Recently in Morality, Religion & Philosophy Category

I wrote about David Mamet's break with "liberalism" a couple of months ago, and here's another great story about a Hollywood leftist's conversion to the right-wing.

In my former life I was Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh’s agent and manager. I co-owned a prosperous talent management firm, Relativity Management, lived in a four-story mansion, and somehow success­fully stumbled (often drunk and stoned) through the whorehouse called Hollywood. I was an indoctrinated hardcore liberal. If you think I’m a spoiled dick and you hate me, then we’re on the right track. But having a child 10 years ago changed my thinking. It gave me a certain respect for capitalism and even corporate America.

When I bought a new Hummer H2 back in 2002, I ordered a custom license plate that read U.S. WINS. I got it because I believed in the message. I wanted people to have a reaction to the plate, usually negative, and then examine their thinking. Would it be so bad to win this war? Plus, I knew it would fucking piss everyone in the city off because it was Los Angeles.

I could give two fucks about WMDs. There were much more important reasons to topple Saddam—terrorism being one of them. The root causes of terrorism are the lack of capitalism, the lack of democracy, and the lack of modern education. What has stood in the way of those things has primarily been the regimes of Iraq, Iran, and Syria. We just got one of them out of the way.

It looks like visiting Iraq and watching the War on Terror first-hand can really affect one's perspective.

(HT: My wife.)

Republicans should be concerned about demographic shifts in America, but writer Alan Abramowitz doesn't leave any room for the possibility that conservative positions could gain traction within the emerging majority of non-white, non-married, non-Christians.

Since the potential for additional Republican gains among married white Christians appears to be limited, Republican leaders will need to find ways to reduce the Democratic advantage among voters who are not married white Christians in order to maintain the party's competitive position. However, given the generally liberal views of this group, this will not be easy. In 2006, according to data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, 57 percent of these voters supported a woman's right to choose an abortion under any circumstances, 66 percent opposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage, and 71 percent favored a single-payer health care system. Any attempt by Republican leaders to significantly increase their party's support among voters who are not married white Christians would therefore require changes in some of the party's longstanding policy commitments -- changes that would clearly upset a large segment of the current Republican base.

There are several problems I can see with Dr. Abramowitz' analysis.

1. The political preferences he attributes to skin color are more likely to be due to dynamic cultural factors, such as recency of immigration, urban living conditions, and so forth. It's unlikely that skin color alone causes a person to favor gay marriage or broadly legal abortion. Whatever cultural factors underlie the leftist dominance of non-whites could change or be changed as easily as white preferences have changed over the decades.

2. Even though people are getting married later than they have in the past, most people still do marry. As longevity increases, it's not clear that people will spend fewer voting years married than they have in the past. Additionally, there's no reason to believe that marriage is experiencing a permanent decline. Perhaps conservatives need to lead by teaching/convincing others about the merits and benefits of marriage. Strong leadership could, perhaps, work to rebuild the institution of marriage within our society and fight against the forces that are working hard to erode it. Instead of trailing these demographic shifts, political leaders should be working to shape the culture.

3. Christianity seems to be rather cyclical in its popularity. There's no doubt that the church needs to be more active in evangelism, not merely for political or demographic purposes, but because God commands it. The political consequences of this calling are secondary to the spiritual, but will follow nonetheless.

Rather than seeing these shifts as a reason to abandon conservatism as Dr. Abramowitz suggests, I see them as a challenge: if we conservatives really do have a better way of running the world than the leftists do, we need to make our case for it and convince the voters. Demographics are destiny, but they are not beyond our ability to influence.

It's hard for me to imagine anything more grotesque than Yale student Aliza Shvarts' abortion-based art project. (Backup URL.) It's like something out of a horror movie. The sheer barbarity and cavalier display of evil leaves me almost speechless.

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself ?as often as possible? while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts? project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock ? saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion.

But Shvarts insists her concept was not designed for ?shock value.?

?I hope it inspires some sort of discourse,? Shvarts said. ?Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it?s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone.?

There's no "discourse" I'd want to have with this subhuman vermin. What she's done isn't illegal, but should be a capital crime. So yes, I'd be pleased to see the justice system put Aliza Shvarts to death. Since that's not likely, she should be cast out of society, shunned, ostracized, and abandoned.

The students and administrators of Yale should be ashamed of what their institution has become. This sort of evil has no place in our culture, contributes nothing to public discourse, and ultimately degrades our society when left unpunished. I hope the Yale alumni find some way to respond to the cruelty done in their name and supported by their money.

For the rest of us, take a long hard look at what our modern amorality has spawned: Aliza Shvarts is a vile creature who conceives human babies only to slaughter them for her amusement, and our society is left with no legal recourse thanks to the decades-long ascent of secular humanism. We should be ashamed of what we've become.

I'm ashamed, as an American, that such evil could be perpetrated in our midst and that I'm powerless to stop it. Pray for our country.

Update:

Maybe it's a hoax?

Color me dubious about the Yale art project story. In talking to a few knowledgeable docs this morning, the facts don’t add up very well. Self-insemination of the sort she seems to be claiming is no easy feat, and “herbal” abortifacients are extremely dangerous and not at all reliably effective. It’s highly unlikely that these two improbable elements would both be carried off successfully multiple times, and with no side effects. It’s more likely that her senior art project is to see how many people she can upset with a hoax.

If it’s a hoax, it’s an abhorrent and disgusting one. If it turns out to be true, it’s of course all the more so and far worse. Either way, where are the adults at Yale?

I read "The Black Swan" several months ago and it really opened my eyes to a new understanding of risk. Here's an interview with the author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

There are two types of businesses: those that are exposed to Black Swans and those that are relatively insulated from them - not because Black Swans cannot occur, but because their impact is not going to be monstrous. Your dentist's income will not disappear on a single day: No single event will carry big consequences for her. But trading profits can all be lost by a single transaction. So some businesses are insulated, some (like technology) are exposed to positive Black Swans, and others are exposed to negative ones. ...

The Black Swan is a matter of perspective. A turkey is fed for 1,000 days - every day lulling it more and more into the feeling that the human feeders are acting in its best interest. Except that on the 1,001st day, the butcher shows up and there is a surprise. The surprise is for the turkey, not the butcher. Anyone who knows anything about the history of banking (or remembers the 1982 Latin American debt crisis or the 1990s savings and loan collapse) will tell you that the subprime crisis was so bound to happen. Banks are exposed to such blowups. Bankers have been the turkey, historically.

I recommend buying the book.

As an artificial intelligence researcher I've always been fascinated by animal intelligence. It's simpler to understand than human intelligence, but often quite sophisticated in species-specific ways. Here's a National Geographic article about animal minds and various flavors of animal intelligence, and while it's quite fascinating I find it to be rather limited by its insistence on evolution as the mechanism behind the observed commonality.

But if animals are simply machines, how can the appearance of human intelligence be explained? Without Darwin's evolutionary perspective, the greater cognitive skills of people did not make sense biologically. Slowly the pendulum has swung away from the animal-as-machine model and back toward Darwin. A whole range of animal studies now suggest that the roots of cognition are deep, widespread, and highly malleable.

It's almost as if there were some common intelligent creator behind it all!

"Dogs' understanding of human forms of communication is something new that has evolved," Kaminski said, "something that's developed in them because of their long association with humans." Although Kaminski has not yet tested wolves, she doubts they have this language skill. "Maybe these collies are especially good at it because they're working dogs and highly motivated, and in their traditional herding jobs, they must listen very closely to their owners."

Scientists think that dogs were domesticated about 15,000 years ago, a relatively short time in which to evolve language skills.

Maybe dogs were designed for a purpose?

"People were surprised to discover that chimpanzees make tools," said Alex Kacelnik, a behavioral ecologist at Oxford University, referring to the straws and sticks chimpanzees shape to pull termites from their nests. "But people also thought, 'Well, they share our ancestry—of course they're smart.' Now we're finding these kinds of exceptional behaviors in some species of birds. But we don't have a recently shared ancestry with birds. Their evolutionary history is very different; our last common ancestor with all birds was a reptile that lived over 300 million years ago.

"This is not trivial," Kacelnik continued. "It means that evolution can invent similar forms of advanced intelligence more than once—that it's not something reserved only for primates or mammals."

Some will object that my belief in a creator is somehow not scientific, but anthropomorphizing the process of evolution such that it can "invent" characteristics isn't far different.

Kacelnik and his colleagues are studying one of these smart species, the New Caledonian crow, which lives in the forests of that Pacific island. New Caledonian crows are among the most skilled of tool-making and tool-using birds, forming probes and hooks from sticks and leaf stems to poke into the crowns of the palm trees, where fat grubs hide. Since these birds, like chimpanzees, make and use tools, researchers can look for similarities in the evolutionary processes that shaped their brains. Something about the environments of both species favored the evolution of tool-making neural powers.

Or, again, perhaps these species were designed for their niche -- a possibility that is as interesting and testable as evolution.

"Elele just loved to be right," Herman said. "And she loved inventing things. We made up a sign for 'create,' which asked a dolphin to create its own behavior."

Dolphins often synchronize their movements in the wild, such as leaping and diving side by side, but scientists don't know what signal they use to stay so tightly coordinated. Herman thought he might be able to tease out the technique with his pupils. In the film, Akeakamai and Phoenix are asked to create a trick and do it together. The two dolphins swim away from the side of the pool, circle together underwater for about ten seconds, then leap out of the water, spinning clockwise on their long axis and squirting water from their mouths, every maneuver done at the same instant. "None of this was trained," Herman says, "and it looks to us absolutely mysterious. We don't know how they do it—or did it."

If that is accurate, the feat described is quite amazing.

Through these dolphins, he made some of the most extraordinary breakthroughs ever in understanding another species' mind—a species that even Herman describes as "alien," given its aquatic life and the fact that dolphins and primates diverged millions of years ago. "That kind of cognitive convergence suggests there must be some similar pressures selecting for intellect," Herman said. "We don't share their biology or ecology. That leaves social similarities—the need to establish relationships and alliances superimposed on a lengthy period of maternal care and longevity—as the likely common driving force."

Maybe! You can put your faith in that untestable hypothesis if you want to. I guess I just have a grander view of the universe, of humanity, of our fellow creatures, and of our Creator.

This Slate article about American Asians and gender selection is interesting as a counterpoint to the "technology will solve everything" meme that permeates our culture.

Now comes further evidence of this effect. Two days ago, economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund published an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examining the ratio of male to female births in "U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian parents." Among whites, the boy-girl ratio was essentially constant, regardless of the number of kids in a family or how many of them were girls. In the Asian-American sample, the boy-girl ratio started out at the same norm: 1.05 to 1. But among families whose first child was a girl, the boy-girl ratio among second kids went up to 1.17 to 1. And if the first two kids were girls, the boy-girl ratio among third kids went up to 1.5 to 1. This 50 percent increase in male probability is directly contrary to the trend among whites, who tend to produce a child of the same sex as the previous child.*

There's no plausible innocent explanation for this enormous and directionally abnormal shift in probability. The authors conclude that the numbers are "evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage."

So some Asians in America -- or Americans of Asian descent -- are almost certainly using abortion to ensure that they get a boy. This process is enabled by technology: not only does technology make it possible, but advancing technology makes gender determination and selective abortions more private, which bypasses any opprobrium such an abortion might otherwise provoke.

I've written before that gender selection poses a philosophical problem for libertarians and an existential problem for the primarily Asian cultures that practice it. It's hard for me to see how technology will "solve" this quandary absent a culturally dominant moral worldview.

Peripherally, the sentence I starred above doesn't sound right to me. According to this article about an article about the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, the gender of later children is only very slightly affected by the genders of earlier children, if at all. Did the author of this Slate article, William Saletan, pull the starred statistic out of thin air, or is there other research on this topic I haven't been able to find with Google? Sounds like an old wives' tale to me.

Andrew Walden claims that Muslims are leaving Islam in droves, mainly for Christianity or secularism.

Pope Benedict’s choice to publicly baptize the most prominent Muslim in Italy, Egyptian-born Magdi Allam, highlights a quiet worldwide exodus from Islam. In recent years, millions have moved on. With this high-profile action, Pope Benedict demonstratively blesses this massive conversion from the highest levels of the Church. ...

Although al-Qataani points to Africa, there is another phenomenon based on repulsion from Islamist dictatorship, corruption, and terrorist violence. In Iran as many as 1 million people have surreptitiously converted to Evangelical Christianity in the last five years. Pastor Hormoz Shariat claims to have converted 50,000 of them through his U.S.-based Farsi-language satellite ministry. He contrasts the upswing to the efforts of evangelical missionaries in Iran between 1830 and 1979, whose 149 years of work built a Christian community of only 3,000.

Lots more there, with a great many links. Not sure how accurate the premise is as a whole, but it sounds encouraging.

It seems that leftists are only with taxpayer money, not their own personal wealth.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and his wife Michelle gave $10,772 of the $1.2 million they earned from 2000 through 2004 to charities, or less than 1 percent, according to tax returns for those years released today by his campaign.

The Obamas increased the amount they gave to charity when their income rose in 2005 and 2006 after the Illinois senator published a bestselling book. The $137,622 they gave over those two years amounted to more than 5 percent of their $2.6 million income.

Bill Burton, a campaign spokesman, said the Obamas gave as much as they could afford. He also said the Obamas gave $240,000 to charity in 2007, though they have yet to make last year's tax returns public.

My wife and I make a lot less money than the Obamas, so I'm surprised to learn that we give away a lot more. I guess it's just a difference in priorities. Leftists prefer to tax others to fund their generosity, while conservatives are willing to give their own wealth away. It sure makes Barack Obama's lectures on "hope" a little less palatable, doesn't it? Put your money -- not mine -- where your mouth is, Senator.

The fact that he decided to give more away when his candidacy for the presidency became serious makes him look worse, not better.

(HT: Political Punch.)

Here's an article that really made me think over the past month, which is why I didn't post it sooner. "The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors". I'm not good at this, and I've really been debating the merits of the idea internally.

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious — wasted time, missed opportunities. If you are afraid to drop any project at the office, you pay for it at home.

“We may work more hours at our jobs,” Dr. Ariely writes in his book, “without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away. Sometimes these doors close too slowly for us to see them vanishing.” ...

So what can be done? One answer, Dr. Ariely said, is to develop more social checks on overbooking. He points to marriage as an example: “In marriage, we create a situation where we promise ourselves not to keep options open. We close doors and announce to others we’ve closed doors.”

Or we can just try to do it on our own. Since conducting the door experiments, Dr. Ariely says, he has made a conscious effort to cancel projects and give away his ideas to colleagues. He urges the rest of us to resign from committees, prune holiday card lists, rethink hobbies and remember the lessons of door closers like Xiang Yu.

I don't tend to bite off more than I can chew, but I do like to stay extremely busy. Am I too busy? I don't know. I know I get bored if I don't have something productive to do.

Anyway, I still don't know what to think of the article, but I figured it was time to share it so I can close at least one thing: a lingering browser window.

I feel like I've written about UCLA students versus Planned Parenthood before, but I can't find a post of mine that mentions that earlier incident in which a PP employee told a supposedly-15-year-old girl to lie about her age so she could get an abortion.

Anyway, lately students from my alma mater have been calling Planned Parenthood and getting the employees to admit to explicit racism.

The call to Idaho came in July to Autumn Kersey, vice president of development and marketing for Planned Parenthood of Idaho.

On the recording provided by The Advocate, an actor portraying a donor said he wanted his money used to eliminate black unborn children because "the less black kids out there the better."

Kersey laughed nervously and said: "Understandable, understandable. ... Excuse my hesitation, this is the first time I've had a donor call and make this kind of request, so I'm excited and want to make sure I don't leave anything out." ...

The student editor-in-chief of The Advocate said she's not surprised by Planned Parenthood's response and that the unedited recordings speak for themselves. The activist students think Planned Parenthood targets minorities and minority neighborhoods.

Well there's certainly statistical evidence that Planned Parenthood targets minorities, but I'll admit that I'm surprised it's due to racism rather than greed. I guess they're returning to their roots: Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger, advocated the abortion of black babies "by force if necessary".

Barack Obama's crazy racist spiritual advisor, Jeremiah Wright Jr., is finally getting some attention from the mainstream media, but you may remember that I was all over this story almost a year ago. (Which is why I believed, asserted, and still believe, that Barack Obama cannot win the general election.)

It's not like "Pastor" Wright is an strange estranged family member associated with Obama by random chance... Obama and his family have been under his spiritual guidance for 20 years by their own volition. There's no way for Obama to disassociate himself from this nutcase at this point... and frankly, there's no reason to believe that Obama doesn't share Wright's view of the world.

Writer and ironically self-described "brain-dead liberal" David Mamet has written a compelling account of his transition from "liberalism" to realism.

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read "conservative"), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

I highly recommend reading the whole thing. If you're a leftist you might find some new ideas to consider, and if you're not you'll at least get some insight into the "liberal" mind.

The disconnect between reality and the prevailing leftist view of a world gone horribly wrong that must be fixed immediately, by government, at any cost, is why I often have a hard time respecting even the most intelligent leftists I encounter. This cornerstone of leftist dogma just does not compute.

I hung out with my brother and Bernardo tonight and realized that Bernardo and I have fundamentally different views of liberty. To paraphrase him, he thinks that our rights as humans derive from a Rousseau-ian "social contract" that depends solely on whatever agreements a majority makes within itself. I, on the other hand, believe that we each individually have inalienable rights that supersede any the desires of any majority, even if it's everyone else in the world against me alone.

I think this ode to tax havens will serve as a concrete example of our differing perspectives. I agree with the writer, Johnathan Pearce, and I expect Bernardo will take the communitarian position.

The difficulty that even any pro-freemarketeer politicians - if there are many - have in defending tax havens is defending the right of people to essentially flee from an oppressive but still-democratic regime. In chatting to people on this issue and reading the commentary, a lot of people make the assumption that wealth is collectively owned if enough voters wish it so and that therefore no-one has the right to flee from the looting intentions of such voters. In other words, non-domiciled residents who want to get away from the British taxman are not being good, democratic citizens by shirking their 'responsibilities'.

At its core, what this issue throws up, beyond the practical issues of how tax rates hurt economies, is a broader issue of the obligations, if any, that an individual has to his fellow citizens. If one believes the classical liberal idea that governments exist to serve the individual and not the other way round, that individuals have no apriori obligations to others, then the crackdown on tax-avoiders should be seen as the power grab that it is.

Another issue, of course, is this: democracy and liberty are not the same thing, a point that has been remarked at this blog many times before. For sure, democracy may - may - be the least-worst way to kick out a government and replace it with a hopefully better one, but the idea that freedom comes from letting 51% of the electorate steal from 49% of the electorate has precious little to do with liberty. The right to own property and enjoy its fruits unmolested is as important as freedom of speech or the right to self defence. Tax havens rile communitarians precisely because they are a standing reproach to the looters who use democratic mandates to justify their depredations. They act as a brake on the power of governments with a temporary majority in a democratic assembly every bit as powerful as other checks and balances such as independent courts and upper chambers.

The "classic liberal" ideas expressed in that second paragraph are utterly foreign to modern "liberals" -- leftists -- who rarely hesitate to advocate the use of coercive power for the accomplishment of their desired ends.

The comments to the first post with this title were quite interesting. Rather that respond at length there, I've decided to put my thoughts in a new post so that the conversation stays near the top of the queue.

I think Ben Bateman has done an admirable job, and his eloquent explanation of Intelligent Design is well worth reading. In response to commenters Bernardo and Mauyr, I think there are a couple of points that Mr. Bateman made that got lost in the shuffle.

1) Mutations are in exponential space, information is in linear space. I don't see how this can be overcome, and in fact long periods of time and large populations work against information accumulation. Despite Mauyr's characterization of natural selection as "aggressively favoring" beneficial mutations, that's only true for mutations that accumulate to the point of being useful. So even if Behe isn't convincing to you, you must concede that his arguments drastically weaken the power of natural selection.

2) Mutations don't seem to be randomly distributed. From my limited research there appears to be a rather small set of very common mutations, all harmful, largely cancerous. (Mostly studied in humans, for obvious reasons.) So the information generation through mutation is probably significantly less than linear in an exponential space. Perhaps logarithmic, but that's purely speculation.

Finally, I think Darwin's motivations and beliefs matter more than, e.g., Newton's or Shakespeare's. Plenty of people have used Darwin's theories to support all sorts of evil, from fascism to eugenics to genocide. I'm not aware of any fans of Newton with an aggressive alchemy agenda. Nor, to my knowledge, does Shakespeare's antisemitism provoke many non-fictional villains.

In fact, I believe that the rise of Darwin's dogma and the vehemence of some of its defenders can be traced back to the same philosophy that motivated Darwin. There are a great many people who desperately want to believe that men are no better than apes, that the human race is a cancer on the planet, that a man is worth no more than what he produces, and that the role of government is to protect and coddle a population that is incapable of self-determination. These are all pernicious deceptions, and evolution is the cornerstone of this philosophy.

People who push evolution would have you believe that they approached the question with complete neutrality, performed some intellectually rigorous research, and subsequently concluded that evolution is the most likely explanation for life as we know it. In fact, their journey was more like this: starting with rejection of God as an axiom, man spent thousands of years searching for an explanation for life that could explain existence without him. Darwin proposed an untestable process that cannot be refuted because it cannot be observed, and because of this non-falsifiability the people who were already eager to discard any notion of the divine latched onto it and built their secular humanist religion upon it. They present evolution as the cause and their disbelief in God as the effect, but in reality those roles are reversed.

Questioning the validity of evolution is unacceptable and provokes rage because it threatens the very foundation of secular humanism. Without a godless creation myth secularists would be forced to confront spiritual matters on a personal level rather than with skepticism and detachment, which is a scary prospect for any man.

Did anyone else have no idea about the full title of Darwin's "masterpiece" that is now commonly referred to simply as On the Origin of Species?

Those who argue at school board meetings that Darwin should be taught in public schools seldom have taken the time to read him. If they knew the full title of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, they might have gained some inkling of the racism propagated by this controversial theorist. Had they actually read Origin, they likely would be shocked to learn that among Darwin's scientifically based proposals was the elimination of "the negro and Australian peoples," which he considered savage races whose continued survival was hindering the progress of civilization.

In his next book, The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin ranked races in terms of what he believed was their nearness and likeness to gorillas. Then he went on to propose the extermination of races he "scientifically" defined as inferior. If this were not done, he claimed, those races, with much higher birthrates than "superior" races, would exhaust the resources needed for the survival of better people, eventually dragging down all civilization.

Darwin even argued that advanced societies should not waste time and money on caring for the mentally ill, or those with birth defects. To him, these unfit members of our species ought not to survive.

Uh, yeah. As Professor Tony Campolo writes in the rest of the article, Darwin's philosophy is no less morally and spiritually influenced than the theory of intelligent design. It even has its own gods: whites. I can't figure out why they didn't mention any of this in high school... it's almost like the secular humanist education system was trying to brainwash me by teaching half-truths and concealing all contrary viewpoints.

(HT: Ed Driscoll and Brothers Judd.)

Here's an offensive characterization of modern women!

We can argue endlessly about whether "femininity” is natural or constructed—whether women are innately frigid, needy, and demanding, or socialized to be that way—but there’s no denying the lesson of today’s media marketplace: give young women a choice between adult responsibility on the one hand, and makeup, chick flicks, gold digging, and the Facebook on the other, and it’s the makeup, chick flicks, gold digging, and Facebook by a mile. For whatever reason, adolescence appears to be the young woman’s default state, proving what anthropologists have discovered in cultures everywhere: it is marriage and children that turn girls into women.

Oh no wait, I got the quote wrong:

We can argue endlessly about whether “masculinity” is natural or constructed—whether men are innately promiscuous, restless, and slobby, or socialized to be that way—but there’s no denying the lesson of today’s media marketplace: give young men a choice between serious drama on the one hand, and Victoria’s Secret models, battling cyborgs, exploding toilets, and the NFL on the other, and it’s the models, cyborgs, toilets, and football by a mile. For whatever reason, adolescence appears to be the young man’s default state, proving what anthropologists have discovered in cultures everywhere: it is marriage and children that turn boys into men.

How about if people started taking men seriously again and quit being so judgmental? It's not a crime for men to be different from women... civilization seems to have benefited quite a bit from our gender.

(HT: Dr. Helen.)