in Ohio and you want to hire an engineer. Your new hire has a PhD in polymers from a U.S. university (13 points) and you’re offering him 40 percent of median wages (13 points). But he’s 53 (zero points) and his English is only about average for foreigners (zero points). At 26 points, this candidate is totally ineligible for a visa despite obviously being good for the country.At least, that’s what should happen.

But the RAISE Act designers made a crucial drafting error. They slashed family visas, implemented a points-based system… then left the number of employment visas unchanged at 140,000. This is nonsensical. Sure, the RAISE Act relieves some pressure on low-skilled workers, which is good, but it does absolutely nothing to make the United States more globally competitive.

The problems, Stone maintains, are easy to remedy, and he suggests some fixes in his article to which I refer you for many more details than I've mentioned here.

It's hard to see why this bill, with appropriate modifications, should not be passed into law, although some will oppose it simply because it's a Republican proposal endorsed by Trump. The "Resist" folks notwithstanding, though, it's a system that makes a lot of sense, has been adopted by other first world nations, and one that we should adopt as well.

The State of Inflation

Cosmologists (scientists who study the origin and structure of the universe) have long been intrigued by the fact that regardless where they point their telescopes what they find is that the universe is almost completely uniform, that is, its matter and energy are the same everywhere in the universe. Why that should be is a puzzle.

Another puzzle is that the expansion rate of the universe is almost perfectly balanced by the universe's mass density which exerts gravitational pull. This means that the universe should neither tear itself apart in an out of control expansion nor collapse back on itself but eventually reach a state of eternal equilibrium. This is called "flatness", and flatness requires an incredible degree of fine-tuning.

One theory that has been advanced to account for these remarkable features is cosmic inflation - the hypothesis that at the very beginning of the universe when it was only miniscule fractions of a second old, it underwent incredibly rapid expansion for a miniscule fraction of a second.

Inflation is still the consensus view among cosmologists but it's being subjected of late to some tough criticism. If the critics prevail it would have serious consequences for not only inflationary cosmology but also for the multiverse hypothesis. It would also powerfully strengthen the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God.

There's an interesting article on all this by Denyse O'Leary at Evolution News. Here's her lede:

Two features of our universe puzzle cosmologists: One is the horizon problem: The universe looks the same in all directions and the cosmic microwave background radiation is about the same temperature everywhere. As String Theory for Dummies puts it, “This really shouldn’t be the case, if you think about it more carefully.” Assuming that current measurements are correct, the radiation must have exceeded the speed of light if it really communicated in this way, but that is forbidden by the standard Big Bang model of the universe.

Then there is the “flatness problem”: “The matter density and expansion rate of the universe appear to be nearly perfectly balanced, even 14 billion years later when minor variations should have grown drastically” (Dummies). Inconveniently, the apparent 1:10^66 fine-tuning of the Big Bang, of which horizon and flatness are features, is frequently used as an argument for the existence of God.

Cosmic inflation theory, first proposed by Alan Guth in 1981, modified the Big Bang theory (the Standard Model) by proposing that the universe, instead of unfolding at a steady pace, expanded rapidly shortly after it was created, which could account for apparent fine-tuning.

The article goes on to discuss some alternatives to inflation while acknowledging that inflation remains the most plausible explanation for the fine-tuning of the Big Bang. It's the most plausible explanation, that is, if one's metaphysical commitments require that intentional design be ruled out as a possible option a priori. As O'Leary puts it:

All parties to the dispute assume, as a metaphysical stance, that science cannot address the possibility that the universe shows evidence of design. Even if design turns out to be the best explanation and the most fruitful for progress, it cannot be accepted, as a matter of first principles.

The words of the philosopher/psychologist William James come to mind here. James wrote that "any rule of thinking that would prevent me from finding a truth, if that truth were really there, is an irrational rule." And so it is.

You can read a summary of the state of the debate about inflation at the link. It's not too technical and is quite accessible to the layperson.

Mainstreaming Hate and Bigotry

This was a surprise. A committed liberal feminist, writing in the New York Times, of all places, offered a profound criticism of the leadership of the Women's March yesterday. Bari Weiss wonders why the four women who organized the affair have been given a pass by the media despite the fact that each of them has made decidedly unliberal, even odious, statements and associations.

Weiss begins by describing her initial enthusiasm for the March and her disgust with the then newly-elected Trump administration and then writes this:

The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, offered her congratulations to the march’s “courageous organizers” and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand gushed about them in Time, where they were among the top 100 most influential people of 2017. “The Women’s March was the most inspiring and transformational moment I’ve ever witnessed in politics,” she wrote. “And it happened because four extraordinary women — Tamika Mallory, Bob Bland, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour — had the courage to take on something big, important and urgent, and never gave up.”

The image of this fearsome foursome, echoed in more than a few flattering profiles, was as seductive as a Benetton ad. There was Tamika Mallory, a young black activist who was crowned the “Sojourner Truth of our time” by Jet magazine and “a leader of tomorrow” by Valerie Jarrett. Carmen Perez, a Mexican-American and a veteran political organizer, was named one of Fortune’s Top 50 World Leaders. Linda Sarsour, a hijab-wearing Palestinian-American and the former head of the Arab-American Association of New York, had been recognized as a “champion of change” by the Obama White House. And Bob Bland, the fashion designer behind the “Nasty Women” T-shirts, was the white mother who came up with the idea of the march in the first place.

But despite the fawning praise these women are not what they may seem:

Start with Ms. Sarsour, by far the most visible of the quartet of organizers. It turns out that this “homegirl in a hijab,” as one of many articles about her put it, has a history of disturbing views, as advertised by . . . Linda Sarsour.

[O]ddly, given her status as a major feminist organizer, [she has sent more] than a few [tweets] that seem to make common cause with anti-feminists, like this from 2015: “You’ll know when you’re living under Shariah law if suddenly all your loans and credit cards become interest-free. Sound nice, doesn’t it?” She has dismissed the anti-Islamist feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the most crude and cruel terms, insisting she is “not a real woman” and confessing that she wishes she could take away Ms. Ali’s vagina — this about a woman who suffered genital mutilation as a girl in Somalia....

On July 16, the official Twitter feed of the Women’s March offered warm wishes to Assata Shakur. “Happy birthday to the revolutionary #AssataShakur!” read the tweet, which featured a “#SignOfResistance, in Assata’s honor” — a pink and purple Pop Art-style portrait of Ms. Shakur, better known as Joanne Chesimard, a convicted killer who is on the F.B.I.’s list of most wanted terrorists.

Like many others, CNN’s Jake Tapper noticed the outrageous tweet. “Shakur is a cop-killer fugitive in Cuba,” he tweeted, going on to mention Ms. Sarsour’s troubling past statements. “Any progressives out there condemning this?” he asked.

In the face of this sober criticism, Ms. Sarsour cried bully: “@jaketapperjoins the ranks of the alt-right to target me online. Welcome to the party.”

It requires either profound ignorance or audacious mendacity to accuse anyone at CNN, and particularly Jake Tapper, of being among the ranks of the alt-right.

Ms. Weiss goes on to ask the reasonable question, "Since when did criticizing a domestic terrorist become a signal issue of the far right? Last I checked, that position was a matter of basic decency and patriotism."

But it's not just the benighted Linda Sarsour who holds views so contrary to the goals of most feminists and associations so contrary to basic human decency:

Ms. Mallory, in addition to applauding Assata Shakur as a feminist emblem, also admires Fidel Castro, who sheltered Ms. Shakur in Cuba. She put up a flurry of posts when Mr. Castro died last year. “R.I.P. Comandante! Your legacy lives on!” she wrote in one. She does not have similar respect for American police officers. “When you throw a brick in a pile of hogs, the one that hollers is the one you hit,” she posted on Nov. 20.

Ms. Perez also expressed her admiration for a Black Panther convicted of trying to kill six police officers: “Love learning from and sharing space with Baba Sekou Odinga.” But the public figure both women regularly fawn over is Louis Farrakhan.

On May 11, Ms. Mallory posted a photo with her arm around Mr. Farrakhan, the 84-year-old Nation of Islam leader notorious for his anti-Semitic comments, on Twitter and Instagram. “Thank God this man is still alive and doing well,” she wrote. It is one of several videos and photos and quotes that Ms. Mallory has posted of Mr. Farrakhan. Ms. Perez is also a big fan. In the fall, she posted a photo in which she holds hands with Mr. Farrakhan, writing, “There are many times when I sit with elders or inspirational individuals where I think, ‘I just wish I could package this and share this moment with others.’ ” She’s also promoted video of Mr. Farrakhan “dropping knowledge” and another in which he says he is “speaking truth to power.”

Weiss goes on to explain to younger readers why Farrakhan's hateful views are so contemptible and why praise of him from the organizers of the March is so appalling. It makes you wonder whether American women really want these four organizers to be the face of modern feminism. Has progressivism degenerated to such an extent that the heroines of the movement are people who praise the oppressions of sharia, who praise tyrants and killers like Fidel Castro and those who murder police, and who embrace men like Farrakhan who are patent anti-semites and racists?

Weiss concludes with this:

Will progressives have more spine than conservatives in policing hate in their ranks? Or will they ignore it in their fury over the Trump administration?

I am sure that Linda Sarsour, and perhaps the other leaders of the Women’s March, will block me for writing this. Maybe I’ll be accused of siding with the alt-right or tarred as Islamophobic. But what I stand against is embracing terrorists, disdaining independent feminist voices, hating on democracies and celebrating dictatorships. If that puts me beyond the pale of the progressive feminist movement in America right now, so be it.

Sadly, she is indeed outside the ranks of much of contemporary progressive thinking which is more closely aligned with that of the March's organizers than it is with Ms. Weiss. The Left has been mainstreaming hatred and bigotry for some time, and the progressive media has largely ignored it. It's good that liberals like Ms. Weiss are beginning to notice and to call attention to it.

Struggling to Read

Philip Yancey, a writer of many very fine books, offers a lament in the Washington Post about his inability to read like he used to. I empathize with him when he writes:

I am going through a personal crisis. I used to love reading. I am writing this blog in my office, surrounded by 27 tall bookcases laden with 5,000 books. Over the years I have read them, marked them up, and recorded the annotations in a computer database for potential references in my writing. To a large degree, they have formed my professional and spiritual life.

Books help define who I am. They have ushered me on a journey of faith, have introduced me to the wonders of science and the natural world, have informed me about issues such as justice and race. More importantly, they have been a source of delight and adventure and beauty, opening windows to a reality I would not otherwise know.

My crisis consists in the fact that I am describing my past, not my present. I used to read three books a week. One year I devoted an evening each week to read all of Shakespeare’s plays (Okay, due to interruptions it actually took me two years). Another year I read the major works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. But I am reading many fewer books these days, and even fewer of the kinds of books that require hard work.

So, what's the reason Yancey has degenerated from obsessive reader to literary slacker?

The Internet and social media have trained my brain to read a paragraph or two, and then start looking around. When I read an online article from the Atlantic or the New Yorker, after a few paragraphs I glance over at the slide bar to judge the article’s length. My mind strays, and I find myself clicking on the sidebars and the underlined links. Soon I’m over at CNN.com reading Donald Trump’s latest tweets and details of the latest terrorist attack, or perhaps checking tomorrow’s weather.

Worse, I fall prey to the little boxes that tell me, “If you like this article [or book], you’ll also like…” Or I glance at the bottom of the screen and scan the teasers for more engaging tidbits: 30 Amish Facts That’ll Make Your Skin Crawl; Top 10 Celebrity Wardrobe Malfunctions; Walmart Cameras Captured These Hilarious Photos. A dozen or more clicks later I have lost interest in the original article.

I'll bet Yancey's not alone in this. In fact, a friend to whom I sent Yancey's article told me that after the first couple of paragraphs he found himself fighting the temptation to check out the stuff on the sidebar.

A sage once observed that leaders are readers and readers are leaders. Yancey quotes from an article that certainly bears that out:

An article in Business Insider studied such pioneers as Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg. Most of them have in common a practice the author calls the “5-hour rule”: they set aside at least an hour a day (or five hours a week) for deliberate learning. For example:

• Bill Gates reads 50 books a year.
• Mark Zuckerberg reads at least one book every two weeks.
• Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day.
• Mark Cuban reads for more than three hours every day.
• Arthur Blank, a co-founder of Home Depot, reads two hours a day.

This is extremely impressive, yet Yancey's primary concern is nourishing his soul, and I suspect that most of what these gentlemen read does more to nourish their wallets than nourish their souls. Plowing through two books a day sounds more like reading for the sake of reading and that seems rather pointless except as an occasional entertaining diversion.

Charles Chu calculates that at an average reading speed of 400 words per minute, it would take 417 hours in a year to read 200 books—less than the 608 hours the average American spends on social media, or the 1,642 hours watching TV. “Here’s the simple truth behind reading a lot of books,” says Quartz: “It’s not that hard. We have all the time we need. The scary part—the part we all ignore—is that we are too addicted, too weak, and too distracted to do what we all know is important.”

This may all be true but there's more to it. Reading, especially reading worthwhile stuff, books from which we can learn, is hard work. It requires concentration and thinking, and to remember what one has read requires having someone else to talk with about what one has read. Unlike so much else to which we devote time to perusing, reading good books requires commitment and discipline and that's not something many people are willing to invest in.

Yancey concludes with this:

I’ve concluded that a commitment to reading is an ongoing battle, somewhat like the battle against the seduction of Internet pornography. We have to build a fortress with walls strong enough to withstand the temptations of that powerful dopamine rush [that social media affords] while also providing shelter for an environment that allows deep reading to flourish. For deep reading, I’m searching for an hour a day when mental energy is at a peak, not a scrap of time salvaged from other tasks.

I’m still ... trying to resurrect the rich nourishment that reading has long provided for me. If only I can resist clicking on the link 30 Amish Facts That’ll Make Your Skin Crawl.

I'm reminded of the words of P.J. O'Rourke who advised that we should "always read stuff that makes you look good if you die in the middle of it."

Excommunicating the New Atheists

Those who enjoy reading about hypocritical ideological foibles will never find themselves short of good material to peruse.

Especially is this true of those interested in exploring the inconsistencies of those who claim to be for peace but frequently resort to violent "protest", who claim to be for tolerance but seek to silence those who disagree with them, who claim to be for the little guy while running big corporations which put little guys out of business, who claim to abhor oppression while supporting tyrannies all around the globe, who claim to be advocates for the poor but who support policies which ensure that the poor will remain so, who want to make it difficult for parents to send their children to private schools while they send their own children to private schools, who insist that we should all happily pay higher taxes while they themselves shelter their money and punctiliously take every tax deduction to which they're entitled, who deplore the use of carbon fuels while flying around the globe in their private jets, and on it goes.

Well, the National Review's Elliot Kaufman has presented us another fine example of such muddled, inconsistent thinking. Kaufman points out how the Left has essentially disowned many of the so-called New Atheists because, although these folks - people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Bill Maher, et. al. - were feted as long as their barbs were directed at Christians, especially Catholics, they could no longer be abided once they began to include Islam among the targets of their religious critiques.

Scoffing at religion is fine, indeed socially meritorious, as long as the religion isn't Islam.

Just as a lefty forfeits his membership card and risks excommunication if he insists on applying the same standards and expectations to blacks and Hispanics as he does to whites, just as one can freely criticize whites with the most baneful rhetoric but risks committing grievous heresy if she applies the same criticisms to minorities, so it is with religion. There are some religions, such as Christianity, upon which there is year-round open season for ridicule and derision and, on the other hand, there are religions, such as Islam, so sacrosanct that it's almost blasphemy to even politely question them.

There are plenty of gems in Kaufman's essay and I encourage you to read the whole piece, but here are a few excerpts:

Organized religion’s shallowest critics made the mistake of blasting Islam along with Christianity, and the Left crucified them for it. On Friday, it became official: The New Atheists are no longer welcome on the left. Battered, condemned, and disinvited, these godless and once-favored “public intellectuals” are now homeless, spurned by their erstwhile progressive allies. Richard Dawkins, the famously skeptical evolutionary biologist, was the last shoe to drop. He was disinvited from a speaking engagement at Berkeley because his “comments about Islam” had “offended and hurt . . . so many people,” according to the event’s organizers.

Dawkins is in good company. His New Atheist compatriots, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, had already been expelled from the party. In both cases, insufficient deference to Islam was the proximate cause. Hitchens was denounced as a “neocon” for his support of the Iraq War. This was nonsense; he remained a committed socialist, but felt a war on Islamic terror and autocracy was needed.

Harris is a liberal, straight and true, but drew the ire of Reza Aslan for refusing to except Islam from his broad critique of religion. “Islam is not a religion of peace,” Harris often says. In fact, he thinks it’s just the opposite. For that, everyone from Glen Greenwald to Ben Affleck has cast him as an Islamophobe and a bigot.

That means that three of the much-acclaimed “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism have been turfed from the left for extending their critique of religion to Islam. The fourth is Daniel Dennett, who also criticizes Islam. The only actual philosopher of the bunch, he is far too boring and ponderous to be noticed, let alone denounced, by anyone.

In his place, one can add Bill Maher, a popularizer of New Atheism who has also been barred from Berkeley over criticism of Islam. One by one, these men have been excommunicated from the Left.

What has happened? Why did the Left delight in seeing these men ignorantly mock and vilify Christians, but denounce them when they treated Islam the exact same way? Confirmation bias deserves at least a part of the blame. The New Atheists have long harbored an irrational fear of Christianity, but Christophobia doesn’t worry the Left. Combatting Islamophobia, however, is a progressive priority, and so it is noticed and addressed when it strikes. None of this New Atheist silliness bothered the Left so long as it flattered the right tribes and battered the wrong ones.

[On the left] the defense of Islam becomes a defense of Islamic radicalism and intolerance. Slavoj Žižek sees in Islamism “the rage of the victims of capitalist globalization.” Judith Butler insists that “understanding Hamas [and] Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important.” These voices cannot just be dismissed as aberrant: They are prominent, fiercely secular left-wing intellectuals who find common cause with Hamas — which pushes gays off of buildings and stabs children in their sleep — and with Hezbollah, the “Party of God.”

In fact, they join a long line of left-wing apologists for murderous anti-Western regimes. Eric Hobsbawm, the renowned historian, refused to abandon the Soviet Union, even after the tanks rolled through Prague. Professors Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman spent years dismissing and minimizing reports of a genocide in Cambodia as Western propaganda. Michel Foucault, the postmodern philosopher, defended the indefensible cruelty of the Iranian Revolution by claiming that Iran doesn’t “have the same regime of truth as ours.”

What really lies at the bottom of this tendentiousness, it seems, is not principle, nor is it genuine concern for people, it's rather an aversion to being applauded by people one holds in contempt:

In conversation with the Polish anti-Stalinist dissident Adam Michnik in 1993, the liberal philosopher Jurgen Habermas admitted “he had avoided any fundamental confrontation with Stalinism.” Why, asked Michnik? He did not want “applause from the wrong side” replied Habermas. You have to read that twice, and then think about the enormities of Stalinism, to realise just how appalling it is. But Habermas was only expressing a piece of liberal-left common sense.

In short, the New Atheists have won applause from the wrong side: the anti-Muslim, crusading Right. Christopher Hitchens, an endlessly entertaining writer who could give it to Saddam Hussein as good as anyone, was every right-winger’s favorite radical. Sam Harris started finding agreement with the likes of Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Rich Lowry’s defense of Harris from Ben Affleck appeared in the New York Post. Bill Maher now delights the Right as much as he infuriates it. And the Left, smelling traitors in its midst, simply cannot tolerate this sort of transgression.

The strange love affair between leftists and radical Islamists was documented over a dozen years ago by liberal scholar Paul Berman in his book Terror and Liberalism (2004). Many on the left have always had a perverse fascination with violence and that, combined with the conviction that the capitalist West is an evil enemy, goes a long way toward accounting for their fulsome apologies for terrorism, terrorists, and tyranny throughout most of the last century.

Kaufman goes on:

Why must ardent secularists from the Islamic world like Ayaan Hirsi Ali — the type of people the Left looks to for inspiration in the history of Western secularism — be deemed bigots, while Sharia-supporting conspiracy theorists like Linda Sarsour are cherished? Why has criticizing Islam caused the New Atheists to cross a red line in the progressive imagination? These positions make no sense if one thinks of the Left as seriously secular, convinced of the need to end the reign of superstition.

New Atheism pleased the Left as long as it stuck to criticizing “God,” who was associated with the beliefs of President George W. Bush and his supporters. It was thus fun, rather than offensive, for Bill Maher to call “religion” ridiculous, because he was assumed to be talking about Christianity. Christopher Hitchens could call God a “dictator” and Heaven a “celestial North Korea,” and the Left would laugh. Berkeley students would not think to disinvite Richard Dawkins when he was saying “Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion.”

We might wonder what would liberal progressives would say were it common to find among white, male Christians a significant number who advocate executing gays, who call for the extinction of Jews, who wish to deny women the same civil and human rights as men, who wish to remove from the Constitution freedom of press, speech, religion, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments, who favor banishing the separation of church and state, who desire to base civil and criminal law on the book of Leviticus in the Bible, and so forth?

A Christopher Hitchens would properly say that they're advocating for a version of North Korea, and liberal pundits would smirk and offer emphatic "amens" in response. Late night liberal comedians like Stephen Colbert would subject such people to withering, relentless public derision and obloquy until they finally retreated in abject humiliation back into obscurity.

But switch the description of the promoters of those retrograde ideas from white, male Christians to swarthy, male Muslims and progressives rapidly reverse gears, censoring the voices of anyone who publicly disapproves of those religious beliefs while disdainfully sniffing that the complainers are themselves intolerant bigots and racists.

It's as amusing as it is amazing.

Perhaps you've seen this on Viewpoint before, but it's worth showing again. With apologies for the vulgarity, it serves as a pretty good summary of this post:

Amazing Machines

Among the phenomena which support the claim that life is the product of intentional, intelligent design is the sheer number of complex molecular machines that operate in each of the trillions of our body's cells to ensure that these cells carry out the functions that keep us alive.

One of these machines is the system of proteins that synthesizes adenosine triphosphate (ATP) from adenosine diphosphate (ADP). Here's a short video animation that describes how this machine, called ATP synthase, works:

There are thousands of such machines in the cell, all of which, on the standard Darwinian account, somehow developed - through random, undirected, processes - not only their structure, not only the coordination with other systems in the cell necessary for proper function, but also the genetic regulatory mechanisms that control how and when the machine operates. If it happened, it's a near-miraculous achievement for blind, undirected processes.

David Hume, in his famous essay On Miracles, wrote that when we hear an account of a miracle we should ask ourselves whether it's more likely, given our experience, that a law of nature had been violated or that the witness was somehow mistaken. Hume argued that a mistaken witness is always more likely than that a law of nature had been violated, and we should always, he insisted, believe what's most likely. Applying Hume's principle to the present case, we should ask ourselves, what is the greater miracle, that an astonishing mechanism like ATP synthase came about by chance and luck or that it came about by intelligent engineering?

It seems to me that the only way one can assert the former is if they've already, a priori, ruled out the possibility of the existence of the intelligent engineer, but, of course, that begs the question. Whether the intelligent engineer exists is the very matter we're trying to answer by asking whether blind chance or intelligence is the best explanation for the existence in living things of such machines as ATP synthase.

If we allow the evidence to speak for itself rather than allow our prior metaphysical commitments to dictate what the evidence says then I'm pretty sure most people would agree that the kind of specified complexity we see in this video points unequivocally to the existence of a designing mind.

If this video has piqued your interest here's another that pushes us toward the same conclusion. It's an animation of just a few of the structures and processes in a living cell. Note the amazing motor protein that carries the vesicle along the microtubule:

How does the motor protein "know" to carry the vesicle along the microtubule and where to take it? What regulates the process? What's the source of the information needed to choreograph this phenomenon? How and why did such a complex system ever come about? Was it all just blind chance and serendipity or was it somehow a product of intelligence? On which of those possible explanations, intelligence or blind, purposeless, random processes, are such mechanisms more likely?

On Time (Pt. II)

In yesterday's post (On Time Pt.I) I wrote that:

[Physicist Paul] Davies is saying here that the flow of time is an illusion like the apparent movement of the sun across the sky is an illusion. It's we who are moving, not the sun. Likewise, on Davies' view, sometimes called the static view of time, every moment of time, every event, past, present, and future exists now, and somehow our consciousness moves from one to the next.

On this view, the universe is like a movie that has been instantaneously burned onto a DVD. Every event in the movie exists simultaneously with every other event, but the characters in the movie, and even the person viewing the movie, perceive those events as happening sequentially.

Suppose for a moment that this is true. It would seem then that time does not exist "out there" but is rather somehow an internal feature of our minds. Time is a word we use to describe the way our minds apprehend events. Our minds create the illusion of temporality.

Immanuel Kant declared that "time, apart from the subject [i.e. the perceiver], is nothing". In other words, Kant is saying that time is not an objective reality but rather a structure of the human mind that enables us to experience the world. If Kant is correct then it follows that if there were no minds there'd be no time. There might be events like the events in the movie that's been impressed onto the DVD, but they wouldn't occur in any time unless they were experienced by a mind.

If we take this a step further it makes moot the questions of the age of the universe or the age of the earth. Since there were no minds (if we bracket out the mind of God) to perceive the unfolding of the universe then from the original "Big Bang" to the appearance of minds the events would have all occurred instantly or simultaneously, like "burning" an entire movie instantly onto a DVD.

Eventually, when observers with minds appeared they looked back at the evidence of cosmic history and concluded that, had a human observer been watching this "movie" it would have taken about 13.5 billion years, but since we're assuming there were no observers, no minds, it didn't take any time at all.

In other words, when human beings look back at the history of cosmic evolution - the expansion of the universe, the birth and death of stars, radioactive disintegrations, etc. - it's like popping the DVD into the player and watching the movie. Until the movie is played and observed it's just a bunch of pits in a disc. There's no time on the disc. Nothing on the disc has any meaning until it's put in the player and apprehended by a mind.

If Kant's view that time is part of the structure of our minds is correct then if the human race, or at least all creatures with minds structured to experience time, were to disappear, time itself would disappear. Just as there would be no pain or sound or color if there were no organisms with senses structured to experience these sensations, likewise there'd be no time if there were no minds to experience it.

This seems astonishingly counter-intuitive, but then Galileo's view that it was the earth, not the celestial bodies, that was moving was also counter-intuitive. The more we learn about the universe the stranger it seems. Indeed, it's quite possible that the world we experience is in reality not at all as it appears to us to be.

It's also quite possible that the only way to hold onto the belief that there is an objective time - that time would continue to exist even if human beings and other minds were extinguished from the earth - is to believe that time exists because an omnipresent mind, the mind of God, observes every event in the universe.

On Time (Pt.I)

St. Augustine (354 - 430 A.D.) wondered in his Confessions about the nature of time. He wrote that "As long as nobody asks me I know perfectly well what time is, but as soon as I'm asked to explain it I haven't the faintest idea".

Philosophers and scientists ever since have sympathized with Augustine's perplexity. Time has been called one of the universe's greatest mysteries and no one really knows what it is.

John Steele, the publisher and editorial director of Nautilus puts some questions about time to physicist Paul Davies. In an interview for Nautilus Steele asks Davies the following:

• Is the flow of time real or an illusion?
• So where does this impression of flow come from?
• Is time fundamental to the Universe?
• So time could be emergent?
• If multiple universes exist, do they have a common clock?
• What do you think are the most exciting recent advances in understanding time?

Davies' answers to most of these questions amounts to an admission of scientists' ignorance on the topic, but his answer to the first question is interesting. He replies:

The flow of time is an illusion, and I don’t know very many scientists and philosophers who would disagree with that, to be perfectly honest. The reason that it is an illusion is when you stop to think, what does it even mean that time is flowing?

When we say something flows like a river, what we mean is an element of the river at one moment is in a different place of an earlier moment. In other words, it moves with respect to time. But time can’t move with respect to time—time is time. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that the claim that time does not flow means that there is no time, that time does not exist. That’s nonsense. Time of course exists. We measure it with clocks. Clocks don’t measure the flow of time, they measure intervals of time. Of course there are intervals of time between different events; that’s what clocks measure.

Davies is saying here that the flow of time is an illusion like the apparent movement of the sun across the sky is an illusion. It's we who are moving, not the sun. Likewise, on Davies' view, sometimes called the static view of time, every moment of time, every event, past, present, and future exists now, and somehow our consciousness moves from one to the next.

On this view, the universe is like a movie that has been instantaneously burned onto a DVD. Every event in the movie exists simultaneously with every other event, but the characters in the movie, and even the person viewing the movie, perceive those events as happening sequentially.

If this is true then it would seem that time does not exist "out there" but is rather somehow a feature of our minds. It's the way our minds apprehend events.

I'll have more to say about this tomorrow.

Hate Speech

Imagine that a prominent Christian pastor, speaking from the pulpit, called for the annihilation of gays. Imagine, too, that he referred to them as filth, and that his sermon was put up on YouTube for all the world to see. What do you suppose would be the reaction? Is it unreasonable to think there'd be nation-wide 24/7 condemnation of that pastor's bigotry and his hateful speech?

The pastor would become a pariah, and Christianity would be discredited, don't you think? The left, especially, would be marching outside that pastor's church, demanding he be removed from the pulpit.

Well, recently that very thing happened, sort of, and there's been almost no reaction to the preacher's hatred and bigotry whatsoever. Perhaps, you'll understand why when you read the details. You see, it wasn't a Christian pastor calling for the annihilation of gays in a sermon, it was a Muslim imam calling for the annihilation of Jews in a lecture:

In a July 21 lecture ... Muslim preacher Ammar Shahin spoke in English and Arabic about how all Muslims, not only Palestinians or Syrians, will be called upon to kill all the Jews on "the last day."

Shahin is an Egyptian who has been in the U.S. since 1999. His mosque isn't in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, it's in Davis, California.

In a video translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Shahin also stressed that the Hadith (oral tradition of sayings attributed to the prophet of Islam) does not say where the final battle will take place. "If it is in Palestine," for example, "or another place," hinting at the possibility that such a battle could happen in the United States or Europe as well.

He also prayed that al-Aksa mosque be liberated from "the filth of the Jews."

Here's the relevant clip:

This sort of rhetoric would not be tolerated were it to be delivered by a representative of any other religion or political party. Why is it tolerated when it's delivered by Muslims? Why are Muslims excused from standards of behavior we expect of everyone else in a tolerant, civilized society?

Shahin should be free to cite his beliefs, as repugnant as they are, but that doesn't mean that everyone else should just shrug and say, "Well, that's just what Islam teaches". Hatred of this sort, taking delight in the prospect of mass slaughter, should be exposed and roundly condemned, as it would be were it to come from any other source.

To the extent that Shahin accurately represents mainstream Islamic belief, and according to the article at the link he teaches Sunni Islam to Westerners, it sure makes it difficult to accept the notion that Islam is a religion of peace.

Where's the Racial Outrage?

It's good, I suppose, that a cop involved in an interracial shooting of an unarmed, innocent victim is receiving support from the press. It's important that in such situations our law enforcement be given the benefit of the doubt until we learn all the details. Our media, however, has not been particularly eager to grant the police that benefit in the past so the current reticence to pillory law enforcement, and the reluctance of organizations like Black Lives Matter to take to the streets calling for more cops to die, may seem a little surprising in the recent case of the shooting of an unarmed woman by police in Minneapolis.

It's surprising, that is, until one learns the details of the case. In Minneapolis the shooter is a black, Muslim police officer, and his victim was an innocent white woman. Given that set of facts the absence of the usual media hysteria and black outrage is totally understandable.

Scott Greer at the Daily Caller wonders why race and religion make a difference when white cops shoot black victims but not when black cops, who also happen to Muslims, shoot white victims:

Last weekend, an Australian woman, Justine Damond, called police to report an alleged assault that was occurring near her home in Minneapolis. But when police arrived on the scene, Damond ended up becoming the victim of an officer’s bullet.

While there are many questions still lingering about the shooting, the initial details of the case have all the ingredients for the media to paint it as another sign of lawless police brutality.

Except, the press has been remarkably reserved in its coverage of the case, there are no activists marching and chanting on the streets of Minneapolis, and Black Lives Matter is seemingly sitting out on this matter.

This is likely due to this shooting having a reversal of roles when it comes to race. Ms. Damond was a white woman, while her shooter, Mohamed Noor, is of Somali Muslim descent.

That probably explains why the emerging narrative from the press and Minneapolis’s leaders is concern that the shooting may prompt a backlash against the Somali community in the city. It’s quite odd to see since there is never a concern from the media that the white community may receive grief any time a Caucasian officer shoots someone over contended circumstances.

So, why is it that the media is eager to crucify white cops who shoot black victims, especially unarmed black victims, but they suddenly take seriously their responsibility as journalists not to be inflammatory when the shooter happens to be a minority?

But here we are seeing multiple outlets run with this narrative of blowback fears. The Washington Post published an article on Tuesday with the headline, “After Minneapolis officer in police shooting is named, Somali community braces for backlash.” The article begins with statements that America is experiencing unprecedented levels of Islamophobia, as well as “racial tension stoked in part by shootings of black people by white police officers.”

Although apparently, we don’t need to worry about tension stoked by shootings of Aussies by Somali police officers.

The Post implies that it was wrong for media outlets to identify the officer due to his background. Reminder: there was never this quibble when it came to other controversial police shootings.

"They fear this will be just another event used to create animosity toward the Somali community,” one Somali Minneapolis leader said of how his community is reacting to the news. Another said that other Somali police officers are now feeling “nervous.”

The WaPo article also expresses a fawning attitude towards Officer Noor and makes sure to highlight how celebrated he was in his community. Additionally, the Post buried the important detail of how the Somali cop has racked up three complaints against him since joining the force in 2015.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune and Reuters ran similar stories to the Post’s that attempted to portray Noor in a positive light.

Did these news organizations write fawning stories about officer Darren Wilson after he shot a threatening thug named Michael Brown? I don't recall any.

In response to the Somali community’s so-far unfounded worries, the mayor of Minneapolis has promised to make its interests are a top priority in the investigation of the shooting of an unarmed white woman. “I stand with our Somali community. We can’t compound the tragedy of Justine Damond’s death by turning to racism,” Mayor Betsy Hodges tweeted out Wednesday.

How much do our politicians worry about racial backlash against the white community when the victim is black and the cop is white? Not so as anyone could tell.

For instance, one of the worst cases of police misconduct in recent memory comes from Louisiana where two black cops shot a white six-year-old several times as his father pleaded for them to stop.

One of the officers involved in the 2015 shooting was sentenced to 40 years behind bars in March. The other cop faces second-degree murder charges.

While an outrageous case, it netted nowhere near the amount of coverage as that of the shooting of Michael Brown and other incidents where the officer was later exonerated.

In fact, I never heard of this case until I read about it in Greer's column, and I'll bet most of you didn't either. It's hard to escape the conclusion that our media newsrooms are populated by people laden with so much "white guilt" that they simply can't bring themselves to treat these tragic episodes fairly and objectively. They're so eager to prove to minorities that they themselves are not racists, they themselves are not evil, that they debase both their profession and themselves by their tendentious and sometimes dishonest reporting.

It's one reason, perhaps, why confidence in the integrity of people in the media, at least on the part of people who pay a modicum of attention, is so abysmal.

Tasting His Own Medicine

Some might call this a story about karma, but there's something both amusing and disturbing about the recent cancellation of a scheduled speech by Richard Dawkins by a bunch of progressives who had originally agreed to sponsor it.

Dawkins, an atheist and hostile critic of religious belief as well as one of the most prominent promoters of naturalistic Darwinian evolution, has been disinvited from giving a speech at Berkeley, not because he has said some disparaging things about Christians, nor because he has advocated denying a livelihood to university professors who disagree with him about Darwinism.

The sponsors of his speech are apparently not concerned about such trifles as those. What got him disinvited was that he has committed the unpardonable sin of tweeting some criticisms of Islam.

The erstwhile sponsor of the lecture is a progressive radio station in the Berkeley area whose management is apparently cool with screeds against Christianity and creationists, but harsh words for Islam and Muslims is just taking matters too far. Here are a few details from the link:

Richard Dawkins’ biggest critics used to be conservative Christians. Now they’re Berkeley progressives who defend anything and everything Islamic. The militant atheist, evolutionary biologist and former University of Oxford “professor for public understanding of science” was supposed to speak about his new collection of essays at a Berkeley church, sponsored by a local progressive radio station, KPFA.

Then the station learned about his tweets critical of Islam and cancelled the Aug. 9 event.

KPFA said this in their email announcing the cancellation:

We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn’t know he had offended and hurt – in his tweets and other comments on Islam, so many people.

KPFA does not endorse hurtful speech. While KPFA emphatically supports serious free speech, we do not support abusive speech. We apologize for not having had broader knowledge of Dawkins [sic] views much earlier.

It is ironic that a man who would silence others for their ideas on the matter of origins is himself silenced for his ideas on religion, but it's disturbing that the people responsible for the silencing evidently don't care that his book, The God Delusion, was primarily a rant against Christianity or that in it he called Christians child-abusers for raising their children in the faith. If they do care then why did they sponsor his talk in the first place?

The dhimmis at KPFA know there's no price to pay for mocking Christians, but not so, as events of the last several years have shown, for mocking Muslims. Dawkins would've been fine, presumably, had he limited himself to heaping abuse on Christianity, but Islam is above criticism at KPFA.

Dawkins sent an email to the station in which he pointed to this very inconsistency:

I am known as a frequent critic of Christianity and have never been de-platformed for that. Why do you give Islam a free pass? Why is it fine to criticise Christianity but not Islam?

Good questions. Here's another good question posed by Michael Egnor:

Why, one asks, is it fine to criticize Islam, but not Darwin? Dawkins has fought mightily to “de-platform” intelligent design scientists and anyone who harbors even a shimmer of doubt about Darwinian theology. But now he’s shocked — shocked — that defenders of another religion get to silence heretics too.

Freedom of speech is in retreat in America and throughout the West. One suspects that in the years to some, even atheists and Darwinists may come to lament the injunction on dissent that they pioneered and so assiduously maintained.

Dawkins should be free to criticize both Christianity and Islam if he wishes. He should even be free to criticize Jesus and the prophet, and KPFA should be free to cancel his speeches if he does. And the rest of us should be free to point out and laugh at the witless hypocrisy of both of them when they do.

Mysterious Stuff

Materialism is the belief that everything in the universe - including our bodies, our brains, our thoughts, our sensations - all of it is reducible in principle to material "stuff". There's no mental substance, no mind, just brains and the functions the brain performs. But if that's so, then what is the material stuff everything is made of? What, exactly, is matter?

Physicists, many of whom are materialists, tell us that matter is made up of particles which are themselves simply a "wave function", but then what's a wave function? What's it made of? No one seems to have an answer.

This video takes the viewer down to the smallest bits of matter, but when we ask what these smallest bits are comprised of the only reply from physicists is a shrug of the shoulders. At some point matter just seems to dissolve into energy, forces, and fields which are themselves inscrutable. They can be measured, but if we ask what it is, precisely, that we're measuring we just get another shrug for an answer.

The fundamental nature of matter is a riddle:

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor helps us understand the provenience of the idea that everything is made of matter. He writes:

The materialist conception of matter derives in part from Democritus and Lucretius (two ancient materialist philosophers), but I believe that the most cogent view of matter as held by modern materialists is that of Descartes.

Descartes defined matter as res extensa — literally, substance extended in space. Matter, in the Cartesian view, is characterized by extension — length, width, and depth, and by associated properties such as mass that accompany extension in space. In the Cartesian view, all subjective mental properties, such as qualia and intentionality, were defined away — excluded — from matter itself. How, then, could the mind exist if subjective properties had no basis in matter?

In order to explain subjective experience and the mind, Descartes posited the existence of a second substance, res cogitans, which entailed subjective mental experience and which was [not] composed [of] matter in human beings. This was Cartesian substance dualism. The body and the mind were separable substances, each existing in its own right.

Furthermore, Descartes believed that only humans had minds. Animals were automatons, essentially mindless machines made of meat.

Modern materialists have ... discarded Cartesian mind but retain Cartesian matter.

To the modern materialist, what really exists is matter extended in space, tangible stuff, and all intangible stuff (like the mind) needs to be explained in terms of tangible matter.

Of course, none of this explains what matter actually is. If it's "extended substance" then what kind of substance? And how can such a nebulous entity explain human cognition, human values, or any of the products of human consciousness? Egnor puts the question this way:

How, from a materialist perspective, can we explain the laws of physics? How can we explain abstract things, like universals and mathematics, if all that exists is matter extended in space? How can the mind arise from matter — how can meat think? How can we square the materialist understanding of nature with quantum mechanics, which reveals very non-materialist properties of matter at its most fundamental level?

Matter is a mystery and the belief that everything is made up of, and/or arises from, this mysterious substance is really nothing more than a prejudice that derives from a naturalistic worldview.

There's no reason, in fact, not to believe that the fundamental stuff of the universe isn't material at all but rather mental. Indeed, this is the direction that modern physics has been moving in since the early years of the twentieth century. Perhaps, so far from mind arising from matter, the sensation of matter actually is a product of mind.

Just as Copernicus sparked a revolution in science by getting us to look at the solar system from a different perspective - a heliocentric rather than a geocentric perspective - looking at the world from the perspective of mental substance rather than material substance could spark an analogous revolution not only in science but also in metaphysics.