Publisher’s Note: I am so enjoying the intersectional cannibalism that the trans-movement is causing to the usual suspects on the Left. Quillette has hosted some terrific essays describing the vaudevillian melodrama in the LGBT+ community of philosopher kings.
“Stonewall and other trans groups frequently misrepresent Britain’s Equality Act of 2010, which states clearly that single-sex spaces and facilities are perfectly lawful provided they are a “proportionate means to a legitimate aim.” They insist, falsely, that separately stipulated protections against discrimination and harassment for trans-identified people ensure that they can access all spaces intended for the opposite sex. Under such false guidance, Girlguiding UK and Sport England have gone “trans-inclusive,” a euphemism used to describe policies that enable males and females to “self-identify” into spaces intended for the opposite sex. Anyone with even the faintest grasp of biological reality will see immediately why such policies impact most heavily on girls and women.”
Same-sex attraction is being sniffed at by the trans folks as “bigotry” and “privilege”….
Man the fainting couches! Popcorn please…
Other delicious jeremiads are at the site. I frequent Quillette daily.
Impeachment of the Mango Emperor? Who cares?
This is something of a continuation of the previous post. I understand the sheer moonbattery of the climate alarmists but in the bigger picture the damage to real science is profound and long-lasting. Here is something to ponder: Absent an aggressive and rationalized atheism, government supremacist and collectivist ideologies have a harder time creating the state as a secular Godhead. Most of the SJW worldview is informed by a profound rejection of a supernatural God to facilitate the use of state violence to remake the world. Hence the monolithic communist tendency to state sanctioned atheism.
Ian Plimer does a brilliant job explaining how the teaspoon will disappear if the scientifically illiterate envirus prevail. “Coal has saved the forests, not environmentalists.”
Get thee to the range. Dry fire at home. The cartridge box is truly the choice of kings and serfs alike.
Resist. -BB
“Under true peer-review…a panel of reviewers must accept a study before it can be published in a scientific journal. If the reviewers have objections the author must answer them or change the article to take reviewers’ objections into account. Under the IPCC review process, the authors are at liberty to ignore criticisms.”
– Richard Lindzen
“We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder. And historically, the really bad times for the environment and for people have been the cold periods rather than the warm periods.”
“Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.”
– Freeman Dyson
Most humans have to believe in something to guide their lives. Could be supernatural religion, may be a secular faith or something in between.
My two oldest sons and I have been conversing for several months about my middle lad’s quest for theological significance, his journey to believe in Christianity. My oldest is now an agnostic like myself although he has traveled the gamut from Christian to atheist; I myself would probably be best described as a Spinozan deist. I have no explanation for the reason for the first cause of the universe nor the intellectual bandwidth in this mortal coil to join either the theist or atheist ranks thus the spiritual fence-sitting.
My closest divine spark is my life-long practice of Stoicism which has informed and enriched my life for decades. Spending most of my adult life in the Legions made me a dead man walking and that is a gift that has made my Stoicism more vital and real than ever.
These conversations have simply confirmed my absolute loathing of atheists.
Scott Alexander, a lefty, wrote a scintillating essay at SlateStarCodex on the evolution of the New Atheism into what may be the core orchid house for the current Social Justice Warrior cargo cult.
Most movement atheists weren’t in it for the religion. They were in it for the hamartiology. Once they got the message that the culture-at-large had settled on a different, better hamartiology, there was no psychological impediment to switching over. We woke up one morning and the atheist bloggers had all quietly became social justice bloggers. Nothing else had changed because nothing else had to; the underlying itch being scratched was the same. They just had to CTRL+F and replace a couple of keywords.
Keep in mind that Alexander is a champion of communism.
Theist and atheist.
Both camps broadly seek to prove or disprove a supernatural null. I have no dog in either hunt. While I find most Christians baffling, I do appreciate their assumption of moral probity that isn’t as loopy and demented as the government supremacists.
Atheists, on the other hand, tend to substitute the supernatural Godhead with an almost child-like and altogether un-skeptical worship of state power. I agree with the inimitable Christopher Hitchens of the harm religion has done to human minds but the virus only becomes lethal when married to government mayhem and bureaucracy. While religion boasts a heavy penalty for making human suffering worse than it has to be, the state takes the mantle of existential serial killer of all recorded history and now we are in the new century and the viral contagion and human software virus called communism is alive and well. Again…
Most Western religions excepting curious sects like Shakers and Quakers also embraces the state as a tool to ranch human cattle and punish the non-compliant.
My path started decades ago. I have been a paranormal skeptic my entire adult life reading publications like the Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic magazine even indulging in Steve Allen’s thinly-veiled secular humanist programs like Meeting of Minds; and I had always enjoyed the Martin Gardner articles in Scientific American (which should be reflagged as something else since it is no longer an organ of science but a secular religious periodical covering fashionable notions of illogic and government supremacism).
Whether ESP or telekinesis or cryptozoology, I had always found the skeptical logician’s skillful disembowelment and rending of paranormal frauds satisfying.
Enter climate disruption.
It caused a sea change in the skeptic community. These publications rarely touched on religion thinking it too radioactive a topic. Yet they would go on to embrace the religion of climate [fill-in-the-blank] nonsense conveniently conflating the correlative with the causative at every turn.
Something happened to empirical science, all of a sudden it became imperative to use Scientific American and even the other aforementioned publications as house organs for the climate disruption conspiracy and other government-funded Thule Society -style nonsense fully embracing the Lysenko madness of the twentieth century. If one landed from Mars and knew nothing of scientific investigation on Earth, one would think that the occult and paranormal paradigms had completely hijacked scientific business in America (not engineering but wait for it).
If one were to subscribe to Retraction Watch, you would be astonished at the craven and sloppy methodology that is empiricism today.
Once the AGW climate alarmists started to gain traction in earnest in the twenty-first century, the ripple across the whole of the scientific endeavor entered a new dark age. The combination of government funding, university-centric bureaucratic sinkholes and the harnessing of pseudo-science in NASA (Never Ascend to Space Again) and NOAA (No Observation, Attribution or Analysis) will take decades to un-fuck to jump-start sound science again. If NASA could reach Alpha Centauri (1.34 parsecs) via PowerPoint, we may have reached the system by now.
As I have said previously in my writing, so goes the education system, so goes the rationalization of serfdom. Zero out state funding to government schools K-PhD and in a generation, the very idea of communism meets the same derision as the flat earth and present climate notions.
It will take decades for a sober and honest scientific community to recover and reconstitute from the ravages of the Climate Endarkenment and its atomic leveling of scientific investigation at the altar of fabricated “consensus” as if the scientific method demanded democracy and a nod to Marx as an interlocutor for truth.
“Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.”
-Leonardo da Vinci
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“A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies” – Alfred Lord Tennyson
I am an astrophysicist working at the University of Calgary – you might like to read my short book summarizing this greatest fraud of all time:
https://www.amazon.ca/Laymans-Guide-Greatest-Scientific-History/dp/169480125X
And please watch the modest list of videos I’ve produced on my YT channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/ClimateOfSophistry
“…all of a sudden it became imperative to use Scientific American and even the other aforementioned publications as house organs for the climate disruption conspiracy and other government-funded Thule Society -style nonsense fully embracing the Lysenko madness of the twentieth century.”
Most media is converged. I remember, 30 years ago,, thinking that National Geographic and The Smithsonian magazines largely followed a healthy empirical bent. I watched over the years as they became Social Justice Warriors about climate, sexual orientation, and politics. I haven’t read either in years, but my mother gave me an annual gift subscription to National Geographic, which I collected but did not read. I finally canceled it after my mother died and I saw the cover which had a :”transgender” child on it. It is not about truth. It is about, propaganda, disinformation, and social engineering. People that don’t understand that are just the new “Catholics” that will execute the “Protestants”, to help the “Protestant” achieve salvation.
I believe that the Creation account is extremely compelling, and thus requires a Creator. In the beginning…
The other view, that first there was nothing which then exploded and then there was everything, which after an immense period of time through unknown processes became planets (the explosion of nothing shrinking into planets in a universe which is expanding!), which after an immense period of time through unknown processes became some sort of life form, which after an immense period of time through unknown and unproven processes became life as we know it; all of which requires a suspension of known scientific laws all the while proclaiming to be a scientifically proven view of the universe.
The first view requires faith, the second view requires mentally divorcing oneself from reality. From there it requires no cognitive effort to accept the ACGW nonsense. That worldview easily accepts that morality, the sense of right vs wrong, is subject only to the twisted whims of a society run by and for the insane.
Iggy,
I have noted my agreement with an unexplained first cause but my faith necessarily dissolves after that absent any evidence in this mortal coil. AGW posits that the Earth is flat and the greenhouse effect of solar activity has no bearing whatsoever on temperature fluctuation[s]. Climate alarmists are scientifically illiterate.
Bill
Noted and agreed, except that WE and everything that exists, is evidence.
I am reminded of the Francis Crick quote loosely recalled as “evolution is impossible, but that is all we have to go on” and ““Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”
Thus, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
Cheers!
In a closed system – the universe, for example – with the passage of time, disorder will increase. That’s the second law of thermodynamics. It suggests, as we go back in time, that the universe was more and more ordered, until at the beginning, the universe was in its most highly ordered state.
That suggests, given what we know about the history of the universe and the Big Bang theory, that we are not in a closed system, that there is some source of information, some source of ordering energy, which brought about the order that we see today.
As for evolution, there must be, at some point, here or elsewhere, abiogenesis – the coming into existence of molecules which have sufficient information content to at minimum reproduce themselves. Randomness begets randomness, where does the information to create ordered molecules which contain sufficient information to reproduce themselves, come from?
And evolution is *highly improbable* from a mathematical and physical point of view – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noj4phMT9OE&t=2s
All I really know is- if humans were created in some gods image… what a train wreck disaster that god must have been. Of course, if ‘it’ still exists, then what a failure it has always been. Just look around you… They aren’t even human anymore, just blobs of sh!t with very little reason to even be.
Onward through the fog.
The only thing keeping it tangable for me is the discovery every now and then, of a new species. That discovered gives me a sliver of hope.
Sorry for being a weakling, but I need to believe in something, other then me, my family. Hope is my last straw.
Dirt