Right2Left

Archive

2010-12-07T20:33:00.000-08:00

This moment of honesty:
"I thought only of my own needs and not of their futures."

Reminded me of these cases:

In the present case, the record shows a mother who, although devoted to her son, refuses to subordinate her own desires and priorities to the child's welfare.
(Bottoms v. Bottoms, 457 S.E.2d 102, 108 (Va. 1995)

We are not reassured, given Lisa's past actions, that she will put the needs of her children first.
(Chicoine v. Chicoine, 479 N.W.2d 891 (S.D. 1992) (holding the trial court abused its discretion in awarding unsupervised overnight visitation to a lesbian mother without first ordering a home study and enforcement measures to ensure compliance with restrictions on visitation, when mother had psychological problems, had taken the children to gay bars, had allowed the children to sleep with her and her partner while the mother was nude, had openly kissed and caressed her partner in front of the children ignoring protests by her oldest son, and had continued a sexual encounter rather than comfort a child after the child found her engaged in sexual activity)

Arhcive

2008-09-13T11:48:00.001-07:00

"When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells the time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence, when it embraces everything, including these artifacts themselves and their artificers?" (Cicero, De Natura Deorum, ii. 34)

Archive

2008-09-13T11:35:00.000-07:00

Proponents of Darwinian reasoning use the term “selection” so often that for some it seems to be a way of attributing intelligent choice to inanimate matter. It’s interesting that those who believe in things coming about by “chance” often use language implies intelligence. It seems to me that using such language allows a mind that cannot really think itself the result of random chaos and chance to rest on bits of intelligence which it argues actually do not exist. Note that they don’t really need to refer to label rather simple processes of culling, screening and filtering “selection.” Darwin himself noted that it would be more accurate to call the so-called process of “selection” natural preservation. I’d suggest “natural happenstance” myself because if variation and the environment come about “randomly” then despite the tendency of modern Darwinists to argue that “natural selection” isn’t a random process that doesn’t really matter given that it’s filtering through “random” mutations that come about by chance in an environment ultimately created by chance.

Ironically the notion of chance is a science/knowledge stopper, it is an argument which stops the study of cause and effect. A scientific view rooted in the study of cause and effect would be that chance is an illusion brought about by an absence of knowledge. Even the examples that people use to argue for the creative power of “chance” combined with a process of filtering like natural selection can be surrounded by knowledge based on an actual scientific view. For instance, some use a coin toss to illustrate the concept of chance. Yet since chance is actually just an illusion brought about by the absence of knowledge it is easy to point out that if the trajectory of the coin, its mass, the force it was flipped with, etc., was all known then “chance” disappears as one advances toward a knowledge of how the coin will come to rest. Chance is ignorance, chance is ultimately nothing, yet it’s typical for proponents of Darwinism to argue as if it something which explains all there is to know.

If our perceptual capacities are the result of variation then the real issue is not “natural selection” but what actually produces the variations and adaptations which it filters. Is your argument ultimately rooted in our perception of chance?
mynym
September 10th, 2008 at 4:01 pm

…we would have to have a way of stepping outside of ourselves, and I don’t see how that makes any sense at all.

At all? This reminds me of the “nothing but” statements typical to reductionists who tend to argue that what we tend to think we are is actually nothing but an illusion generated by natural selection operating on genes and so on. I’d argue that the view that we can’t step outside of ourselves for a transcendent view of things is generally correct, an important view, etc. The problem is adding “at all” to it.

For example, if we have no way of stepping outside of ourselves, observing ourselves, talking to ourselves and so on then why do we do such things all the time and further how would we have any knowledge of ourselves if we could not somehow get outside of ourselves enough to see ourselves? In contrast to the argument that immanence is all there it seems to me more likely that sense is in some sense always a union of transcendence and immanence in awareness:
On the one hand there are the millions of neurons at work, the iris adjusting the pupil, the lens thinning or thickening to focus light on the retina and information being processed faster than in any super computer at the bat of an eyelid. On the other, we directly and constantly experience all that we see in our minds. The act of seeing allows us to get “in touch” with things. To see is to be aware and thereby to know what’s going on in the world around us. Acts of awareness are not simple optical processes. Optical processes enable us to be aware, but to identify being aware with the operation of optical processes is like saying that the images on TV screens are to be identified entirely with electron guns and screens. The enabling structure is one thing and the enabled experience another. Awareness is an ontological reality as fundamental as matter itself.
But so far our discussions have remained at the level of physical sight. Let me pass on to the equally important theme of seeing on a purely mental plane. Here we are talking of the mind’s capacity to grasp meaning that is the exact counterpart on the conceptual plane of what takes place during the act of seeing at the perceptual level. When we “see the point” or “see something to be the case” or “know what you mean” or “realize” or “understand” or “comprehend” or “visualize,” then we are performing acts that, again, cannot be described and explained in physical terms, let alone by reference to evolution. All of these acts presuppose the mind coming to grips with something. When we say that a sense of integrity should prohibit us from taking a bribe, we’re not talking simply of physical actions but of irreducible ideas. When our reading of Mahatma Gandhi’s My Experiments With Truth moves us, it’s not the print marks on paper that stir our emotions. Our mind sees something that can’t be expressed in terms of molecules and particles.
(The Wonder of the World
by Roy Abraham Varghese :164)

It’s interesting how symbolism seems to be timeless. For example he argues on the one hand and then on the other while dealing with themes of transcendence and immanence. The right hand is typically symbolic of transcendence while the left is more immanent, it seems that one might even be able to extend this ancient notion to the political notion of a Left and Right. Is it symbolism or reality? Interesting to note that at some point people really do tend to sit on one side of a room or another and then tradition develops while language unfolds as labels like “right wing” apparently emerge and so on. Of course in Christianity God’s right hand man is the Christ who sits on his right and so on while those to the sinister left are sent away. Perhaps it’s little wonder that Leftists seem to fear the Christian Right so much, yet at the same time those on the Right can be blinded by righteousness. They forget that God seems to be willing to cut off his own right hand symbolically speaking. Now I am meandering because it’s a political season.

----

In the case of biological systems, the parameters are physical processes and the laws that govern them. It is not possible to rule out the possibility of a “intelligent designer,” but the argument from analogy cannot sustain the belief that there is, either.

If one were to land on another planet and find it full of robotic-like technology which had the apparent purpose of self-replication, resource gathering, etc. then the statement “This planet is full of technology.” would be more of a basic aspect of pattern recognition and detection than an “analogy” or pattern comparison. Of course we typically recognize technology based on our own experience but that doesn’t necessarily mean that recognizing technology must always be rooted in analogies to our own. In fact, many of the technologies observed in biology may have no analogy* in our own yet, typically mankind’s technology lags behind and follows from technology already in use. The microscopes and telescopes by which science/knowledge progresses are designed with lenses which imitate the human eye while the simple fact is that such lenses couldn’t be designed in the absence of vast amounts of biological technology already in use and so on.

*E.g.
One of the accomplishments of living systems which is, of course, quite without any analogy in the field of our own technology is their capacity for self-duplication. With the dawn of the age of computers and automation after the Second World War, the theoretical possibility of constructing self-replicating automata was considered seriously by mathematicians and engineers. Von Neumann discussed the problem at great length in his famous book Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, but the practical difficulties of converting the dream into reality have proved too daunting. As Von Neumann pointed out, the construction of any sort of self-replicating automaton would neces sitate the solution to three fundamental problems: that of storing information; that of duplicating information; and that of designing an automatic factory which could be programmed from the infor mation store to construct all the other components of the machine as well as duplicating itself. The solution to all three problems is found in living things and their elucidation has been one of the triumphs of modern biology.
So efficient is the mechanism of information storage and so elegant the mechanism of duplication of this remarkable molecule that it is hard to escape the feeling that the DNA molecule may be the one and only perfect solution to the twin problems of information storage and duplication for self-replicating automata.
The solution to the problem of the automatic factory lies in the ribosome. Basically, the ribosome is a collection of some fifty or so large molecules, mainly proteins, which fit tightly together. Altogether the ribosome consists of a highly organized structure of more than one million atoms which can synthesise any protein that it is instructed to make by the DNA, including the particular proteins which compromise its own structure — so the ribosome can construct itself!
The protein synthetic apparatus is also, however, the solution to an even deeper problem than that of self-replication. Proteins can be designed to perform structural, logical, and catalytic functions. For instance, they form the impervious materials of the skin, the contractile elements of muscles, the transparent substance of the lens of the eye: and, because of their practically unlimited potential, almost any conceivable biochemical object can be ultimately constructed using these remarkable molecules as basic structural and functional units. The choice of the protein synthetic apparatus as the solution to the problem of the automatic factory has deep implications. Not only does it represent a solution to one of the problems of designing a self- duplicating machine but it also represents a solution to an even deeper problem, that of constructing a universal automaton. The protein synthetic apparatus cannot only replicate itself but, in addition, if given the correct information, it can also construct any other biochemical machine, however great its complexity, just so long as its basic functional units are comprised of proteins, which, because of the near infinite number of uses to which they can be put, gives it almost limitless potential.
It is astonishing to think that this remarkable piece of machinery, which possesses the ultimate capacity to construct every living thing that ever existed on Earth, from a giant redwood to the human brain, can construct all its own components in a matter of minutes and weigh less than 10^16 grams. It is of the order of several thousand million million times smaller than the smallest piece of functional machinery ever constructed by man.
(Evolution: A Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton :337-338)

In any event, the argument would only work if the analogy can be sustained between genetic and other intracellular mechanisms on the one hand and human-contrived codes and machines on the other. But it is far from clear to me how far this analogy can be pressed.

I don’t agree that it’s analogy, instead I would argue that human technology is reliant on and is only a pale imitation of technology which can be recognized as already in use in Nature.

Perhaps we describe the molecules as being “codes” and “machines” simply because those are systems with which we are more familiar?

Or perhaps we describe them that way because that’s what they are. We’re along way from Darwin’s ideas of blobs of goo/”protoplasm” and so on. The irony of the hubris typical to us is that if a person designed a flying machine based on nano-technology which was half as efficient and elegant as that already in use in actual flies then such a structure would be looked at as one of the wonders of the world. Yet flies already exist, so why is it that human technology is a wonder of the world but technology already in use isn’t?

*E.g.
How do insects fly and hover? Initially it might seem that the aerodynamics involved would work against flight. For instance, how is it possible for a bumblebee to fly given that its wings are too small to support the lift required by its weight? Moreover, insects, unlike airplanes, continually flap their wings—and this is hard to square with theoretical calculations. Michael Dickinson points out that fruit flies, which know nothing of aerodynamics, nevertheless utilize vortex production, delayed stall, rotational circulation and wake capture as they effortlessly stay aloft while flapping their wings about 200 times a second.
(The Wonder of the World: A Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God, by Roy Abraham Varghese :103-106)

Note that the notion of flying isn’t drawn from “analogies” to mankind’s technology or knowledge of flight, it already existed as a fact of Life for millenia and we’re only just now getting around to imitating and understanding some aspects of it. If anything mankind’s technology is analogous to the technology already in use in Nature, not the other way around.
mynym
September 12th, 2008 at 2:06 pm

I have to admit, I do find it amazing that, considered one way, we’re basically just apes that figured out to talk and make fire, and considered another way, we produced the magnificent works of Plato… works through which the human spirit does somehow touch something transcendent.

You are still adhering to “nothing but” reasoning there. I may do it myself sometimes, it seems to be more tempting for men given its hidden disdain for immanence and the way that the human mind “naturally” seems to associate immanence with the feminine for many reasons. There are exceptions but women don’t seem to tend towards that type of reasoning as much.

But anyway, why is it that “just” and “nothing but” seems to emerge when talking about the physical substrate of existence/immanence? For one thing it’s wrong anyway but there’s also little reason to think of immanent things as if they are “nothing but.” If a physicist says that we’re “nothing but” matter then they had best look a little deeper into the nature of matter. If a biologist says that we’re “nothing but” apes then they had best look a little deeper into the biological structure of apes. And so on. Biologists have a bad habit in this area, perhaps when biologists design a machine that can run on some plants and animal products, has teleological principles written into it which shape its being, self-reproduces in ways that approach an infinite diversity while maintaining typological unity which also sometimes apparently sings and dances in joy, writes Mozart, etc., then maybe they can engage in “nothing but” reasoning. But until they do they clearly don’t have some supposedly all encompassing knowledge to back up their ignorant and stupid “All there is to this, is this!” statements about immanent things.

Comment

2007-11-07T07:26:00.000-08:00

51

Mats

11/07/2007

8:21 am

...even if every single Christian in the world accepted Darwinism, we would still want to know which non-inteligent force is able to generate coded information like DNA. The wind? The rain? The waves in the sea?
Secondly, it is not complexity alone that makes the design inference more acurrate. It’s complexity and specificity.

Darwinists must tell the world what natural force is able to generate complex and specified mechanisms.

If there isn’t any, then what becomes of Darwinism?

Comment

2007-11-07T06:49:00.002-08:00

Borne

11/06/2007

1:01 pm

Black swans aside. I vigorously protest the idea that mammals descended from reptiles.

That idea is crude and even ridiculous assumption-based Darwinist hype and story telling.

It’s almost as bad as the “water breathers deciding to get out and live” on land stories. (??? a strange idea if ever there was one)

Of course the first fish that tried would die within minutes. So would all the others.

So how did that happen?

Di they evolve air breathing systems while still in the water? Think about how dumb that is for a second.

And why would creatures perfectly adapted to water ‘decide’ to get out and take a walk? Thus miraculously developing limbs as they kept trying!?

Try it yourself. Go ‘back to the sea’ (like whales and dolphins supposedly did!)

Just how many generations of humans drowning would it take before one succeeded? The answer is infinite, because none would ever succeed at all without the appropriate morphological mutations occurring before hand! This isn’t hard.

Darwinist fairy tales (frogs to princes - there’s no real difference, the mechanism is the same - it’s called MAGIC) aside where is reason in these bozo the clown scenarios?

The problems are stupendous.

And as always such tales of biological magic can’t be proven.

You have to demonstrate the possibility with a viable sequence of RM + NS steps and then show how it actually did work.

The whole concept is based on enormous assumptions and the number of required functional morphings involved from cell to fish to reptile to mammal is astronomically high.

And no one has the slightest idea of how such drastic changes could have occurred undirected. Gradualism sucks.

Thus the whole idea is not merely astronomically unlikely but just plain old dumb to the nth power.

Comment

2007-11-07T06:49:00.001-08:00

Black swans aside. I vigorously protest the idea that mammals descended from reptiles.

That idea is crude and even ridiculous assumption-based Darwinist hype and story telling.

It’s almost as bad as the “water breathers deciding to get out and live” on land stories. (??? a strange idea if ever there was one)

Of course the first fish that tried would die within minutes. So would all the others.

So how did that happen?

Di they evolve air breathing systems while still in the water? Think about how dumb that is for a second.

And why would creatures perfectly adapted to water ‘decide’ to get out and take a walk? Thus miraculously developing limbs as they kept trying!?

Try it yourself. Go ‘back to the sea’ (like whales and dolphins supposedly did!)

Just how many generations of humans drowning would it take before one succeeded? The answer is infinite, because none would ever succeed at all without the appropriate morphological mutations occurring before hand! This isn’t hard.

Darwinist fairy tales (frogs to princes - there’s no real difference, the mechanism is the same - it’s called MAGIC) aside where is reason in these bozo the clown scenarios?

The problems are stupendous.

And as always such tales of biological magic can’t be proven.

You have to demonstrate the possibility with a viable sequence of RM + NS steps and then show how it actually did work.

The whole concept is based on enormous assumptions and the number of required functional morphings involved from cell to fish to reptile to mammal is astronomically high.

And no one has the slightest idea of how such drastic changes could have occurred undirected. Gradualism sucks.

Thus the whole idea is not merely astronomically unlikely but just plain old dumb to the nth power.

Darwinism and Marxism

2007-10-04T09:30:00.000-07:00

This genetic screen doesnât exist. Babies with genetic defects die because the defect doesnât work well enough to sustain life. It is simple ad hoc biology.

You may be right but it's ironic that you disagree with the way that they include theological claims in their textbook when writing on a blog named after a theological argument.

All False. Lies. Evolution is a scientific theory about life changing through time.

Wrong. If evolution explains the complexity of higher life forms then it is generally a theory about progression. It seems that progressives and socialists need a creation myth of progress which Darwinism fits.

Also, as the philosopher David Stove notes:

What deserves to be well known, but has in fact been virtually forgotten, is this: that if Darwinism once furnished a justification, retrospective or prospective, for the crimes of capitalists or National Socialists, it performed the same office to an even greater extent, between about 1880 and 1920, for the crimes, already committed or still to be committed, of Marxists. It is in fact scarcely possible to exaggerate the extent to which Marxist thought in the period incorporated Darwinism as an essential component. Marxists do not believe, of course, that there will be any struggle for life among human beings in the future classless society. But it was that Darwinian conception which Marxists at this time adopted as their description of human life under capitalism.
The reader can easily verify this statement, by opening any Marxist book, pamphlet, or newspaper of that period...(Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove: 106-107)

I would note that one shouldn't be surprised that Marxists would include Darwinism in their economic theories given that that the notion of a Darwinian struggle seems to have more to do with Victorian era economics than the empirical facts of biology.

Stove also notes:

It will perhaps be said, in defense of Darwinism, that many and enormous crimes have been committed in the name of every large and influential body of ideas bearing on human life. Whether that is true or not, I do not know. But even if it is, there are great and obvious differences, among such bodies of ideas, in how easily and naturally they amount to incitement to the commission of crimes. Confucianism, for example, or Buddhism does not appear to incite their adherents to crime easily or often. National Socialism, by contrast, and likewise Marxism, do easily and naturally hold out such incitements to their adherents...
It is impossible to deny that, in this respect, Darwinism has a closer affinity to National Socialism or Marxism than with Confucianism or Buddhism. Darwin told the world that a "struggle for life," a "struggle for existence," a "battle for life" is always going on among the members of every species. Although this proposition was at the time novel and surprising, an immense number of people accepted it. Now, will any rational person believe that accepting this proposition would have no effect, or only randomly varying effects, on people's attitudes towards their own conspecifics? No. Will any rational person believe that accepting this novel proposition would tend to improve people's attitudes towards their conspecifics--for example, would tend to make them less selfish, or less inclined to domineering behavrio, than they had been before they accepted it? No.(Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove :108-109)

DCBA

2006-06-11T11:11:00.000-07:00

Condoms and Seatbelts

2005-08-23T15:45:00.000-07:00

There are three ways in which a large increase in condom use could fail to affect disease transmission.

First, condom promotion appeals more strongly to risk-averse individuals who contribute little to epidemic transmission. Second, increased condom use will increase the number of transmissions that result from condom failure. Third, there is a risk-compensation mechanism: increased condom use could reflect decisions of individuals to switch from inherently safer strategies of partner selection or fewer
partners to the riskier strategy of developing or maintaining higher rates of partner change plus reliance on condoms. A Canadian study cited by Wilden (Wilde GJS. Target Risk. PDE Publications, 1994.) showed that televised AIDS messages from the Ontario Ministry of Health made respondents more inclined to use condoms and less inclined to avoid casual sexual partners. A US study showed that women taught to negotiate condom use with their partners had no change in incidence of sexually transmitted disease compared with controls, with a trend to an increase in such diseases.
(Cohen DA, Dent C, MacKinnon D, Hahn G. Condoms
for men, not women: results of brief promotion
programs. Sex Transm Dis 1991; 19: 245-51)

A vigorous condom-promotion policy could increase rather than decrease unprotected sexual exposure, if it has the unintended effect of encouraging greater sexual activity (figure 3)[Not available]. The figure shows the potential effects of increasing condom use among soldiers posted overseas for 6 months, when the condom failure rate is 10%. Data are derived from the work of Hopperus-Buma and colleagues,

(Hopperus-Buma AP, Veltink RL, van Ameijden EJ, Tendeloo CH, Coutinho RA.
Sexual behaviour and sexually transmitted diseases in Dutch marines and naval personnel on a United Nations Mission in Cambodia.
Genotourin Med 1995; 71: 172-75)

and use the equation: total number of acts of unprotected sexual intercourse=total
number of all acts of sexual intercourse (1minus c)doplus(cxf) , where f is the proportion of acts in which the condom fails, and c is the proportion of acts in which a condom is used. Point A shows that if sexual intercourse takes place on a mean of two occasions per soldier, there will be 1100 acts of unprotected sex per 1000 soldiers if condom use is 50%. Point B shows a fall in unprotected sex of 33% to 740 acts, which could be achieved by increasing condom use from 50% to 70%. Point C shows that if, as a result of condom promotion and availability, the mean number of episodes of sexual intercourse per soldier increased from two to three, the benefit of increasing condom use from 50% to 70% would be lost. Point D shows that a doubling of acts of sexual intercourse (from two to four) would lead to a substantial (35%) increase in the amount of unprotected sex if condom use is increased to 70%. Point E shows that condom uptake would need to increase to at least 81% to bring the level of unprotected sex back to baseline. Points Aprime to Eprime relate to a baseline situation of 10% condom use. In this case, to reduce
the total number of unprotected sexual acts, condom use must increase to at least 44% if the total number of acts increases by 50%, and to at least 61% if the total number of acts doubles. .... These findings can be generalised.

(The Lancet; 355 (9201): 400-403
January 29, 2000
Condoms and seat belts: the parallels and the lessons
Department of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Royal
Free and University College Medical School,
The Mortimer Market Centre, Mortimer Market,
London WC1E 6AU, UK
Richens, John; Imrie, John; Copas, Andrew)

A note on behavioral adaptation:

There is evidence to show behavioural adaptation in response to other interventions that may affect HIV transmission. Two studies have reported that gay men are less worried about HIV infection since treatments have improved, and that they are significantly more likely to report unprotected sexual exposure than in the past. Kalichmann reported that of 327 men surveyed at a Gay Pride festival in Atlanta in 1997, eight (3%) had already used antiretroviral post-exposure prophylaxis and 85 (26%) intended to do so if the occasion arose. Otten and colleagues showed that rates of prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases doubled in a group of patients who had a negative HIV test and counselling for prevention. Early studies on the likelihood of HIV transmission through oral sex suggested
that transmission by this route was insignificant, which led to widespread advocacy of oral sex as a safer alternative to anal sex for gay men. Since then
there has been a steady increase in the number of transmissions attributed to oral sex, which has led epidemiologists to revise upwards their estimates of the likelihood of transmission from oral intercourse.

In an interesting theoretical paper Blower and McLeann have argued that a suboptimal HIV vaccine might increase transmission if lowered risk perception in the target population led to increased risk behaviour.

(Ib.)

2005-07-18T17:24:00.000-07:00

Scientism and Peer Review

2005-06-26T19:47:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, scientists who declare a taboo will insist that only they are qualified to discuss and reach conclusions on the matters that they have made their own property; that only they are privy to the immense body of knowledge and subtlety of argument necessary fully to understand the complexities of the subject and to reach the ‘right’ conclusion. Outsiders, on the other hand, (especially non-scientists) are ill-informed, unable to think rationally or analytically, prone to mystical or crank ideas and are not privy to subtleties of analysis and inflections of argument that insiders have devoted long painful years to acquiring.
Yet the history of science abounds with examples that contradict this kind of elitist thinking: amateurs or non-scientists like the Wrights, Edison and even Charles Darwin; and outsiders like John Dalton (the self-taught meteorologist who revolutionised chemistry) and Fleischmann and Pons, the chemists who ‘rescued’ fusion physics.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the taboo reaction is that it tends to have a cumulative and permanent discriminatory effect: any idea that is ideologically suspect or counter to the current paradigm is permanently dismissed, and the very fact of its rejection forms the basis of its rejection on all future occasions. It is a little like the court of appeal rejecting the convicted man’s plea of innocence on the grounds that he must be guilty, or why else is he in jail? And why else did the police arrest him in the first place? This ‘erring on the side of caution’ means that in the long term the intellectual Devil’s Island where convicted concepts are sent becomes more and more crowded with taboo ideas, all denied to us, and with no possibility of reprieve.
How exactly do the guardians of the temple of knowledge impose their taboo? On the face of it, even the suggestion is implausible. Surely scientists, however prejudiced some individuals may happen to be, lack a mechanism to impose their world view on others in any systematic way? In practice, it is the easiest thing iii the world for those who manage the profession of science to declare a subject taboo. For any young scientist to progress in the profession, or even to be employed in science at all, he or she has to conduct research (or to teach what has already been learned from research to students). But to conduct research, the scientist must receive funds from some institu tion or organisation and getting such funds means placing proposals before a number of scientific colleagues who will evaluate them and decide whether or not to recommend that the financial and other necessary resources should be used in this way.
At this stage, the research scientist may be persuasive enough to secure funding or the institution enlightened enough to grant the resources, even for research which apparently flies in the face of orthodox scientific belief (although this happens less and less often today). But the researcher will then encounter the next obstacle which is usually insuperable. To continue to receive funds, he or she must publish their initial findings. A paper has to be submitted to one of a few professional journals where it will be reviewed by distinguished senior scientists from the field. Nominally, these reviewers are the researcher’s scientific peers. In reality they are likely to be academically superior. Even if not senior in rank they are superior in at least one important respect: they decide who gets published and who doesn’t. If they believe the research to be without merit (regardless of the results obtained) they will block its publication. And unless the researcher can get some findings published, he or she will find it impossible to get the grant renewed. Unless there are very unusual extenuating circumstances, non-publication is taken in science to mean experimental failure.
[...]
The net effect of this peer review system is that, at any given time, almost the entire research effort of the country is directed into subjects that are tacitly approved by those who comprise editorial review committees of the scientific press. Those review committees are, in turn, frequently drawn from among the more conservative scientists in the community and the system is self-perpetuating from supervisor to postgraduate to undergraduate. For this reason, virtually the only scientific research being conducted anywhere in Britain into taboo subjects is privately funded and is usually carried on in ‘skunk works’ — private laboratories with little or no resources — and its results are privately published usually in short-run paperback or photocopied editions that do not receive general circulation, or reach major libraries.

(Alternative Science: Challenging the
Myths of the Scientific Establishment
by Richard Milton :85-87)

Archive...

2005-06-14T16:44:00.000-07:00

[I]mperfections are the primary proofs that evolution has occurred (Gould, 1987a, p 14)

The argument from imperfection was developed by Darwin as a response to Paley’s argument from design. Darwin showed that nature contains many examples of odd, non-optimal, imperfect design, and he argued that a capable designer would not use these bad designs. His favorite examples were the odd reproductive organs of orchids. He said such imperfect designs are unexpected from a capable designer, but are the expected result of evolution which modifies available structures for an immediate use in nature.

That argument is a favorite of evolutionists. Some of them, most notably Gould and Ghiselin, built it into an argument of considerable force.

[I]deal design is a lousy argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution — paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. (Gould, 1980, p 20-21)

[Darwin began] inquiring just what sort of empirical consequences one would expect if God had structured each organic being according to the same kinds of standards that an engineer or craftsman might demand. The facts do not bear out the predictions, and insofar as it has a scientific basis, the argument from design is refuted. (Ghiselin, 1969, p 157-158)

If there were no imperfections, there would be no evidence of history, and therefore nothing to favour evolution by natural selection over creation. (Cherfas, 1984, p 29)

The argument from imperfection is Gould’s preferred class of evolutionary evidence. He has devoted many articles and books to promoting it, particularly The Panda’s Thumb. He argues that odd and funny solutions (such as the panda’s awkward thumb) are the major evidence of evolution. He calls this line of reasoning the panda principle.

Yet the argument from imperfection is not evidence for evolution either perfection nor imperfection is evidence for evolution, since evolu is so vacuous it could accommodate both situations. Perfection is not immune from the facile just-so stories of natural selection, even Gould admits this.

But perfection could be imposed by a wise creator or evolved by natural selection. (Gould, 1984a, p 122, my italics)

The argument from imperfection never was evidence for evolution, instead it was used as evidence against a designer.

Creationists traditionally responded to the argument by showing that the alleged “imperfect” designs are, in fact, sophisticated engineering feats that serve a useful, even optimal, purpose. They had notable success in this effort.
Additionally, creationists might argue in the following way. The problem does not begin and end with a single structure, such as the panda’s thumb. If the panda had been designed with a perfect hand then we might wonder why the panda had not been given the motor capability necessary to fully mobilize it. If the motor capability was provided, then we might ask why the panda had not been given the creative intellect to fully apply it. Such a regress continues with this and other structures, and perhaps we would soon be suggesting that pandas should not have been made at all.

A system of life has many requirements. Not every organism needs the most perfect vision, wings, or hands. Not every organism can be at the top of the food chain. A system of life requires organisms with different capabilities and differ ent positions in the overall scheme of things. Perhaps a system of life requires, for its survival, some organisms that are “imperfect”?

One could continue with this line of reasoning, with some success. It could help focus the debate, but it is implausible as a principal solution. It is difficult to argue that pandas, complete with their unusual thumbs, are needed for the system of life to survive.

No, the evolutionists have correctly identified a problem. There are just too many designs that are functional, maybe even highly so, but which are odd nonetheless. The problem of imperfection is real, and to solve it we must approach it directly.
Evolutionists have seen “odd arrangements and funny solutions” in nature and they insist these are paths a sensible designer would never tread. They are mistaken. Not only is it sensible, but message theory absolutely requires it, though at first it will seem paradoxical.

We expect a designer of life to create perfect designs. Yet this expectation itself constrains a biomessage sender to do the unexpected. A world full of perfect optimal designs would form an ambiguous message. In fact, it would not look like a message at all. It would provide no clues of an intentional message. It would look precisely as expected from a designer having no such intentions. Life’s designer created life to look like a message, and therefore had to accept an astonishing design constraint: life must incorporate odd designs.

How can I be so utterly sure on this point? Because evolutionists have (unknowingly) said so. In fact, they insist on it. Every one of them — from Darwin, to Ghiselin, to Could — has emphasized how unreasonable it is for a designer to have created such non-optimal, odd structures. We can rightfully conclude that if evolutionists had the wherewithal to create life, then they would independently go forth and create optimal perfect designs. We can conclude that a world of perfect designs would look precisely like the work of multiple designers acting independently. The biomessage sender created life to look unlike the product of multiple designers, and therefore had to use odd designs.

It is not enough for a biomessage sender to merely include odd designs. All the designs together must form a pattern attributable only to a single designer. Life on earth has such a pattern.

Suppose we examined many separate handwritten documents. How would we recognize they all had the same author? Answer: By the overall pattern, especially the funny quirks and odd imperfections. It is the same with living organisms.

The quirks and imperfections play a key role in the pattern. They unite all organisms into a unified whole, while looking unlike the product of multiple designers. They give life the distinctive look of a single designer. They also make the pattern look like an intentional message, rather than an ordinary design effort.

The concept of “perfection” is loaded with different meanings. Anti-creationists thought of it solely as engineering elegance. Yet message theory indicates a slightly different standard is needed. Biological designs serve a dual role: (1) as instruments of survival; and (2) as conveyors of a message. There is some range between ‘elegant engineering designs’ and ‘designs sufficient for survival.’ Life’s designer used this range to incorporate a message. In this sense, life’s designs are neither imperfect nor non-optimal. They are more aptly described as odd and curious. The argument from imperfection falls down because it used the wrong concept of perfection.

This case illustrates several themes of this book.
• Evolutionary theory never did make a clear prediction on the matter, it just accommodated the data. It can adapt to both imperfection and perfection, since both explanations are available within the evolution ary smorgasbord. Imperfection never was evidence for evolution.

• Imperfection was erroneously used as evidence against a designer.

• The concept that life is a message resolves problems that seemed insoluble in the 1800s. Life was designed as a biotic message, it was designed to resist all other interpretations.

(The Biotic Message: Evolution
Versus Message Theory
by Walter ReMine :26-28)

Haloscan...

2005-05-14T17:50:00.000-07:00

Too bad the move deleted all the comments here, sorry about that.

Censorship...

2005-04-14T15:46:00.000-07:00

These little fellows banned me and censored away a few of my posts, while answering what they could.
It seems to make the case about proto-Nazism, in the comments. That was the very thing that was at issue, so I think I will use their blog as an example sometimes. Their blog is reminiscent of GLAAD and other organizations based on the methods and modes of Nazi propaganda. I don't write such things to be controversial or some such. It is historically accurate to write and can be proven by comparing each movement and their writings. Come to think of it, I will compare some of their texts here sometime, Nazism and gay activism.

Even on their blog they followed some of the patterns and scripts. They do not censor ignorant and associative arguments using projections of Nazism onto Scripturalists, then to protect them from refutation a victimization script is invented, "He's vandalizing the blog! Hate speech!" or some such, and then the move to ban and censor, etc. It's like that little fellow from "Culture Wars" who didn't seem to know how to fight his war at all. All one can expect from them is some sort of associative argument based on victimization scripts which supposedly justify a move to censorship and the like.

These are the sort of scripts that seem typical to effeminate psychology.

The internet makes it difficult for proto-Nazi censorship and the like these days. I suppose it's all so hard for the Victims.

Ironically he argues, "You fail to substantiate the suggestion that 'modern Gays© seem to get to the 'truth' and define the truth ... by their own sexual desires or orientation.' "

That is easy to substantiate, very easy. It is written in the act of self defining as Gay© to come out and proselytize the identity as a path away from "living a lie" and so to "truth," etc. The thing that such a little fellow will not like is the case being proven with appropriate citations, research and so on where appropriate.

The Hedonist is not like many Scripturalists. They seem much more insecure and so the sweaty little hands of the censor appear quite quickly!

American Universities

2005-04-11T20:23:00.000-07:00

On what is wrong with them.

Canadian Leftists...

2005-04-10T08:36:00.001-07:00

...having debated them on Usenet for years in the past, it is nice to see some smarmy Liberals brought down. Down!

On with the story,
"A blogger's revelations could bring down Canada's governmentFOR the past week, an unassuming call-centre manager in Minnesota has become a key player in Canadian politics, whipping up a storm that could end in a snap general election. On an internet blog-site dubbed "Captain's Quarters," Ed Morrissey has been posting the explosive details of supposedly secret testimony to a judicial commission in Montreal that is investigating a huge political corruption scandal centred on the ruling Liberal Party.Most of the government-appointed commission's hearings have taken place in public. But Judge John Gomery, its chairman, imposed a publication ban on the testimony of Jean Brault, former head of Groupaction, an advertising agency, as he is to stand trial on fraud charges in June.Sitting on the American side of the Canadian border and thus able to ignore the ban, Captain Ed, as he is known to his friends, has blithely been publishing all the juicy details that the Canadian press has been unable to touch. After the story of his blogging exploits broke in Canada on Monday, the normal traffic on his website increased tenfold as delighted Canadians rushed to log on.

Denouncing the revelations as "very serious", Peter MacKay, deputy leader of the main opposition Conservative Party, has hinted at the possibility of a vote of no confidence leading to the fall of Paul Martin's minority Liberal government and a snap general election—less than a year after the last one.But how accurate are Captain Ed's blog-site accounts? His informant, whom he describes as "a friend...in a position to have the information", is thought likely to be a Conservative political operator eager to besmirch Mr Martin and his government with biased reports of the hearings. However, Captain Ed is far from the only source reporting on the closed-door proceedings; he is simply the only one publishing the details. Observers from the Bloc Québécois, New Democrats and Conservatives, as well as journalists covering the inquiry, can also hear what is being said and pass word around. Almost every Canadian now seems to know at least the gist of Mr Brault's testimony. [There are five hundred news stories in the Canadian press about a network of corruption dealing in millions of dollars, with more being written.]

Following the separatists' failure to remove Quebec from Canada in a 1995 referendum, the then Liberal prime minister, Jean Chrétien, set up a government "sponsorship programme" to raise the federal profile and promote national unity in Quebec. Five advertising firms, including Groupaction, with links to the Liberals were allegedly guaranteed a monopoly on government-sponsorship advertising at sporting and cultural events in the province and, as a result, are said to have made huge fortunes from contracts worth around C$250m ($200m).Having denied that he had any part in the award of the contracts, Mr Chrétien is now seeking legal ways to close down the inquiry. This could deal a final blow to Mr Martin, his successor and long-time rival, allowing the Conservatives to claim that his Liberal Party is seeking to conceal all manner of misdeeds. A beleaguered Mr Martin has spent many ugly hours in parliament vowing that he wants all the facts to emerge and any wrongdoers punished....."
(The EconomistApril 9, 2005 U.S. EditionSection: The Americas
HEADLINE: Shivering Mr Martin's timbers; Canada's corruption scandal
DATELINE: Ottawa
HIGHLIGHT: A blogger's revelations could bring down Canada's government)

Many commentators have begun noting that the Liberal Party seemed to have become so arrogant that they believed they could do anything.

_____
One of the things I debated against liberal Canadians and on the side of the conservatives a while back was the Canadian "Ministry of Culture"* blocking Fox News from being received in Canada. Yet they have various things on their Canadian public service type television, including Al-Jahzeera, a broadcast with Islamist tendencies. Note the themes of this story of corruption. It's partly about control of the media. Canadians actually do not have free speech in the same way that Americans do, apparently thanks to some stronger proto-fascist tendencies in modern "liberalism" in the region.

*If that name sounds rather proto-fascist, it probably is, as is corruption in the media.

Iraqi bloggers...

2005-04-10T08:36:00.000-07:00

...on April 9th,"I don't think I need to tell you how close is the 9th of April to my heart. And now, after two years happiness is still the same for me; one person among millions who were freed on that great day. The 9th of April had turned one of the darkest pages in our history and opened the door wide before the people and their dreams, just as when the idol was knocked down, fear and oppression were knocked down as well. ...."(Continue reading, from Iraq the Model)

Leftists...

2005-04-06T14:52:00.000-07:00

Why call them radical egalitarians?

One modern example of radical egalitarianism, from among the many over the course of history...

Hmm...

2005-04-04T20:28:00.000-07:00

This blog may slow a bit, or it may not. It's mainly for reactions to blogs of the Left and the like. I have some books I want to read, so I may not be reading such blogs as much.

My main blog is here.

The Judiciary

2005-04-02T21:45:00.000-08:00

And blogging...

The ACLU

2005-03-28T15:11:00.000-08:00

What position did they take on Terri Shiavo? I'll just take a guess, it was not on the side of the rights of the disabled and so on because the ACLU's agenda seems to be much more proto-Nazi or socialist. Their talk of "civil rights" is an increasingly thin mask of their agenda in which the judiciary would become an oligarchy to make all your discriminations for you, guided by none other than the ACLU. Their alliance has grown closer and closer, with the ACLU and the judiciary working hand in hand.

"If you went down the list of controversial constitutional decisions of the last forty years - on abortion, criminal procedure, busing, prayer in schools, aid to religious schools, pornography, discrimination on the basis of sex, alienage and illegitimacy, vagrancy control, street demonstrations, and so on almost endlessly - you could not fail to be struckby the fact that in every case the Court's decision adopted and enacted the position of the ACLU. The ACLU opposes prayer in the schools; the Supreme Courtholds prayer in the schools unconstitutional. The ACLU opposes restricting the availability of pornography; the Supreme Court holds most restrictions on the availability of pornography unconstitutional. The ACLU favors busing for school racial balance, the Supreme Court holds that the Constitution requires busing for school racial balance. Isn't the coincidence amazing? Indeed, one could sum up the situation in a word by saying that constitutional law is simply a device for the enactment of the ACLU's policy agenda."
(Syracuse Law Review
Syracuse L. Rev. 631
ESSAY: CONSTITUTIONALINTERPRETATION
By Lino A. Graglia)

"It would be only a small exaggeration to say that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the paladin of far-left causes and paradigmatic constitutional litigator of our time, never loses in the Supreme Court, even though it does not always win. It either obtains from the Court a policy choice it cannot obtain in any other way because opposed by a majority of the American people--for example, the removal of restrictions on pornography or the prohibition of prayer and Bible reading in public schools --or it is left where it was to try again on another day. It took three tries for the ACLU position on contraception, for example, finally to prevail in 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut, the progenitor of Roe v. Wade.
.....
The Court functions today primarily as the mirror and mouth piece of liberal academia, especially legal academia, and the enacting arm of the ACLU. The nightmare of the American intellectual is that policymaking should fall into the hands of the American people. The American people favor capital punishment, effective enforcement of the criminal law, prayer in the schools, suppression of pornography, restrictions on abortion, and the assignment of children to their neighborhood schools, all anathema to our intellectual elite. It is only the power of the Supreme Court to create constitutional law that prevents these unenlightened views from prevailing. Policymaking by a committeeof nine lawyers with no particular training or expertise relevant to the issues they decide is far from ideal in the view of academia--policymaking by sociologists, anthropologists, and moral philosophers would surely be better-but it is the only available alternative in America togovernment by the people. The self-assigned primary functionof constitutional law professors, therefore, overwhelmingly far to the left of the American people, is to defend and support what the Supreme Court has done and see that this particular system of government continues.
Defenders of the Supreme Court's decision making of the past four decades are, however, faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, it is not possible in the American context for them to come clean and openly defend a system of totally centralized and totally undemocratic government by majority vote of nine unelected lawyers. The only reason this system of government is favored is that it has overwhelmingly pushed and can be relied on to continue to push policy choices to the left, hardly a reason that can be publicly offered in its defense. On the other hand, it has become increasingly difficult to defend with a straight face the Court's rulings of unconstitutionality as the unavoidable dictates of theConstitution--the only ground generally recognized as legitimate. Even the least sophisticated observer must be aware by now that this is not the case; indeed, it is only the most sophisticated who claim to believe otherwise.
The result has been the creation of a law school industry in the production of "constitutional theory."
.....
The task of justifying the Supreme Court's controversial rulings of unconstitutionality to a nation still purportedly committed to representative self-government in a federalist system is not merely difficult, however, but impossible. It is to be hoped that the increasingly apparent deleterious effects of the Court's remaking of our society will ultimately convince the American people that government by judges is not an improvementon the constitutional scheme--that our four-decade experiment in policymaking by the Supreme Court has been a failure. Nothing is more important to our political health and our continued freedom and prosperity than that the American people reassert their most precious and fundamental right--the right of self-government--and find a means to make the reassertion effective."
(Georgia State University Law Review July, 1998
14 Ga. St. U.L. Rev. 767
SYMPOSIUM: Judicial Review and Judicial Independence:
CONSTITUTIONAL LAW: A RUSE FOR GOVERNMENT BY AN INTELLECTUAL ELITE
By Lino A. Graglia)

The ACLU does not protect all controversial speech, perhaps they are too busy defending NAMBLA. (If history is any measure, that did not happen as a random quirk of principle. Given history, there may be pederasts supporting their interests through the ACLU.)

The controversial speech the ACLU fails to protect while protecting NAMBLA:
"In Oakland, California, two anti-abortion protesters were arrested and charged with child pornography for displaying a picture of aborted fetuses. A trial court in New York, until reversed, enjoined anti-abortion protesters from using the terms "murder"and "kill." The Washington Supreme Court upheld an injunction against pro-life protesters carrying signs or otherwise referring to abortionists as "killers" or "murderers" on the ground that such restriction of free speech was necessary to protect any children who might be in the area. Likewise, Denver police arrested two abortion protesters for carrying a sign saying "THE KILLING PLACE." In Milwaukee, a pastor was cited for disorderly conduct for displaying a banner that read: ""Abortion: The Silent Holocaust.'" In Vermont, a pastor was charged with a felony for distributing literature criticizing a judge's pro-choice ruling, and a local printer was charged with violating a Vermont anti-discrimination law for refusing to print pro-abortion material. Contempt findings were issued against anti-abortion protesters who entered a buffer zone created by a court injunction even though the arrested protesters were not named in the injunction. Such blatant disregard for the right to protest would not be tolerated if the protesters were expressing opposition to a war, or to experimentation on animals, or even if they were expressing opposition to democracy or support for racism or totalitarianism. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) would have run to the rescue, press releases blazing. But the suppression of pro-life free speech has been met with nearly total silence of virtually all First Amendment advocacy organizations."
(Albany Law Review 1999
62 Alb. L. Rev. 853
ARTICLE: THE QUANDARY OF PRO-LIFE FREESPEECH:
A LESSON FROM THE ABOLITIONISTS
By Lynn D. Wardle)

An example of the sort of censorship that was practiced against the abolitionists.

Judicial diktat , slavery and the abolitionist view.

Drawing together the parallels again:
(2002 51 DePaul L. Rev. 825
DOUBLE STANDARDS: THE SUPPRESSION OF ABORTION PROTESTERS' FREE SPEECH RIGHTS
By Christopher P. Keleher)

Left2Right....

2005-03-25T19:10:00.000-08:00

Same place that brought you the parasitic vampire babies.

"....pregnancy too involves blood, gore and indeed something like a parasitical relationship. Embryos, fetuses and babies do not neutrally reside in their mothers' bodies, but actively draw from them. .....it seems to me that we treat mothers' bodies especially lightly, as if pregnancy did not suck anyone's blood."(Link)

Now they are reconciling other difficulties in dealing with babies, those little suckers! Mothers, they may vant to drink your milk too!

Onward and upward,
". . . Prenatal injury raises issues quite different from those raised by abortion because nothing about the morality of inflicting prenatal injury hinges on the controversial matter of the moral status of the fetus. This is because the real victim of prenatal injury is not the fetus but the person into whom the fetus, if it survives, will develop." (Link)

They are "real victims" but aborted babies are fake victims, I suppose. The thing to remember about liberals and their victimization scripts is this, they are always working to define their Victims.

Say there was a gay gene (or if more people figured out the strong association between intersexuality and homosexuality, duh!) and people began to practice selected abortions against Gays© in the womb because they didn't want Gay© (Many do not, based on no hope of a heritage of grandkids, gay problems, etc.). In that case, I suspect that liberals would contort themselves in various contradictions to argue that such abortions are wrong because Gay© fits their victimization scripts.

Gay© = Victim

Most liberals have been taught that very well, and conditioned some too. So they will have their feelings about it.

In contrast, the average baby that is aborted seems to have no place in the victimization scripts that liberals believe in.

The mystical attitude of the social Left toward the Judiciary

2005-03-21T17:49:00.000-08:00

Recall,
"Deconstruction demystifies the liberal faith. . . .exposing its vulnerability to the same critique it makes of more traditional forms of religious faith. The sacred scripture, the Constitution, is indeterminate. The spiritual intermediaries, judges, are tainted by personal bias, and the body of religious literature, constitutional decisions, protects the status quo. . . ."

Compare the attitudes of social Leftists on a current issue that involves the Judiciary.

"If we are going to let her die -- and I'll trust the opinion of the six courts that we should...."
Culture Wars

"Multiple courts have heard testimony...."

So he goes along with them.

In contrast to such bowing and scraping before the blessed Judiciary,
"Congress is engaged in shameless grandstanding...."

And supposedly they contradict themselves because they complain of the Judiciary overstepping itself more and more....
"....yet here they are frantically trying to get the federal courts to intervene where they have no authority."

Wrong, how silly that is.

Here one sees just how a mystic pseudo-religious belief in the gnostic power of the Judiciary can blind a social Leftist. This was the same sort of issue with Scalia and a failure to understand Scalia's challenge to the liberal faith. It's quite simple, the legislature is that which gives the federal judiciary the power it has, the power to intervene.

In contrast, according to what seems to be some modern form of mystical gnosticism, the Courts can give themselves power whenever they feel like emitting a penumbra or two. That type of liberal faith based on judicial diktat seems to be why the social Leftist does not understand much more than, "The Courts say, so I obey!"

The liberal faith is in need of deconstruction.

______
Side note, same site:
"If you want to take the position that as long as the parents are willing to take on the responsibility of her care, there's no harm in allowing her to stay on the machines..."

She is not "...on the machines." Sheesh, that little fellow seems to understand everything by a combination of "...the courts, the courts!" and his own personal experience. So if his family had to pull a comatose body off of life support then most every case is just like that one. If he knew a nice Gay© , then SSM ought to be legal. It seems if you mix in "...the courts, the courts!" with his personal experience, that's pretty much all he has to say.

Archive...

2005-03-17T17:05:00.000-08:00

"Most of the rules of the law of holiness relate to the basic categories of the natural world and of human experience. Such categories as the living and the dead; mortal and divine; human and animal; air, sea, and land; male and female; past, present, and future are common to most peoples. They provide a framework of basic “natural” categories that render the universe meaningful. What is peculiar to the Jewish people is that these natural categories are also moral categories and anything that is ambiguous or threatens to blur the boundaries of these categories is treated as abominable. Hence the ban on the consumption of shellfish, which are not fully sea creatures or land creatures but live on the littoral margin of each, or on the eating of flightless birds, which do not belong properly to the air as birds should and yet are not proper land animals either (Douglas 1970, pp. 54—72). There is a similar explanation for the rules relating to the slaughter of animals for food which insist that the blood (the life) must be removed from the meat (dead and hence consumable) before it is eaten (Lev.17:10—14).

We can see also why sorcery, necromancy, and witchcraft are forbidden (Ex. 22:18; Lev. 12:26—27, 20:6—7; Deut. 18:9—15; 1 Sam. 15:23, 28:7— 20; 2 Chron. 33:6) and why “any man or woman among you who calls up ghosts and spirits shall be put to death” (Lev. 20:27). Such people are dangerous because they break down the division between the living and the dead or between the present and the future (Is. 8: 19—2 2, 47: 13—15).

The book of Leviticus makes explicit a central moral distinction that runs throughout the Old Testament—the Jews must either live in a world of carefully separated discrete categories (i.e., remain a people with a distinct identity) or face a world of utter confusion (Douglas 1970, p. 67; Davies 1975, p. 97). The biblical account of the creation involves the resolution of the world into clear categories from primeval confusion (Gen. 1: 1—19) , and the flood represents the return of that confusion as the separation of the land from the sea is eliminated. The building of the tower of Babel, an impious attempt to join together the separate categories of heaven and earth, is punished by the infliction of confusion on its builders, the beginning of the mutual unintelligibility of men’s various languages (Gen. 11:1— 9), an unintelligibility removable only by the divine gift of tongues (Acts 2:2—12).

It is now possible to provide a complete explanation for the harsh treatment of homosexuality, bestiality, and transvestism in the scriptures. These are all forms of sexual behavior which break down the boundaries between some of the most fundamental categories of human experience—the categories of male and female and human and animal. This is why homo sexuality and bestiality are condemned in Leviticus and why in Deuteronomy God tells the people of Israel through his prophet Moses: “No woman shall wear an article of man’s clothing, nor shall a man put on a woman’s dress; for those who do these things are abominable to the Lord your God” (Deut. 22:5).

It is easy to see how transvestites break down the categories of male and female, but the situation is slightly more complicated in the case of homosexuality. The essential point to grasp is that “male” and “female” are complementary categories, each defined in relation to the other. The male is by definition complementary to the female and only remains male so long as his sexual behavior relates exclusively to females. Any sexual behavior directed by a biological male toward another male will (at any rate so far as the scriptures are concerned) automatically place him in the same cat egory as a female, for whom this is the normal sexual orientation.
Because homosexual behavior involves a person placing himself or her self in the wrong sex category it erodes the boundary between these cat egories. This is why homosexual behavior is linked in Leviticus with bestiality, a sexual practice which breaks down the division between the equally fundamental categories of the human and the animal (see also Epstein 1948, p. 135)."
(Sexual Taboos and Social Boundaries
By Christie Davies
American Journal of Sociology,Vol. 87,
No.5, Mar., 1982 :1032-1063)

Arguments from the Left...

2005-03-17T13:24:00.000-08:00

Typically they will begin to make some scripts in which they are Victims. That is where if one attacks what they are saying then you are attacking, "Who they are." It is rather simple. It seems that all you need to do is to throw yourself, personally, in front of whatever views you hold in order to claim some personal hatred or intolerance on the part of any who would dare disagree with you. This type of argument is typical to the social Left.

It also works backwards, the shifting or blurring of what to who.

Some of its form,
"Despite its logical untenability, the genealogical method holds a great attraction for Foucault and his followers. In debates with their opponents, especially if the opponent is a 'positivist' or a 'piecemeal empiricist,' they hold what they believe is an unassailable position by focusing on who is speaking rather than on what is being said. They use the genealogical method to absolve themselves of the need to examine the content of any statement. All they see the need to do is examine the conditions of its production--not 'is it true?' but 'who made the statement and for what reason?'. This is a tactic that is well known in Marxist circles where, to refute a speaker, one simply identifies his class position and ignores what he actually says."
(The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and
Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past
By Keith Windschuttle (The Free Press. NY.) (1997) :132)

Religion, and the Separation of Church and State...

2005-03-17T10:01:00.000-08:00

It is important to remember that it has always been debated. Yet not in the atheistic or pagan sense in which religion is to be extirpated from public life for forms of atheistic or pagan Nature based belief systems to take its place.

Some of the religious rationales on the side of separation,
". . . .Backus and other Baptist leaders agreed with their clerical adversaries in believing that religion was necessary for social prosperity and happiness but they believed that the best way for the state to assure the health of religion was to leave it alone and let it take its own course, which, the Baptists were convinced, would result in vital, evangelical religion covering the land."cf. The Library of Congress

It's debatable whether he was right. It ought to be noted that Christianity contains within it the notion of separation based on religious rationales, including freedom of Conscience. In contrast, there is no space for free-will and freedom of Conscience in Naturalism.

Virtually none of the Founders or anyone in American culture at the time that the founding documents were written would agree with the sort of advocacy that comes from the ACLU, an advocacy that is supposedly based on such documents. Their type of advocacy is typically for separation for the sake of socialist extirpation.And after all, the ACLU was founded by Communists, as I recall.

This is the socialist attitude toward religion:
"We want to sweep away everything that claims to be supernatural or superhuman, for the root of all untruth and lying is the pretension of the human and the natural to be superhuman and supernatural. For that reason we have once and for all declared war on religion and religious ideas . . . "
(Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6, :103)

"It is often suggested that we have no ethics of our own; very often the bourgeoisie accuse us Communists of rejecting all morality. This is a method of confusing the issue, of throwing dust in the eyes of workers and peasants.In what sense do we reject ethics, reject morality? In the sense given to it by the bourgeoisie, who based ethics on God's commandments. On this point we, of course, say that we do not believe in God. . . .We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts."
(Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 31, p. 291)

"Every religious idea, every idea of God, even flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness . . . .vileness of themost dangerous kind, 'contagion' of the most abominable kind. Millions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions . . . are far less dangerousthan the subtle, spiritual idea of a God . . ."
(Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 15, p. 402)

"We must combat religion, that is the ABC of . . . Marxism." --Lenin

"The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion." --Marx

The Bill of Rights

2005-03-16T17:24:00.000-08:00

Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Scalia...

2005-03-15T17:02:00.000-08:00

Scalia says,

"And that, of course, deprives the constitution of its principle utility. The bill of rights is meant to protect you and me against - who do you think? - the majority. My most important function on the Supreme Court is to tell the majority to take a walk."

To which Ed says,

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this at odds with his often stated majoritarian views? During the oral argument in last week's Texas ten commandments case, he argued that the majority has a right to have government endorse its religious views at least to the extent of putting up monuments to them. He has famously said that if the the majority wants abortion to be legal, it should remain legal as long as it is done through the legislature rather than the judiciary.

Ed is missing something, something he seems to have a tendency to miss....text. Perhaps because it is not all thing, still not just nothing, yet still quite something. It seems that Naturalists do not really understand it, or have the eyes to see it. They try to say that much of it lacks "substance" and so on. The social Left tends to focus on Scalia and can only see Scalia and fail to see the principled nature of Scalia's position. Scalia is talking from within the context of his veneration of text. In that context it is his most important duty to tell the majority to "take a walk" if they are going against the text. That is the appropriate time to go against legislative majorities, not on a whim, feeling or a want as the social Left feeeels.

They cannot seem to see that it is the same textual principle that upholds both Scalia's anti-majority and pro-majority positions. They seem to feel, "Hey, he was anti-majority here. So that must mean that he personally hates the majority! But wait a minute, wasn't he pro-majority over there? And doesn't that mean he just loooves, loves the majority? He's contradicting himself!"

They have an odd view of Self. That is why they will try tell you what your feely feelings are instead of looking at textual facts, logic and evidence. You are hating....or you are tolerant and loving. Etc. Their typical argument when they get upset looks like the Jerry Springer show, "Don't be hatin'!" or "You just jealous!" That really has nothing to do with anything as a matter of principle. Although it seems to make them happy to believe such, or to at least let them avoid some cognitive dissonance. But there is a difference between mere perceptual feelings and conceptual principles that existentialists do not seem to be aware of. Existence without essence can be a deathly silence, just try thinking without words.

Ed goes on,

Here he appears to be saying that in any situation where the constitution does not explicitly state that the minority has a specific right, the majority may do as it pleases. Indeed, in this same article he was quoted as saying, "(T)hat's why we have a Bill of Rights. We set them forth in the Bill of Rights. But that is the limit of them, and I do not make up other ones." But this ignores the 9th amendment and the entire concept of unenumerated rights.

The Ninth Amendment states that "the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Ed seems to be working from within the existentialist assumption of a liberal sort of faith. So if the Constitution says that rights by nature reside in the people he inverts that to something like, "Rights are granted by the Judiciary to the people through their gnostic occult interpretive abilities!"

Etc....it is not as if you can understand the text that they "interpret" in mystical ways. So you had best leave it to the social Left to make all your discriminations for you.

As they say,
"Like the character of an individual, the legitimacy of the Court must be earned over time. So, indeed, must be the character of a Nation of people who aspire to live according to the rule of law. Their belief in themselves as such a people is not readily separable from their understanding of the Court invested with the authority to decide their constitutional cases and speak before all others for their constitutional ideals."(112 S. Ct. 2816 (1992) (emphasis added) Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey)

The Ninth Amendment...what is retained by the people in the schemes of these modern gnostics with their supposed mystical interpretive abilities? The notion that any ideal or right is retained by the people does not make sense given the notions of textual degenerates who would make all your discriminations for you. The Court was meant to be limited by the very document that it now purports to control and define "....before all others..." yet these new politicians now that they must not work to distort text too much or too fast and in so doing have people become aware of their fundamental textual illegitimacy. Jefferson noted that the Constitution would become a "...thing of wax..." if the philosophy of the social Left is adhered to.

He was right and the social Left within the Judiciary has been making it up as it goes along for quite a while now. As it does so it leaves a morass of contradictory decisions and moral degeneracy in its wake. The moral degenerate is the textual degenerate.

Ed does not seem to have the eyes to see that, as the result of his adherence to Naturalism. But others have and note the results,
"To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy."
(Letter from Thomas Jefferson to William Charles Jarvis (Sept. 28,1820) in 15 The Writings of Thomas Jefferson 276, 277(Andrew A. Lipscomb & Albert Ellery Bergh eds., 1904)

It is quite a contrast to what the modern Judiciary writes in its decisions.

Archive...

2005-03-15T14:50:00.000-08:00

"Anthony Cook characterizes liberalism as 'a different kind of religion, with its own presuppositions of faith' that conceives of the autonomous rational individual as its own god, pursuing her own perception of good ratherthan a presupposed common good reflecting the will of a transcendent God.

He argues that:

Deconstruction demystifies the liberal faith. . . .exposing its vulnerability to the same critique it makes of more traditional forms of religious faith. The sacred scripture, the Constitution, is indeterminate. The spiritual intermediaries, judges, are tainted by personal bias, and the body of religious literature, constitutional decisions, protects the status quo. . . .

Deconstruction permits us to see liberalism as but another way of understanding the world. . . . The hope is that by deflating liberalism of its pretensions of superiority to religious discourse, the playing field is leveled and the way prepared for a more genuine dialogue between these competing attempts to discern life's purpose and to imbue our lives with meaning.

The structural bias that liberalism has erected to the use of religious knowledge in public and legal discourse does not alter the fact that theological norms are even more useful and fundamental to our understanding of desegregation theory and racial justice in general, than the thoroughly deconstructed and indeterminate norms of liberalism."
(The Journal of Gender, Race & Justice
Spring, 1992, 315
Transformative Desegregation: Liberating
Hearts and Minds
By Wendy Brown Scott)

Aristocracy?

2005-03-14T19:48:00.000-08:00

I suspect that a type of populist rhetoric against "the rich" from the Left masks an envy of what John Adams called the natural aristocracy. There are sound reasons that the Founders designed a system in order to attempt to harness the best of each style of government by putting each in opposition to each other. So that each may refine and define the other forms the system has an element of monarchy (Presidency), an element of representative democracy (House of Representatives) and an element of aristocracy (Senate).

As John Adams argued you cannot deny a natural aristocracy because men are not equals in talent. E.g.,
"Although, among men, all are subject by nature to equal laws of morality, and in society have a right to equal laws for their government, yet no two men are perfectly equal in person, property, understanding, activity, and virtue, or ever can be made so by any power less than that which created them. . . ."

Adams was largely responsible for the notion of checks and balances becoming nothing more than a taken for granted truism of American politics today. This combined with a dread of any form of unmixed government was based on a vast amount of study and knowledge leading to the conclusion that each branch of power has ". . . an unalterable foundation in nature; that they exist in every society natural and artificial; and that if all of them are not acknowledged in any constitution ofgovernment, it would be found to be imperfect, unstable and soon enslaved....."

Cicero noted of the purely democratic mobocracy,
"Plato says that from the exaggerated license which people call liberty, tyrants spring up as from a root. . .and that at last such liberty reduces a nation to slavery. Everything in excess is changed into its opposite. . .
For out of such an ungoverned populace one is usually chosen as a leader. . .someone bold and unscrupulous. . .who curries favor with the people by giving them other men's property. To such a man. . . .the protection of public office is given, and continually renewed. He. . .emerges as a tyrantover the very people who raised him to power."
--Cicero (De republica, i, 2.)

Tocqueville notes,
"While you preserve your aristocracy, you will preserve your freedom. If that goes, you are in danger of falling into the worst of tyrannies--that of a despot appointed and controlled, if controlled at all, by the mob."

It is the democratic populism when taken as some sort of moral good per se that is a radical notion. It was typical to the old radical leftists of Jacobin tradition ever since theFrench Revolution. That was the sort of revolution that the American Founders disdained. They knew that the uncivil barbarity inherent in the uncivilized philosophy behind socialism is soon made manifest.

Bias, same issue...

2005-03-10T15:28:00.000-08:00

"[Biased] stories [on HIV] were scaring the hell out of millions of Americans. In the beginning, it probably couldn’t be helped. Maybe AIDS really would start to spread among heterosexuals, through sex, from one to another to another and on and on. In the early days, I interviewed “experts” who told me exactly that—and I put it on the air. Who knew?

But after the virus was around for a while, I started to wonder: where are all these straight Americans with AIDS? I didn’t know any. My friends and neighbors didn’t know any. I had read about two brothers with hemophilia who lived in my area and who died of AIDS because the clotting factor they used to control bleeding was infected with HIV. But where was this epidemic I kept reading about in the newspapers and hearing about on the television news?

There was no escaping the fact that the news I was getting from the press and TV didn’t jibe with reality. When I read a study from the Center for Media and Public Affairs (the same research team in Washington, D.C., that had written about the real homeless versus the homeless portrayed on television), I understood why.

The center monitored network TV stories in 1992 and concluded that “TV’s visual portrait of AIDS victims has little in common with real life.” The center compared the people on TV, using only the information provided in the story, with “real-world data on AIDS victims compiled by the Centers for Disease Control”:

• During the period studied, 6 percent of the people with AIDS shown on the evening news were gay men. But in real life 58 per cent were gay men.
• On TV, 16 percent were blacks and Hispanics. But in real life 46 percent were black or Hispanic.
• On TV, 2 percent of the AIDS sufferers were IV drug users. In real life 23 percent were.

“Thus, the risk groups the news audience sees are very different from their real-world counterparts,” was the report’s conclusion.
As with the homeless, television was back in the business of prettifying reality. Make the victims look more like you and me, and maybe we can drum up some support for their cause while we’re drumming up some support for our ratings. And unlike other ailments, like cancer and heart disease, AIDS had civil rights. “How did you get it?” was considered an uncivil question.
In 1991, when Magic Johnson told the world he had HIV, Dan Rather looked into the camera and proved once again that it was more important to be politically correct than factually correct.
“As correspondent Richard Threlkeld reports, the perception may finally be catching up with the reality. That reality is: AIDS is not, quote, ‘just a gay disease!’”
Then Threlkeld, a smart, veteran newsman, narrated, over pictures of Magic: “Magic Johnson’s just the man to educate the rest of us about AIDS. He’s not a drug user. Neither are most AIDS victims. He’s heterosexual. So are four out of ten AIDS victims these days.”
Let’s set aside some important assumptions Threlkeld casually makes about how Magic did or did not get the virus. Because the fact is, Richard Threlkeld knows nothing about how Magic Johnson got HIV.
When Threlkeld came on the air that night and reported that four out often people with AIDS are heterosexuals, I got a certain impression. My guess is so did most of the people who watched the CBS Evening News that night.
When a reporter tells you that four out of ten people with AIDS are heterosexuals, it’s reasonable to think he’s talking about straight, non-IV-drug-using Americans who are getting AIDS through sexual intercourse.

But that’s not at all what Richard Threlkeld was talking about because most of that 40 percent Threlkeld cites got the virus not simply because they were heterosexual but because they were shooting up or having unprotected sex with people who were shooting up. The other heterosexuals apparently were patients in hospitals who got transfusions tainted with HIV, hemophiiacs, maybe even “heterosexual” babies born to mothers who were HIV positive. You would have to include all those groups in order to say four out of ten HIV cases involve heterosexuals.
But what if 40 percent of the people with HIV are Protestants? Or 40 percent have brown eyes? Or 40 percent have dark hair and are under six foot two? No reporter in his right mind would tell his audience, “He’s Protestant and so are four out of ten victims these days.” Or, “He has brown eyes and so have four out often victims these days.”
Harry Stein, a good friend and author of How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right- Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace), wrote in his TV Guide column in 1994 that “AIDS is presented not just as a hideous disease, but as a gauge of our collective humanity.” That is precisely why so many reporters would not ask, “How did you get it?” It some how seemed inhumane. It seemed as if we were not sympathetic.
So when Dave Marash did his Magic Johnson story for Nightline on ABC, he said, “Our curiosity about people with AIDS has often been limited to one hostile question: How did you get it?”
Why in the world is that a hostile question? If Dave Marash did a story about lung cancer, he certainly wouldn’t consider it “hostile” to ask, “How did you get it?”—especially if he knew the answer was “Three packs of Marlboros a day for twenty-five years, Dave.” Dave, and every other reporter, would relish the opportunity to take on Big Tobacco, given the misery smoking has caused.
But AIDS is different. It’s off limits. Only AIDS is shrouded in political correctness. We might offend gays if we ask, “How did you get it?” We fear we may look uncaring and without compassion if we ask, “How did you get it?”

In 1996, Jacqueline Adams did a story for CBS News about teenagers with AIDS and reported that the problem was mainly the result of these kids having unprotected sex.
“Ten years ago, at age fourteen, Luna [Ortiz] was infected with the HIV virus, the very first time he had sex unprotected sex,” Adams reported.
Then she introduced us to a woman named Patricia Fleming, an AIDS activist, who said, “At least one American teenager is becoming infected every hour of every day.” (Six months later, in September of 1996, another CBS News reporter, Diana Olick, reported, “The number of HIV-infected teens continues to rise. Every hour two kids under the age of twenty are infected.” Two—not one! As with the homeless story the numbers keep going higher and higher until they bear no relationship whatsoever to reality. Stay tuned!)
There was one word missing from Jacqueline Adams’s story. Never, not even once, did she or any of the people she interviewed ever utter the word “gay” or “homosexual.” This is quite remarkable: a story about AIDS and unprotected sex, yet the reporter doesn’t tell us any thing about the sexual orientation of the person with HIV. [If he was fourteen it was probably something anthropologists call the "homosexual mentorship." You won't hear anything like that in the Old Press though.]
The closest anyone came was when Luna said, “I wasn’t educated about it [AIDS]. The only thing I knew was Rock Hudson died a year before.” Was that the clue that Luna was gay? I don’t know. Adams never told us.
By leaving out the crucial fact that almost all of these teenage AIDS cases involve homosexual sex or IV drugs or tainted blood, we are left with the impression that straight, middle-class heterosexual teens are being infected with HIV “every hour of every day.”
It’s simply not happening! That anyone is still contracting HIV is a tragedy of huge proportions. That the gay lobby would try to mislead us is understandable. That the media go along is disgraceful.
[. . . . .]
It’s a sad story. But sometimes I get the impression that the media that have helped spread the epidemic of fear would love to spread it just a little more. Sometimes I get the impression that they’d like to write a headline that shouts: “AIDS Epidemic Takes Toll on the Middle Class.” Then it really would be everyone’s disease. Not just the disease of junkies and gays and poor black people in the rural South. Then no one would be safe, just as the media have been telling us for so many years. And then, finally, we would all be equal.”
(Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How
the Media Distort the News (Regnery, 2002)
By Bernard Goldberg :81-84, 87)

"And then, finally, we would all be equal.”

The radical egalitarianism of the social Left is false. Yes, it is radical and it is egalitarianism. I note this for some fellows who do not seem to understand such words.

A similar public relations bias in England,
“The embarrassing truth about the government's Aids campaign is that it has failed to alter the sexual behaviour of the groups most at risk because everyone was finger-wagged, and disbelief has set in."
(The Sunday Times
July 26, 1992, Sunday
AIDS
Byline: Tom Mangold)

It seems typical in the West. In the Old Press, fear mongering sells just as well as other crass and base appeals that they make. While the politicians tend to fancy themselves as the same sort of elite as the Old Press and celebrities. Apparently, despite the fact that it is a losing issue politically there are those politicians who will stick with it because that is their type of socialite society and "gay rights" seems to be the latest pet cause for the socialites on the Left. (As Eugenics was in the past....)

Bias

2005-03-09T19:40:00.000-08:00

I'm combining two controversial issues on the blog. It may not be a good idea. But anyway, this was a pretty good book, there is another citation from it here.

"We’ve seen how the October 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a homosexual, became a huge national news story, with the cover of Time magazine proclaiming, “The War Over Gays.” The liberal media predictably used the occasion to blame religious conservatives, calling for hate-crime laws and other items on the gay-Left agenda. But why did the national media ignore a murder that occurred less than a year later, a murder that was just as shocking as Shepard’s?

On September 26, 1999, thirteen-year-old Jesse Dirkhising died from suffocation after being bound, gagged with underwear in his mouth, blindfolded, drugged, taped to the bed, and raped with objects by one gay man while another gay man watched. In this modern media age, ratings-obsessed news programs rush to report on lurid murders of children (can you say JonBenet Ramsey?). But in this case it seems the liberal media did not dare incur the wrath of the militant gay movement by reporting a grisly murder story that had as its villains two homosexuals. Had Dirkhising been openly gay and his attackers heterosexual, you can bet the mortgage the crime would have led every network’s evening news broadcast.

The primary offender in this tale of politically correct self-censorship had to be the Associated Press. While the AP had put the story of the Shepard beating on its national wire, it sent out only local dispatches about the Dirkhising murder. Even these stories were but two-hundred-word pieces of colorless court reporting, which suggested to editors that the story could be buried deep inside the paper. Amazingly, although Dirkhising’s killers implied that the boy had died because of a “sex game” gone awry, the Associated Press never described them as gay men.

The Washington Times told the story of this horrific murder, but, all too predictably, only two other national outlets—the New York Post and Fox News Channel—picked up on the story. Fox News filed a series of reports and made the Dirkhising murder a major topic on its talk shows, but still the established media refused to touch the story. Amazingly, the liberal media saw no news in this statement from a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the gay rights group: “This has nothing to do with gay people.” The statement was demonstrably false, but it was more shocking coming from the Human Rights Campaign, which was the same group that had led the media to the story of how “hatred” from the “Far Right” and Christian conservatives had resulted in the murder of Matthew Shepard. That propaganda campaign—which was central to the organization’s fund-raising efforts—was marked by poisonous incivility, reckless guilt by association, and ugly rhetorical excess. And yet conservatives are the extremists.

When a mainstream outlet finally deigned to cover the Dirkhising story; it was merely to defend the media’s indefensible double standard. On the Time.com website, reporter Jonathan Gregg acknowledged that the Dirkhising story “received relatively little coverage”—actually, it had at that point received no coverage on the networks, in the news-magazines, or in the biggest newspapers—”while Shepard leaves a story that will probably endure for years to come as a symbol of intol erance and lowest-common-denominator conformity;” But he quickly dismissed the notion that “we in the media elite were unwilling to publicize crimes committed by homosexuals because it didn’t suit our agenda.” Gregg argued that, “essentially, Shepard was lynched—taken from a bar, beaten and left to die because he was the vilified ‘other,’ whom society has often cast as an acceptable target of abuse; Dirkhiser [sic] was just ‘another’ to a pair of deviants.” In other words, he was saying that the victim of a “hate crime” matters much more than someone who doesn’t fit a politicized category. Then Gregg repeated the reckless claim that Shepard’s killers “dramatically reflected some of society’s darkest influences—an acceptance of the persecution of gays” and that “many in our society think that beating up gays is justifiable.” Really? Just who had suggested that the violence against gays was accept able? Just who were these “darkest influences” he cited?

Jonathan Gregg might have wanted to bury the Dirkhising story, but alternative news outlets would not let that happen so easily. In March 2001, the key figure responsible forJesse Dirkhising’s death was convicted of first-degree murder. At that point, writing in the New Republic, Andrew Sullivan pointed out the clear double standard that Gregg and others had so adamantly denied. Sullivan, an openly gay journalist, wrote, “[.....]Consider the following statistics. In the month after [....] Shepard’s murder, Nexis recorded 3,007 stories about his death. In the month after Dirkhising’s murder, Nexis recorded 46 stories about his. In all of last year, only one article about Dirkhising appeared in a major mainstream newspaper, the Boston Globe. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ignored the incident completely. In the same period, the New York Times published 45 stories about Shepard, and the Washington Post published 28. This discrepancy isn’t just real. It’s staggering.”
[.....]
The media have made it clear that they intend to cover gay rights not as a controversial issue but as a cause to be advanced. And the gay movement is relentless, pressuring an already sympathetic media at every turn. For example, Cathy Renna of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) told an October 1999 gathering, “One of the most important things you can do is have those tough conversa tions with journalists about when it is completely inappropriate to run to some radical group like the Family Research Council because of misguided notions of ‘balance.’ We have to offer them some more moderate voices, or convince them that there is no other side to these issues... . We are now in the position of being able to say, we have the high ground, we have the facts, and we don’t have to go one-on-one with these people.” Renna was shamelessly imploring the gay movement to spin the media...."
( Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming
Meltdown of the Liberal Media
By Brent Bozell :122-124)

Hatred?

2005-03-08T18:03:00.000-08:00

Perhaps an explanation,
"...homophobia is just a propaganda word that gay activists use to ward off attack. It’s an epithet, a scare word that activists use to silence anyone who does not automatically accept the“normalcy” of same-sex sex. They make it sound like a disease, and it’s an effective defense strategy. If leaders of the gay rights movement can put that handle on anyone who has reasonable reservations about the gay political agenda, then they will turn the tables on critics of the movement......
The successful use of certain words, like homophobia, to advance the gay activist propaganda machine, is a triumph that many ad men would envy. But I think gay activists do this quite unwittingly.
.....
The dynamics are clear. Once they realized, as little boys, that they were different, and that they could expect a certain amount of razzing, if not persecution, for being different, they learned to fear, even hate, their tormentors. Then, such is our human propensity to think good of ourselves, they rejected the notion that they could hate anyone. “We don’t hate the straight guys,” they said. And they turned it around,and settled on the notion that the straight guys hated them. They projected their hatred on to the heteroworld, and blamed the hetero world for hating them."
(Homosexuality, A Freedom Too Far
By Charles W. Socarides M.D.
(Adam Margrave Books) (1995) :37)

Dan Rather, retiring this week...or being retired this week.

2005-03-07T13:39:00.000-08:00

“I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.”
Dan Rather on The O'Reilly Factor, May 15, 2001

That's the type of thing that the Old Press has to say as they defend Democrats.

Huh...

2005-03-06T18:58:00.000-08:00

I wanted to save something here. There are the self defined gays and the self defined ex-gays, the latter is an interesting perspective that is not as much just a bundle of pop-culture type memes.

"There's a general sense that something's not right, not fullfilling -- and it doesn't come from any external source, but from within. No one's a better judge of the potential in each of us than well, us. When your body, mind and spirit are sending you signs of discontent and your sexuality leaves you empty, it's time to listen."
Scattered Words

Proto-Nazis?

2005-03-06T11:32:00.000-08:00

Professor Michael Newsom of Howard University,
"No, I didn't miss the point. The employee's religious beliefs prevent him from affirming the value of gay people. I call that homophobia."

Rick Duncan,
"It sounds like your ideological beliefs prevent you from affirming the value of Christians who believe that homsexuality is a serious moral disorder. I call that Christophobia and religious bigotry."

Professor Michael Newsom of Howard University,
"Rick, you are so full of #@#$%!!!!! I am a Christian[sic], but I don't buy into your right wing #!@#$%. (I also suspect that my Catholicism[sic] is something that you can't handle.) No one on this listserv is more ideological or bigoted than you are. Anybody who disagrees with your right wing views is a bigot. It's like the pot calling the kettle black. You are a hateful bigot and a disgrace!"

Unfortunately, the second professor is the type of person writing the type of opinions found in judicial diktats.

Note the original sentiment,
"...affirming the value of gay people. I call that homophobia."

The first sentence has a sense of smarmy moral vanity to it, typical to those who engage in constructing their Gay© people. Those that they then get to protect from all the Big Meanies. The second is meant to be clinical, it is the proto-Nazi tendency to supposedly diagnose the situation in some medical, more physical sense. I.e., the person who dares disagree is being diagnosed with phobia. The proto-Nazi tendency to medicalize can get very crass and crude, very fast. The subject being medicalized is supposedly like an arachnophobe, irrational, driven by irrational fear and so probably about to crush their Gay© people's heads the same as they would a spider's.

So shew, it's a good thing the social Leftist is there to stop the Big Meanies and protect all their Gay© people! There are two things that the social Left tends to care about, their own alternative and subjective ethics and proving that they hold to them because they are smart, intelligent or downright scientific! That's the main reason that they are alternative and subjective, because the traditional and objective is often too easy to humbly admit to.

Even with the vague handwaving that the social Left makes towards their Gays© they are not terribly concerned with the welfare of people, as people. Their Gay© people serve them, to make a point about how tolerant they are, as social Leftists. Oh how the social Leftist knows what others do not, how smart they are, how ignorant the average person who sees the complementarity of the sexes is. The social Leftist blinds theirselves and cannot see the people, as people. They cannot see the people for all their Gays©. And they cannot even really see their own Gays© for their own supposed tolerance and intelligence. You can point out some of the results of the modern invention of the Gays© identity, yet they will often continue anyway. Often they will keep repeating that they know some nice Gays©, which besides proving how tolerant they are is meant to make the case against millenia of moral teachings, any concern for the general welfare, posterity, etc. If you take a rather precise inversion of the philosophy of the American founders then you may almost come to their sort of philosophy. (You're not even supposed to be looking at such things, instead of the subjective. This includes looking to yourself as a subjective subject and what your feely feelings supposedly are about things, so you will be attacked in subjective, personal ways. That subjectivity seems to be meant to cause you to stop thinking, start feeling and to begin to be ruled by your feely feelings, just as the social Leftist is.)

It seems that they are more concerned with their own feelings and their own subjective Selves more than much else. Thus there is a lack of conceptual thought and they rely on more perceptual imagery about Big Meanies, how everyone who disagrees is just like Fred Phelps, etc. All that is meant to appeal to the emotional rather than the rational. There is nothing inherently wrong with getting emotional about things. It is only important that the rational come before the emotional, that you are correct in what you get emotional or passionate about. If your arguments are just one long list of emotional appeals, emotional manipulations, associative arguments, false medicalizing, etc., then you may be getting passionate over virtually nothing for the sake of emotional conditioning.
_____
Side note, on the philosophical framework behind a tendency of placing the emotional before the rational see:
(Hitler's Professors: ThePart of Scholarship in Germany's Crimes
Against the Jewish People
By Max Weinreich
(New York:The Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946)

Archive...

2005-03-05T18:22:00.000-08:00

"This paper reviews evidence for a link between suicide or suicidal behavior and sexual orientation by (1) reviewing studies of the rates of completed and attempted suicides for gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) people compared to the general population; (2) examining risk factors that might explain any differences; (3) outlining opportunities for prevention; and (4) providing directions for future research. Studies suggest an elevated risk of suicide attempts among some cohorts of GLB people, particularly GLB youth. Evidence is also strong that GLB youth are at high risk for associated maladaptive risk behaviors. Mental health problems and substance abuse disorders are critical predisposing factors for GLB suicide, as for the general populations. ....."
(The relationship between sexual orientation
and risk for suicide: Research findings and future
directions for research and prevention
By Mcdaniel, J. Stephen; Purcell, David; D' Augelli, Anthony R.
Emory U School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, US
Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior. Vol 31
(Suppl), Spr 2001, pp. 84-105)

"Suicide is also associated with homosexuality. One of the more enlightening studies to come out recently was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in October 1999. This issue focused on the mental health results of sexual orientation, and contained two articles on the subject, with several comments following the studies.The first article, by R. Herrell et al., found that "same-gender sexual orientation is significantly associated with each of the suicidal measures."

.....The second article, by Fergusson et al., reports that "gay, lesbian, and bisexual young people were at increased risks of major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, conduct disorder, nicotine dependence, other substance abuse and/or dependence, multiple disorders, suicide ideation, and suicide attempts." They then conclude, "Findings support recent evidence suggesting that gay, lesbian, and bisexual young people are at increased risk of mental health problems, with these associations being particularly evident for measures of suicidal behavior and multiple disorder."

There were three commentaries to these studies, one of which was by Michael Bailey, one of the two researchers who did the study on homosexual twins. He commented on the homosexuality and suicide studies and possible explanations:

Homosexuality represents a deviation from normal development and is associated with other such deviations that may lead to mental illness . . . .

Another developmental hypothesis concerns gender. On average, homosexual people are sex-atypical with respect to some traits, both during childhood and adulthood . . . . .

Another possible explanation is that increased psychopathology among homosexual people is a consequence of lifestyle differences associated with sexual orientation. For example, gay men are probably not innately more vulnerable to the human immunodeficiency virus, but some have been more likely to become infected because of 2 behavioral risk factors associated with male homosexuality: receptive anal sex and promiscuity. . . .
. . .Perhaps social ostracism causes gay men and lesbians to become depressed, but why would it cause gay men to have eating disorders?

Bailey's favored explanation was that homosexual youth commit suicide more due to societal oppression. However, a study of youth conducted in The Netherlands makes this hypothesis unlikely. The study also shows a higher rate of youth suicide among homosexuals than in the normal population in The Netherlands. The Netherlands is notably tolerant of homosexuality, even a gay-affirming society with little if any societal oppression aimed at homosexuals."
(Regent University Law Review 2001 / 2002
14 Regent U.L. Rev. 383
Homosexuality: Innate and Immutable?
By A. Dean Byrd and Stony Olsen)

The Gay© identity itself, and choosing to self define as gay:
". . . .gender nonconformity and precocious psychosexual development were predictive of self harm. . . For each year's delay in bisexual or homosexual self-labeling, the odds of asuicide attempt diminish by 80 percent."
(G. Remafedi, J. A.Farrow, and R. W Deisher. “Risk Factors for Attempted Suicide in GayBisexual Youth,” Pediatrics 87, no.6(1991), pp.869—75)

"The very experience of acquiring a homosexual or bisexual identity at an early age places the individual at risk for dysfunction. This conclusion is strongly supported by the data."
(G. Remafedi, “Adolescent Homosexuality: Psychosocial and Medical Implications,” Pediatrics 79, no. 3 (1987), pp. 331—37)

Archive...

2005-03-05T18:12:00.000-08:00

"Examined differences between 7,076 heterosexually and homosexually active adults (aged 18-64 yrs) in 12-mo and lifetime prevalence of mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders. Data were collected via the Composite International Diagnostic Interview. Among Ss who could be classified, 2.8% of 2878 men and 1.4% of 3120 women had had same-sex partners. Psychiatric disorders were more prevalent among homosexually active people compared with their heterosexual counterparts. Homosexual men had a higher 12-mo prevalence of mood disorders and anxiety disorders than did heterosexual men, while homosexual women had a higher 12-mo prevalence of substance use disorders than did heterosexual women. Lifetime prevalence rates reflected identical differences, except for mood disorders, which were more frequently observed in homosexual than in heterosexual females. Results suggest that people with same-sex sexual behavior are at greater risk for psychiatric disorders."
(Same-sex sexual behavior and psychiatric disorders:
Findings from the Netherlands mental health survey and incidence study (NEMESIS)
By Sandfort, Theo G.M.; de Graff, Ron; Bijl, Rob V.; Schnabel, Paul
Utrecht U, Dept of Clinical Psychology, Utrecht, Netherlands
Archives of General Psychiatry. Vol 58(1), Jan 2001, pp. 85-91)

An interesting note, places like the Netherlands and Canada are more tolerant, with speech being policed and all. Yet some patterns of disorder and dysfunction hold, as there are some very basic dysfunctions involved that are more than just societal...all the talk of intolerance, tolerance or no. As I look into this issue based on what a sound argument may be as well as facts, logic and evidence, it seems to become apparent why pro-gay researchers try to make claims about "ignorance" so much.

Archive...

2005-03-05T17:49:00.000-08:00

_______________
"The studies of child adjustment of children reared in homosexual homes versus married couple homes are further confounded by the fact that the children in homosexual homes have spent a significant part of their childhood in married couple homes before divorce and often maintain significant contact with non-custodial fathers. In the study by Golombok, Spencer, and Rutter for example, one-third (twelve subjects) had spent at least five years in a home with mothers and fathers before living in a homosexual setting, another one-third had lived in a married couple home for at least two years.
(Susan Golombok et al., Children in Lesbian and Single-Parent Households: Psychosexual and Psychiatric Appraisal, 24 J. CHILD PSYCHOL. & PSYCHIATRY (1983) :561)

Moreover, only three children had never lived in a married couple home. (Ib.) Golombok, Spencer, and Rutter found no difference in gender identity, sex role, and sexual orientation between the homosexual-reared versus heterosexual mother-reared children they studied. (Ib. :568) However, gender identity is established in the preschool years (Michael Rutter, Psychosexual Development, in SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATIONS OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHIATRY 322, 323 (Michael Rutter ed., 1980)) when most of the subjects in both groups had been still residing with their mother and father, and there are theoretical relationships between gender identity, sex role, and sexual orientation."
(Regent University Law Review
14 Regent U.L. Rev. 343, 2001 / 2002
Studies of Homosexual Parenting: A Critical Review
By George Rekers and Mark Kilgus)

_____________
A study of New York children reared by lesbian mothers (mostly in couples) and those reared by divorced homosexual single mothers suggested that"there is a possibility that rearing [by a homosexualparent] might influence [the child's] sexual partner choice, temporarily or permanently."
(Ghazala Afzal Javaid, The Children of Homosexualand Heterosexual Single Mothers, 23
Child Psychiatry & Human Dev. 235, 236 (1993))

Also observed in the previous study was that "a girl in a lesbian homecould be more vulnerable [to developing homosexual attraction] because of an increased awareness of herself in relation to other women .... the effect ofan additional exposure to the subculture"might promote internalized permission for homosexual behaviour."
.....
A 1993 study by Philip A. Belcastro, an independent examination of the methodological validity and reliability of fourteen post-1975 published "data-based studies addressing the affects of homosexualparenting on children's sexual and social functioning," found:

"The most impressive finding is that all of the studies lacked external validity. Furthermore, not a single study remotely represented any sub-population of homosexual parents. This limitation, in terms of scientific inference, is imposing.

With only three exceptions ... the studies' designs presented moderate to fatal threats to their internal validity. Seven studiesdid not utilize a control group and only three studies satisfactorily attempted to match comparison groups....

The majority of studies also suffered from internal validity flawssuch as inadequate instrumentation and disparate testing conditions that ... were well within the researchers' control...

Finally, ...most were biased towards proving homosexual parentswere fit parents....Some of the published works had to disregard their own results in order to conclude that homosexuals were fit parents."

The study concluded that "the statement that there are no significant differences in children reared by homosexual parents versus heterosexual parents is not supportedby the published research base."
(Philip A. Belcastro et al., A Review of Data Based
Studies Addressing the Affects of Homosexual Parenting
on Children's Sexual and Social Functioning
20 J. Divorce & Remarriage A(1993) :105, 110)

....When fathers nurture and care for their children, they do so not quite as "substitute mothers" but differently, as fathers. For example, some studies show that fathers play with their infant children more than mothers, play more physical and tactile games than mothers, and use fewer toys when playing with their children. Mothers tend to talk and play more gently with infant children. Compared to mothers, fathers reportedly appear to "have more positive perceptions of the more irritable sons and less irritable daughters," and perceive their baby daughters to be more cuddly than mothers do. Mothers smile and verbalize more to the infant than fathers do, and generally rate their infant sons as cuddlier than fathers do. Moreover, "men encouraged their children's curiosity in the solution of intellectual and physical challenges, supported the child's persistence in solving problems, and did not become overly solicitous with regard to their child's failures." One study found that six-month-old infants whose fathers were actively involved with them "had higher scores on the Bailey Test of Mental and Motor Development." Infants whose fathers spend more time with them are more socially responsive and better able to withstand stressful situations than infants relatively deprived of substantial interaction with their fathers."
(University of Illinois Law Review1997
U. Ill. L. Rev. 833
The Potential Impact of Homosexual Parenting on Children
By Lynn D. Wardle)

Breath taking!

2005-03-05T13:41:00.000-08:00

"There is more than enough room for honest, philosophical debate on providing benefits to anyone. But that isn't what we got. Instead, we got Karen Johnson launching a speech so filled with hate-mongering and fear-peddling as to be breathtaking.

....She even invented her own illness, something she called "gay bowel disease," an ailment with which the specialists at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are unfamiliar. But they are getting interested in studying what should be called Bigot's Brain Disease."
(The Arizona Republic
February 14, 1999 Sunday, Final Chaser Arts and Ideas; Pg. E15
Intolerable Behavior: Legislators Guided by Hate,
Capitol Is No Place For Anti-Gay Venom
Byline: Stephen Tuttle)

Typical....

Yet,
"Other authors have reported on the treatment of homosexual men with anorectal diseases, and on the unusual manifestations of AIDS. Croxson et al. reported nine intraepithelial carcinomas of the anus in homosexual men, two of whom already carried the diagnosis of AIDS. Four of the remaining seven patients were reclassified as either ARC or AIDS-P prior to publication of the manuscript. Otherwise "healthy" homosexual men with anorectal diseases have been reclassified asAIDS patients soon after presenting with anorectaldisease. The gay bowel syndrome has been describedas a constellation of diseases in homosexual men at high risk for AIDS. This syndrome includes anal and colorectal infections with gonorrhea, secondary syphilis, condylomata lata and condylomata acuminata, chlamydia, salmonella, cryptosporidium, campylobacter, shiegella, giardia, entamoeba, herpessimplex virus and cytomegalovirus. All of these are diseases for which the colorectal surgeon is likely to be consulted with increasing frequency and widening geographic distribution over the next few years. In this study, 116 of 340 patients (34 percent) with AIDS, ARC, and AIDS-P had anorectal pathology. Fifty-two patients (15 percent) presented with a complaint of anorectal disease and had an average life expectancy of 7.4 months. Fifty-one patients (15 percent) were treated surgically, resulting in a postoperative complication and mortality rate approaching 90 percent. This compares with a less than 5 percent postoperative complication rate following anorectal surgery in otherwise healthy patients. Because the colorectal surgeon may be first to evaluate the homosexual patient, an exhaustive history must be taken.Homosexual men with anorectal pathology must bequeried about recurrent anorectal venereal disease, colonic enteric infection, herpses zoster, and oral candidiasis."
(The Surgical Management of Anorectal Diseases in AIDS and Pre-AIDS Patients
By Steven D. Wexner, M.D., William B. Smithy, M.D., Jeffrey W. Willsom, M.D.,Thomas H. Daly, M.D. November, 1986
Diseases of the Colon & Rectum1986; 29: 719-723)

This pattern reminded me of that,
"This is perhaps the most ignorant and offensive comment I've read from you yet on this topic. It is the one that made me stop to cool down before responding at such length. This is so clearly an erroneous assertion that I hardly know where to begin. After all, how does one begin to answer the illogic in something so ridiculous? What logical response is there to someone who blindly asserts a causal relationship that simply does not exist? ....There's really no way to refute an idea that exists isolated in a bubble solely in someone's mind. To say that changing cultural views would cause men to be gay is just as absurd." (emphasis added)

Yet,

"Broude (Broude, G. 1981. The Cultural Management of Sexuality. Ref. 279. :633-73) concludes that child training can have a profound effect on adult sexual orientation."
(The Cross-Cultural Study of Human Sexuality,
Annual Review of Anthropology,Vol. 16, 1987,
By D. L. Davis, R. G. Whitten :98)

Of course it does.

And so on. This is an obvious point, sexuality is relative to culture. Anyone vaguely acquainted with history ought to know that. No one is saying that there will be some sudden change, everyone's form of sexuality will change tomorrow if SSM is enacted! No, it is more generational. One has to wonder about just how ignorant pro-gay people are sometimes, perhaps that is why they project about "ignorance" so often. But think about it, history and anthropology show that sexuality is relative to culture. If you go by your own feelings it certainly may not feel so. No one is saying that it will feel so in your feely feelings. It is not a personal issue. To shift to the personal on such a broad issue is to take a myopic and subjective focus.

That disregard for posterity and myopic focus only makes sense if you are narcissistic. Perhaps if gender narcissism begins to become narcissism then that focus makes sense. In that case Gays© would tend to have such a subjective focus as the result of gender narcissism. To make matters worse, as I think one study on effeminacy put it, "Tends to cry about nothing...." And so, I suppose that one has to tell the activist to catch their breath, calm down, etc. These fellows get upset sometimes! It's breath taking, living in a bubble. After all, if you take the breath then there is none left for the others in the bubble! And that means you are the Big Meanie.

A series of posts...

2005-03-05T12:35:00.000-08:00

I'm going to take a little time here and write some refutations of the usual memes and talking points of the average Gay© activist. This way, I will have some links to refer to instead of providing the same research and so on every time the issue comes up on blogs and the like. The Gay© activist is typically following along in a stream of cultural scripts and memes that have been made for them, passively, guided along by feelings and emotional conditioning in some rather effeminate way.

A generic example,
"Being gay does not give you HIV. HIV is transmitted, primarily, by chosen risk behaviors."

The typical activist has to rely on some scripts and the like about "being Gay©." This is a core tenet. You are not allowed to say anything about what Gay© is. Only they can say the Gay©, all that you say of their manufacturing of the Gay© identity will be "stereotype" and the like. They have to control the type, by censorship if necessary.

In that sentence the manufacturing of the Gay© identity is being divorced from the risky behavior patterns that are inherent to male homosexuality. The form of sexuality neglects the complementarity of the sexes and in so doing amplifies male promiscuity and male risk taking to levels that destroy the subculture in which the complementarity of the sexes is denied.

On a broad cultural scale in the West, the invention of the Gay© identity ("being Gay©") and its linkage to the civil rights movement is associated with AIDS.
"The introduction of the [AIDS] epidemic to developed countries, such as the UnitedStates, followed relatively soon after the 'gay revolution' that had its origins in the riot at the Stonewall Inn, a bar frequentedby homosexual men, in New York City in 1969.....

Similar patterns soon followed in other developed countries, such as Canada, Australia, and those of western Europe."
(The AIDS Epidemic -- Considerations
for the 21st Century.
By Fauci, Anthony S.
The New England Journal of Medicine
September 30, 1999; 341: 1046-1050)

At this point the Gay© activist is sure to engage in some handwaving towards HIV in Africa or other less developed nations.

The first thing that should be noted is the consistent failure to take any responsibility, any at all, among those who go so far as to claim to be the hapless victims of their genetics. It does not just harm their own welfare, it harms others.

The invention of the Gay© identity itself and the way that he Old Press writes cultural scripts for it also takes its toll.

"If the New York Times and other mass media had given the first thousand AIDS victims even a fraction of the coverage given to the seven victims of poisonedTylenol capsules, millons of Americans would have learned of the new disease much earlier, and tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans who are now dead might be living. Instead, the Times published fifty-four stories on the Tylenol affair (several on the front page) and a total of three stories on AIDS— none of which appeared on the front page, and none of which used the words 'sex' or 'homosexual.'"
(Homosexuality and American Public Life,
Edited by Chrisopher Wolfe
(Dallas: Spence Publishing Company)1999, :122)

Typically, the Gay© activist will also want things both ways on the issue of HIV. They will say that HIV has nothing to do with Gay©. But then they will say that Gays© have something to do with stopping it now, unlike the old times. But they never took responsibility in the first place, instead they try to blame Reagan for their own behavior patterns. Yes, blame the President for your own sexual behavior and sexual ethics. It is amazing just how far and contorted things can get. They also want things both ways here, there is no problem with Gay©...but they are fixing it.

On the issue of HIV there will be some vague handwaving towards Africa or other underdeveloped nations, yet the issue there is the same issue of sexual ethics. That has something to do with they such nations are underdeveloped, the fiscal is the social, the social is the ethical. I was conversing with a Hindu once about cultural taboos and what prejudices are pancultural and the like. They said that "sexual perversion" is a luxury that Indians cannot afford. The Gay© activist pointing to other nations to avoid responsibility is pointing to that which makes the case for the civilization of the West that they work to undermine. At times this undermining of civilization can be very clear, as when they begin to argue that what is natural for animals is "natural" for man.

I will finish this post by citing some research. It is not dated the way that the Gay© activist will argue. Feces in the bloodstream and the like are still just as unhealthy now as they were at another date. Excrement has not evolved, so what has changed? All that has changed is the modern manufacturing of the Gay© identity and attempts to destroy the reputation of anyone who would let true information get out into the Old Press. Does the new Gay© identity in which Gays© are saints, the apostles of tolerance, truth and love (Besides having a higher aesthetic sense too! ) prevent the health impact of "being Gay©"? Does it negate the reality of the complementarity of the sexes? Of course it does not, nor does the manipulation of pop-culture and the MTVeee generation prove anything about the general welfare in the real world. Note that the problems associated with denying the complementarity of the sexes have to do with more than HIV.

E.g.,
"The special intestinal and anorectal problems of male homosexuals,the so-called 'gay bowel syndrome,' are often unfamiliar to pediatricians. Symptoms may range from minimal abdominal or rectal discomfort to fulminant dysentery. Both infectious and noninfectious causes have been described. (Sohn N, Robilotti JG.The gay bowel syndrome: a review of colonic and rectalconditions in 200 male homosexuals. Am J Gastroenterol1977; 67: 478-84)

In a vigorous investigation of the infectious agents, Quinn et al.(Quinn TC, Stamm WE, Goodell SE. The polymicrobialorigin of intestinal infections in homosexual man, N Engl J Med 1983; 309: 576-82.) identified specific enteric pathogens in 80 percent of homosexual males with gastrointestinal complaints and in 39 percent of homosexual controls. Neisseria gonorrheae, HSV, and Treponema pallidum are identified in 60 percentof cases of proctitis. Campylobacter species, Shigellaflexneri, Chlamydia trachomatis, Entamoeba histolytica, and Clostridium difficile are identified in 60 percentof cases of proctocolitis. Giardia lambdia is the single agent significantly correlated with enteritis. Once again,the sexual history is a critical item in the evaluation of the adolescent with abdominal complaints. When a history of homosexual practices is elicited, a thorough microbiologicaland endoscopical investigation may be indicated. The reader isreferred to the work of Quinn and colleagues (Quin et al.) for a detailed discussion of the diagnostic evaluation.The final category of sexually related illnesses is the acquired mmunodeficiency syndrome with its infectiousand neoplastic complications....."
(Pediatrics Adolescent Homosexuality;Issues for Pediatricians
By Gary J. Remafedi, MD
Clinical Pediatrics ClinPediatr (Phila) 1985; 24: 481-485)

I'd like to know what these Gay© activists would write to a San Fransico father who's eighteen year old son is being manipulated to "come out" by an older man. That pattern is not exactly atypical. I'd certainly not tell the father this, but here is what seems to me would most likely happen. His son is mentored into a whole community of tolerance and acceptance. Then his son gets HIV or some other problem mysteriously comes up that I'd rather not note. So eventually, his son dies. The father buries his son and will not allow the older "partner" to come to the funeral, etc. Then the Gay© activists write another cultural script about the father's ignorance, hatred and intolerance on their webpages, a script that is reported by the Old Press. Perhaps they use some imagery that Fred Phelps supplies, it is just another instance of homophobia and bigotry by a father against effete Victims.

Then the MTVeee generation begins to feel, "You know, Gay© is good!" And maybe those who are dead in the head and easy subjects for emotional conditioning begin to get mysterious illnesses more and more too. (What is interesting is the impact of cultural scripts and memes on a person like Ed. Not exactly a free-thinker, that one. He claims to be fighting HIV, then promotes the very things that are associated with it.) I'll make another post in this series about medical facts, comparing "gay bowel syndrome" to the sort of thing that researchers say about the host of "problems" or "risky behavior" now.

The Left tries to speak....

2005-03-03T17:00:00.000-08:00

From the guy who feels he is waging a culture war, "Here's the arch-moron mynym's latest response to me, wherein he still is too stupid to understand the difference between a public form and a private one."

I never made a legal case about the supposedly public nature of his forums, etc. This is nothing. He's going on tangents about his precious privacy after he writes ignorant and stupid things on the internet (of all places) and then censoring because things like the complementarity of the sexes are all too obvious. What I wrote can be proven, his memes and prejudices based on how nice he feels that Gays© are cannot be. But behold the power of some pseudo-religoius Gay© witnessing and proselytizing, it is rather amazing. I mean, I know some nice Christians but that does not mean I agree with every public policy they may want. Nor would I support something that went against the general welfare just because there were some nice Christians who wanted it. But with the Gays©, their modern saints, social Leftists seem to make exceptions on everything and for everything. This fellow seems to be no exception.

"I'm not going to bother with a line by line refutation of it."

Of course not....

Because, for one thing, you can't. That is why another fellow changed the lines with an odd sort of editing job instead of attempting to refute them. And he also fails to argue the validity of the complementarity of the sexes, yet then acts as if it is not valid. The Yin and the Yang and so on are at the foundation of what I am writing about marriage and SSM. His failure and your failure are telling. It's little wonder that so many are voting against the social Left.

"If you feel like it, go there and pick out all the logical fallacies yourself."

A lot of claims have been made by the Left, not much proof, other than manufacturing some total non-issue about private and public....he likes to talk about what is rational. But it seems that he has no rationale for rationality. He seems to be one of those who will only have rationalizations about it.

"Most amusing thing about it: he actually thinks he was stopped from commenting here because he was disproving me."

That's because I was. From that absurd interracial marriage argument to your false sort of "equality" arguments. Racial discrimination and sex discrimination are far from comparable, nor is it apparent why anyone should want a sex-blind society in the same sense that a color-blind society is desirable. Forms of sexuality that are clearly not "equal," should not be treated as if they are equal.

Uh oh...

2005-03-02T14:32:00.000-08:00

Someone is tripping and slipping a bit in one of the comments sections on Right2Left. He did a decent job of writing for the other side. But that may be all for him, I think.

I may deal with the studies he brought up at some point if I have the time.

Right2Left...

2005-03-01T17:42:00.000-08:00

I am going to begin writing down a theory and assembling some evidence, between a lot of other things. So, see what you think of some ideas about a continuum between transcendence and immanence and its associations with the masculine and feminine.

The Right falls more to the side of the masculine and transcendence. For instance, after 9/11 American politics went to the Right because the masculine is emphasized for its ethos of provision and protection. The Left is typically more nurturing and focused on healthcare. It is interesting that the leaders of the American Left have some problems based on such an immanent focus being rather feminine. Examples, Al Gore has to be more of an "Alpha Male," he grows a beard, then he shaves, etc. It's rather humorous. John Kerry has to have a hunter shoot some ducks for him and then pretend that he shot them. Dean says something like, "We have to reach out to the people we are missing on God, guns and gays." I don't recall the exact comment. But I do recall the growling. What was it, "Yeeeaaargh!" Yee haw!

God, guns and gays, what are those three issues

Father God, provision and protection, effeminacy.

Yes, you are missing some people there. There are those who make an issue of the gender divide with respect to the Right not winning enough votes from women. Yet the Left has its problems with men...and increasingly with women too. It is interesting to note that married women lean toward the Right more.

When the Left starts obsessing over healthcare too much it is almost as if they want to breast feed the nation and then change all our diapers. The simple fact is, most people do not want to be treated as a baby by such smothering mothers. And it is not smart politically to take these patterns of immanence and transcendence too far in either direction. It is not smart for the Left anymore than the Right ought to focus on transcendence to the point of flying off and denying physical existence altogether. (E.g., some Taliban man hopping on a plane, etc. That is hyper-masculinity, typical to Islamism.)

The blindness of the America Left is rather humorous. They seem blind to the electorate and they seem to feel that creating an "Alpha Male" will help their troubles. (It's not going to help if you say that is what you are doing. Duh. Being a man is something you are, it is not something you act. It is authentic. Some inauthentic acting just makes the whole situation much, much worse, exacerbating the original problem. The irony!) Then there is Gore's whole mommy Earth thing that is typical to the Left. It is not that these patterns are necessarily good or bad. Good or bad, I don't know that you can win an election by appealing mainly to single women and some effeminate men no matter how strong you are as an incumbent in decent economic times or how weak the candidate of the Right is.

I'll finish this later, maybe much later. I have some old writing and some evidence for the beginnings of a theory somewhere that I probably ought to read again. So reader, you can jump in and try to tear into such a theory if you want. (Just try to know what you're talking about, lest your ideas be the ones to be torn apart.)

Later.

The Complementarity of the Sexes

2005-02-28T17:31:00.000-08:00

...since I've been mentioning it some, I will prove it some. Sometimes it is rather sexy. But it is also a basic, biosocial reality that is denied by the radical egalitarianism at the root of SSM. (Same sex marriage)

Booring....but anyway, at each point of complementarity based on a hetero sort of difference within marriage there is something missing in homosexuality. First things first, you would not be reading this if not for the complementarity of the sexes. The complementarity of the sexes at the root of Romance, civilization, etc., is not something easy to deny or obfuscate.

Some things that will or may be missing,
"Involved fathers typically initiate more active play and are more tolerant of physical exploration by infants than mothers....In their efforts to encourage infant competence, mothers are generally more concerned with verbal-intellectual teaching, whereas fathers are more oriented toward active, arousing play and fostering autonomy and independence."
(Henry B. Biller, Father and Families:
Paternal Factors in Child Development,
Auburn House, Westport, Connecticut, 1993)

In a study of 42 families of young children, mothers were more likely to use indirect forms of communication such as questions, directives, and suggestions, while fathers tended to use direct forms of communications such as imperatives. Mothers in the study were found to be less direct and tried to elicit compliance and cooperation from their children. Fathers in the study offered a model of directiveness and self assertion. In measures of compliance or obedience toward their mothers and fathers, although girls did not differ in their rates of compliance to mothers and fathers, boys showed higher levels of compliance to their fathers than to their mothers.
(Thomas G. Power, Marianne McGrath, Sheryl O. Hughes, and Sarah H. Manire, "Compliance and Self-Assertion:Young Children’s Responses to Mothers Versus Fathers," Developmental Psychology, 30 (1994): 980-989)

"The author puts play in a central position in his model, as central to fathering as nurturance to mothering, and then ascribes an essential function to it, that of opening the child up to the world, as essential to development as providing a sense of security. The author presents the case that the unique aspects of father child play make positive contributions to early development."
(Do Fathers Just Want to Have Fun? Commentary on Theorizing the Father-Child Relationship
By Roggman, Lori A.)

Gender identity,
"...the security of the boy's attachment to his mother, in providing the foundation for a transitional turning to an 'other', and the mother's capacity to reflect upon and recognize her own, as well as the father's and her son's, subjectivity and maleness, are crucial in comprehending boys' 'attachment-individuation' process. Likewise, the unconscious paternal and maternal imagos and identifications of both the boy's mother and father, as well as the father's pre-oedipal relationship with his little boy and the boy's mother, are extremely significant in shaping a son's gender identity. The author argues that these early maternal (and paternal) identifications live on in every male and continue to impact the sense of maleness in a dialectical interplay throughout the life span."
(The shaping of masculinity: Revisioning boys turning
away from their mothers to construct male gender identity
By Michael J. Diamond
International Journal of Psychoanalysis
Vol 85(2), Apr 2004, pp. 359-379)

Note the issue of gender identity disorder and homosexuality, they go together. On the issue of gender identity development, there is evidence that boys resent their mom's (typically masculine) lesbian partner.

It is only in the case of homosexuality where Americans have beeen conditioned to begin to make special exceptions. Pediatricians will argue that there is "no difference" between homosexuality and heterosexuality when it comes to parenting and then they will list "special challenges" faced by gay parents. The average person also tends to believe in some cultural scripts in which homosexuality is treated as a special form of sexuality. For example, no matter how "oriented" a man is by the sexual orientation he was born with to sleep with many different women, people will not make excuses for him and the impact his promiscuity or divorce will have on his children. Yet thanks to a lot of positive emotional conditioning and the cultural creation of some patterns of memes, if the man "comes out" as gay instead of promiscuous and divorces, makes the same mess, etc., he is just being "true to himself" or some such. For otherwise, he would have been "living a lie." Are we all "living a lie" if we do not self define by and act on our sexual desires? Somehow people have come to the position of saying that their own sexual desires define what is true, ethical and moral. That is absurd. Yet that is what they are saying. Unfortunately, sexual desires do not define what is true for children, nor do they really define much of anything. They're not "who you are." They don't define your whole life. Nor will the world come to an end if you are not defined and ruled by your sexual desires.

People are coming to the position of denying basic biosocial realities and natural categories such as male and female, men and women, masculine and feminine, instead focusing on their own self-definitions, sexual desires and the like. It cannot work. (Note that even self-defined gays are still admitting to basic natural categories when they say that they are oriented only to males or females.)

A general summary of what sound research will always show,
"The attributes of mothering and fathering are inherent parts of sex differentiation that paves the way to reproduction. This is where the sociology analogy so often drawn between race and sex breaks down in the most fundamental sense. Genetic assimilation is possible through interracial mating, and we can envisage a society that is color blind. But genetic assimilation of male and female is impossible, and no society will be sex-blind."
(American Sociological Review, Vol. 49,
No.1, Feb., 1984.
Gender and Parenthood
By Alice S. Rossi :10)

In the end, I am only restating in academic terms what the electorate has already voted for again and again. Marriage....

This is just silly, or is it?

2005-02-28T13:15:00.000-08:00

This whole censoring from your blog thing and then continuing to comment that this fellow has going. Actually, it would be rather nice if blogger had a way to link comments together so that you could just write from your own blog.

But anyway, he's running off on a tangent now, the whole SSM issue is lost. And it is lost, because he has no argument for that. It was odd that he kept failing to answer in a thread and then going to his front page to write something. Now this, a back and forth between blogs because he feels the need to censor someone pointing out some of the basic facts of life to him such as the biosocial complementarity of the sexes.

"In a response to my post on his ridiculous equation of private and public forums, mynym has taken his own already-established absurdity and raised it to a whole new level. In response to my statement that "The Constitution's free speech provision applies to governments....", he replies, "But a principle that the law is based on applies to all." But he is obviously wrong. If someone came into your home and called your wife a whore, and you threw him out of your house, would you say that you have violated the principle of free speech? Of course not."

So now his blog is "like" his house and pointing out the basic facts of life to him or calling his viewpoints ignorant and stupid is "like" coming into his house and calling his wife a whore. (This is odd writing "him" as if he doesn't read this. So I'll just say you.) You don't think that the censors at the university also have some associative arguments and victimization propaganda up their sleeves to justify their own censorship? Of course they will make the same type of arguments for their censorship, just as you make for your own. The censor never thinks that their censorship is wrong and will always provide some argument for it, typically they will be increasingly inane. You cannot even quote something and demonstrate, "This needed to be censored." Instead, you have your rationalizations, just as the Leftist university does. They have their victimization propaganda too. In fact, victimization is generally the way that the modern censor attempts to justify themselves. So you pretend or make some associative argument about how I've supposedly victimized you. If you are a Victim of having ignorant and stupid ideas refuted, then so be it. You are free to censor.

As to this analogy,
If one really must use such an analogy then it is more like Ed is waging a "culture war" from his house, he speaks from his front porch and then people walking down the street may listen or come on to his lawn to talk about his "culture war." But if someone comes along who starts disproving Ed on something then he gets a lil' upset about it all. Then he calls the police to make the person get off of his lawn. So the person goes across the street to their own house and Ed is disproven anyway.

"If someone stood up in the middle of a restaurant and began screaming out a political speech and disturbing the other diners who are just there to eat their lunch, would the restaurant owner be violating the principle of free speech by removing the offending person from his restaurant? Again, of course not."

I know, and what if two people were in a truck having a conversation. But then, they disagreed. (gasp!) They argued quite vociferously! So the owner of the truck told the passenger to get out, then they left them on the side of the road. (yikes!) What does this associative argument have to do with blogging where there is a forum specifically for writing? Pretty much nothing, but I say that if you're going to have an associative argument that evokes some emotions, one may as well have some trucks in it. Otherwise, how will the people in other associative arguments get to the restaurant to see the show?

"If someone stood up in the middle of a church service and began to call the people there stupid and ignorant because of their religious beliefs, would the church be violating the principle of free speech by having him removed for disrupting a church service? Again the answer is, of course not."

And now, your blog is like a church service! Look, I think you need to change the name of your blog from "culture war" to "I'm just a prissy lil' fella who does not like to be disturbed."

"Because all sane people....recognize that there is no principle of free speech that applies in someone else's home or business or privately owned forum. They own it, and if you choose to go there, you implicitly agree to abide by their rules."

It's really too bad, everything that Leftists touch seems to turn into censorship and attempted emotional conditioning, etc. It's the same in the university. To my fellow bloggers, do not change the blogs into this nonsense based on the principles that he is trying to set up. Rather, try to uphold the principle of free speech much better than this little fella with all his supposed victimization does. Yes, funny but true, no one is coming into his house to attack his wife or anything of the sort.

"Now here's what is so funny about this. The only person who has thus far been banned from commenting at the Panda's Thumb is Great White Wonder."

Wrong. And the thing about it is that one really cannot tell on Leftist blogs just what is going on. Perhaps they have censored all their strongest or most vociferous opposition. Blogs do give the appearance of allowing free speech, but it seems increasingly important to note that on Leftist blogs that may be just an appearance.

"If anything, we've shown far more leeway to....even to mynym himself....."

I'd like to see what you are talking about, this claim that I need "leeway." I am curious about what gives you the impulse to censor. I have some ideas about it. It seems that the same urge to merge is there in the SSM issue as in the evolution issue. And that is part of the pattern. It is a proto-Nazi pattern, thus the rumblings of and attempted justification of censorship.

"See, this is a perfect illustration of the absurdity of the argumentum ad labelum. He has labelled me a "leftist" and therefore assumed that I would support the violation of free speech through the recent campaign finance reforms. But in fact I have strongly opposed those reforms as unconstitutional in numerous posts on this blog over the last year and a half. I should also point out that even if his assumption was not completely false, it would still be a ridiculous thing to label those reforms as "leftist" given that Bush went to court during the campaign to go even further than the BCFRA did and also try to ban all soft money organizations from buying ads."

The impulse for "reform" generally came from progressives on the Left, and I did not say that you specifically, were one of them. Politics is a messy business, one that must deal in generalizations. For one who labels their blog a part of the "war" you do not seem very aware of how it is fought. Politics is generalizations, if you want to note or argue that you do not fit a pattern then that is fine with me. Ironically, this whole pattern recognition and so on is a part of the evolution debate.

All I would say of you specifically is that you have demonstrated yourself to be a radical egalitarian (or social Leftist) by taking political positions in denial of such a basic biosocial fact as the complementarity of the sexes.

I hope you understand that biosocial is a word, just like complementarity.

"But such facts are completely lost upon people like mynym, who simply are incapable of thinking beyond this simple left vs. right dichotomy. They just can't go any deeper than argument by label."

All words are labels, all types are not stereotypes....

I think you have the urge to merge. A failure to discriminate will make you indiscriminate. That Left vs. Right dichotomy is there and is a very real pattern to things. Pattern recognition, this begins to leave evolutionists behind.

"....he still insists on grouping me in with the very people I oppose?"

A hypocrite who condemns others, actually stands with them. Again, do you honestly think that the professors and the like who seek to censor do not also have emotionally based or associative arguments as to why it is all so very justified?

I appreciate that you do not fit all the way into the most radical portions of Leftism, few people do.

"Just a textbook example of how the mediocre mind gets trapped inside these false dichotomies and is incapable of extricating itself to see beyond the label."

The Right and the Left is a very real and true dichotomy. All words are labels, most based on patterns and pattern recognition and definition, they are a way to insight.

"This is of course a very common tactic among those who simply cannot help but portray themselves as persecuted martyrs."

Sheesh, have I made associative arguments that you are a Big Meanie coming into my house to call my wife a whore, etc.? Let's face facts here, you have the urge to merge. It seems that you feel that anything that may draw you up or out is victimization, like someone coming into your house or what not. Like most on the American Left these days you want to avoid definition and the discrimination that comes with words and labels. In fact, it seems that you do not know that some words exist. That's one way to avoid them, I suppose.

All I would say about you specifically is that you are a social Leftist because of the radical egalitarianism you illustrate with respect to SSM.

"And even while banning my last two trollers, Robert O'Brien and Mynym, I have also provided links to their blogs, wherein they exercise their constitutional right to speak their mind and call me names and the like."

It is just important to note when reading the Panda's Thumb and these other blogs of the Left that there is no telling what sound opposition has been censored away, given their tendency. The sad thing is that some people will assume by the fact that they have comments that the principle of free speech is adhered to.

They will no doubt object to the category of Left. What is it that keeps on slithering about in words trying to avoid all definition, anyway? Words are definition, by definition! I think they need to read some Karl Kraus. Evolutionists, they are probably too busy picking up rocks from the bottom of the sea and saying, "You know, this looks a little like that. ....Hey, maybe it came from that! ...or, well, at least has a common ancestor. Are you sure there is not some way we can merge this? Because I have the urge to merge!"

And again.....

2005-02-27T19:52:00.000-08:00

One might wonder what the point of Leftist censorship is if the Leftist who loses an argument reeeally seems to want to continue it anyway. He's probably still trying to think of something to say against the basic biosocial facts having to do with the complementarity of the sexes. (Or his own illiteracy in not knowing of the existence of words like complementarity? Who can say....I need to be writing parables, but I'll spare some time again. After all, here I do not have to worry about censorship, illiteracy or sniveling about writing too fast for some little fellows.)

"Come on, tell the truth. You all missed mynym, didn't you? Well let me show you his latest bit of stupidity, wherein he takes me to task for opposing censorship by a public university while banning him from leaving comments here. It seem that our favorite little halfwit still doesn't recognize the difference between a private forum and a public one."

So he's borrowing my writing against him, apparently. The problem that is left on the social Left are the nitwits who deny the spirit of the writ. They are human, all too human, almost just humus. They are those who know not the spirit of the writ, until the verse that brings their hearse. They perceive, yet do not conceive, and so only deceive. Who will exchange the conceptual for the perceptual?

He lacks principle. How will you advocate to make laws without adhering to principles?

"The Constitution's free speech provision applies to governments...."

But a principle that the law is based on applies to all.

"...not to privately owned webpages, or family homes, or even privately owned businesses."

Why even bother having a section for comments or dialogue if one only wants a monologue? He has his little yes men, that is certain. Left2Right does the same thing, and so does the Panda's Thumb, all these Leftist blogs seem to censor. This does not surprise me in the least. If these people actually had power they would rationalize censorship based on their principles and then the law would begin to reflect that. He is arguing backward, that he law comes before principles.

"This webpage, on the other hand, is privately owned. I pay for the domain name and for the web hosting. So guess what? I decide what is allowed to be posted here and what does not."

I.e., his blogs reflect the principles he upholds. Imagine that, and one of his principles is censorship on a forum in which political speech takes place. The position that social Leftists come to is the exact opposite of the Founders. They seek to protect non-speech like pornography and do away with free political speech through the latest "reforms" in campaign finance and so on.

"Free speech doesn't mean you can say anything you want to anyone you want at any time or place you choose."

I didn't say it did. I say that a blog based on political writings represents the writer's principles. The principle on the Left is censorship, illustrated from the Panda's Thumb to this fellow's blog too.

"It means that the government cannot restrain or punish your speech except in certain very narrowly drawn circumstances. It is perfectly legal for someone to rant and rave about how much they hate gay people, for example, and I would fight for their right to do so free from government interference."

The government is not all that censors. (Ever go to the video store and see, "The uncensored version!" Etc.) That's a silly argument. Ironically, censorship almost always seems to draw more attention to the subject than not because then people think it is worth censoring. (

"That is precisely why I oppose hate speech codes at public universities. But if you rant and rave like that at my home, I'm going to throw you out on your ass..."

It's very easy to censor these days, first you invent some Gay© People and then claim that someone hates your People. Then you are just protecting "them," you see.

I think I shall invent some Smart People and protect them from this fellow's inanity. They might illustrate the inanity of failing to see that the issue is one of principle, as that is how laws having to do with free speech get written in the first place. But I do not need to invent a group of Smart People and then claim that he hates them. I do not have any need to censor this little fella. It's the social Leftists of the universities and the blogs Left2Right, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Panda's Thumb, etc. It is a pattern right in the university itself, thanks to its Leftward tilt. That is why it is ironic that this fellow tries to set himself up to criticize the university based on legality instead of principle to avoid his own hypocrisy. That is an inversion, the principle makes for the law, not the other way around.

By the way, hatred and such judgments about intents and motivations are irrelevant, someone can love gays and still be being ignorant and stupid, while someone can hate gays and still be factually correct. Is hatred or love going to change such basic biosocial facts as the complementarity of the sexes? Nope. So why do social Leftists mainly argue about everyone's intents, motivations, supposed phobias and feeelings in general? Well, it's all really rather silly and it seems to have to do with a pattern of neurosis. But that is another issue. Suffice it to say that even if someone hates or loves(!), that will not change some basic forms of knowledge or the facts, logic or evidence on a public policy issue.

But hatred....don't you just hate that? How does that make you feel?

I feel fine, but I think this little fella will pretty consistently be trying to tell me what my feely feelings supposedly are. Hatred....or whatever he's most likely projecting at the moment. Feelings are like that, they're subjective, personal and your own more than anyone else's. You start dealing only in them and you're saying more about your subjective Self than much else.

Do I feel the same need to try to tell him what his feelings are? Nope.

That is ironic.

2005-02-27T07:26:00.000-08:00

This fellow who censors, criticizing censorship.

"The faculty senate resolution calls on the university to "develop clear policies restricting any behavior which demeans or reduces an individual based on group affiliation or personal characteristics." This vague demand for censorship did not receive a single no vote. Read that again. In a university, an institution specifically designed for the free exchange of ideas, not one member of the faculty senate thought it would be a bad idea to restrict any speech that they viewed as "demeaning" or "reducing" an individual based on "group affiliation of personal characteristics." By this vague language, anything anyone finds insulting could be restricted."
Dispatches from the Culture Wars

He is the same fellow who begins the Kulture Kampf typical to social Leftists and then just cannot stand the war. Ironically, on his blog his own "vague demand for censorship" failed to receive a single no vote among social Leftists. Read that again. On a political blog, something specifically designed for a free exchange of ideas, not one social Leftist thought that censorship was a bad idea. Duh. That seems to be the way they are. As history shows, when they get into a position of power, a totalitarian sort of censorship seems almost certain to follow. On his own blog that patterns holds.

Why is this fellow surprised at Leftists? It is his own pattern too. I would cite his equally vague "reasons" for his own censorship, but why bother. It is quite ironic. Apparently he has his own push button issues that he becomes a censorious bigot on, just as they do. I choose that term carefully, as he seemed to be seeking to protect his own ignorance on a social issue.

(A note of update, I criticize his social Leftism and radical egalitarianism. I have not attempted to say anything about his fiscal views. On that, I would only note that the fiscal is an element of the social. There is not as much a difference between the two as one may think.)

2005-02-26T21:11:00.000-08:00

A blogging note, I tend to write on Into Good and Evil more than on Right2Leftists.

2005-02-26T19:35:00.000-08:00

Archive

From Darwin to Hitler

2005-02-25T21:12:00.000-08:00

"The Negro is far removed from the European and close to the ape through its small build, through the relatively small breadth of its skull, through its relatively long upper limbs, and further the relatively short length of the thigh....

Also the Negro is more animal, in that it gives off a disgusting odor, distorts its face in grimaces, and its voice has a harsh, grating tone."
(From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany
By Richard Weikart, 2004
(USA: Palgrave Macmillan) :112)

The Conservation of Conservatism

2005-02-25T21:05:00.000-08:00

"I agree with you that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country."
Thomas Jefferson to Hugh P. Taylor, October 4, 1823

Part of the Socialism in National Socialism

2005-02-25T16:13:00.000-08:00

"The system of myriad business and trade associations organized during the Republic was maintained by the Nazis, though under the basic law of February 27, 1934, they were reorganized onthe streamlined leadership principle and put under the control of the State. All businesses were forced to become members. At the head of an incredibly complex structure was the Reich Economic chamber, whose leader was appointed by the State, and which controlled seven national economic groups, twenty-three economic chambers, one hundred chambers of industry andcommerce and the seventy chambers of handicrafts. Amidst this labyrinthine organization and all the multitude of offices and agencies of the Ministry of Economics and the Four-Year Plan and the Niagara of thousands of special decrees and laws even the most astute businessman was often lost, and special lawyers had to be employed to enable a firm to function. The graft involved in finding one’s way to key officials who could make decisions on which orders depended or in circumventing the endless rules and regulations of the government and the trade associations became in the late Thirties astronomical."
(The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
By William L. Shirer. (Simon and Schuster) 1990 :262)

Me...

2005-02-23T18:23:00.000-08:00

Me in Technorati, currently...

About me blogs...

2005-02-22T18:13:00.000-08:00

Right2Left is suggested reading, because it is written by a zealot, a very zealous one!

Well, not zealous enough to write much of anything else today, besides what has already been written. I'll have to work on this whole zeal thing.

Christianity in American History

2005-02-20T20:27:00.000-08:00

"Whereas the general diffusion of Christian knowledge hath a natural tendency to correct the morals of men, refrain their vices, and preserve the peace of society; which cannot be effected without a competent provision for learned teachers, who may thereby devote their time and attention to the duty of instructing such citizens.

...it is judged that such provision may be made by the Legislature, without counteracting the liberal principle heretofore adopted and intended to be preserved by abolishing all distinctions of pre-eminence amongst the different societies or communities of Christians."
(George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741-1799: Series 4.
General Correspondence. 1697-1799
Virginia House of Delegates, December 24, 1784,
Bill for "Teachers of the Christian Religion")

Yeah, yeah...

2005-02-20T16:24:00.000-08:00

"You know it's amazing. This person isn't the only one who is still citing this dated figure. Robert Knight cited it a few years ago during the Boy Scouts v. Dale case, right before Bryant Gumbel called him a "f--king idiot.""

They cannot overlook the pattern of evidence based on one dated figure. (With respect to the short life-expectancy of gay men.)

That Dale v. Boy Scouts case was one of the most patently absurd cases ever brought. For some reason the social Leftists just do not get it. Yes, if you put yourself on the side of sexual perversions mixed with judicial diktats vs. the Boy Scouts then you are going to lose elections. Yeah, surprising, yet true!

As to the figure, I can most likely update that figure. But it doesn't matter given that the social Left are some of the most censorious bigots these days. I have little use for an issue that they keep pounding their heads against an electoral wall on.

It might be interesting to discuss some of the merits, etc., in passing, politically it seems to be done. This fellow running a blog on the Kulture Kampf of the cultural left may as well give it up. Indeed, in the usual pattern of censorship, he already did give up. And now they write about their little "studies" and things that no one is there to answer, as if that proves something after censoring any opposition.

You may as well use a self-selected sample of wealthy lesbians compared to single mothers to argue that "homo"sexuality is "no different" than "hetero"sexuality. Wait a minute....they already did that. I wonder, do these little fellas even understand that the sexes are "different?"

And again...

2005-02-20T09:41:00.000-08:00

This fellow just keeps making ignorant and stupid arguments. He makes arguments which are refuted and then says, "I did not make that argument." Then he goes back to his front page and makes the same ignorant and stupid arguments again. It seems he gets a little frustrated with it all, soon enough, so there are the sweaty little hands of the censor.

"Well mynym, I gave you a chance to actually give substantive responses, and you failed miserably, doing the same thing you did before. 9 comments in less than an hour and a half, none of them substantive."

As if your ignorant assertions are "substantive"? For one thing, I slowed down for his little blog. Another, there were ten or so nit wits commenting on the side of moral degeneracy. Yet nothing seems to make this lil' fella happy. His "balance" or "equality," is his own totalitarian control, with all his nit wits agreeing.

"You didn't engage any of the actual analysis on the various studies...."

Judge for yourself, and if you really agree with such "studies" then comment here on a free forum that does not rely on censorship. It is interesting to note that if these social Leftists ever got into power it is almost certain that they would continue their pattern of censorship, if they can get away with it. In areas that they control, like the university, they still use censorship.

"....and why the criticisms you cited don't invalidate them, you just repeated the charge of being 'agendized.'"

First I refuted them, then I noted that the reason they were wrong is because they are agendized.

"And of course, the inaccurate claim that I'm "illiterate" for pointing out that the words "agendized" and "complimentarity[sic]" don't exist."

Those are the small points that an Leftist intellectual must rely on, I suppose. But ironically, they are ignorant on that too.

Main Entry: com·ple·men·tar·i·ty
Pronunciation: "käm-pl&-(")men-'tar-&-tE, -m&n-
Function: noun: the quality or state of
being complementary

Main Entry: -ize
Function: verb suffixEtymology: Middle English -isen, from Old French -iser, from Late Latin -izare, from Greek -izein1 a (1) : cause to be or conform to or resemble : cause to be formed into (2) : subject to a (specified) action (3) : impregnate or treat or combine with b : treat like c : treat according to the method of 2 a : become : become like b : be productive in or of : engage in a (specified) activity c : adopt or spread the manner of activity or the teaching of usage The suffix -ize has been productive in English since the time of Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), who claimed credit for introducing it into English to remedy the surplus of monosyllabic words. Almost any noun or adjective can be made into a verb by adding -ize ; many technical terms are coined this way as well as verbs of ethnic derivation and verbs derived from proper names . Nashe noted in 1591 that his coinages in -ize were being complained about, and to this day new words in -ize are sure to draw critical fire.

"But I was right about that. Plug them into dictionary.com, which offers definitions from a dozen or so different dictionaries and it comes up snake eyes on both of them."

What a nit wit! Sheesh....it is not as if I was planning on keeping up with a blog where he records his own stupidity and ignorance all the time. I was just having some fun with some lil' minds.

"So your entire strategy goes like this....invent words, then accuse people of being illiterate for pointing out that they're invented...."

Or a half-wit....he seems lacking in wit, one way or another.

"....quote from people on your side, then completely ignore all substantive criticism of the claims in the quotes...."

This lil' fella calls what he did "substantive"? That's pretty funny.

"...accuse everyone else of "bias" without actually pointing out any factual errors in the arguments..."

The factual and substantive errors in the "research" is doing things like comparing a self-selected sample of wealthy lesbian moms intent on using their children to make some political point (leaving out gay men altogether) to compare to poor single moms and then concluding, "Well, there's no difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality when it comes to parenting!" You've carefully excluded the impact of fathering from the study, that whole "hetero" part of heterosexuality.

Yes, that is substantive. And I cited the peer reviewed literature where such researchers say exactly what they are doing, to "provide lesbians with information for their custody battles."

That is agendized, even if you are too illiterate to understand the term.

"...and of course, spam the blog with as many comments as you can until they ban you."

There's ten or so people writing on his side, yet he just can't stand the truth.

"I'll stop you from dropping this insubstantial drivel on my webpage, so you can now go back to yours and puff yourself up and say, "A-ha, those socialists just can't handle the Truthtm, so they have to censor me!" Crow to your heart's content, it doesn't budge reality one little bit. Goodbye."

Hehe, those socialists just can't handle the truth. But it is best to get them to illustrate that their textual degeneracy is their moral degeneracy, which is why they must rely on censorship.

Quit being such a crybaby about it all. Now you will always know that those "studies" are agendized garbage, even if you cannot allow yourself to admit it thanks to an obstinate sort of bigotry.

Here's what this blog is for....

2005-02-20T09:38:00.000-08:00

To go around Leftist censorship....

From here:

Yet another example of a sterling answer to a simple description of religious left and the social left, i.e. radical egalitarians.

"Sorry for the blatantly off-topic comments."

Interesting to note that you certainly will not be censored, no matter what type of personal attacks you settle on. No, as the sniveling of the "It makes me sick." walk out proves on the topic at hand, there is something more visceral at issue. It seems that radical egalitarians are going with their feeelings, all the time. They do not see what they are saying. Frankly, those here seem rather illiterate and intent on being politically correct instead of textually correct.

As I noted at the top, all any scholar has to do is say, "I'm looking past our typical presumption of radical egalitarianism to seek the truth." And at that point, he will be attacked, censored, walked out on, or there will be a series of inane comments written by mental retards. And the legal scholars so concerned with any "chilling effect" on free speech and the like in other contexts, where are they?

Perhaps they are too busy defending pedophiles and pornographers. That is the "speech" they protect.

Jefferson's Macaroni?

2005-02-19T17:54:00.000-08:00

"Jefferson not only served his guests the best European wines, but he liked to dazzle them with delights such as ice cream, peach flambe, macaroni, and macaroons. This drawing of a macaroni machine, with the sectional view showing holes from which dough could be extruded."

(Thomas Jefferson's drawing of a macaroni machine and instructions for making pasta, ca. 1787, The Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress))

Darwin noting the pattern of Darwinian racism of his day.

2005-02-19T14:09:00.000-08:00

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla."
--Darwin
(Blacks Less Likely to Accept Charles
Darwin's Dethronement of Mankind
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 21. (Autumn, 1998), p.40)

Healthcare and Science in Nazism

2005-02-19T14:08:00.000-08:00

"To be sure, other movements, Marxism and Soviet Communism, for instance, have also claimed scientific validity. But only the Nazis have seen themselves as products and practitioners of the science of life and life processes—as biologically ordained guides to their own and the world’s biological destiny. Whatever their hubris, and whatever the elements of pseudo science and scientism in what they actually did, they identified themselves with the science of their time.....

The contribution of the actual scientific tradition to this ethos was exemplified by the quintessentially German figure of Ernst Haeckel, that formidable biologist and convert to Darwinism who combined with ardent advocacy of the Volk and romantic nationalism, racial regeneration, and anti-Semitism. He was to become what Daniel Gasman has called “Germany’s major prophet of political biology.” "
(The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and
the Psychology of Genocide
By Robert Jay Lifton :441)

2005-02-15T18:03:00.000-08:00

"O CAPTAIN! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead. "

Walt Whitman, on the untimely death of Abraham Lincoln.

Einstein, on Intelligent Design

2005-02-15T15:51:00.000-08:00

"You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a religious feeling of his own.

....His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages."
cf. "The Religious Spirit of Science," in Einstein's Mein Weltbild
(Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934)

Socialism's Heresy, Fascism...

2005-01-24T19:36:00.000-08:00

"What distinguished Nazism from traditional forms of socialism was its febrile nationalism, although not its virulence against despisedpeoples. Marx, as we have seen, looked forward to the "annihilation"of "reactionary races." The examples he gave were "Croats, Pandurs, Czechs and similar scum." He did not in this passage mention Jews, but his desire for their disappearance was amply expressed elsewhere. His aspiration for "the emancipation of society from Judaism" because"the practical Jewish spirit" of "huckstering" had taken over the Christian nations is not that far from the Nazi program's twenty-fourth point: "combating the Jewish-materialist spirit within us and without us" in order "that our nation can.. . achieve permanent health." What also distinguished National Socialism from the mainstream Left was Hitler's insistence that he aimed to "destroy Marxism," and he railed in Mein Kampf against "scatterbrains" who "have not understood the difference between socialism and Marxism. " Yet on other occasions he confessed himself an heir to the Marxian legacy. "National Socialism derives from each of the two camps the pure idea that characterizes it, national resolution from the bourgeois tradition, [and] vital, creative socialism from the teachings of Marxism," he told an interviewer in1934. And his one-time disciple Hermann Rauschning wrote that Hitler once said to him:

I have learned a great deal from Marxism as I do not hesitate to admit....The difference between them and myself is that I have really put intopractice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have timidly begun.The whole of National Socialism is based on it.... National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order."

(Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism.(2002: Encounter Books)
by Joshua Muravchik :164)

2005-01-22T20:30:00.000-08:00

Archive

Charles Sumner and William Lloyd Garrison

2005-01-18T13:42:00.000-08:00

"It is pretended, that I am retarding the cause of emancipation by the coarseness of my invective and the precipitancy of my measures. The charge is not true. On this question my influence--humble as it is--is felt at this moment to a considerable extent, and shall be felt in coming years--not perniciously, but beneficially--not as a curse, but as a blessing; and posterity will bear testimony that I was right. I desire to thank God, that he enables me to disregard "the fear of man which bringetha snare," and to speak his truth in its simplicity and power."
(William Lloyd Garrison 1805-1879)
Garrison was publisher of The Liberator, founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. He had hundredsof death threats made against him for his politically incorrect views that went against the cultural and economic interests of his day.

Charles Sumner,
"Familiarity with that great story of redemption, when God raised up the slave-born Moses to deliver His chosen people from bondage, and with that sublimer story where our Saviour died a cruel death that all men, without distinction of race, might be saved, makes slavery impossible. Because Christians are in the minority there is no reasonfor renouncing Christianity, or for surrendering to the false religions...."
Charles Sumner was a staunch abolitionist and one of the founders of the Republican Party

George Washington

2005-01-17T19:59:00.000-08:00

So often the Founders sound like strong believers in Intelligent Design:
"If it has pleased the Supreme Architect of the Universe to make me an humble instrument to promote the welfare and happiness of my fellow men, my exertions have been abundantly recompensed by the kind partiality with which they have been received; and the assurance you give me of your belief that I have acted upon the Square in my public Capacity, will be among my principle enjoyments in this Terrestial Lodge." --Washington

Abraham Linclon's Inaugural Address

2005-01-15T11:17:00.000-08:00

A few notes,
"Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken his favored land, are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty."

(Some of this is rough draft by Lincoln and his speech writer.)
"....the candid citizen must confess, that if the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, it is plain that the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Nor is there, in this view, any assault upon the Court, or the judges-- It is a duty, from which they may not shrink, to decide cases properly brought before brought before them....."

Lincoln's handwriting,
"I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends-- We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memorys, streching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

(Note 60 The presence of a pointing hand, characteristically drawn by Lincoln, seems to indicate that the handwritten addition "I am loth to close . . ." was intended as a separate paragraph.Lincoln's indebtedness to, and masterful transformation of, Seward's suggested closing paragraph have long been recognized. Seward's text is as follows: "I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but countrym fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly they must not be broken -- they will not, I am sure they will not be broken. The mystic chords which proceeding from every ba so many battle fields and patriot so many patriot graves bind pass through all the hearts and hearths all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet harmon again harmonize in their ancient music when touched as they surely breathed upon again by the better angel guardian angel of the nation".
See William H. Seward, Suggested Changes to First Inaugural Address (February, 1861))
cf.
(Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress.
Transcribed and Annotated by the Lincoln Studies
Center, Knox College. Galesburg, Illinois.
Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, Final Version, March 1861)

He and his speech writer seem like a good team.

2005-01-14T21:41:00.000-08:00

....I thought so.

Some signs are easy to read, a parable of signs and wonders, some of the dry bones that can be its structure:

"Male and female laugh patterns suggest that laughter may be a factor in meeting, matching, and mating. Among young German adults, Grammer and Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1990) observed that the more a woman laughed during an encounter, the greater was her self-reported interest in the man to whom she was talking. In the same vein, men were most interested in women who laughed in their presence. The laughter of the female, not the male, is most predictive of a promising relationship. But not all laughter is equally effective. Bachorowski and Owren (2001) found that voiced laughs make a more positive impression than unvoiced grunts or pants. In an analysis of 3,745 personal ads from eight major U.S. newspapers (Provine, 2000), females were more likely than males to indicate they were seeking a “sense of humor,” whereas men were more likely to offer it. However, women seeking men with a “good sense of humor” are probably looking not for giggly guys, but rather for men who make them laugh, perhaps dominant males. At your next social gathering, observe laugh patterns. Females laugh most in the presence of men whom they find attractive or interesting.

These laughter patterns are particularly revealing because laughter is spontaneous and relatively uncensored, thus showing our true feelings. Laughter, like crying, is difficult to produce on command and, therefore, is an honest signal. We cannot deliberately activate the brain’s mechanism for affective expression laughter is an unplanned response to social, cognitive, and linguistic cues."
(Laughing, Tickling, and the Evolution of Speech and Self
By Robert R. Provine
Current Directions in Psychological Science
Volume 13 Issue 6, December 2004 :216)

You have to separate out the mythological narratives of naturalism that the testy testers sometimes begin to do their story telling with. Later, this testy tester begins to do some storytelling about the breath of life that may need some deconstruction. Some of the things he says seem to need a good satire.

There are valid observations mixed in, sans the storytelling. So there are some valid observations there. After all, "...voiced laughs" really do "make a more positive impression than unvoiced grunts or pants." Ergo, don't go around grunting or panting at people, so write that down.

I wonder if I can prove each sign in that parable and validate my observations or add some new ones. For I am an observant observer, almost like those cold toads who are such testy testers, yet not.

What will be observed is predictable, given some basic patterns,
"....females were more likely than males to indicate they were seeking a “sense of humor,” whereas men were more likely to offer it. However, women seeking men with a “good sense of humor” are probably looking not for giggly guys, but rather for men who make them laugh...."

The sensuous wants to be sensed, men desire women and women desire to be desired. A sense of the humors is the same thing again. Sometimes to have a laugh, you have to make a laugh.

Men in a decadent society begin to lack a sense of the sensuous and they need more raw sensuality. Women want to be sensed and so they supply more sensuality. For that is the only way to be sensed, is it not? Everyone wants what they want and so that is the only way.

Or is it? At any rate, there is the decline of civilization, in a summary of the basic relations that make it up. From dawn(Sense) to decadence (sense and sensuality) to dissolution (the crass and crude)....

2005-01-14T18:12:00.000-08:00

Archive...

Over at Left2Right, David Velleman writes....

2005-01-14T13:34:00.000-08:00

....about the sissification of the Left, to coin a word. This issue is probably very near and dear to his heart, you see. He has the sweaty little hands of a censor, especially on this issue. But he likes to talk about it anyway. As far as I can see, he does not allow for comments on this post of his. Most likely, the "virtue" of being a sissy is taken as some sort of self-evident truth with this little fellow.

In the end, he says, "My point (do I need to have a point?) is that much of the talk about "moral values" may in fact be about values that aren't moral at all—values embodied in different images of masculinity."

VIRtue is not very VIRile for this little fellow, you see. He does not have a point. He does not feel he needs one. And if he did have a lil' point, it would not be a very pointy point. For the unsafety of that! (Yes, you need to have a point.)

So why would a lie about the Yin and the Yang, i.e. effeminacy, be taken to be some sort of self evident truth, evident in the Self? It depends on what is evident in the Self. David Velleman, who censors, bans and threatens like some effeminate proto-Nazi takes effeminacy to be "virtuous."

As if it is possible to remove virility from virtue.

The Founding Fathers, on virtue:
"Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly? .....I believe no effort in favor of virtue is lost."
--John Adams

They often said things like that. What is effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly? Some people call it the "gay lifestyle."

Take a further look at it, the philosophy of the Founders, was it right?

John Adams,
"Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy....."

"Most sissies will grow up to be homosexuals,and most gay men were sissies as children...Despite the provocative and politically incorrect nature of that statement, it fits the evidence. In fact, it may be the most consistent, well-documented, and significant finding in the entire field of sexual orientation research and perhaps in all of human psychology."
(Queer Science
By Simon LeVay
(The MITPress: 1996) :166)

Some reports indicate that 46% to 64% of boys with untreated gender identity disorders develope homosexual or bisexual orientation during their adolescence.
(Davenport CW: A follow-up study of 10 feminine boys
Arch Sex Behavior. 15: 511, 1986.)
(Green R: The "sissy boy syndrome" and the development of homosexuality, New Haven. Conn. 1987, Yale University Press.)
(Zucker K.J: Cross-gender-identified children. In Steiner BW, editor Gender dysphoria: development, research, management New York,1985, Plenum Press.)
(Zuger B: Early effeminate behavior in boys: outcome and significance for homosexuality, J Nerv Ment Dis 172: 90, 1984.)
(Zuger B: Is early effeminate behavior in boys early homosexuality? Comp. Psychiatry 29: 509, 1988)

I can no doubt update this research. It is a basic pattern.

John Adams,
".....intoxication...."

"Model I, Onset of Behaviors Before Age 13, showed use of cocaine before age 13 years as strongly associatedwith GLB orientation (odds ratio [OR]: 6.10; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 2.45-15.20). Early initiation of sexual intercourse (2.15; 10.6-4.38), marijuana use (1.98; 1.04 4.09), and alcohol use (1.82; 1.03-3.23) also was associated with GLB orientation. ModelII, Lifetime Frequencies of Behaviors, showed that frequency of crack cocaine use (1.38; 1.06-1.79), inhalant use(1.30; 1.05-1.61), and number of sexual partners(1.27; 1.06-1.43) was associated with GLB orientation. Model III, Frequency of Recent Behaviors, showed smokeless tobacco use in the past 30 days (1.38;1.20-1.59) and number of sexual partners in the previous 3 months (1.47; 1.31-1.65) were associated with GLB orientation.

......Overall, GLB respondents engaged disproportionately in multiple risk behaviors, reporting an increased mean number of risk behaviors (mean =6.81 +/- 4.49) compared with the overall student population (mean = 3.45 +/- 3.15)."
(American Academy of Pediatrics
Pediatrics 1998; 101: 895-902
May, 1998
The Association Between Health Risk Behaviors and Sexual Orientation Among a School-based Sample of Adolescents
By Robert Garofalo, MD.R. Cameron Wolf, MS; Shari Kessel, ScB; Judith Palfrey, MD and Robert H. DuRant, PhD)

John Adams,
....extravagance, vice and folly?"

"Only substance abuse and AIDS adversely affect more gay men, making domestic violence the third largest health problem facing gay men today."
(DAVID ISLAND & PATRICK LETELLIER, MEN WHO BEAT THE MEN WHO LOVE THEM: BATTERED GAY MEN AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE 14 (1991))

"Gays and lesbians are more likely to be victims of domestic violence than anti-gay violence, according to a survey made public yesterday by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs."
(The Gazette (Montreal) October 23, 1996,
Wednesday,Final Edition. News; Pg. F10
Gay domestic violence; Study documents
abuse in homosexual relationships
Byline: Vicki Haddock)

"Battering is also a problem among gay couples: the National Coalition on Domestic Violence estimates that almost one in three same-sex relationships are abusive, seemingly more than among heterosexual couples."
(Newsweek October 4, 1993 , U.S. Edition
Special Report; Pg. 26 Patterns of Abuse
Byline: By Michele Ingrassia et al.)

"Most recent violent crimes involving gays and lesbians were committed by other homosexuals....said Michelle Lamoureux...We realized that there is a lot of conjugal violence and violence within the gay community.'"
(The Gazette (Montreal) April 4, 1996,
Thursday
News; In Brief; Pg. A3
Pilot project tracking violence against gays)

Religious hedonists never have had much use for each other, only more abuse for each other. It is ironic, in Canada they set up organizations to prevent all the "hatred" and violence against gays that an intolerant society supposedly supplies, yet it turned out that their phone lines filled with gays beaten and sodomized by gays.

Note,"Broude (Broude, G. 1981. The Cultural Management of Sexuality. Ref. 279. :633-73) concludes that child training can have a profound effect on adult sexual orientation."
(The Cross-Cultural Study of Human Sexuality
Annual Review of Anthropology,Vol. 16, 1987,
By D. L. Davis and R. G. Whitten :98)

Why would a culture want more "being gay." It seems not so gay.

Religious hedonists seem blind to the pattern of abuse, but when you go around self defining by your own feelings and saying that they define ethics and morality for you, sometimes you might feel like beating someone. Then, you may beat someone because, in that moment, you feel like it and your feelings define what is true for you. (Not to mention, defining who you are. "This is who I am.")

There are deep problems with the whole gay identity and the gay philosophy it is based on. Actually, like Socrates said, being ruled by and defined by your appetites makes you a slave. Some people try to revel in bondage and Sadean philosophy, as if it is not what it is.....yet, they still seem to sense that they are becoming dead in the head as they do so.

What a gay life that is, though. If you make it through the pattern of addiction, sodomy, STDs, HIV, etc., you may do so only to come to the brutality of gay philosophy.

"My point (do I need to have a point?) is that much of the talk about "moral values" may in fact be about values that aren't moral at all...."

Ridiculous....I am aware that I did not answer all the points he tried to make and examples he cited. But the thing is, he does not have a point.

Lincoln....

2005-01-13T19:20:00.000-08:00

...he cited the Declaration more than the Constitution, unlike the modern judge who is often one step away from calling it "unconstitutional." There is an absurd idea.

Lincoln,

(The New York Herald
February 23, 1861
The President Elect on Washington's
Birthday, in Independence Hall)

"The President elect at Philadelphia, in several speeches there delivered, has made a declaration or two calculated to produce a profound impression upon the public mind. In a speech on the 21st he said that he might be required to down his foot firmly 'in his administration of the federal government,' and in a speech on the 22d, the anniversary of Washington's birthday, and in Independence Hall, Mr. Lincoln, speaking of the immortal 'Declaration' of 1776, said that the issue involved not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land, 'but it was that sentiment gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but I hope to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men;' and he furthermore said that '....this county cannot be saved without giving up that principle....I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.'

Now, in these emphatic declarations of Mr. Lincoln, we have not the evidence for a positive interpretation. If by his foot down firmly he means that it is his purpose firmly to take his position in behalf of a peaceful policy for the restoration of the Union he is entirely right; but if he means the policy of a warlike subjugation against all parties repudiating his executive authority, he is all wrong. In his Independence Hall speech, however, he assures us that in 'my view of the present aspect of affairs, there need be no bloodshed or war. There is no necessity for it. I am not infavor of such a course, and I may say in advance that there will be no bloodshed unless it be forced upon the government, and then it will be compelled to act in self defence.'

We are thus encouraged to hope for a conciliatory policy on the part of the incoming administration....."

2005-01-13T18:59:00.000-08:00

(The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the
Cosmos is Designed for Discovery
By Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards)

Some of the curves that supposedly no one noticed, until Colombus...or Copernicus...or someone or other.

The Flat Earth, Myth, Mythology and more mythological narratives of naturalism...

2005-01-13T18:33:00.000-08:00

More idiocy, another ignorant narrative popular in the American University....

"The story is so common that it’s tedious to repeat it in great detail. As we all think we know, ancient superstition put Earth and its inhabitants at the physical and metaphysical center of a small, anthropocentric—that is, “human-centered”—universe. The benighted masses thought Earth was flat, while the educated elites, following Ptolemy and Aristotle, imagined it as a sphere, with the Moon, planets, Sun, and stars revolving around it.

Copernicus, according to the popular story, demoted us by showing that ours was a sun-centered universe, with Earth both rotating around its axis and revolving around the Sun like the other planets. This claim is some times accompanied by still more egregious factual errors. For instance, Bruce Jakosky explains in The Search for Life on Other Planets, “Because of this tremendous change in world view, Copernicus’ views were not embraced by the Church: the history of his persecution is well known.” Never mind that Copernicus wasn’t persecuted and died the same year (1543) that his ideas were published, not at the oil-soaked stake but peacefully and of natural causes. Since these historical facts muddy the popcorn-movie simplicity of the Official Story, with its cast of intrepid, steely eyed scientific heroes on the one hand and its one-dimensional villain priests on the other, the historical facts are garbled. (Understand, we don’t believe this is part of a willful conspiracy. Jakosky is a well-known and respected scien tist, and the publisher, Cambridge University Press, is a respected publisher of astronomy books. Such a mistake could only survive the editorial process because a great many intelligent people simply assume the stereotype.)

The popcorn movie continues on from Copernicus’s persecution with a bravura medley of fact and fiction: The messiah Copernicus leaves his even less fortunate followers, like Bruno, the first martyr, and Galileo, the first saint, to suffer even more hideous consequences. In time, however, the brave and unflagging march of scientific evidence overwhelms the darkness and idiocy of religious superstition—swelling and triumphant musical score followed by cheers and the film’s credits. The test audience loves it; everyone goes home fat and sassy in the knowledge of modern man’s incalculable superiority to the superstitious fools of a dead and defeated past.

Thus is the story purged of its cumbersome subtleties. The Copernican Revolution, we’re led to believe, was the opening battle in the ongoing war between Science and Religion. Textbooks and science writers on the sub ject display varying degrees of reductiveness and aversion to detail, but with few exceptions, the central message is the same: Religious superstition maintained the myth that Earth and human beings are the center of the universe, both physically and metaphysically, but modern science has taught us otherwise. Copernicus is the enduring symbol of science’s unflinching commitment to the facts, even when it means displacing humanity from our false sense of uniqueness and importance. As astronomer Stuart Clark puts it: “Astronomy leads us to believe that the Universe is so vast that we, on planet Earth, are nothing more than an insignificant mote.” Strangely, some even see Copernicus’s work as play ing the role of moral teacher. Philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “The Copernican Revolution will not have done its work until it has taught men more modesty than is to be found among those who think Man suf ficient evidence of Cosmic Purpose.”

The intended subtext, of course, is that one will be scientific only to the extent that one is nonreligious. To be “religious,” in the narrow sense intended here, is to believe that there is something unique, special, or intentional about our existence and the existence of the cosmos. “Science” here has a special definition as well. Rather than a search for the truth (scientia means knowledge) about nature—based on evidence, systematic study, and the like—science becomes applied naturalism: the conviction that the material world is all there is, and that chance and impersonal natural law alone explain, indeed must explain, its existence.

Toward this end, the official story line comes close to reversing the most important historical points. Predominant in that story line is the link between our “central” location and our importance in the overall scheme of things. As planetary scientist Stuart Ross Taylor puts it:

Copernicus was right after all. The idea that the Sun, rather than the Earth, was at the centre of the universe caused a profound change in the view of our place in the world. It created the philosophical climate in which we live. It is not clear that everyone has come to grips with the idea, for we still cherish the idea that we are special and that the entire universe was designed for us.

Historians of science have protested this description of the development of science for decades, but so far their protests have not trickled down to the masses or the textbook writers."
(The Privileged Planet: How Our Place
in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery
By Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards :222-225)

The judiciary, the way of the Left....

2005-01-13T18:15:00.000-08:00

African American Newspaper, The 19th Century:
".....I will next read from his letters, to show what he thought of the Supreme Court, which President Buchanan and his followers have apotheosized since its determination of the Dred Scott case. In a letter of W.H. Torrance, dated Monticello, June 11, 1815, Mr. Jefferson says:

The second question, whether the judges are invested with exclusive authority to decide on the constitutionality of a law, has been heretofore a subject of consideration with me in the exercise of official duties. Certainly there is not a word in the Constitution which has given that power to them, more than to the Executive or Legislative branches. Questions of property, or character, and of crime, being ascribed to the judges through a definite course of legal procedure, laws involving such questions belong, of course, to them; and as they decide on them ultimately, and without appeal, they of course decide for themselves. The constitutional validity of the law or laws again prescribing Executive action, and to be administered by that branch ultimately, and without appeal, the Executive must decide for themselves also, whether under the Constitution they are valid or not. So also as to the laws governing the proceedings of the Legislature, that body must judge for itself the constitutionally of the law, and equally without appeal or control from its co-ordinate branches. And, in general, the branch which is to act ultimately, and without appeal, on any law, is the rightful expositor of the validity of the law, uncontrolled by the opinions of the other co-ordinate authorities. It may be said that contradictory decisions may arise in such case, and produce inconvenience. This is possible, and is a necessary failing in all human proceedings. Yet the prudence of the public functionaries and authority of public opinion will generally produce accommodation.

Jefferson's Complete Works, vol. 6, pages 661,662.

It would be difficult to find two theories of the Constitution more widely different than this one of Jefferson, and that of President Buchanan, as laid in his inaugural, his Silliman letter, and his messages in regard to Kansas. But I will come to that presently. On this subject of the power of the Supreme Court, numbers of Mr. Jefferson's letters might be quoted, to the same purport as the above. I have only time to present brief extracts. In a letter to Judge Roane, date Poplar Forest, September 6, 1819, he says, referring to the Supreme Court:

In denying the right they usurp, of exclusively explaining the Constitution, I go further than you do, if I understand rightly your quotation from the Federalist of an opinion that 'the Judiciary is the last resort in relation to the other departments of the Government, but not in relation to the rights of the parties to the compact under which the Judiciary is derived.' If this opinion be sound, then indeed is our Constitution a complete felo de se. For intending to establish three departments, coordinate and independent, that they might check and balance one another, it has given, according to this opinion, to one of them alone the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others, and to that one, too which is unelected by, and independent of, the nation.

* * *

The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax, in the hands of the Judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please. It should be remembered as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any Government is independent, is absolute also; in theory only at first, while the spirit of the people is up, but in practice as fast as that relaxes. Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.

To Thomas Ritchie, whose name as the editor of the Richmond Enquirer, is familiar to us all, Mr. Jefferson wrote, under date of December 25, 1820, as follows:

The Judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners, constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our Constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special Government, to a general and supreme one alone.

I should weary you if I were to quote a tithe of what Mr. Jefferson has left us on this subject. What I have presented will suffice to show you that he entertained a deep-seated jealousy of Federal encroachments upon the rights of the States, and that he utterly repudiated the modern doctrine of the party which claims to be Democratic, that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of constitutional questions."
(THE NATIONAL ERA
April 21, 1859
Washington, D.C., Vol. XIII No. 642 P. 61)

Contrast that with what judges say, in "decisions" not unlike those at issue there.

"Like the character of an individual, the legitimacy of the Court must be earned over time. So, indeed, must be the character of a Nation of people who aspire to live according to the rule of law. Their belief in themselves as such a people is not readily separable from their understanding of the Court invested with the authority to decide their constitutional cases and speak before all others for their constitutional ideals."
(112 S. Ct. 2816 (1992) (emphasis added)
Planned Parenthood of
Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey)

Jefferson on the judiciary, what he saw from the beginning...

2005-01-13T18:05:00.000-08:00

African American Newspaper, The 19th Century:
"The Evening Post republishes certain letters of Thomas Jefferson, warning the country against the dangers to be apprehended from the aristocratic and despotic organization and construction of the Supreme Court. Out of the inspired volume, we have never read warnings which were more completely justified by time. We can say nothing to add to their force.

.....Mr. Jefferson held:

First. That the Federal Judiciary is no more competent to construe and interpret the Constitution for the other departments of the Government - the Legislative and Executive - than they are to construe it for the Judiciary.

Second. - “That each department is truly independent of the others, and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the Constitution in the cases submitted to its action; and especially where it is to act ultimately, and without appeal.”

Third. That “the germ of the dissolution of our Federal Government is in the constitution of the Federal Judiciary” - “an irresponsible body, working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, advancing its noiseless step like a thief over the field of jurisdiction, until it shall be usurped from the States, and the Government of all be consolidated into one.”

Fourth. That the tendency to consolidate the Government by strengthening the hands of the Federal Judiciary, constituted, in his day, the difference between Republicans and pseudo-Republicans - real Federalists.

Fifth. That the judges should be appointed for terms not exceeding six years, and renewable by the President and Senate. “The insufficiency of the means provided for the removal of the judges gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping by little and little the foundations of the Constitution, working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secure against all liability to account.”

Sixth. “The Judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundation of our confederate fabric. They are construing our Constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special Government to a general and supreme one alone. This will lay all things at their feet, and they are too well versed in English law to forget the maxim, 'boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictiomem.' (To amplify jurisdiction is characteristic of a good judge.) The power of declaring what the law is, ad libitum, by sapping and mining, slyly and without alarm, the foundations of the Constitution, can do what open force would not dare to attempt.”

Seventh. “That a Judiciary, independent of a King or Executive alone, is a good thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in a Republican Government.”

How far the Supreme Court of the United States has justified the anxiety which Jefferson felt and expressed in regard to its influence upon the Federal Government, we leave to the judgment of the public."
(THE NATIONAL ERA
July 9, 1857
Washington, D.C., Vol. XI No. 549 P. 112)

Typical....

2005-01-13T16:19:00.000-08:00

______________________________________________________
Stickers unconstitutional

Since 2002, science text books in Cobb County have carried disclaimer stickers which state that evolution is a theory, not a fact. A judge ruled today that these stickers must be removed because they are unconstitutional, thanks to a lawsuit brought by parents and - wait for it - the ACLU.
______________________________________________________
(As reported at WorldMagBlog)

Most of evolutionism is a mythological narrative, not a fact. Generally it is hypothesis, not theory.

Evolutionism has nothing to do with being proto-Nazi, of course not. It's just a happenstance that Darwinists try to rule by oligarchy and force their views on local communities through the judiciary. There is a deep irony in Jefferson's words being so abused, when actually he wanted to protect the right of communities to make their own discriminations. Note that he believed in Intelligent Design, the philosophical basis of the Declaration. In contrast, look at the organicism of Nazism and the worship of Nature, the Blood and the Soil, etc. In the American Republic the Founders purposefully wrote anti-evolutionist and anti-fascist ideas into our founding documents, as their focus was metaphysical instead of physical. So the Republic is based on a belief in elected representation over hereditary leadership, the consent of the governed over monarchy, separation of powers over consolidation and republicanism over democracy.

The foundational belief which laid out the end that government was to be a means to was based on a belief in theistic origins and consequent transcendent self-evident truths. The argument could be made that as the elitists of the Weimar Republic support evolutionism and fascism so do too many of the elites of the American Republic, lawyers, jurists, psychologists, etc. So when you take a case like that before one, the results are not surprising, no matter what the truth is.

(As to the ACLU, a socialist organization, it has this queer habit of protecting pederasts. That is not surprising.)

The supposed argument from ignorance....

2005-01-10T19:32:00.000-08:00

...also known as the god-of-the-gaps. I.e., science will fill in the gaping holes it has on the issue of origins, if we just wait for it. Typically, this argument is followed up by some emotional conditioning with respect to religion and science, implying that we should keep waiting for science, keep faith in it. It is used very often on the American Left, because they want to have faith in science while simultaneously pretending that they and science are opposed to religion based on facts.

An answer,
".....Australian philosopher Alan Olding, in commenting on thepersistent use of the argument from-ignorance or god-of-the-gaps objection against the work of Michael Denton and Michael Behe, writes, The phrase 'god of the gaps' is nothing more than a question-begging insult meant to stop the flow of argument before it has barely started.
(See his article: Maker of Heaven and Microbiology, Quadrant, January-February 2000.)

To see that the argument-from-ignorance objection is not a magic wand for silencing intelligent design, let's begin with a reality check. When the argument-from-ignorance objection is raised against intelligent design, who exactly is accused of being ignorant? It's natural to think that the ignorance here is on the part of design theorists, who want to attribute intelligent agency to biological systems. If only those poor design theorists understood biology better, those systems would readily submit to mechanistic explanation. Thus, when I lecture on university campuses about intelligent design, a biologist in the audience will often get up during the question-and-answer time to inform me that just because I don't know how complex biological systems might have formed by the Darwinian mechanism doesn't mean it didn't happen that way. I then point out that the problem isn't that I personally don't know how such systems might have formed but that the biologist who raised the objection doesn't know how such systems might have formed and that despite having a fabulous education in biology, a well-funded research laboratory, decades to put it all to use, security and prestige in the form of a tenured academic appointment, and the full backing of the biological community, which has also been desperately but unsuccessfully trying to discover how such systems are formed for more than one hundred years. Who is ignorant here? Not just the design theorists, but the scientific community as a whole. In fact, it's safe to say that the biological community is clueless about the emergence of biological complexity. How so? Because the material mechanisms to which the biological community looks to explain biological complexity provide no cluefor how those systems might realistically have come about. The problem, therefore, is not ignorance or personal incredulity but global disciplinary failure (the discipline here being biology) and gross theoretical inadequacy (the theory here being Darwin's).

Now, such vast ignorance is not something one typically wants to advertise. A few biologists, however, have now come clean. These include James Shapiro and Franklin Harold, neither of whom supports intelligent design. In a review of Michael Behe's book Darwin's Black Box (National Review, September 16, 1996), James Shapiro, a molecular biologist at the University of Chicago, conceded that

there are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations. It is remarkable that Darwinism is accepted as a satisfactory explanation for such a vast subject--evolution--with so little rigorous examination of how well its basic theses work in illuminating specific instances of biological adaptation or diversity.

Five years later, cell biologist Franklin Harold wrote a book for Oxford University Press titled The Way of the Cell. In virtually identical language, he noted, "There are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations."

David Ray Griffin, also no supporter of intelligent design, is a philosopher of religion with an interest in biological origins. Commenting on the evolutionary literature that purports to explain how evolutionary transitions lead to increased biological complexity, he writes (in his book Religion and Scientific Naturalism),

There are, I am assured, evolutionists who have described how the transitions in question could have occurred. When I ask in which books I can find these discussions, however, I either get no answer or else some titles that, upon examination, do not in fact contain the promised accounts. That such accounts exist seems to be something that is widely known, but I have yet to encounter someone who knows where they exist.

At a recent debate with Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, I quoted Franklin Harold on the absence of detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of complex biological systems. Miller did not challenge Harold's claim. Instead, he impugned Harold's credibility by remarking that Harold was old, having retired fifteen years ago."
(The Design Revolution
By William Dembski :213-215)

The Left is opposed to religion, science is not.

Thomas Jefferson, on Intelligent Design...

2005-01-10T13:42:00.000-08:00

Thomas Jefferson,
"And when the atheist descanted on the unceasing motion and circulation of matter thro' the animal vegetable and mineral kingdoms, never resting, never annihilated, always changing form, and under all forms gifted with the power of reproduction; the Theist pointing `to the heavens above, and to the earth beneath, and to the waters under the earth,'asked if these did not proclaim a first cause, possessing intelligence and power; power in the production, and intelligence in the design and constant preservation of the system; urged the palpable existence of final causes, that the eye was made to see, and the ear to hear, and not that we see because we have eyes, and hear because we have ears; an answer obvious to the senses, as that of walking across the room was to the philosopher demonstrating the nonexistence of motion."
Letter to John Adams.

Those who have eyes, let them see.

An update, more knowledge dealing with the same philosophy that Jefferson thought was true:
"The presence of complexity — interdependent parts that do not function unless other parts are also present — poses another major problem for evolution. For instance, a muscle is useless without a nerve going to the muscle to direct its contracting activity. But both the muscle and the nerve are useless without a complicated control mechanism in the brain to direct the contracting activity of the muscle and correlate its activity with that of other muscles. Without these three essential components, we have only useless parts. In a process of gradual evolutionary changes, how does complexity evolve?

Interdependent parts, which represent most of the components of living organisms, would not be expected from random, undirected changes (mutations) as is proposed for evolutionary advancement. How could these develop without the foresight of a plan for a working system? Can order arise from the turmoil of mixed-up, undirected changes? For complicated organs that involve many necessary changes, the chances are implausibly small. Without the foresight of a plan, we would expect that the random evolutionary changes would attempt all kinds of useless combinations of parts while trying to provide for a successful evolutionary advancement.

Yet as we look at living organisms over the world, we do not seem to see any of these random combinations. In nature, it appears that we are dealing largely, if not exclusively, with purposeful parts. Furthermore, if evolution is a real ongoing process, why don’t we find new developing complex organs in organisms that lack them? We would expect to find developing legs, eyes, livers, and new unknown kinds of organs, providing for evolutionary advancement in organisms that lacked desirable advantages. This absence is a serious indictment against any proposed undirected evolutionary process, and favors the concept that what we see represents the work of an intelligent Creator.

The simple example of a muscle, mentioned, above, pales into insignificance when we consider more complicated organs such as the eye or the brain. These contain many interdependent systems com posed of parts that would be useless without the presence of all the other necessary parts. In these systems, nothing works until all the necessary components are present and working. The eye has an automatic focusing system that adjusts the lens so as to permit us to clearly see close and distant objects. We do not filly understand how it works, but a part of the brain analyzes data from the eye and controls the muscles in the eye that change the shape of the lens. The system that controls the size of the pupil so as to adjust to light intensity and to reduce spherical lens aberration also illustrates interdependent parts. Then there are the 100,000,000 light-sensitive cells in the human eye that send information to the brain through some 1,000,000 nerve fibers of the optic nerve. In the brain this information is sorted into various components such as color, movement, form, and depth. It is then analyzed and combined into an intelligible picture. This involves an extremely complex array of interdependent parts."
Dr. Ariel Roth, biologist
(In Six Days: Why Fifty Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation
Edited by John Ashton Phd :87-88)

The Left and censorship...

2005-01-10T07:52:00.000-08:00

Dean Kenyon, like one former atheist came to the conclusion that abiogenesis is, quite simply, impossible. Physicists define something as impossible once it reaches a level of improbability that is defined as a state of clear impossibility.

But some things are held to because of the dogmas of the Left,
"When Kenyon taught the prevailing naturalistic theories of biological and chemical evolution in his large introductory biology course for non-majors, he also explained his own skepticism about whether these theories were consistent with the evidence and argued that intelligent design was a legitimate alternative to naturalistic evolution. A handful of students complained, and the department chairman immediately endorsed their complaints. He announced that he would not allow Kenyon to teach this course in the future, on the ground that the professor was improperly introducing his 'religious opinions' into the science curriculum."
(Colorado Law Review
SPRING, 1995 66 U. Colo. L. Rev. 461
ESSAY: IS GOD UNCONSTITUTIONAL?
By PHILLIP E. JOHNSON )

Darwinian censorship,
"....dogmatic Darwinists begin by imposing a narrow interpretation on the evidence and declaring it to be the only way to do science. Critics are then labeled unscientific; their articles are rejected by mainstream journals, whose editorial boards are dominated by the dogmatists; the critics are denied funding by government agencies, who send grant proposals to the dogmatists for "peer" review; and eventually the critics are hounded out of the scientific community altogether. In the process, evidence against the Darwinian view simply disappears, like witnesses against the Mob. Or the evidence is buried in specialized publications, where only a dedicated researcher can find it. [Enter, the dedicated researcher!] Once critics have been silenced and counter-evidence has been buried, the dogmatists announce that there is no scientific debate about their theory, and no evidence against it. Using such tactics, defenders of Darwinian orthodoxy have managed to establish a near-monopoly over research grants, faculty appointments, and peer-reviewed journals in the United States. In April 2000 a furor erupted at Baylor University in Texas over the right of academics to dissent from Darwinian orthodoxy. The Michael Polanyi Center, named after a noted philosopherof science, had been established six months earlier by theUniversity administration to promote research on the conceptual foundations of science. When the Center sponsored a major international conference (numbering among its participants two Nobel laureates), all hell broke loose, because the faculty learned that the Center's director,William Dembski, was openly critical of Darwinian evolution. The Baylor Faculty Senate immediately voted to shut downthe Michael Polanyi Center.....

Sloan said it "borders on McCarthyism." As of this writing,the future of the Michael Polanyi Center at Baylor is uncertain. Dogmatic defenders of Darwinian evolution control not only most American universities, but they also wield enormous power over most public school systems. Kevin Padian is president ofthe ironically misnamed National Center for Science Education(NCSE), which pressures local school districts to prohibit classroom challenges to Darwinian evolution. (The executive director of the NCSE was a co-author of the NationalAcademy's 1998 booklet on evolution that included the sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in jail.)In 1999, when a school district near Detroit wanted to put some books critical of Darwinism in the high school library, the NCSE strongly advised them against it.[...]

If [a] warning doesn't work, the NCSE calls on the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for backup, and the ACLU sends a letter to the school board threatening an expensive lawsuit. Since every school district in the country is already struggling to make ends meet, this bullying by the NCSE and ACLU has been quite successful in blocking overt criticism of Darwinian evolution in public school classrooms. In Burlington, Washington, high-school biology teacher Roger DeHart taught evolution for years, but supplemented his pro-Darwinian textbook with material criticizing Darwinian evolution from the perspective of "intelligent design theory." In 1997 the ACLU wrote a letter to the local school board threatening legal action on the grounds that intelligent design theory is religious rather than scientific. DeHart withdrew the disputed materials, but requested permission to provide others dealing with scientific problems in Darwin's theory. [.....]"
(Icons of Evolution
By Jonathan Wells
(Regnery: 2000) :135-38)

What begins to happen in this context of censorship,
"Fred Hoyle, The Origin of the Universe and the Origin of Religion18 (1993). The vast majority of scientists work in isolated areas of science and base most of their opinions about evolution on what they have been taught. Being similarly indoctrinated since grade school, they are just as likely to follow the dominantevolutionary paradigm as the non-scientist. Hoyle calls this type of mental conditioning 'respectable ignorance' because it is the antithesis of what science is supposed to represent."
(Ohio State Law Journal 2002
63 Ohio St. L.J. 1507
ARTICLE: Storm Clouds on the Horizon of Darwinism:
Teaching the Anthropic Principle
and Intelligent Design in the Public Schools
By Jeffrey F. Addicott)

Intelligent Design, a very short summary...

2005-01-09T11:06:00.000-08:00

"THINK OF MOUNT RUSHMORE—what about this rock formation convinces us that it was due to a designing intelligence and not merely to wind and erosion? Designed objects like Mount Rushmore exhibit characteristic features or patterns that point us to an intelligence. Such features or patterns are signs of intelligence. Proponents of intelligent design, known as design theorists, are not content to regard such signs as mere intuitions. Rather, they insist on studying them formally, rigorously and scientifically. Intelligent design is the science that studies signs of intelligence. Note that a sign is not the thing signified. Intelligent design does not try to get into the mind of a designer and figure out what a designer is thinking. Its focus is not a designer’s mind (the thing signified) but the artifact due to a designer’s mind (the sign). What a designer is thinking may be an interesting question, and one may be able to infer something about what a designer is thinking from the designed objects that a designer produces (provided the designer is being honest). But the designer’s thought processes lie outside the scope of intelligent design. As a scientific research program, intelligent design investigates the effects of intelligence and not intelligence as such."
(The Design Revolution
By William Dembski :33)

Science and Religion....

2005-01-09T11:04:00.000-08:00

"Let’s put it this way. I think the physical sciences are more likely to be religious than the biological sciences because they have, as it were, perhaps, a simpler concept of the universe and they are not so involved in minutiae as the biological sciences. [I.e., they are not so myopic.] In The Human Mystery, I deal with findings that are relevant for the theistic view, the Big Bang theory, and the anthropic principle. What Heisenberg called the First Principle, the principle of order — I don’t know whether by that he meant God— as long as we carry on the tradition of this, which was derived from the Christian religion, some dim theistic view that goes onguiding us; if that should go, he said, that will be quite terrible, worse than concentration camps. I can see that very much today still. What you have is a scientistic view, science as a kind ofreligion. Jacques Monod is an arch-priest of this, or arch-prophet, but there are quite a lot of others in the same way in other movements like sociobiology denying anything human, value-systems which animals don’t have. The situation I regard as quite serious, and I don’t think that in the seminaries training Protestant andCatholic clergymen, I don’t think they are really training them properly to face the modern world, to go out into a world where the average man in the street says that science has disproved religion. This is what you’re up against. I think it is very important indeed to be examining the whole mental outlook, from time to time, that is governing our lives and that is developing into the future. I hope very much that we are recovering from the long deep depression of materialistic monism which has spread over the intellectual world like a dark fog blanketing out all of the brightness and illumination of the ideals and imaginations of human beings. I hope very much that we can be restored to some sanity in relationship to the mystery of existence and become more and more freed from this domination by the dogmatic assertions of materialists that can only lead to despair and nihilism."
--John Eccles
(The Intellectuals Speak Out About God
Edited by Roy Abraham Varghese :47-48)

Marriage....

2005-01-06T11:49:00.000-08:00

Over at Left2Right they have a topic on changing marriage to suit those who desire to change it. It would take a while to go through. A few points....

The title, "Tone Deaf to Dignity"

That is ridiculous. Who goes around self defining by their sexual desires and arguing that they define truth for them? Is that dignified? What about gay pride parades? Are they dignified, typically? Gay day at Disney? Just look at the dignity of that!

One might say that "heterosexuals" do the same things as they have their Mardi Gras, etc. Although those who adhere to traditional values, the main issue, do not. And heterosexuals do not take on some religious identity which they are "coming out" to witness and proselytize about. Self defined gays do, that is a portion of their own identity politics. So you can't have it both ways. You can't on the one hand say that "gay people" as a group need this and that. Then have "gay people" as a group disappear whenever the decadence in the hedonism of self defining by your own desires and declaring that they define what is moral and true for you is illustrated. If there is a group that bears a witness for itself when it comes to civil rights, discrimination and the like then there is always a group.

Looking at the way the self defined gay group of "gay people" represents itself, it is not "dignified." Instead, they are tone deaf to dignity, civility and civilization. Examples abound of that....

Dealing with what the author said, more than that which he is replying to. Some of his own views,
"But surely the brouhaha over gay marriage is triggered by the expressive side of marriage. The question isn't just, what are the consequences of being married? It's also, what does it mean to be married?
.....If we extend marriage rights to gays and lesbians, we are saying that in the eyes of the law their relationships are worthy of respect, equal to those of straight couples who want to make the same commitment."

Yes, that's right. Yet, homosexuality and heterosexuality are not on a par, not at all. The sexes are different and complementary. To the same extent of this difference and complementarity homosexuality is inferior. The Yin and the Yang are how human life is created and sustained. Homosexuality and heterosexuality can only be put on a par and treated equally if the Yin and the Yang are the same. They are not. Their difference is celebrated in every Romance movie, book, etc. Therefore, that which is not equal should not be treated as if it is equal.

It is an impossible goal, this New Equality.

Because,
"The attributes of mothering and fathering are inherent parts of sex differentiation that paves the way to reproduction. This is where the sociology analogy so often drawn between race and sex breaksdown in the most fundamental sense. Genetic assimilation is possible through interracial mating, and we can envisage a society that is color blind. But genetic assimilation of male and female is impossible, and no society will be sex-blind."
(Gender and Parenthood
By Alice S. Rossi
American Sociological Review,
Vol. 49, No.1, Feb., 1984 :10)

The main argument against what he is saying is that one form of heterosexuality is promoted and respected by the State currently. It is one form of sexuality. This is done because it promotes the general welfare. Does another form of sexuality promote the general welfare too? Does it promote the general welfare on a par with the form currently sanctioned?

The answer in the case of homosexuality is a thorough going no. In fact, the behavior patterns of homosexuality harm the general welfare. Homosexuality neglects the complementarity of the sexes. One example, men tend to be more promiscuous than women. In same sex relationships among a community of men this comes out more and more, to a ridiculous and self-destructive extent. Then, a philosophy of hedonism is there too. Perhaps the philosophy came out of it, in the denial of the Yin and the Yang.

"Gay men, as everyone's research shows, are perfectly comfortable with a nonmonogamous philosophy and, in a pre-AIDS world, with institutionalized nonmonogamous partnerships."
(Sociological Research on Male and Female Homosexuality
by Barbara Reisman and Pepper Schwartz
Annual Review of Sociology 1988 14:125-47)

He does not make the argument that same sex marriage will make gay men be monogamous. In fact, he seems to call that "wacky." So I will not deal with it. It is a typical argument from the left on this though, that same sex marriage can reform gay men. I.e., if only they could get married then their new legal status would make them think, "You know, maybe I should stop being promiscuous now. What with being married and all...." Etc.

He goes on, equality and special rights, etc. I say, this New Equality is an impossible goal. So why try to structure society based on an impossibility?

He goes on,
"....what's 'special' if the comparison is being treated the same as straight couples?"

One form of heterosexuality is already being treated in a special way compared to all other sexualities. The real question is why should any other sexuality be treated like one form of heterosexuality is? But here is the little game, invent some "sexual desire people" and then you can have some little groupie groups. So then you can say that people are not being treated equally before the law. That some are being treated as "special" while others are not, etc. This is a silly thing to try to accomplish with the form of sexuality at hand. One could do this with men who want to commit adultery.

Example, I say that there are promiscuity people. That is who they are. That is their sexual orientation. Now, despite millenia of moral teachings there are still promiscuity people. Would you just look at that? They've been discriminated against throughout the ages, yet there they are, the promiscuity people. So, these men were just born that way and society discriminates against them. Why would anyone choose to be discriminated against, after all?

Promiscuity people rights! I think we need to have some promiscuity people pride parades and things. Not to mention the fact that promiscuity people sometimes get beat up when they hit on people in bars. That is because of the hatred in society towards promiscuity people. It's mainly from the pulpits. There should probably be some hate speech codes for promiscuity people, to protect them, like they have in Canada.

And so on.

The fact is, this talk of a immutable sexual orientations is just not true. Sexual desires are more situational, environmental and hormonal...so promiscuity people exist in the same way that "gay people" exist,

"In the West, for instance, it may be common to expect that a homosexual preference is life-long, exclusive, and may even be genetic. [A rather ridiculous idea.] McIntosh (McIntosh, M. 1968. The Homosexual Role. Soc. Probl. 16(2):182-92) has argued, however, that this kind of homosexuality is a relatively new Western cultural phenomenon, and Weatherford (Weatherford, J.M. 1986. Porn Row. New York: Arbor House) questions the extent to which exclusive homosexual preferences are even characteristic of present day U.S. culture. The cross-cultural evidence suggests that life-long orexclusive homosexuality is a rare phenomenon. Bisexuality and situational or ad hoc homosexual behavior are more common."
(The Cross-CulturalStudy of Human Sexuality
Annual Review of Anthropology,Vol. 16, 1987,
By D. L. Davis and R. G. Whitten :69-98)

Also topical,
"Broude (Broude, G. 1981. The Cultural Management of Sexuality. Ref. 279. :633-73) concludes that child training can have a profound effect on adult sexual orientation."
(Ib :98)

So the cultural issue is, is homosexuality generally desirable, something worth prescribing and promoting by marriage laws and the like?

I'll finish this later. It's getting long. It'll probably have to be long. Just one of those huge issues....that's what people are saying when they ask, "Do you believe gays are born that way?" I.e., what are your thoughts on biology, genetics, philosophy, religion, men and women, and on and on....

A further comment...

2005-01-05T06:56:00.000-08:00

...on the one below this.

"Embryos, fetuses and babies do not neutrally reside in their mothers' bodies...."

Isn't it obvious that mothers are the Victims© of their babies? This is the typical framework of any Leftist argument, inane victimization propaganda.

It is easy to deconstruct.

I like one of the comments there by CDC:
"My wife and I are host organisms. One of our little parasites just finished reading "Gone With The Wind". She's ten. The other parasite is starting multi-variable algebra applications. He's eight.

I'm looking forward to bouncing the next generation of this infestation on my knee."

Breast nursing, those dang parasites are just hanging on.

In the end, the Leftist worldview really is disgusting. These are the views of the moral degenerates in the American universities. But watch out in telling them about it like that CDC. They will begin to find excuses to censor and ban you.

Left2Right, on babies....

2005-01-05T06:44:00.000-08:00

Trackback to this post.

I too would say that the Left should be honest and go ahead and argue what they actually believe instead of the sanitized version.

I.e., argue that babies are like vampiric parasites.

"....pregnancy too involves blood, gore and indeed something like a parasitical relationship. Embryos, fetuses and babies do not neutrally reside in their mothers' bodies, but actively draw from them. .....it seems to me that we treat mothers' bodies especially lightly, as if pregnancy did not suck anyone's blood."

Watch out, it's the invasion of the body snatchers, all those blood sucking babies don't you know.

There are three groups that a certain type of mind will hate, Jews, babies and Christians of the Spirit. I think it has to do with an ancient convenant. But just who is the vampire? Christ gives his own blood for those he loves, I suppose the precise inversion would be to try to steal it or drink it. The way that stories get told and verses written by inversions of Version is always interesting. Then one is left with the Leftist perversions, which I would argue are illustrated at Left2Right on occasion.

Winning the war.....

2005-01-05T06:30:00.000-08:00

Left2Right, on the war...

There is nothing controversial about what he says. One point, he says, "My fondest hopes are that this administration's insistently cheery refrains on the war are all about managing domestic public opinion...."

First, sometimes they have said it is tough or will be tough. But generally, they are balancing the Old Press which despite some early rumblings of support is now pretty much totally against the war. People who are informed know all the negative news and even the spin too, it is almost unavoidable.

An example of some early support from the Old Press as well as the different ways that the press can spin. Different story tellers make for different stories.

I think that the reason Bush, when being negative, only said that there were "miscalculations" with regard to specific things like WMDs is because an increasingly anti-war Old Press would have run headlines like this: "Bush says war a mistake!"

But, "Bush says there were some miscalculations!" does not have the same normative ring to it. In other words, soldiers will not begin to think, "You know, we're really bad dudes here fighting for absolutely nothing. This is the wrong war, in the wrong place at the wrong time. I am just Evil."

Recall the press conferences where the Old Press was quite intent on, "So, what mistakes have you made?" It was as if they all had the same talking point. They seemed to want a "mistake" to write about, not miscalculations.

On the topic of the war, you can contribute to the Iraqi Pro-Democracy Party. I did. And this blog, Iraq is the model, will link you into various Iraqi blogs which are both pro and anti-American. It is part of their own voice, and what they have to say may suprise you. Do not rely on the Old Press to tell you the truth, in any case.

Later....

Something else to think about....

2005-01-04T19:58:00.000-08:00

"Seeing Outside the Visual Spectrum

Finally, let us consider some of the hypothetical problems that would be met in attempting to construct a biological high-resolution camera-type eye to “see” in wavelengths outside the visual region of the spectrum. For example, to obtain, with infrared or radio waves, the same degree of resolution as that which can be achieved with the human eye and many other optimized vertebrate camera eyes would require eyes of vastly in creased size, even if a biological detector device could be constructed. To obtain the same resolving power as that of the human eye with, say, radiowaves with a wavelength of 100 centimeters would requirea reflector disc 10 kilometers in diameter. Even far-shorter-frequency radio waves, or microwaves of 1 millimeter wavelength, wouldrequire a lens or disc with a di ameter of 10 meters to equal the resolving power of the human eye."
(Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of
Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe
By Michael J. Denton (The Free Press: 1998) :67)

I feel bad...

2005-01-04T19:55:00.000-08:00

....that there's nothing on here yet for those clicking through blogs.

So here's something to think about.

What animal rights activists say,
"...Singer believes that humans do give less consideration to nonhuman animals and he labels this concept 'specieism.' 'Specieism' is defined by Singer as 'a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species."
(Whittier Law Review. Fall, 1995 17
NOTE AND COMMENT: THE INADEQUATE
PROTECTION OF ANIMALS AGAINST CRUEL
ANIMAL HUSBANDRY PRACTICES UNDER
UNITED STATES LAW
By Nicole Fox)

Blog keeping....

2005-01-04T18:40:00.000-08:00

For now, this is the parent blog of this blog.

This will be used for answering the blog Left2Right because of its censorship and also for extra archives of research and such.

Later...

Left2Right

2005-01-03T15:28:00.000-08:00

This blog may be an answer to another blog. Once I get around to it.