PZ continually displays his ignorance of the foundations of science. Being totally imbued with inferential evolution as “valid science”, it is little wonder that he does not connect with the actual empirical process, and the underlying support axioms. He is perpetually incensed that anyone would conclude that there is “faith” involved; after all, faith is evil.
So I will again bring up the inductive fallacy, the deductive fallacy, and the group of axioms called the First Principles. Science exercises all of these. And evolution exercises even more due its lack of experimental verifability. Even Dawkins acknowledges that. The axiomatic foundations are not based on scientific factoids and they are not vulnerable to experimentation, although they are falsifiable and have not been.
What PZ is on about is usually not related in any way to valid scientific assessment or the ways in which knowledge is accumulated. PZ is focused only on defending Materialism and Atheism. To do that he uses a slap-dash scientism-in-your-face attack. Its always an attack: that’s what his congregation likes about PZ’s sermons, he’s an uncivil explosive device, and that appeals to the rebellious adolescent emotional level, those who wish they had the nerve to do that. In our time, there are plenty of those, it seems.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Not Black Enough: Kenneth Gladney's Race is Revoked.
Remember Kenneth Gladney? He was the black man who was selling American flags at a Tea Party rally, who was beaten to the ground by white SEIU thugs. Now the NAACP explains why they didn't and don't care:
To display independence of action and thought is unpardonable and therefore indefensible, especially if it threatens the cash flow into the culture. What the NAACP is defending is the right of Leftists of any color to beat senseless anyone who rises out of the Culture of Victimhood. The fact that the assailant has not been prosecuted, and the fact that there are rallies in the defense of the assailant, speaks volumes about the culture of the Left in the USA today.
These are Obama's people: SEIU thugs. They responded to his charge to "hit back twice as hard". He made no statements chastising his own people, as he did criticising the police who legitimately challenged a bellicose black professor. Obama's silence here is a racial, Victimhood statement in itself. He is quick to endorse activism, and slow-to-never condemns violence against his opposition. In fact, as in the infamous Black Panther case, the racism and endorsement of violence is overt.
Once again I recommend the book, "The Big Black Lie: How I Learned the Truth About the Democrat Party", by Kevin Jackson. Jackson is another ex-black who rejected the internal culture of victimhood (and racial hatred) in black society.
Normally blacks are accorded automatic certification of the moral certitude of their opinions due to the inherited pain of, well, being black. So when a black's opinion doesn't fit the Victimhood narrative, then that person is not black enough to be black. The Left revokes his race.
Rationality is not part of the narrative; preservation of the co-dependent benefactor-victim relationship is the narrative. And it is all on other people's money of course.
Gladney is not black enough. He is an Uncle Tom.This has nothing to do with skin color or genetic inheritance. "Not black enough" and "Uncle Tom" mean that Gladney did the unpardonable, for which his race has been rescinded: he is no longer black. What Gladney actually did was to leave the "Democrat plantation" as one commenter put it. He left the brotherhood of perpetual victims and sops for government treasure, therefore he is no longer a brother.
To display independence of action and thought is unpardonable and therefore indefensible, especially if it threatens the cash flow into the culture. What the NAACP is defending is the right of Leftists of any color to beat senseless anyone who rises out of the Culture of Victimhood. The fact that the assailant has not been prosecuted, and the fact that there are rallies in the defense of the assailant, speaks volumes about the culture of the Left in the USA today.
These are Obama's people: SEIU thugs. They responded to his charge to "hit back twice as hard". He made no statements chastising his own people, as he did criticising the police who legitimately challenged a bellicose black professor. Obama's silence here is a racial, Victimhood statement in itself. He is quick to endorse activism, and slow-to-never condemns violence against his opposition. In fact, as in the infamous Black Panther case, the racism and endorsement of violence is overt.
Once again I recommend the book, "The Big Black Lie: How I Learned the Truth About the Democrat Party", by Kevin Jackson. Jackson is another ex-black who rejected the internal culture of victimhood (and racial hatred) in black society.
Normally blacks are accorded automatic certification of the moral certitude of their opinions due to the inherited pain of, well, being black. So when a black's opinion doesn't fit the Victimhood narrative, then that person is not black enough to be black. The Left revokes his race.
Rationality is not part of the narrative; preservation of the co-dependent benefactor-victim relationship is the narrative. And it is all on other people's money of course.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Rebellion, Freedom and Reality
When the movie, “Rebel Without a Cause” came out in 1955, I felt as if they had made it about me. Being adolescent in a time of gang warfare, football hero worship, drag racing, and back seat bingo – none of which applied to me – put me in a peripheral category. Being a peripheral adolescent is not fun, especially if it includes life at home, a place where I was pretty much just in the way. Mom and Dad both had careers and their expectations for me were that I be a scholar and keep quiet. Neither of which appealed to me, both which I ignored. I felt marginalized and without a definition of being anyone.
In those days, they cracked down on peripheral slackers. These days I suppose slackers and peripherals get lots of sympathy, and co-dependent support. I got cracked down on. James Dean got co-dependent support in the movie. Either way, rebellion is inevitable, because there is no way to develop a sense of ownership of one’s own self, if that self is controlled by someone else. Adolescent rebellion is one of the ways that youth sheds dependence and becomes. It is the need to become that drives rebellion, the need to differentiate oneself, to become autonomous, and in control. In adolescents, it is normal.
Not long after the James Dean movie, the James Bond movies started coming out. Talk about cool and in control. Bond always survived the worst attacks and then had sex with the most beautiful women. Not so the peripheral adolescent. The lack of control became omnipresent and painfully so.
Yet with the acquisition of adult age, a self-financed degree, a good professional job, the peripheral adolescent in me should have disappeared. It faded, but never really seemed to disappear, in the sense that rebellion against authority was always still just subcutaneous, barely repressed but also not really visible to the casual observer.
Rebellion is a destructive force. When it is not released, it becomes an attitude, a worldview. As it gets worse, it metastasizes into internalized negativity, then externalized as a substitute for rational thought. In an adult, it is a toxin.
Here’s what I mean by that. Rebellion might originally have legitimate causes such as seeking oneself by eliminating the forces that control. But it has illegitimate tactics that go along with that, including a thoughtless rejection of articles that are perceived as threats, which really are not. The pursuit for autonomy can and frequently does eliminate every input from standard cultural sources as wrong, and then: evil.
Such rebellion, when not abated in adulthood, can become stultifyingly irascible, belligerent, reflexive, uncompromising and destructive to rationality. This sort of individual finds support from like minded belligerents who come to feel that their pain is a source of moral superiority, a source that cannot be comprehended by the “Other”. Rebellion thus becomes a moral statement, a decree against almost everything cultural which might inhibit or control the rebel. Rebellion becomes a force against the tyranny of others, the tyranny of external control, of standards, of rules, of mores and of ethos. Rebellion leads to a reflexive rejection of most everything which the host culture values.
It is this reflexive rejection that gives chronic rebellion its irrational character. The adult rebel will immediately reject or deny a cultural standard without a shred of evidence to support his premise. The common path of rebel thought includes rejection, Reductio Ad Absurdum, ridicule, Ad Hominem attacks, and verbal violence upon foes. The adult rebel automatically knows better than his foes, still without a shred of supporting evidence. Generally seen as a fractious belligerent, the rebel will not succumb to reasoned debate, but will frequently explode tangentially into a non-coherent tantrum in the face of persistent logic.
This sort of worldview is seen by the rebel as freedom, total freedom of thought. Rather, he is captive to negative reflexion away from standards, all standards, whether rational or not, beneficial or not, moral or not. The rebel’s morality is merely to reject.
What suffers for the rebel is the loss of contact with universals. To present universals to a rebel is to meet with instantaneous rejection. Sometimes the rejection is based on scientism. No matter, the just the idea of universals is an idea of external control: psychologically anathema to the rebel.
But for rationality, universal reality is the only guideline we have. Coherence can only be derived from a condition of universal consistency, a trait that we can observe ourselves without external coercion. In fact, universal reality is deduced after inductive observation of the characteristics of the universe; it is falsifiable by continuous observation, and philosophical observations over millennia have observed some consistent characteristics that are inherent to the basic construction of the universe, and which render it coherent. These principles allow the deduction of First Principles, which apply to reality, and how we can think about reality coherently and produce valid thoughts through structured processes of thought. Such structured thinking about universal realities is called “logic”. And symbolic math. And ultimately science.
But rebellion is against the external control of things like roots, which demand subservience as they require recognition of their validity. Here again, reflexive rebellion goes astray, goes awry, as it rejects the implacable validity of the universal characteristics to which we are subject. Misreading roots as threats rather than foundations for valid thinking is endemic in rebels.
The freedom that rebels crave, they also reject because freedom of thought comes with the ability to apply rationality to every and all propositions, at least those subject to rational analysis.
And this brings us to morality. The rebel’s presumed morality, mentioned above, is derived from the pain produced by the rebellion, which the rebel presumes confers moral authority upon himself. But it can be seen that irrationality rules the rebel; so why would morality be invested upon such an individual? And invested by whom?
The intellectual world is infested with rebels of the sort discussed above. Their forte’ is to reject all the norms for thought and behavior that are present in the culture which provides for them. And they self-anoint (in Sowell’s terminology) with mantles of extraordinary morality, priests of differentiated thinking and Consequentialism. They gather into groups of self-appellated intellectuals, remaining in and taking control of university lounges, and venturing into government advisory positions from which to pontificate and maneuver the masses.
But their rebellious rejectionism remains a distinctive characteristic, the immediate defiance in the presence of rational alternatives to their “moral advances” and progressivism for the herd. Again, a mark of the irrational rebel is that they know better than us about everything (and in a moral way), without a shred of supporting evidence, in fact despite the masses of evidence to the contrary. Morality is not influenced by evidence, if you are possessed of irrational rebellion. The lack of personal freedom that the rebel incurs for himself everyday is to be compensated by the removal of personal freedoms from the Other, leveling the field once and for all, and this is morality. As Alinsky said in his tenth rule, “…clothe it in moral garments.” He didn’t mean be moral. He meant, make it look moral, regardless of the tactic: make the ends look moral, and the means will justify themselves: Consequentialism.
The inevitable Consequentialism of the rebellious is merely a self-justification for doing whatever they wish (frequently to whoever they wish). This illusion of freedom results in either incarceration of the Consequentialist in a just world, or abuse of the Consequentialist’s fellow man, in a Consequentialist world. Frequently in history it has been the latter, at least for those who aspire to control rather than be controlled. Rebellion in adults is not without victims, not in the victimology sense of co-dependence, but real victims. The first victim is the rebel himself, trapped in a fearful state of perceived persecution by forces that want to control him, unable to free himself into rational thought and worldview behaviors, because that requires his submission – subservience – to outside forces, the universals which cannot be recognized. Rejection of these necessary roots is fatal to rationality, and the rebel suffers under his own constrictions, imprisoned away from the reality of the universe as shown through its coherence.
In short, the rebel is miserable and frequently without recourse. The rebel is frustrated by the refusal of the Other to abandon rationality and join him in his irrational, miserable state. So he is also angry. And an angry, miserable, irrational Consequentialist is not a pleasant companion. Or correspondent. Or politician.
Rebels are beyond help, at least logical help. It is a deep seated psychological issue. But like most mental issues these days, it is not considered pathological until an actual crime is committed. The damage they do can be controlled, until they seize the three branches of government. Uh oh. Our reality is changing, and not to the more rational state.
In those days, they cracked down on peripheral slackers. These days I suppose slackers and peripherals get lots of sympathy, and co-dependent support. I got cracked down on. James Dean got co-dependent support in the movie. Either way, rebellion is inevitable, because there is no way to develop a sense of ownership of one’s own self, if that self is controlled by someone else. Adolescent rebellion is one of the ways that youth sheds dependence and becomes. It is the need to become that drives rebellion, the need to differentiate oneself, to become autonomous, and in control. In adolescents, it is normal.
Not long after the James Dean movie, the James Bond movies started coming out. Talk about cool and in control. Bond always survived the worst attacks and then had sex with the most beautiful women. Not so the peripheral adolescent. The lack of control became omnipresent and painfully so.
Yet with the acquisition of adult age, a self-financed degree, a good professional job, the peripheral adolescent in me should have disappeared. It faded, but never really seemed to disappear, in the sense that rebellion against authority was always still just subcutaneous, barely repressed but also not really visible to the casual observer.
Rebellion is a destructive force. When it is not released, it becomes an attitude, a worldview. As it gets worse, it metastasizes into internalized negativity, then externalized as a substitute for rational thought. In an adult, it is a toxin.
Here’s what I mean by that. Rebellion might originally have legitimate causes such as seeking oneself by eliminating the forces that control. But it has illegitimate tactics that go along with that, including a thoughtless rejection of articles that are perceived as threats, which really are not. The pursuit for autonomy can and frequently does eliminate every input from standard cultural sources as wrong, and then: evil.
Such rebellion, when not abated in adulthood, can become stultifyingly irascible, belligerent, reflexive, uncompromising and destructive to rationality. This sort of individual finds support from like minded belligerents who come to feel that their pain is a source of moral superiority, a source that cannot be comprehended by the “Other”. Rebellion thus becomes a moral statement, a decree against almost everything cultural which might inhibit or control the rebel. Rebellion becomes a force against the tyranny of others, the tyranny of external control, of standards, of rules, of mores and of ethos. Rebellion leads to a reflexive rejection of most everything which the host culture values.
It is this reflexive rejection that gives chronic rebellion its irrational character. The adult rebel will immediately reject or deny a cultural standard without a shred of evidence to support his premise. The common path of rebel thought includes rejection, Reductio Ad Absurdum, ridicule, Ad Hominem attacks, and verbal violence upon foes. The adult rebel automatically knows better than his foes, still without a shred of supporting evidence. Generally seen as a fractious belligerent, the rebel will not succumb to reasoned debate, but will frequently explode tangentially into a non-coherent tantrum in the face of persistent logic.
This sort of worldview is seen by the rebel as freedom, total freedom of thought. Rather, he is captive to negative reflexion away from standards, all standards, whether rational or not, beneficial or not, moral or not. The rebel’s morality is merely to reject.
What suffers for the rebel is the loss of contact with universals. To present universals to a rebel is to meet with instantaneous rejection. Sometimes the rejection is based on scientism. No matter, the just the idea of universals is an idea of external control: psychologically anathema to the rebel.
But for rationality, universal reality is the only guideline we have. Coherence can only be derived from a condition of universal consistency, a trait that we can observe ourselves without external coercion. In fact, universal reality is deduced after inductive observation of the characteristics of the universe; it is falsifiable by continuous observation, and philosophical observations over millennia have observed some consistent characteristics that are inherent to the basic construction of the universe, and which render it coherent. These principles allow the deduction of First Principles, which apply to reality, and how we can think about reality coherently and produce valid thoughts through structured processes of thought. Such structured thinking about universal realities is called “logic”. And symbolic math. And ultimately science.
But rebellion is against the external control of things like roots, which demand subservience as they require recognition of their validity. Here again, reflexive rebellion goes astray, goes awry, as it rejects the implacable validity of the universal characteristics to which we are subject. Misreading roots as threats rather than foundations for valid thinking is endemic in rebels.
The freedom that rebels crave, they also reject because freedom of thought comes with the ability to apply rationality to every and all propositions, at least those subject to rational analysis.
And this brings us to morality. The rebel’s presumed morality, mentioned above, is derived from the pain produced by the rebellion, which the rebel presumes confers moral authority upon himself. But it can be seen that irrationality rules the rebel; so why would morality be invested upon such an individual? And invested by whom?
The intellectual world is infested with rebels of the sort discussed above. Their forte’ is to reject all the norms for thought and behavior that are present in the culture which provides for them. And they self-anoint (in Sowell’s terminology) with mantles of extraordinary morality, priests of differentiated thinking and Consequentialism. They gather into groups of self-appellated intellectuals, remaining in and taking control of university lounges, and venturing into government advisory positions from which to pontificate and maneuver the masses.
But their rebellious rejectionism remains a distinctive characteristic, the immediate defiance in the presence of rational alternatives to their “moral advances” and progressivism for the herd. Again, a mark of the irrational rebel is that they know better than us about everything (and in a moral way), without a shred of supporting evidence, in fact despite the masses of evidence to the contrary. Morality is not influenced by evidence, if you are possessed of irrational rebellion. The lack of personal freedom that the rebel incurs for himself everyday is to be compensated by the removal of personal freedoms from the Other, leveling the field once and for all, and this is morality. As Alinsky said in his tenth rule, “…clothe it in moral garments.” He didn’t mean be moral. He meant, make it look moral, regardless of the tactic: make the ends look moral, and the means will justify themselves: Consequentialism.
The inevitable Consequentialism of the rebellious is merely a self-justification for doing whatever they wish (frequently to whoever they wish). This illusion of freedom results in either incarceration of the Consequentialist in a just world, or abuse of the Consequentialist’s fellow man, in a Consequentialist world. Frequently in history it has been the latter, at least for those who aspire to control rather than be controlled. Rebellion in adults is not without victims, not in the victimology sense of co-dependence, but real victims. The first victim is the rebel himself, trapped in a fearful state of perceived persecution by forces that want to control him, unable to free himself into rational thought and worldview behaviors, because that requires his submission – subservience – to outside forces, the universals which cannot be recognized. Rejection of these necessary roots is fatal to rationality, and the rebel suffers under his own constrictions, imprisoned away from the reality of the universe as shown through its coherence.
In short, the rebel is miserable and frequently without recourse. The rebel is frustrated by the refusal of the Other to abandon rationality and join him in his irrational, miserable state. So he is also angry. And an angry, miserable, irrational Consequentialist is not a pleasant companion. Or correspondent. Or politician.
Rebels are beyond help, at least logical help. It is a deep seated psychological issue. But like most mental issues these days, it is not considered pathological until an actual crime is committed. The damage they do can be controlled, until they seize the three branches of government. Uh oh. Our reality is changing, and not to the more rational state.
Monday, July 5, 2010
PZ's Sunday Sermon 07.04.10
PZ uses Jacob Bronowski to attack Catholics first and “religion” in general later on. He admits that Bronowski did not do that in his work, “The Ascent of Man”. But PZ can’t resist doing it himself. It always resolves to this for PZ: Man’s science is good; Man’s religion is bad. Under the Bronowski spell, science acquires art and architecture too.
As for the antithesis of religious thought, PZ would not listen if he were told that religion is about personal development of positive traits for individual growth. PZ makes up his own narrative concerning what religious thought is, does, is about. He reads only about religious quackery and uses that to support his own scientistic quackery. For such quacks, religion is just some myth, unattainable to materialism, therefore false. And being defined false, it is content free, also by definition.
He is infatuated with his own tenuous attachment to a tenuous process that he identifies with science, which he sanctifies. For PZ science is evolutionary biology; and he is a science teacher and evangelist for scientism / inferential evolutionism. But he betrays no understaning of the role of science
In human affairs, except through the corrupt lens of inferential scientism.
This sort of self-idolatry which PZ produces is just false. Scientists are not blasphemers. Thoughtless, self-involved rebels are; emotional adolescents are. PZ loves to pedestalize himself. But he is not a scientist, he is an Atheist science teacher who loves to use scientism as an excuse for a constant stream of blaspheming, heresy, and sacrilege, as well as personal insults and Ad Hominem assaults. Assaults, including verbal assaults, are the mark of a cowardly weakling attempting to boost his own status somehow through the violence. PZ’s verbal violence is no exception. And those who revere PZ and what he stands for are even moreso.
”But then, aspiring is what we do. It's how we grow as a species, and it's antithetical to religious thought. Where religion thrives on stability and stasis, science thrives on the ragged edge of the known and unknown. Whenever we push back the darkness somewhere, we are killing a little piece of god.”Revealing his complete ignorance of the function of religion, PZ waxes metaphorical. But it is not possible for PZ or any other scientism-ist to have any effect on the First Cause, whatsoever, much less kill it. PZ and the entire scientifc and scientism community are completely impotent in that respect.
As for the antithesis of religious thought, PZ would not listen if he were told that religion is about personal development of positive traits for individual growth. PZ makes up his own narrative concerning what religious thought is, does, is about. He reads only about religious quackery and uses that to support his own scientistic quackery. For such quacks, religion is just some myth, unattainable to materialism, therefore false. And being defined false, it is content free, also by definition.
He is infatuated with his own tenuous attachment to a tenuous process that he identifies with science, which he sanctifies. For PZ science is evolutionary biology; and he is a science teacher and evangelist for scientism / inferential evolutionism. But he betrays no understaning of the role of science
In human affairs, except through the corrupt lens of inferential scientism.
”A dead civilization is one that has stopped progressing, that ends that dynamism in the stasis of preservation and numbing reverence for the past — when a 2000 year old myth becomes the greatest knowledge worth knowing, we have abandoned the process and begun the contraction into the shells we built while still vital. We must continually break down and rebuild, reduce and reintegrate, disassemble and reassemble to grow. I often hear complaints about "reductionist science" that damn it for breaking the world apart into smaller and smaller units — but those complaints are ill-founded for two reasons. That destruction has always been and always will be a key part of human progress; that contemplation of what is without breaking it to reveal what is within is exactly the failure of the civilizations Bronowski is describing. And further, there is no such thing as purely reductionist science — science always builds again for deeper understanding. Evolutionary theory is a beautiful example of a powerful synthesis driven by insights from reductive analyses. It's also an idea that is constantly being taken apart from within and rebuilt with new insights — it's strength is in dynamism, not stasis.”Scientific reduction always fails if the reduction cuts into or eliminates the core essence of the study target. If the core is not correctly identified, then reduction is not warranted. When it comes to religion, PZ denies that there is any essence or core value that could be defensible; so, warranted only by his own denial, he cuts it down reductively to zombies chanting to a big faerie. It is truly amazing that he gathers so many credulous followers of his own brand of zombieism, because the fallacies he produces are so blatantly obvious that surely thoughtful analysts would shy away from him.
[emphasis added]
”Blasphemers, heretics, and the sacrilegious are the cutting edge of the hand of humankind. Our eyes turn to everything and take it apart, picking at its bones and tracing the sinews and nerves to understand what makes it work, and the everything we critically analyze includes the dogmas of our religious institutions. The most terrible thing we do to religion is to take it seriously — as seriously as we do a piece of flint, a stone arch, or a cathedral — and aim to take it apart, extract the bits that serve us well, and reassemble it into a tool that will serve humanity better. The chaff will be stripped, the nonsense carved out, the comfortable lies burned away, and what will be left will not bear a trace of the revered superstitions, but a framework of human art and utility.”But first, religion must be drastically reduced to what it is not. Otherwise it does not fit into the scientism narrative that PZ chants. Religion must first be reduced to a parody, and then again reduced from parody to an absurdity, in order to show that it is absurd. It is this reduction^2 that PZ promotes as his truth. No wonder he defends reductionism without condition; he can’t understand religion without it.
This sort of self-idolatry which PZ produces is just false. Scientists are not blasphemers. Thoughtless, self-involved rebels are; emotional adolescents are. PZ loves to pedestalize himself. But he is not a scientist, he is an Atheist science teacher who loves to use scientism as an excuse for a constant stream of blaspheming, heresy, and sacrilege, as well as personal insults and Ad Hominem assaults. Assaults, including verbal assaults, are the mark of a cowardly weakling attempting to boost his own status somehow through the violence. PZ’s verbal violence is no exception. And those who revere PZ and what he stands for are even moreso.
Name That Document
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Stem Cells From Blood
This seems major:
"Blood drawn with a simple needle stick can be coaxed into producing stem cells that may have the ability to form any type of tissue in the body, three independent papers report in the July 2 Cell Stem Cell. The new technique will allow scientists to tap a large, readily available source of personalized stem cells.
Because taking blood is safe, fast and efficient compared to current stem cell harvesting methods, some of which include biopsies and pretreatments with drugs, researchers hope that blood-derived stem cells could one day be used to study and treat diseases — though major safety hurdles remain."
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