You Think People'd Be Used to Snow by Now

This basically sums up my opinion of people whining about snow. Every time this happens people act like it's the first winter EVER and they have no idea what to do about this bizarre phenomenon that is snow.

They're After Your Women!!

Rabbis' wives in Israel are telling Jewish girls not to get into relationships with Arab men.

The statement was made in a letter organized by Lehava, an organization aimed at what it calls "saving the daughters of Israel" from assimilation. The group runs a shelter for Jewish women who have left their Arab partners and is calling for a boycott of a supermarket in Gush Etzion that employs Arab men and Jewish women.

And to avoid such a danger, they are telling them "Don't date non-Jews, don't work in places where there are non-Jews, and don't perform national service together with non-Jews". Why, you ask? Because "As soon as you're in their hands, in their village, under their control, everything changes." These sneaky Arabs may even try to disguise themselves as Jews! "In some of the places where Jewish girls might work, like supermarkets or hospitals, 'there are no few Arab workers who use a Hebrew name,' it [the letter] states. 'Yusuf turns into Yossi, Samir turns into Sami and Abed turns into Ami.'"

This is a totalitarian level of paranoia. Fortunately, the ladies who wrote this are on the fringes of Israeli society. A country in which this kind of talk is taken seriously could never be a free one. And it's not like they are talking about some serious epidemic of Jewish girls being whisked away by Arab men. According to the article in Ha'aretz, a paper not exactly known for its liberalism,

A protest in Bat Yam this month previously coupled the real estate issue with warnings that Jewish women should stay away from Arab men, though no convincing evidence was provided to indicate that such a phenomenon exists on a broad scale or that an increasing number of Jews are dating Arabs.

The letter also warns, "Your grandmothers never dreamed or prayed that one of their descendants would commit an act that would remove future generations of her family from the Jewish people". So remember girls, keep your race pure!

Apparently the Guy with $12.7 Billion Is Getting Ripped Off

Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, is suing AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube for infringing on his patents for "related links", "alerts" and "recommendations".

This is the second time he's tried to file this lawsuit, because the first time the courts wouldn't here it due to the fact he was basically claiming that he invented the majority of the services that every major site on the internet provides. The language of the patents is so vague that one wonders how they even qualified as patents. The patent for "alerts" describes them as "displaying information to a user in an unobtrusive manner that occupies the peripheral attention of the user." In other words, Paul Allen is claiming to have invented putting shit to one side of the screen.

Also, I LOLd when I saw that the site that featured this story had two links below the first two paragraphs labelled "See more of our latest Patents coverage" and "add an alert for future coverage of Patents."

Oopsie Doopsie

The feds are investigating whether Christine O'Donnell misused campaign money. She denies it of course, but it wouldn't surprise me if the allegations were true. Not because I think Christine O'Donnell is corrupt, but because she seems like the kind of person who would consider getting a manicure before a big political rally should be considered a legitimate expense.

Yay! Death Panels

When the opponents to Obamacare were trying to come up with ways to make it sound scary, they thought up "death panels". It is the job of these panels, they claimed, to review whose granny gets her plug pulled to save money to care for the next person. What was actually in the legislation is a provision that would pay for a person to consult their doctor about what they would like done should they ever end up a vegetable and unable to make decisions about their own care. They would see their doctor, the doctor would tell them their options, be it staying on life support indefinitely or a DNR, and Obama's health care package would cover that doctor visit.

Opponents of this cite Terri Schiavo as an example of its dangers, but, ironically, if Terri Schiavo had had this option, she could have gotten her wishes down on record, and could possibly still be alive today. Fortunately, it looks like this consultation will be covered by Medicare as of January 1st despite the ridiculous opposition against it.

Palin Doesn't Understand Conservationism

"Where do you think those pencils and paper came from?" Yeah, they came from trees. We all know that. The point is that we'd like to continue to get those things from trees. In order to do that you need to harvest them sustainably. And this doesn't just apply to trees, but everything else that can only be replaced at a finite rate.

Birthers Again

The newly inaugurated Governor of Hawaii says he wants to change the laws keeping Obama's hospital birth records private. He hopes this will put an end to the conspiracy theories about him being born in Kenya, or wherever.

It won't, of course. The birthers are crazy and will reject any evidence given to them. Obama has already shown his birth certificate, and after the initial wave of accusations that it was a fake, they said, "oh well, that a 'certification of live birth' not a birth certificate! We want the real birth certificate has the name of the doctor who delivered him and the hospital where he was born." Now, I don't know what kind of birth certificates these people have, but my birth certificate doesn't list any of those things. I've never seen a birth certificate that does. What these people want are Obama's medical records. They argue that foreign born babies can get birth certificates issued by the state of Hawaii. This is true, but the way that works is if you were born in a hospital in Wellington and your parents brought you home to Hawaii instead of applying for a birth certificate from the government of New Zealand, you could then get a Hawaii birth certificate that says you were born in Wellington, New Zealand, and they would ask for hospital records to confirm even that.

Chris Matthews wants to know why Obama hasn't just asked the state of Hawaii to release those records. Well, the first reason is that it obviously wouldn't convince them so there's no point. The second is that if people believe your birth certificate to be fraudulent and ask to see your private medical records to prove that it isn't, it is, I think, at that point, perfectly reasonable to tell them to fuck off.

Assange's Extradition

Having come to terms with the fact that publishing leaked documents is not, in itself, a crime, the US is apparently working on a way to accuse him of having ordered the documents to be leaked, or aided the leaker. Given the breadth of what really counts as espionage, it is conceivably possible for Assange to be convicted if the person responsible for the leak asked if he wanted them and Assange said "yes". He's considerably screwed if he brought it up first, like, "hey, do happen to have any secret or classified documents you can give me?"

Or what they could argue is that WikiLeaks itself, by the very nature of its existence, is an invitation to leak documents, making the whole organization a kind of bizarrely open spy ring. That argument might not fly, but we'll see if Eric Holder has the balls to make it.

Prior Restraint

Like Nixon's attempt to keep the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers (see New York Times Co. v. United States), no attempt to keep WikiLeaks from publishing the documents they have will be successful. Even if they can find a way to prosecute Assange for publishing what he has, the US government can't stop any of the other documents from coming out unless they contain specific information endangering specific people.

Arguably, some of the documents already released have given away the identities of people working as informants for the US in Afghanistan, but, so far, nobody seems to have been killed because of it. As long as WikiLeaks takes care to keep people who may become targets under wraps, the US really has no way to keep the rest of the documents from coming out.

Is Assange a Spy?

I think this video sums it up.



It should also be noted that Joe Lieberman believes it may be worth the trouble to investigate the New York Times for publishing the info posted on WikiLeaks.

The Fact That Amazon Is Uncrashable Is the Reason It Hosted Wikileaks in the First Place

Anonymous has been trying to take down Amazon.com with a DDoS all day for refusing to continue to host space for Wikileaks. This would be quite a blow if it could be done, as it would shut off the flow of all that sweet Christmas shopping money. But because it is prepared for ridiculous amounts of traffic over the holidays, overloading it's servers is next to impossible.

In fact, the reason Wikileaks was being hosted by Amazon in the first place is that it has so much extra server space to handle the extra traffic that rents a lot of it out to other websites.

We'll See How they Like Him When He Gets Some of Russia's Secrets.

Russia wants Julian Assange to get the Nobel Peace Prize. Normally a guy going around giving away everybody's secrets would not attract the affections of Russia, but

"Russia's reflexively suspicious leadership appears to have come round to WikiLeaks, having decided that the ongoing torrent of disclosures are ultimately far more damaging and disastrous to America's long-term geopolitical interests than they are to Russia's."

That may all change, of course, once he gets proof of Putin's involvement in the poisoning of Yukashchenko, or Litvinenko.

"Harmful" Books

Wikipedia's article on Human Events magazine has its list of the ten "most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries". Here it is, this is great:

1. The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
2. Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, by Mao Zedong
4. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred Kinsey
5. Democracy and Education, by John Dewey
6. Das Kapital, by Karl Marx
7. The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan
8. The Course in Positive Philosophy, by Auguste Comte
9. Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by John Maynard Keynes

Now, nobody's gonna argue about Mein Kampf, except for the fact that it is below The Communist Manifesto, which, although a lot of grief came from the implementation of its ideas, was not a call for hatred and genocide, so, if I were compiling this list, I'd put Hitler's book somewhat higher than the Marx books and Mao's book. Of course, just behind Nazism and Communism is Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Conservative's hate this book because it put an end to the credibility of claims by conservative males that they never masturbate.

Democracy and Education dared to claim that a person's personality is formed by a combination of inborn inclinations and environmental factors, leading foolish liberals to believe that criminal behavior may be caused by something other than demonic possession.

The Feminine Mystique pointed out that some women may actually have ambitions beyond simply being wives and mothers.

The Course in Positive Philosophy made the obviously satanic claim that belief should be based on reason and evidence.

Beyond Good and Evil annoys everybody by getting into the hands of sophomore arts majors, and the ideas in Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money ended the Great Depression, but did so without advocating tax cuts and therefore must be forever banned.

SUBPOENA POWER!!!

Now that the Pugs control the House, they can start Ken Starr-style witch hunts against the Obama administration like they did to the Clinton administration. What will they prosecute him for, you ask? Well, "[a]reas ripe for investigation include Obama's health care policy, its response to the BP oil spill, and the multibillion-dollar bailouts of automakers, banks and the troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

In other words, they're going to throw whatever bullshit allegations they can think of at him until they find something people will fall for.

Fuck the Innocent, I'm running for President!

Rick Perry, the re-elected Governor of Texas, is rumored to be considering running for President. A scary scenario considering the recent imbroglio involving the investigation of a recently executed inmate, Cameron Todd Willingham. Willingham's house burned down, killing his children, and he was convicted of murder by arson and sentenced to lethal injection. Sometime after the execution,

"the Willingham case has been reviewed by nine of the nation's top fire scientists—first for the [Chicago] Tribune, then for the Innocence Project, and now for the commission. All concluded that the original investigators relied on outdated theories and folklore to justify the determination of arson."

That's from the August 2009 Chicago Tribune.

When an investigation was about to be conducted by the Texas Forensic Science Commission, Governor Perry replaced the Chair of the commission who then cancelled the investigation.

This is scary shit. What kind of evil prick do you have to be to interfere with something like that? Even if the dude turned out to actually be guilty, there is clearly evidence in this case that any person with a conscience should want the state to look into.

Perry, of course denies that he was trying to interfere with the investigation, but he has a lot to answer for. To be fair, the people he replaced were about to reach the end of their term limits, and would have had to be replaced in the middle of the investigation. Perry said that "it makes a whole lot more sense to make a change now than to make a change later." However, the people he replaced asked to stay on for the beginning of the investigation and got no reply. One of the replaced prosecutors even said that "it would be disruptive to make the new appointments right now." The soon-to-be-expired terms seem to be an awfully convenient excuse to block an investigation that is potentially politically damaging.

The Psychological Attraction of Religion

One of the reasons religion has the power over people that it does is that it not only gives people clear moral instructions, relieving them of the burden of making moral decisions on their own, it forges their emotions into compliance with those instructions through their pretty fairy tales. This is the biggest advantage religion has over secular systems of morality. Although you may be able to convince yourself of the moral rightness of a particular action through your own reasoning, you may not be able to motivate yourself to perform that action through the same kind of rational deliberations.

Here's a nun talking about this very phenomenon. Especially after about 3:30.

John Maynard Keynes FTW!

Buying $600 Billion worth of debt is probably the right move. Put more money into the economy, people will buy more stuff, and businesses will make more stuff, and have to hire more people in order to do so. This works. The standard right wing response is that pouring money into the economy will lead to massive inflation and we'll end up like Weimar Germany. The important difference, of course, is that one of the problems with this economic downturn is deflation, not inflation. The problem is not that prices are too high, it's that nobody has any money so there is little demand in the economy resulting in prices being too low. Inflation is not what people should be afraid of. We need more inflation.

Sure, the US Dollar has sunk a little in comparison to other currencies, but the fact remains that jobs aren't growing because people aren't spending, and people aren't spending because they are broke.

Compromise on What?

Now that the Democrats no longer have the House, Obama says he's willing to compromise. "Compromise" to Republicans, of course, means doing everything they tell you to. To Obama it means "to yield to Republican demands on tax cuts," which is bad enough considering it means that in order to get tax cuts for the middle class, he has to give tax cuts to everyone richer than the middle class, thus cutting off the the vast majority of money that could have been used to pay down the deficit.

Well, at Least They Gained a Democratic Governor

Amazingly, prop19 didn't win. The contributions from the alcohol industry and other interested parties successfully scared people into believing that nurses and school bus drivers would be showing up to work high and their employers would, for some reason, not be able to fire them for it.

But on the bright side, while I actually liked Arnie, I'm glad that the governor of California is now a Democrat.

Creepy NephilimFree

Nobody's surprised, except maybe at how long it took for this kind of thing to come out.

Taking the Credit

Well, the election is tomorrow, and with the economy beginning to look up, the Republicans seem poised to get into power just in time to take credit for the recovery. Here's a good New York Times Article about it.

Of course if the Democrats hang onto power, the Republicans will still try to take credit, but fewer people will fall for it. This seems to be standard Republican sophistry. They still like to tell you that the economic boom of the Clinton administration was all because of Reagan's policies, even though he was two presidents prior.

Frustrating

Obama's justice department is trying to get a stay on the injubction against DADT. Why? Because, "changing the policy immediately as ordered by a federal court in California 'risks causing significant immediate harm to the military and its efforts to be prepared to implement an orderly repeal of the statute.'" How is an injunction less orderly than a repeal? If the military can handle a repeal, they can handle an injunction overturning the policy.

The Social Network

I mainly went to see this movie for the score. I had read that David Fincher told Trent Reznor to "make it cheesy sounding" and I love cheesy music, so I was curious. I was especially curious what "cheesy music" made by Trent Reznor would sound like. I'd also read that he recorded a version of In the Hall of the Mountain King, which I correctly predicted would be awesome.

Here it is:


I had been reading through the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and it seems like the 3% of reviews that are negative aren't really reviews of the movie per se. They read like they were written by people who are close personal friends of Mark Zuckerberg who got all butt hurt that the movie wasn't very flattering. This is not only lame because it has nothing to do with the quality of the movie (although I must say, I've never seen Mark Zuckerberg make the pouty faces that Jesse Eisenberg makes), it is also lame because it is actually not all that unflattering. This movie made me really like Mark Zuckerberg. Sure, he may not be pleasant company, but I like people who ditch the warm, fuzzy routine in the name of efficiency.

Also it's nice to see that Jesse Eisenberg has proven than he can be more than just a poor man's Michael Cera.

To Appeal, or Not...

While a legislative repeal of DADT would be preferable for a few reasons, appealing Judge Phillipsè ruling seems rather silly now that that avenue has proven futile. Obama seems more afraid of being accused of slipping a repeal in through the legislative back door.

Given that the logic of the decision hinged largely on whether keeping gay troops in the closet harmed troop cohesion, the Justice department will now have to argue the opposite. This puts them in the very odd position of having to argue the opposite of what they argued when campaigning for repeal.

DADT Overturned by Republicans!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_Cabin_Republicans_v._United_States_of_America

Israel's Settlement Offer

The Palestinian Authority just offered to freeze the expansion of settlements in exchange for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. This is a convenient way to paint the PA as not willing to bargain, but given what accepting the offer entails, it's hard to blame them for turning it down. Recognition of Israel as a Jewish state would basically be conceding that Jews deserve more rights in Israel than non-Jews. Granted, one would not expect Palestinians or any other Muslim community to grant equal rights to non-Muslims, but either way, ethno-states are ugly, ugly arrangements.

Take THAT WLC

I was kinda disappointed when I saw this video, I was going to do one making roughly the same criticisms.

Waiting For Armageddon

I’m watching Waiting for Armageddon. It’s pretty entertaining for the most part, though it’s a little boring due to the fact that it’s mostly shit that I’ve heard before. What you can get out of this movie, you can get out of pretty much any other footage of fundamentalist Christians: they are not interested in being reasoned with. These people cannot be defeated by mere refutation. They must be marginalized. Making movies like this one and Jesus Camp are good steps toward that. The more people see how foolish and dangerous these people are the better.

Mmmm, Drinks

Today I'm drinking a Moscow Mule.
1 part lime juice
1 part vodka
3 parts ginger ale.

Yum!

Now Let's All Forget About Robert Byrd

Robert Byrd was one of those Democrats with a bit of an odd past that Republicans like to bring up when they need something shady sounding to smear Democrats in general. Like Ted Kennedy, who, whenever he did something that Republicans didn't like -- which covered practically everything he did -- would be reminded of that time he got into a car accident at Chappaquiddick that ended up killing the girl in his passenger seat (even though you never hear an elected Democrat bring up the fact that Laura Bush killed a guy -- that's right, Laura Bush killed a guy), Robert Byrd could never live down his membership in the KKK, his opposition to desegregation, and the fact that he filibustered against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Also he was getting really old and every speech he made sounded increasingly senile and non-sensical. While he may very well have helped out with some decent legislation here and there, he was kind of an embarrassment, and now that he's dead I'm relieved that I'll no longer have to hear Republicans whine disingenuously about his personal history.

Protests and Coherence

News coverage of the G20 meeting in Toronto, like that of most coverage of protests by the mainstream media, has been condescending and dismissive. And although I'd like to say that there's a plain, commonsense message that the protesters are trying to get across that is just being ignored or suppressed, the truth is that there really is no one simple point that this multitude of people is trying to convey. The protesters are made up of representatives of a number of different interests. While all of the protesters are presumably opposed to the G20 and their policies in some fashion, among the various interests being represented there may be a few that are not only inconsistent with those of the other protesters, but possibly even a number that contradict each other. I don't doubt that there may even be a number of tinfoil hat, Alex Jones, anti-New World Order types who are protesting what they think is a global elite trying to wipe out half the world's population by promoting the homosexual agenda, and doing so in the same general vicinity as people advocating greater recognition of gay rights.

Among the issues the protesters wish addressed are debt amnesty, rights of indigenous peoples, corporate globalization, workers' rights, women's rights, and environmental degradation. It's essentially a grab bag of concerns held by those suspicious of anyone who has more money and power than they do. That's not to say that there's anything necessarily wrong with being suspicious of the wealthy and powerful, and it's not that these aren't legitimate issues. The problem is that when so many groups come together at once you can't expect the media to be able to get a complete message across. The best they can do is pull a few quotes from random people in the crowd which will rarely be fairly representative of the positions of all the people that those giving quotes intend to speak for. These protests produce little more than an inarticulate cacophony.

Geert Wilders

This guy has gotten a lot of attention lately, as has Dutch politics in general since Theo Van Gogh was murdered. The fascination, it seems to me, is partly inspired by the fact that the Netherlands is known for its tolerance, but they have a growing nationalist movement lead by people like Wilders who calls for a recognition that the Netherlands are based on "Judeo-Christian values". That does not sound like the position of a prominent European leader, but rather of an American southern Baptist.

This is unfortunate and a little scary. Scary, not because we are seeing people who wish to resist some Muslims in Europe who wish explicitly to Islamize the West, but because the people leading that resistance are no longer libertines like Pim Fortuyn, or or religious skeptics like Ayan Hirsi Ali, but, increasingly, it seems, people like Wilders.

On the Flotilla

The first thing I have to say is that it is a bit silly to expect Israel to not have (or to have but not enforce) its blockade against Gaza. Sure, the anger of the people of Gaza is in many ways understandable, but nothing justifies taking their frustrations out on civilians living on the Israeli side of the border, even if the people their rockets are hitting are supporters of the blockade. Despite what some Palestinian apologists argue I do believe there is such a thing as an Israeli civilian, and Israel should be permitted to do something to protect its civilians. Much of what Israel does in service of this goal is excessive, but I think there is a decent case to be made for the blockade.

Secondly, the people on these boats would have scored more points in public sympathy if they had allowed the Israelis to arrest them without a fight. Muslims have done this in the past, and it's gotten results. Palestinians, in many ways, have the upper hand. They're the ones who are the underdogs. They're the ones who seem to have the greatest public sympathy in much of the West. If they were to take a few lumps from Israel without retaliation, they could gather enough sympathy to put significantly greater pressure on Israel.

That being said, arresting people in international waters and killing nine people armed only with knives chairs and metal rods does nothing but strengthen the perception that the IDF are a bunch of trigger happy sociopaths. I see no reason why these ships had to have been boarded. If the IDF had found these boats near the Gaza coast, they could have turned them back at that point and prevented them from landing. I know, those ships were carrying nothing but wheelchairs, food and medicine, but the IDF had no way of knowing that without inspecting them.

The Real Value of Multiculturalism

It is ironic how much those who advocate multiculturalism and acceptance of foreign cultures in the West would also be appalled were they to go to Mumbai and see a Wal-Mart. This gives them away. They are not so attracted to multiculturalism as they are repulsed by the dominant culture in which they were raised. The word "multiculturalism" gives the impression that its proponents advocate the free mixing of various cultural elements -- that the more different kinds of culture there are in one place, the better. In practice, however, they seem more interested in diluting the Western culture that they see as vapid.

Westerners bored and disillusioned with the superficiality of Western culture. They see depth and meaning in most other cultures. Sometimes it's really there. It's not hard for a culture to have more meaning than Western culture does. But a lot of the time it's just a different kind of superficiality. And whenever they do spot that superficiality, they blame it on Western influence.

Ironically enough, multiculturalism is a predominantly Western value. Slavoj Zizek once pointed out that one of Western civilization's greatest achievements was to question the value of Western culture. You don't hear about movements in non-Western civilizations to be tolerant of immigrants and the cultural practices they import. There may be the occasional marginalized activist, but not movements as large as what you see in the West.

Western multiculturalism occasionally goes in unhealthy directions, giving undue deference to alien traditions merely because they are alien. Cosmopolitanism is great when it helps us realize where our own culture can improve, but is foolish when it compounds unhealthy practices onto other unhealthy practices, degrading all cultures involved.

Fluff

Quite regularly I go online looking for something interesting. Often I have nothing specific in mind, but I guess I'm mainly looking for something to excite me. I'm not looking for something to entertain me. I'm looking for something about which I can form an opinion, or better yet, make me want to learn more about something, or create something in response. These things I rarely find.

There are lots of things to complain about, but complaining doesn't feel particularly productive. Like what I'm doing now. This isn't filling me with much of a feeling of accomplishment.

Picking a Culture

I heard someone once ask, “Why would you limit yourself to one culture, to identify with that solely and exclude all other cultural influences?” The fact that value has a lot to do with exclusivity aside, picking just one and sticking to it relieves you of the burden of having to pick any others. One does not have to choose between cultural practices and traditions when one adopts a particular lifestyle. One can devote oneself exclusively to the traditions and rituals of the chosen culture. Now this is seen by contemporary liberals as kind of icky, because so many people have historically been forced to conform to a particular cultural tradition when a mix and match approach of various cultural elements is what is best for them. There are still many people, however, who identify with one monolithic cultural canon and wish to stick with it. Often these people are simply ignorant of what other cultures have to offer, but there do exist people who devote themselves to one culture because they identify with it more than they do any other set of practices, rather than because they don't know any better.

Palin's Prospects

I have long been hoping that Sarah Palin will not only run for the Republican nomination in the next presidential election, but also that she'll succeed. I have also been quite sceptical of her prospects. Given that she has the far more coherent and far less annoying Mitt Romney running against her, I've always assumed that her prospects were dim. However, given that Obama, and people at the Cato Institute are pointing out how extremely similar Obama's health care reform bill was to Romney's own health care program in Massachusetts, and given that those on the right seem to be looking for someone who is entirely opposed to Obamacare, Romney will be severely handicapped.

On the other hand, Ron Paul has been getting increasingly impressive poll numbers. Either way, if either a retard like Palin, or a crackpot like Ron Paul get elected, it will mean the end of the Republican Party for quite some time. Hopefully, if Ron Paul gets elected, he'll at least legalize weed.

Well...

It's been a while since I posted. I haven't run out of things to say, but my mind always seems to go blank whenever I sit to write something. It's the intimidation of having to make it all coherent. I have lots of thoughts, but they're often disjointed and it's always a chore trying to get them to come together into something readable.

Veritas48

This is a Christian apologist on youtube who tries to make some logical sense and seems to actually understand a lot of the arguments made against believing in god.

In this video, and the other in the series of videos, however, he seems to be doing something kinda sneaky.


He began the project trying to remove what he calls "negative atheists" from the debate. These are people who do not affirm the non-existence of god, but are nonetheless not convinced of the existence of god. In removing them, he eliminates the burden of justifying belief in god, and then focuses on taking on the "positive atheists" who affirm the non-existence of god. Positive atheists are a much softer target because they onus proof can be turned on them, and they have the very difficult task of proving a negative.

I think he's doing away with negative atheists a little too easily. Because they are not stating a position about the existence of god, he says, negative atheism is "not justified" because it is a "non-view". The first problem I have with this statement is the notion that you have to justify a non-view. If you must abandon non-views because you can't justify them, then nobody could ever be on the fence about anything. A person, when given a proposition, must either affirm or deny it according to this view. Nobody is ever justified in saying they are not convinced one way or another. I think this is pretty clearly problematic. As a negative atheist, this means that I either have to adopt positive atheism, a position that I think is impossible to prove, or I must accept the arguments and evidence for theism that I do not find convincing. This seems to me to be clearly unreasonable.

Now I can understand why he wants to do this. When engaging in what is ostensibly a debate about the existence of god, from his point of view what it looks like the negative atheist is doing is simply throwing up his hands and saying "well, I'm not convinced, therefore I win". This is understandably frustrating.

In order to avoid this, both the negative atheist and the theist have to realize that what is really being debated is not the existence of god, but rather the question of what constitutes legitimate grounds for being convinced there is a god. This is a subject that perhaps has not gotten the attention it deserves.

A popular epistemological stance of negative atheists is naturalism. Epistemological naturalists are convinced of things observable and measurable in nature and, because they are not able to grasp anything about entities outside of nature, (that is, supernatural things) they can have no belief one way or the other regarding the existence or nature of those things. And I think what Veritas expects of the negative atheist is an explanation of why things outside of that which is observable and measurable in nature are unworthy of belief. Or at least why, if we can have no knowledge of the supernatural, as the the naturalist believes, we should go through life under the assumption that there is nothing there. As I believe he pointed out, negative atheists, while not being convinced one way or another, most often operate under the assumption that there is no god.

Now I can't speak for all negative atheists, but the reason why I personally limit my beliefs to that which is observable in nature is largely pragmatic. When I try to apply beliefs that I can test to practical circumstances, they have a pretty good track record of giving me reliable results. When I try to apply beliefs that I have not tested, or have no way to test, the results are most often quite unreliable. Now there are plenty of beliefs I hold that I can't test, of course, but they're also beliefs in which I hold little stake because I have no way to practically apply them. I don't know for sure that Socrates existed, but I operate under the assumption that he did because I've been given some evidence and not much, if anything about the way I live my life would change if I were to find out that this belief were false. The existence of god has corollary consequences, especially if the Abrahamic god really exists. These consequences, are, however, untestable, as is the this god's existence. And if Christians want me to believe in something that has practical consequences, those consequences must be demonstrable. Because there are many propositions that are non-demonstrable, many of which are contradictory, not all of them can be adopted. How are we to decide which propositions are the correct ones if the only means of judging correctness that has shown to be reliable, that of observation and experimentation, cannot establish their truth?