Throughout
the modern Western world, it is taken as a given that the religious
members of a society are naïve ignoramuses who are immune to rationality, to
science, to the facts of life, believing as they do in ancient
superstitions.
They are to be contrasted with the
rational beings from the secular part of the society, like scientists,
as well as that part of the population who believe
in, and who revere, science and said scientists, and who altogether, as
one, laugh their heads
off at the hopeless credulity of the religious folks.
But ain't it true that once you start going into the details of the
scientific scoops — in an entirely rational, an entirely factual, and an
entirely scientific manner, I might add — a somewhat different picture
starts to emerge?
When we start to follow the news
somewhat critically, aren't we surprised to learn how one scientific
"fact", or "truth", after another turns out to be wrong or spurious?
And
furthermore, isn't there a darker, a much darker, side to the affair,
one that the rational science thinkers cannot seem to fathom?
Warning: this post, in seven parts, is the length of a book chapter.
1) So How Reliable Is Science Anyway?
Jump
a few decades, a few years, even a few months forward, and lots of what we
"know", or knew, turns out to — surprise! — be wrong. Consider a couple of
factoids:
•
In 2014 we learned from the BBC that
Stonehenge might be 4,000 years
old, not just 2,000 to 3,000 years old. Today it is described as
5,000 years old. By the way, no, they still haven't reached
a consensus over whether it is a solar calendar or not.
• In the Spring of 2015, Discover Magazine launched the theory that Black Holes may not exist.
• I was astonished not too long ago to learn that a mainstay dinosaur of my childhood, the
brontosaurus, turns out (in
a sense) to
have never existed.
•
Austin Bay points to
an Atlantic article
by Ed Yong on where lichen biology, apparently settled for 150 years,
was overturned (and overturned by a guy from a Montana trailer park, to
boot).
• The medical benefits of
dental floss turn out to be entirely unproven, reports the
Washington Post.
• Some basic gospel treatments regarding first aid — both amateur (mouth-to-mouth resuscitation) and specialist (the treatment of gunshot victims) — turn out to have become
disproved and, indeed, totally reversed, and that, over the past 20 to 25 years alone.
Indeed,
the first four factoids above have no real relevance (no, not even the
dinosaurs) on our daily lives. But as to the last two: when faulty (for
want of a better word) scientific truths intrude into
our lifestyle and our day-to-day choices, don't the results tend to
become more
problematic?
Over
the space of a year or two, some of the most mundane "scientific" facts
that we all "know" to be true have turned out to be exaggerated or
outright false — from the
rule against
refreezing to the
government's
recommendations on avoiding
whole milk and
refraining from
skipping breakfast; from the
evils of
salt to the
evils of
air-conditioning; from the supposed benefits of eight cups of water a day to those of eight hours of sleep a night.
Indeed, the whole
breakfast-is-required
deal turns out to have been the 1920s brainchild of "Edward Bernays, a
public relations guru [who] led a nationwide media campaign encouraging
people to start their mornings with bacon and eggs." The New York Times'
Anahad O'Connor
points out that "One of Mr. Bernays’s clients at the time [happened to
be the] Beech-Nut Packing Company, which [happened to sell] bacon and
other pork products."
"Thirty
years of official health advice urging people to adopt low-fat diets
and to lower their cholesterol is having “disastrous health
consequences,” writes
Henry Bodkin on the front page of the
Daily Telegraph, quoting a leading obesity charity.
The
report says the low-fat and low-cholesterol message, which has been
official policy in the UK since 1983, was based on “flawed science” and
had resulted in an increased consumption of junk food and carbohydrates.
Dr Aseem Malhotra,
consultant cardiologist and member of the Public Health Collaboration, a
group of medics, said dietary guidelines promoting low-fat foods “is
perhaps the biggest mistake in modern medical history, resulting in
devastating consequences for public health”.
Calorie
counting is also a damaging red herring when it comes to controlling
obesity, said the NOF report, as calories from different foods have
“entirely different metabolic effects on the human body, rendering that
definition useless”.
… Responding to the NOF document,
Professor Iain Broom, from Robert Gordon University, said: “The
continuation of a food policy recommending high carbohydrate, low fat,
low calorie intakes as healthy eating is fatally flawed.
“Our populations for almost 40 years have been subjected to an uncontrolled global experiment that has gone drastically wrong.”
Back in the U.S., the National Institute of Health’s We Can! program has collapsed and now
we are told that "
Everything you think you know about healthy food could be wrong" — leading the Wall Street Journal's
David McCarron to ponder whether,
After decades of failure, maybe the government should get out of the business of giving dietary advice.
"We’ve seen this before, with
trans-fats,
eggs, and
salt, and good ol’ fat" comments
Mary Katharine Ham at Hot Air.
The
problem with federal recommendations is they are given disproportionate
weight by media and citizens. They dictate food choices and subsidies
in all kinds of federal programs, funded by us. They are repeatedly
shown to be based on a lot of speculation and extrapolation and very
little reliable data.
Indeed, if there has been a problem it has been from the very outset, as we can read in
A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression; hasn't it been the scientists' and the government's intrusion into the private life of the citizen (all for his good, natch)?
Jane Ziegelman and
Andrew Coe's book is reviewed on Acculturated by
Amy Anderson:
A
Square Meal tells the tale of what happened to the traditional and
regional American table through world war, the economic collapse of the
Great Depression, and the massive southern drought that created the Dust
Bowl. The ways in which we responded to these twentieth century crises
shape our food culture to this day. The single biggest consequence can
be summed up in a phrase: the rise of the experts. 
As Ziegelman and Coe
observe, government bureaucrats “took it upon themselves to interrupt a
typically organic process and, in one colossal push, replace traditional
foodways with a scientifically designed eating program.”
The
government’s expanded role in overseeing eating habits began during
World War I, when it sought to get Americans to scale back their food
consumption in order to send extra food to the troops fighting overseas.
To achieve this end, the Food Administration, headed by Herbert Hoover,
deployed squadrons of newly created “home economists,” armed with the
latest dietary “science.”
… Look closely at the
government’s food advice to Americans over the years, and you’ll see a
lot of contradictions. As the Manhattan Institute’s Steve Malanga
argues,
More and more, the history of
dietary guidelines that our public-health authorities promulgate
resembles the Woody Allen comedy Sleeper in which the main character,
awakening from a centuries long slumber, learns that every food we once
thought bad for us, is actually good, starting with steak and chocolate.
Indeed, you might even start thinking that, as the
New York Post puts it — succinctly —
Everything you know about healthy food is a lie. Indeed,
Larry Getlen refers to the Journal of the American Medical Association’s Internal Medicine publication revealing that
many of Americans’ most prevalent beliefs about nutrition might be bunk.
These revelations make the release of a new book by food-industry expert Jeff Scot Philips, “Big Fat Food Fraud: Confessions of a Health-Food Hustler”
(Regan Arts), well-timed. Philips was a personal trainer who founded a
health-food manufacturing company that prepackaged healthy meals. He is
now reformed from that industry, and spends his time educating people on
how almost everything we hear about nutrition — including from medical
experts — may be false. Much of it, he says, is specially designed not
to improve our health, but to separate us from our money.
The blurb of the
Jeff Scot Philips book is
How Corrupt Health Inspectors, Greedy Personal Trainers, and Shady Food Manufacturers Are Making You Fat! — which is important, given the proclivity of people to distrust (and demonize) private companies along with the free market while calling for the government to protect us from these (Satanic?)
capitalists and for — ever — more oversight from its bureaucracies.
But Philips shows how the [US Department of Agriculture] might, in some cases, be actively
making our food less healthful.
A USDA agent who worked with Philips’
company said he couldn’t approve calling a salmon dish “healthy” because
the fat content was too high. The agent offered a solution: not to
lower the fat content, but rather to add sugar or carbs to the meal.
Oh, and in case you're interested:
Given all he knows about the industry, Philips’ own philosophy on
food is to stick to the basics: Eat more protein and less sugar, avoid
processed food or anything that comes in a box, and, most of all, ignore
marketing terms and nutrition labels, because they aren’t educating us
the way we think they are.
“The cold truth is: Food labels aren’t there to educate you,” he writes. “They’re there to help market to you.”
Indeed,
We’re All Guinea Pigs in a Failed Decades-Long Diet Experiment, writes Vice's Tonic (leading
Instapundit to laconically comment:
THEY BLINDED US WITH “SCIENCE”):
If you're like most Americans [and Westerners, you aren't sure how to lose weight]. And it's not your fault. It's the
fault, experts say, of decades of flawed or misleading nutrition
advice—advice that was never based on solid science. … Earlier this year, a UK nonprofit called the National ObesityForum (NOF) published a blistering condemnation of its government's diet and nutrition policies. … Speaking shortly after the report's publication, Aseem Malhotra, a
British cardiologist who consulted on the NOF report, said, "The change
in dietary advice to promote low-fat foods is perhaps the biggest
mistake in modern medical history."
… "Both professional and institutional credibility are at
stake," [Nina Teicholz, a science journalist and author of the The Big Fat Surprise] said when asked why more doctors and policymakers aren't
making noise about the harms caused by the government's dietary
guidance. She also mentioned food industry interests, the potential for
"massive class-action lawsuits," and the shame of copping to nearly a
half-century of bad diet advice as deterrents for USDA and other health
authorities when it comes to admitting they were wrong.
Is it only food and nutrition? Nay. In the New York Times, we learn that a 2015 Lancet study finds that
contrary to common belief, "the widely held view that happiness enhances
health and longevity is unfounded" ("And a million pop-psych theories
bite the dust" notes
Glenn Reynolds wryly); au contraire, writes
Denise Grady,
"earlier research confused cause and effect, suggesting that
unhappiness made people ill when it is actually the other way around."
The
University of Tennessee law professor goes on to confess:
I’m constantly astounded at how many apparently settled items in
medicine turn out to be based on weak evidence — or supposition —
mindlessly repeated for many years.
As for an unknown college psychology professor, one of his students testified that already half a century ago,
he
was dismissive of most psychological studies back then, stating that
"What is called human psychology could more properly be called the
psychology of American college undergraduates."
Indeed, Michael Roston and Benedict Carey report on
Three Popular Psychology
Studies That Didn't Hold Up, while the latter New York Times journalist authors a piece entitled
Many Psychology Findings Not as Strong as Claimed. This leads professional skeptic
Glenn Reynolds to ask:
IS “SOCIAL SCIENCE” JUST A NICE WAY OF SAYING “MADE-UP SHIT?”
Regarding the many new scientific fields of the 19th century, the Weekly Standard's
Andrew Ferguson points to an August 2015 report in the magazine Science
that shows that two thirds of behavioral sciences experiments did not,
could not, replicate the findings of original research teams, meaning
that
"two out of three experiments in behavioral psychology have a fair
chance of being worthless."
Ferguson mentions a Stanford John Ioannidis paper, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," along with a
Gina Perry book,
Beyond the Shock Machine,
and another by
Stephen T. Ziliak and
Deirdre N. McCloskey,
The Cult of Statistical Significance,
before going on to demonstrate the debunkery of such studies as the one
showing that 75% of Americans are racist and the Stanley Milgram
experiment in which subjects were told to increase electric shocks on a
stranger next door (no, contrary to what we've been told, it turns out
that most people did
not increase the strength of the shock to inflict severe pain).
Speaking of racism, it will transpire that
Psychology’s Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Is Not Up to the Job. Leading
Instapundit — again — to ask:
Is there anything in the field of social pyschology that isn’t a fraud or a sham?
By January 2017,
the BBC will be reporting that
Most scientists 'can't replicate studies by their peers'
Science is facing a
"reproducibility crisis" where more than two-thirds of researchers have
tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, research
suggests.
… "It's worrying because replication is supposed to be a hallmark of scientific integrity," says Dr Errington.
Concern over the reliability of the results published in scientific literature has been growing for some time.
According
to a survey published in the journal Nature last summer, more than 70%
of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's
experiments.
… The problem [is]
with the way the scientific literature had been "tidied up" to present a
much clearer, more robust outcome.
"What we see in the published literature is a highly curated version of what's actually happened," [says Marcus Munafo].
"The
trouble is that gives you a rose-tinted view of the evidence because
the results that get published tend to be the most interesting, the most
exciting, novel, eye-catching, unexpected results.
"What I think of as high-risk, high-return results."
The reproducibility difficulties are not about fraud, according to
Dame Ottoline Leyser, director of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the
University of Cambridge.
That would be relatively easy to stamp
out. Instead, she says: "It's about a culture that promotes impact over
substance, flashy findings over the dull, confirmatory work that most
of science is about."
She says it's about the funding bodies that
want to secure the biggest bang for their bucks, the peer review
journals that vie to publish the most exciting breakthroughs, the
institutes and universities that measure success in grants won and
papers published and the ambition of the researchers themselves.
"Everyone has to take a share of the blame," she argues. "The way the system is set up encourages less than optimal outcomes."
In a
Wall Street Journal piece entitled
How Bad Is the Government’s Science?,
Peter Wood and David Randall write that
Half the results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals are probably wrong. John Ioannidis,
now a professor of medicine at Stanford, made headlines with that
claim in 2005. Since then, researchers have confirmed his skepticism by
trying—and often failing—to reproduce many influential journal
articles.
… It seems as if there’s no end of “scientific truths” that just aren’t
so. … The
chief cause of irreproducibility may be that scientists, whether
wittingly or not, are fishing fake statistical significance out of noisy
data.
… All government agencies should review the
scientific justifications for their policies and regulations to ensure
they meet strict reproducibility standards. The economics research that
steers decisions at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department
needs to be rechecked. The social psychology that informs education
policy could be entirely irreproducible. The whole discipline of climate
science is a farrago of unreliable statistics, arbitrary research
techniques and politicized groupthink.
All
these scientists, of course, as well as the part of the population
who believe in, and who revere, said scientists, belong to the "culture that promotes impact over
substance" along with "flashy findings" and are the very people laughing
their heads off at the hopeless credulity of religious folk.
Richard Smith, who edited the British Medical Journal for more than a decade, told
The Independent
there was no evidence that peer review was a good method of detecting
errors and claimed that “most of what is published in journals is just
plain wrong or nonsense”.
… The editor
of the second of the country’s two leading medical journals, Dr Richard
Horton of The Lancet, wrote in an editorial earlier this month that
“much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue”,
blaming, among other things, studies with small sample sizes,
researchers’ conflicts of interest and “an obsession” among scientists
for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance”.
“The
apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming,” he wrote.
“In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often
sculpt their data to fit their preferred theory of the world.”
As it happens, notes
Daniel Lattier, today
Academics Write Rubbish Nobody Reads:
Half of academic papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, peer reviewers, and journal editors … an average of 10 people … many academic articles today [being] merely exercises in what one professor I
knew called “creative plagiarism”: rearrangements of previous research
with a new thesis appended on to them.
Is it any wonder that two MDs, Dr.
Aaron E. Carroll and Dr.
Rachel C. Vreeman's have felt the necessity to write books such as
Don't
Swallow Your Gum! (Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies About Your
Body and Health),
Don't Cross Your Eyes...They'll Get Stuck That Way!
(And 75 Other Health Myths Debunked) — although they are not alone, of course. Also worth a read is
Ken Jennings's
Because I Said So! (The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings
Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids).
Is it any wonder that, among the running tongue-in-cheek memes over at
Instapundit, one of the most popular is
The Science Is Settled?
2) But Beyond a Few Miscues in the Scientific Field, the Rational Unbelievers Only Have Reasonable Beliefs, Right?
But,
besides putting the utmost trust in science — which as we have seen
(above) has failed them (and us all) on more than occasion — certainly
the anti-religious part of the population are otherwise reasonable? Isn't it time to ask what
sort of rational beliefs are the reasonable unreligious people otherwise known to follow?
Listen to the testimony of
a graduate of (shudder) Oral Roberts University as, in
Redneck Nation,
Michael Graham
explains how he was regularly "a magnet for people who want to talk
about their spiritual beliefs and/or their loathing of Christianity":
After
a set at a hotel in Washington State, I was dragged into a long,
drawn-out discussion with a graying, balding New Ager who just couldn’t
get over my evangelical background. “You seem so smart,” he kept saying.
“How could you buy into that stuff?” Here’s a guy wearing a crystal
around his neck to open up his chakra, who thinks that 
the spirit of a warrior from the lost city of Atlantis is channeled
through the body of a hairdresser from Palm Springs, and who stuffs
magnets in his pants to enhance his aura, and he finds evangelicalism an
insult to his intelligence. I ask you: Who’s the redneck?
Come
to think of it, I’m not sure if this guy—who believed in reincarnation,
ghostly hauntings, and the eternal souls of animals—actually believed
in God. It’s not uncommon for Northerners, especially those who like to
use the word “spirituality,” to believe in all manner of metaphysical
events, while not believing in the Big Guy. “Religious” people go to
church and read the Bible, and Northerners view them as intolerant,
ill-educated saps. “Spiritual” people go hiking, read Shirley MacLaine
or L. Ron Hubbard, and are considered rational, intelligent beings.
Ace of Spades
reminds us that “Bill Clinton Believes in UFOs and the JFK Conspiracy, [While] Hillary Talks to Ghosts” and
Hillary Campaign Manager Jon Podesta [Is] Apparently Interested In [a] Ritual Dinner Featuring "Spirit Cooking", seemingly
linked to Satanic Rituals
and Satanism.
But these weird New Age nonsense beliefs —
dopey pseudoreligions taking the place of actual religions — will be
ignored, while the media continues to jeer at people for reading the
Bible.
… Meanwhile, Kimberly Kaye reminds people that Hillary Clinton, noted UFOlogist, has also taken part in seances in which she spoke to the ghosts of Eleanor Roosevelt and Gandhi.
The ghosts of Eleanor Roosevelt! And Gandhi! At the White House!
But
this is hardly considered part of Hillary's baggage, the way Nancy Reagan was —
roundly — mocked for turning to an astrologer during her years in the White House.
So
yes let's talk up Donald Trump's goofy belief in the Birth Certificate
Conspiracy while never talking about Bill and Hillary's shared belief
that the government is covering up the existence of alien visitors to
earth (despite their having been co-presidents in charge of the
government for eight years) and Hillary's fifth-dimensional astral
projections to the outer planes.
It's
not just science, by the way. It is also everyday "knowledge" and the
abundance of "spiritual" memes on the internet. I was once
looking at a friend's Facebook wall and pondering over a piece of wisdom until I
read another meme exactly below it that pretty much contradicted the one above, perhaps not exactly by 180º, but pretty close thereto.
A few factoids:
• In
college, once, when I had hunger pangs because I hadn't had time to eat
between classes, a friend told me that the solution was to eat an apple,
because that would kill my hunger. Less than half an hour later, when
another friend was told how I was doing, he warned me "Whatever you do,
don't eat an apple; that'll only make you hungrier."
•
Before boiling water in the kitchen, I had always used to fill the pot
with the warmest water possible; until one day, that is, when I was told
by a friend that water boils faster with cold (or was it
room-temperature?) water. From one day to the other, I switched,
although the truth is, of course, I have no idea to what extent the
woman in question was right or ought to be considered an expert in the
matter.
• Hugh Prather remembers being in a dentist's
office and overhearing a long argument between the dentist and the dental
assistant over whether it is better to use dental floss after brushing
one's teeth or before. (Personally, I always brush last, just to leave
the taste of the tooth paste in my mouth — in case anyone is
interested). Needless to say, this was 20 years ago, two decades before, as noted above, the medical benefits of dental floss turned out to be entirely unproven.
2022 update: I am sure that most of us all our lives have heard the dentist's maxim, brush up and down, not left to right. There is probably no controversy thereabout. Except that… there is: While leaving my dentist's office in Copenhagen in 2022, she told me exactly that. You must now brush to the sides as well as up and down. That is apparently the new consensus (or at least some sort of mini-consensus).
In the Wall Street Journal, Naomi Schaefer Riley adds that for the
intellectual
elites of the West, who have been declaring the demise of religion for
centuries and have been advancing a secularization thesis for decades …
religious belief is a susceptibility of the illiterate and ignorant.
With education, in their view, people see the foolishness of their ways
and abandon their beliefs. Education is spreading ever further, thanks
to affluence and technology: Hence the slow decline of faith.
… For the champions of the secularization thesis … Empty churches are a sign of reason’s progress. [Rodney Stark, the co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University and author of The Triumph of Faith] offers some amusing evidence to the contrary.
Drawing
on the Gallup poll, he notes that Europeans hold all sorts of
supernatural beliefs. In Austria, 28% of respondents say they believe in
fortune tellers; 32% believe in astrology; and 33% believe in lucky
charms. “More than 20 percent of Swedes believe in reincarnation,” Mr.
Stark writes; “half believe in mental telepathy.” More than half of
Icelanders believe in huldufolk, hidden people like elves and
trolls. It seems as if the former colonial outposts for European
missionaries are now becoming more religious, while Europe itself is
becoming interested in primitive folk beliefs.
True, conservatives are religious, concedes
Jonah Goldberg,
no one is denying that, but haven't the (homeopathy-, acupuncture-,
aromatherapy-following)
leftists forgotten a couple of minor details?
Democrats
are more likely to believe in paranormal activity. They’re also more
likely to believe in reincarnation and astrology. I have personally
known liberals who think crystals have healing powers who nonetheless
believe that the internal combustion engine doesn’t actually rely on
magical horse power.
… When I hear people talk about
science as if it’s something to “believe in,” particularly people who
reject all sorts of science-y things (vaccines, nuclear power, etc. as
discussed above), I immediately think of one of my favorite lines from
Eric Voegelin:
“When God is invisible behind the
world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols
of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the
inner-worldly language of science to take their place.”
This will be true, he added, even when “the new apocalyptics insist that the symbols they create are scientific.”
In
other words, the “Don’t you believe in evolution!?!” people don’t
really believe in science qua science, what they’re really after is
dethroning God in favor of their own gods of the material world (though I
suspect many don’t even realize why they’re so obsessed with this one
facet of the disco ball called “science”). “Criticism of religion is the
prerequisite of all criticisms,” quoth Karl Marx, who then proceeded to
create his own secular religion.
While the East Coast Élites Mock the Superstition of Conservatives Americans (i.e., Religion),
the New York Times Prints Articles Treating Subjects like Astrology Seriously
3) Isn't One of the Left's Fundamental "Rational" Beliefs About the Events of 9-11 Closely Related to Superstition?
Lest you think that belief in horoscopes, hauntings, and
huldufolk
is (more or less) innocent — although, why more so than belief in Noah's Ark and
the son of God? — it is perhaps not as innocent as it seems.
How
many times do we hear on the news that nature has taken its revenge?
How many perfectly respected politicians speak of Mother Nature and of
saving the planet? These people — those in the media and in politics — are people of power, remember, the geniuses who lead us.
We will return to Gaia, but isn't it true that one of the most pervasive
superstitious beliefs of the rational leftists concerns the attacks on
September 11?
How many times did we hear after 9-11
that this was America's comeuppance, its punishment, notably for what
happened in Santiago on September 11, 1973?
Ils l'ont bien mérité!
This is
what is referred to as poetic justice. But isn't it true that you have
to wonder what poetic justice means actually, and not bring it out
whenever you feel that argument can serve your designs?
Allow
me to give you a personal example of poetic justice. In a plane waiting
on the runway one day years ago, I witnessed a passenger who loudly
demanded, in no uncertain terms, to be allowed to change seats
immediately. The flight attendant was busy for preparing the plane for
takeoff, and to wait until the plane was in the air, but the youngish
man said he could not stand crying babies, there was one a few seats
behind him, and he wanted a change of seats —
now. Finally, she
gave in and placed him in another seat. What she hadn't realized, as the
plane was preparing for takeoff, was that another baby would start
crying just then — far louder and far closer to the man than the other
toddler had been. And as the flight attendant walked down the aisle, she
couldn't help it, she was grinning from ear to ear. As were I and all
the passengers who had witnessed the exchange.
This is poetic justice. Poetic justice is
not
the passenger's sister happening to sit next to a crying baby five
months later. Or the passenger's son missing a flight five years later.
Nor is it another, totally unrelated in any fashion, passenger from the
same city as the arrogant young man, albeit neither family member nor
friend or acquaintance, being forced to sit next to a vomiting fatso 20
years after the fact.
For the question needs to be asked, then, who, or what, is/was behind this revenge, this poetic justice?!
This is the question you are not supposed to ask! Or even think about!
Was it Osama Ben
Laden? Is there any reason to think the leader of Al Qaeda thought any better
of the Chilean unbelievers than of the American unbelievers (whether the
Chileans were/are Allende followers or whether they were/are Pinochet supporters or
whether they were/are apolotical) and didn't treat them all as the infidel dogs the whole bunch of 'em were/are?
Besides, September 11 holds no
meaning for Muslims as not only do they not live under the West's
calendar year, they don't even live according to the same type of calendar, the solar
year. They live according to the shorter lunar year — meaning (besides the fact that over
the course of several years [both lunar and solar, take your pick], a given month
will end up falling during a totally different season), the
chances for the equivalent of September 11 for 2001 (1422 for the
Muslims) falling on the same day for 1973 (1393 for the Muslims) are
extremely low (not 1 in 365 but 1 in 354) and indeed turn out to be, as
expected, unfounded. (9-11 in the "year or our Lord" 1973 turns out to be 8-13 in the year of the Prophet 1393 for
the Muslims while 9-11 of 2001 turns out to be 6-22 of 1422.)
Who, then, or what, is this entity that wished to punish America for 9-11?
I ask this of people, remember, who scoff at the existence of (a) God and of the Devil.
Is it Mother Nature? Gaia?
Alright,
if Gaia and/or Mother Nature is/are so wise: answer me this: Why use
Muslims in the four planes? Why Muslim fundamentalists? Why not
Chileans? Or at least Hispanics?
Why
wait 28 years? Why not bring vengeance two years later? Or 28
minutes later? Or 28 days later? Or 28 weeks later? Or 28 months
later? Or 280 years later?
Why
punish people in the World Trade Center, the vast majority of who
probably knew little to nothing about South American history (recent or
old)?
How about this,
Gaia? Why not punish… (wait for it)
General Pinochet?! That same year?
Or, if you insist on punishing Americans, why not punish… Richard Nixon
and Henry Kissinger? Or, if you insist on a plane crashing in the Pentagon, why wait for 2001 instead of… 1973 or 1974?
As
you can see, to call the 911 attacks the revenge, or the poetic justice, of Gaia
or of Mother Nature — or even (why not?) the vengeance of God the Father as described in the
Bible — doesn't make much sense when one spends some time thinking
about it.
(Which brings to mind an old saying: Leftists
say: follow your heart; conservatives say: follow your heart but… bring
your head along with you.)
More here on
the America-Bashers' Use of Symbolism on 9-11
Maybe the last word should go to Walter Russell Meade, who, regarding a New York Times article on
Ghost Hunting in Norway, points out, in
When God Goes Away, Superstition Takes His Place,
that people "who think themselves too rational for religious belief end
up believing in 'astral forces', ghosts and other phenomena."
But "these superstitions" can lead to much more harm, he adds:
communist atheists … scoffed at the credulity of religious believers even as they worshipped the infallible insights of Stalin
murdering tens of millions of people in the process.
Similarly, the Nazis presented their faith as an alternative to the 'outgrown superstitions' of historic Christianty.
4)
Do the Rational Employees of the Government Only Have Good Intentions,
Determined as They Are to Save Us From Superstitious Backwardness?
As you can see, the more we dig, the more unpleasantness we find. The government's
and the politicians' part in the fight for "rational belief" against
religion. As we forget that one function of religion — yes, it too — is
to serve as a part of the checks and balances against total power.
Think about Bible stories such as the Burning Bush, and the parting of
the Red Sea, and a stairway to Heaven, and Adam and Eve, and even the
world created in 7 days, or at least in less than 2,000 years, as well
as the Gospel stories relating to Jesus the Son of God. However much a Jew
and/or a Christian believes, literally or otherwise, in (at least some of) those stories, the least you can say is
that it hardly has an influence — certainly not a direct influence — on
today's public life and the policies that are debated in the corridors of power.
Here
is where
the politics of science gets even more problematic: Without
necessarily going to the extremes of the communist and the Nazi régimes,
or referring to slippery slopes, here we start seeing how it leads the
government's intrusion into the lives of the citizens (religious and
non-religious alike).
For when religion and the family are weakened, doesn't the welfare state (known by a religious expression in French,
l'État-providence) aka Big Brother (it is not a family expression by accident), take over their functions?
Kevin Williamson:
The
claim is a straightforward one: That under the so-called Affordable
Care Act, the federal government will recognize and subsidize a great
deal of hokum, things like naturopathic medicine and acupuncture that
have no scientific basis, that have been clinically shown to be useless
or worse, and that are rooted in rank mysticism, from the “qi” energy
that acupuncturists claim to manipulate—and which does not, technically
speaking, exist—to the “innate intelligence” underpinning chiropractic
theory—which does not, in fact, exist, either. As endless peer-reviewed
scientific studies document, this stuff is pure quackery, but it is,
thanks to the Affordable Care Act and the focused exertions of former
Iowa Senator Tom Harkin—one of those Democrats who really love science
we’re always hearing about—it is hokum with increasing official status.
…
This is one of those “context” things that people who do not wish to
admit the truth like to talk about. The point is that you could be sure
that if similar concessions were made to pseudoscientific hokum less
popular among Democrats—intelligent design, for example, or various
kinds of gay-conversion therapies—the response would be loud, long, and
heavy on the theme of Republicans’ hating and distrusting science. When a
nobody Republican state legislator in Idaho says something stupid about
female anatomy, it’s national news and an indicator of the Republicans’
corporate disregard for science. Democrats actually write recognition
of and subsidies for unscientific mysticism into a law—the most
important law they have passed this century—and the news media have
approximately squat to say about it.
But it gets worse.
5) Is It Possible To Be More Unscientific Than in Promoting the Left's "Human Rights" Cause du Jour?
Isn't what is possibly the most ludicrous development of the last couple of years — straight out of
a Monty Python sketch — the idea that men who believe they are women must be treated as women?
How
more anti-science, how
more anti-factual, how
more anti-rational can anyone get than to say
that a man wearing woman's clothing has
effectively become a woman?!
If anyone is to be accused of distrusting science or of hating science,
who can be more fit for this position than the person who says a man
wearing woman's clothing
ought to be recognized as a woman?! And that, all the while pretending that
this shows your enlightenment, your wisdom, and your avant-garde
broadmindedness!
Listen! If a transsexual goes the full
way, 100%, getting tata implants and having the wubba-wubba removed, he
(call him/her "she", if you insist) is still a male! Your eyes may widen
when you see, er, her, she may look sexy as hell in those high heels, but she
still has the X and Y chromosome, she still does not have the X and X
chromosomes, she still has no functioning womb, and in the final
analysis — no, I am in no way a hater, indeed, I am not even, believe it
or not,
"judging" her at all, one way or the other, I am simply doing what you love to do, cite scientific facts — she is still a man.
The topic starts losing its humor when
it turns out that various levels of government are involved in
promoting this, wanting to force you to so say and, effectively, so
think. Otherwise you will run the risk of being subject to various
degrees of punishment, from fines up to six figures (up to a quarter of a
million dollars in the Big Apple) to the ruination of a career due to
being publicized as a "hater".
At
Vanderbilt University, staff name tags include "
preferred gender pronouns" (
Pronouns have become a contentious issue lately as people with niche gender identities have invented
new pronouns to refer to themselves, like
ze,
xyr, and
vis) and
the campus has been festooned with
Ze, Zir, Zirs pronoun posters, while
West Virginia University warns that calling someone the "wrong" pronoun is a
Title IX violation.
Outside the university system, this anti-scientific (what other adjective would you call it?) fashion
du jour gets just as bad or worse. Remaining in the field of education (
education!?), the Obama administration issued a decree in May mandating that
every US public-school district allow transgender students to use the
bathroom that matches their gender identities.
Like
Josh Blackman, the New York Post's
Joe Tacopino, the Washington Times's
Bradford Richardson, and the Daily Mail's
Regina Graham, the Washington Post's
Eugene Volokh
has reported on New York City's plan to fine businesses and employers
if they "violate a person's human rights" by not using their preferred
"gender pronoun." (Christian bakers and conservative photographers know quite a lot about this.)
This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to
$125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the
result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” [sic] if people don’t speak
the way the government tells them to speak.
(Just
wait until the government, having brought a lawsuit or facing one
itself,
decides (unless it is the Supreme Court) that every public restroom in
the country has to be rebuilt to conform to new guidelines.) As
David French writes,
On this most contentious of
issues, one must use approved language and protect the most delicate of
sensibilities. It’s bad enough to see this mindset work itself through
Twitter or in shouted arguments on the quad. When it makes its way into
law, then intolerance moves from irritation into censorship. It’s
identity politics as oppression, and it’s infecting American debate.
Perhaps, with respect to the alleged natural superiority of the reasoning rationalists over his superstitiously religious neighbor, the most striking sentence in the article by
the National Review senior writer is the following:
In the secular faith of the illiberal Left, pronoun mandates have
become the equivalent of blasphemy codes.
Do not dismiss the pronominal wars as nonsense or assume that its warriors are merely daft
counsels
Anthony Esolen, as the
Professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island goes on to explain that
If I cannot say, “There is a man walking down the street,” then it is
hard to see how I can make any reliable judgment about anything at all
that bears on human existence. If I cannot say, “Joey is going to grow
up to be a fine man someday,” then what in life is left to talk about?
Everything else is less certain than sex. We may
disagree about whether President Eisenhower was a good leader of men, a
loyal husband and father, or a pious Christian; but if we cannot agree
that President Eisenhower was a man, then speech
itself is but sound and fury, signifying nothing. Or, rather, speech
collapses into action, and reason lies prone before appetite. Speech
delivers the bribes and threats of people who want what they want and do
not care overmuch how they get it.
Microaggressions Warrant Microattention
And here I return to what the … madman is doing. Or madwoman: it is more commonly she who
is demanding that people undergo pronominal lobotomies. She says that
she wants all people to feel “safe” and comfortable, regardless of their
sexual identity. That is not true. What she wants is that ordinary
people should feel uncomfortable. She wants to rob them of
their ordinary perceptions. She sows the field of conversation with
mines, glad if ordinary people learn to tiptoe around them, but
much gladder still when they fail and blow themselves up, because that
provides her with the opportunity for more “education,” which means a
more aggressive campaign against our common grasp of objective reality
and our ability to communicate with ease what we see.
… that prompts the question: why should anybody want to do this to other people? Cui bono?
What Ordinary People Get Right
The first answer is that the confusion redounds to the benefit of the
self-confused, who get to compel other people to play along with their
idiosyncratic dreams of unreality. Elwood P. Dowd not only has his
invisible friend, the six-foot-tall rabbit named Harvey,
but will take you to court unless you shake Harvey’s hand and register
Harvey in at the hotel. Harvey must be your friend too, or else.
Christian bakers who have retained their hold on reality can tell us
what will happen to you if you say, “But there is no Harvey here, nor
will I pretend that there is.”
The second answer is that ideological rent-seekers benefit. I am
thinking especially of certain college professors, directors of the
hideously named “human resources,” compliance lawyers, federal
bureaucrats, and captains of monoform diversity. They sow the mines and
then sell you a map to the field. They poison one well, station a
surveillance team around the others, and force you to drink from
theirs—levying severe fines on you if you try to dip your pitcher into
healthy water. They seek confusion and confrontation, because those
bring them money and power.
But the third answer, I think, brings us nearest to the heart of the
issue. …
Read
the whole thing.
™
6)
There Are Certainly Hordes of People Who Use Neither Common Sense Nor
the Scientific Method, But Is It Really Whom the Rationalists™ Think It
Is?
The
geniuses
who insist on leading us and on informing us about the world try
arduously to figure out "the motivations" of terrorists who unleash
rains of bullets and bombs while shouting
Allah Akbar.
Not to forget the planet, which is routinely considered a
living organism with a (human) disease, a home which we must save. (This also
applies to fiction, incidentally; Tatooine and Jakku "identify" as
desert planets, Hoth identifies as an ice planet, etc…)
Regarding CBS's hyping Earth's "chronic fever" in an extreme weather segment, Newsbusters'
Alatheia Nielsen
notes that “Even when NASA states a weather pattern has not been caused
by climate change, the media still can’t help bringing it up” — leading
Ed Driscoll to laconically remark:
I can remember when CBS said it merely had a cold.
Incalculable
leftists
mock conservatives for not believing in global warming nightmares such
as the rise of the oceans, and editorial cartoons routinely show
conservatives (regularly compared to Holocaust deniers) denying the
obvious, say, pontificating against or laughing at climate change from
the roof of a government building while the water rises around them.
As I wrote in
a couple of posts earlier this year, the disastrous claims about rising sea levels just happen to run into
one unfortunate fact:
think of New York City, of Miami, of Galveston, of San Francisco, of
Tokyo, of Sydney, of Goa, of Alexandria, of Saint Tropez, of Copenhagen.
Correct me if I am wrong, but in the past 5 years, in the past 50 years,
even offhand in the past 500 years (?), has the sea level in any of
those places risen by even one inch, by even one centimeter?
So don't you think that if the humorists had any kind of level thinking
(instead of double standards), they might, y'know, just once in a while
poke fun at the politicians and scientists (and the cartoonists?) who
continue their shouts and screams about the sky that's fallin'?
Who
is really being
unscientific in this world? The conservative skeptics
and the religious folk, or the intelligent, rational, compassionate,
avant-garde
activists?
When Obama diplomatically ducked a question on the campaign trail about
the age of the Earth (“I don’t presume to know”), the press paid no
attention. When Marco Rubio later did the same thing (“I’m not a
scientist”), he was lambasted as a typical Republican ignoramus
determined to bring back the Dark Ages.
In
The Real War on Science, The City Journal's
John Tierney argues that "the Left has done far more than the Right to set back progress."
… the eugenics movement of the 1920s made plans for improving the human population … Even after Hitler used eugenics to justify killing millions, the Left didn’t lose its interest in controlling human breeding.
Eugenicist thinking was revived by scientists convinced that the
human species had exceeded the “carrying capacity” of its ecosystem. The
most prominent was Paul Ehrlich, whose scientific specialty was the
study of butterflies. Undeterred by his ignorance of agriculture and
economics, he published confident predictions of imminent global famine
in The Population Bomb (1968).
… Ehrlich, who, at one point, advocated supplying American helicopters and
doctors to a proposed program of compulsory sterilization in India,
joined with physicist John Holdren in arguing that the U.S. Constitution would permit population control,
including limits on family size and forced abortions. Ehrlich and
Holdren calmly analyzed the merits of various technologies, such as
adding sterilants to public drinking water, and called for a “planetary
regime” to control population and natural resources around the world.
Their ideas went nowhere in the United States, but they inspired
one of the worst human rights violations of the twentieth century, in
China: the one-child policy, resulting in coerced abortion and female
infanticide. China struggles today with a dangerously small number of
workers to support its aging population. The intellectual godfathers of
this atrocity, had they been conservatives, surely would have been
ostracized. But even after his predictions turned out to be wildly
wrong, Ehrlich went on collecting honors.
For his part, Holdren has served for the past eight years as the
science advisor to President Obama, a position from which he laments
that Americans don’t take his warnings on climate change seriously. He
doesn’t seem to realize that public skepticism has a lot to do with the
dismal track record of himself and his fellow environmentalists. There’s
always an apocalypse requiring the expansion of state power. The
visions of global famine were followed by more failed predictions, such
as an “age of scarcity” due to vanishing supplies of energy and natural
resources and epidemics of cancer and infertility caused by synthetic
chemicals. In a 1976 book, The Genesis Strategy,
the climatologist Stephen Schneider advocated a new fourth branch of
the federal government (with experts like himself serving 20-year terms)
to deal with the imminent crisis of global cooling. He later switched to become a leader in the global-warming debate.
Environmental science has become so politicized that its myths endure even after they’ve been disproved. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
set off decades of chemophobia with its scary anecdotes and bad
science, like her baseless claim that DDT was causing cancer in humans
and her vision of a mass avian die-off (the bird population was actually
increasing as she wrote). Yet Silent Spring is taught in high
school and college courses as a model of science writing, with no
mention of the increased death tolls from malaria in countries that
restricted DDT, or of other problems—like the spread of dengue and the
Zika virus—exacerbated by needless fears of insecticides.
Similarly, the Left’s zeal to find new reasons to regulate has led to
pseudoscientific scaremongering about “Frankenfoods,” transfats, BPA in
plastic, mobile phones, electronic cigarettes, power lines, fracking,
and nuclear energy.
Notice how
John Tierney has brought us full circle back to the content of the very first part of this No Pasarán post. After noting a case study of "the Left’s techniques for enforcing political orthodoxy" — at one hearing of the dietary-fat debate, "Senator McGovern rebutted the skeptics by citing a
survey showing that low-fat diet recommendations were endorsed by 92
percent of 'the world’s leading doctors' " — the
City Journal contributing editor goes on to tackle global warming (conveniently retitled climate change).
These same sneer-and-smear techniques
predominate in the debate over climate change. President Obama promotes
his green agenda by announcing that “the debate is settled,” and he
denounces “climate deniers” by claiming that 97 percent of scientists
believe that global warming is dangerous. His statements are false.
While the greenhouse effect is undeniably real, and while most
scientists agree that there has been a rise in global temperatures
caused in some part by human emissions of carbon dioxide, no one knows
how much more warming will occur this century or whether it will be
dangerous.
… Yet many climate researchers are passing off their political opinions
as science, just as Obama does, and they’re even using that absurdly
unscientific term “denier” as if they were priests guarding some eternal
truth. Science advances by continually challenging and testing
hypotheses, but the modern Left has become obsessed with silencing
heretics. In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch last year, 20 climate scientists urged her
to use federal racketeering laws to prosecute corporations and think
tanks that have “deceived the American people about the risks of climate
change.” Similar assaults on free speech are endorsed in the Democratic
Party’s 2016 platform, which calls for prosecution of companies that
make “misleading” statements about “the scientific reality of climate
change.” A group of Democratic state attorneys general coordinated an assault on climate skeptics
by subpoenaing records from fossil-fuel companies and free-market think
tanks, supposedly as part of investigations to prosecute corporate
fraud. Such prosecutions may go nowhere in court—they’re blatant
violations of the First Amendment—but that’s not their purpose. By
demanding a decade’s worth of e-mail and other records, the Democratic
inquisitors and their scientist allies want to harass climate dissidents
and intimidate their donors.
Just as in the debate over dietary fat, these dissidents get smeared
in the press as corporate shills—but once again, the money flows almost
entirely the other way. The most vocal critics of climate dogma are a
half-dozen think tanks that together spend less than $15 million
annually on environmental issues. The half-dozen major green groups
spend more than $500 million, and the federal government spends $10
billion on climate research and technology to reduce emissions. Add it
up, and it’s clear that scientists face tremendous pressure to support
the “consensus” on reducing carbon emissions, as Judith Curry, a
climatologist at Georgia Tech, testified last year at a Senate hearing.
“This pressure comes not only from politicians but also from federal
funding agencies, universities and professional societies, and
scientists themselves who are green activists,” Curry said. “This
advocacy extends to the professional societies that publish journals and
organize conferences. Policy advocacy, combined with understating the
uncertainties, risks destroying science’s reputation for honesty and
objectivity—without which scientists become regarded as merely another
lobbyist group.”
Isn't it almost enough to make you wonder whether more intelligent, rational leftists in fact
believe in magic than we would care to admit? And isn't it enough to make you think that they so believe because, in the era of "hoax 'n' change,"
magic is the stock in trade of politicians and millennial movements, with one
Richard Fernandez referring to it as no less than witchcraft (indeed, "wicked witchcraft", he calls it, adding that "it's strictly taboo to admit it")?
7) Every single postulate in our lives is up for
grabs: What Exactly Is It That Drives the Rational Science Devotees on This Planet?
How about the conviction that every Republican candidate is (akin to) the Devil? How scientific, how rational — how
innocent — is that?
Or, conversely, the conviction that every Democratic candidate is a sainted figure, come to save, come to lead, the people?
Or that all immigrants, legal or otherwise, are innocent souls, worthy of protection and outright embracement?
As
Daniel Payne notes in the National Review,
It’s one of the most ironclad rules of American politics: the next Republican is always the Worst Republican Ever.
This tells us something rather poignant about liberal political
philosophy — namely, that it exists less as a coherent and workable set
of political and public-policy beliefs and more as a fanatical,
oppositional vehicle for hysterics who shriek and faint whenever a new
Republican walks onto the scene.
The problem is not science, of course. Isn't the problem the
liberals? Isn't the
problem the way
leftists
laugh their heads off at
religious people's superstitious attachment to backwards beliefs while
every
time one of their scientific facts is — far from infrequently — proven
incorrect,
it turns out to be nothing more than a, ho-hum, boring fact. Worthy of no coverage, unless
it is back on page 24 of the New York Times or a brief mention in the last
sequence of a news show.
So why do we continue treating
science with such reverence? Why don't we — or certainly, the
holier-than-thou
leftists — treat scientific data with some of the same ridicule
as they do religion?
To answer that, we must ask, What is it exactly that drives them?
Is it logic?
Is it reason?
Is it the love of science?
Is it the pursuit of knowledge?
Isn't it something else?
Isn't it the excitement involved?
The
melodrama?
Isn't it the reason we love young, go-forward, change candidates, like JFK and
Barack Obama and Che Guevara, elevating these knight in shining armor to iconic status?
It is the excitement,
the melodrama, the dramatics of the thing.
The belief
that we are part of the select few, a movement, a struggle, the legions of avant-garde,
forward-looking paragons looking for a better world.
Isn't
it this enjoyable addiction to excitement, to melodrama — not reason —
which explains why the denigration of religious folk will never cease —
just as the never-ceasing self-congratulations of the ever-so-wise and
the rational will continue, just as ardently as ever…
Let
the final word go to an anonymous commentator on
National Review
(slightly redacted for grammar and typos) who goes by the name of
François-Marie Arouet (i.e., Voltaire):
Christianity
is — at its very basic — a set of ethical and moral norms that the West
has sacralized as ideal, common, and (until yesterday) unquestionable.
Science is ethically and morally neutral. Christianity has accrued
the
wisdom of 8,000 generations, not to mention the philosophy that preceded
it. Scientific theories can change point blank and it has no human
roots.
Once we started demoting and discarding the set
of norms that we have found least imperfect for the last 2,000 years, we
have found ourselves floundering after mere causes, short-lived fads,
popular idols, and no shared ethics. If we need this or that study to
conclude that, yes, it is socially beneficial to "honor thy father and
thy mother," you know that every single postulate in our lives is up for
grabs, up for political manipulation, and — ultimately — up for refutation
with the next "study." No principle is sacred because all principles
can be tested and refuted. Therefore, we no longer "believe" in
anything firm, ethically and morally speaking.
Worse
yet, state-sponsored studies can suddenly "prove" that hitherto
abominable actions have a social value — as has sadly happened in the
20th century, costing the West millions of lives. We have eaten the
apple of knowledge, and we think we have all the answers. Meanwhile,
our society is disintegrating, from the family on down.
