Philosophy

What’s Good About Atheism

Frederick Turner has some thoughts:

The figure of the village atheist is a rather comic one. He proves his superior intelligence by mocking the sheeplike conformity of the poor benighted believers. The old word “enlightened” has now been replaced by the word “bright” as the self-description of this sort of atheist. He is a variant of the “Cliffie the mailman” wonk who knows it all, or Sportin’ Life the cynic in Porgy and Bess. An older version is Flaubert’s character Homais the bourgeois anticlerical pharmacist in Madame Bovary, and an even older one is Thersites the scurrilous doubter in Shakespeare and Homer. Much pleased by their own originality, they take their mishaps as the martyrdom of the bold intellectual pioneer, and they have produced a group of arguments that should probably be taken apart.

One is that religious ideology is a unique inspirer of terrible wars. In the current perspective, such an opinion sounds plausible. But anyone with an historical sense will recognize that the few hundred people who die each month in religious conflicts are absurdly dwarfed by the tens of millions, almost all of them religious believers, who died, within living memory, under the savage atheistic regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong and the various dialectical materialist dictators of eastern Europe. We have seen what atheism looks like on the large scale, and it is not pretty: the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields. Religion has indeed been a cause of appalling slaughter during the course of human history; but it must take fifth place behind atheist ideology, nation-state aggression, mercantile colonialist expansion, and tribal war in the carnage sweepstakes.

Another argument brought by the village atheist type is that to base one’s life on faith is intellectual suicide. This argument might be persuasive if there were any alternative, but there is not. Reason is not a basis for thought, but a method of thought. Kurt G

Space

The One Percent Solution

Arnold Kling has an interesting alternative to the preferred solution of many European bureaucrats (deindustrialization) to global warming, and it’s one that would warm the hearts of space enthusiasts.

I think it would be a mistake to get the NSF involved, though. This is a job for engineers, not scientists. I’d work with the engineering societies (e.g., AIAA) instead. And I wouldn’t let NASA anywhere near it.

War Commentary

The Stakes

Donald Sensing, on Al Qaeda strategy (such as it is) in Iraq.

[Update about 11 AM EST]

Democrat Orson Scott Card doesn’t trust his party with power in war time:

If control of the House passes into Democratic hands, there are enough withdraw-on-a-timetable Democrats in positions of prominence that it will not only seem to be a victory for our enemies, it will be one.

Unfortunately, the opposite is not the case — if the Republican Party remains in control of both houses of Congress there is no guarantee that the outcome of the present war will be favorable for us or anyone else.

But at least there will be a chance.

I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America’s role as a light among nations.

But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war. And since the Democratic Party seems hellbent on losing it — and in the most damaging possible way — I have no choice but to advocate that my party be kept from getting its hands on the reins of national power, until it proves itself once again to be capable of recognizing our core national interests instead of its own temporary partisan advantages.

That seems unlikely to happen if they’re rewarded with a return to power now, something that they haven’t earned by their behavior or attitudes. Sadly, neither party deserves to win.

Space

Over The Top

If I were a member of the Mars Society, I’d be looking for a new leader, or looking to form a new organization. This seems like a very unprofessional press release to me (but hardly out of character for Bob Zubrin). Does he really imagine that this is going to win support for any cause associated with him?

I agree that O’Keefe’s decision was a mistake, and that the robotic mission was a waste of money. I also think that he should have left earlier, and let someone else make that decision, because he was obviously unable any longer to deal with risk after the trauma of Columbia. But that doesn’t justify this kind of vicious, personal attack on a good man.

Also, this is simply wrong:

Alone among space advocacy groups, the Mars Society responded the former NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe’s stupid and cowardly decision to desert the Hubble with forthright opposition, exposing as fraudulent the technically illiterate oaf’s claims that a mission to Hubble was more dangerous than missions to the Space Station…

There was nothing fraudulent about it. It was true then, and remains true, that a Hubble mission is in fact riskier than an ISS mission. O’Keefe’s mistake wasn’t in believing that it was riskier, but rather in believing that it was too risky. He was wrong, but that doesn’t mean that we should pretend that the risk isn’t greater. I agree with Mike Griffin’s decision to go forward (and think that, if anything, it’s late–he could and should have made it much sooner), but only because we are continuing to fly Shuttle for ISS. It certainly wouldn’t have been worth keeping Shuttle alive just to fix Hubble.

In the meantime, Bob might want to invest in a Dale Carnegie course.

Humor

Losing A Key Constituency

I don’t usually do deep political analysis, particularly when it comes to getting down and dirty with demographics, but I’m fascinated by this story, and it seems particularly appropriate on Halloween:

An analysis of state-wide records by the Poughkeepsie Journal reveals that 77,000 dead people remain on election rolls in New York State, and some 2,600 may have managed to vote after they had died. The study also found that Democrats are more successful at voting after death than Republicans, by a margin of four-to-one, largely because so many dead people seem to vote in Democrat-dominated New York City.

In light of today’s holiday, on which, like Kwanzaa for blacks and Cinco de Mayo for Mexicans, this demographic is particularly celebrated, I’m going to ask the question that nobody seems to ever ask, and one that the Republicans have to be asking themselves: how have they lost that key demographic, the metabolically challenged?

Admittedly, the Dems don’t have the dead vote locked up in the same way that they do the black vote (only four to one, rather than the ten to one they traditionally get from the African American community), but that’s still a huge “fog a mirror” gap. And the implications have to be frightening for the Republicans. After all, this is the largest demographic group of all–there are many times as many dead people as there are living ones, and that’s likely to remain the case for some time to come, and probably forever, unless we develop radical life extension technologies.

So far, the GOP has been fortunate, because, whether due to apathy, or barriers thrown up at the polls, the dead don’t tend to vote at all, by and large. But perhaps, if they could not only get many of them to switch party affiliation, but also mount a huge GOTDV drive, they could actually take advantage of this huge potential voting block, and take away a traditional Democrat advantage.

So what is it about the Dems that appeals to the non-living voters?

It really is a mystery, at least at first glance. You’d think that dead people would be naturally conservative. What more static, unchangeable state can there be, after all, but the grave? And after all, it isn’t the Republicans who want to tax the dead. You’d think that these people would be voting their pocketbooks, even if the leather in them is rotting away. And yet they still continue to pull the donkey lever.

It can’t be the entitlements: they’re all at a stage of their life at which they don’t really need the Social Security and Medicare any more.

Is it abortion on demand? That wouldn’t seem to be a life-or-death issue (so to speak) for people well beyond their prime child-bearing years. And state of health.

Is it the war? The dead have little to fear from war. Their stuff’s not going to get broken, because their descendants have it now, and what they didn’t pass on, the Democrats taxed away. As for the last measure of devotion, how much worse can it get than being dead? That can’t be it.

How about gun control? Well some, perhaps even many, of the dead may be dead as a result of guns. But given all of the other frailties and diseases that come with being human, it seems unlikely that this is a significant number of them. I can’t imagine that this is what appeals to them about the gun-control party.

Support for the UN, and immigration? Well, here’s a good possibility. After all, most of the dead aren’t American citizens. Of course, the ones that aren’t, aren’t eligible to vote, either. But then, neither are dead people, so this hardly seems to be a major barrier.

You know, I think we may have it.

The key for Republicans is to really tighten up on the voting rolls, and only allow American dead to vote, and actually require, you know, IDs and stuff. Of course, we can expect the Dems to scream in outrage, about “voter intimidation,” etc., to such a policy.

You know, on second thought, maybe we should just put up a fence around graveyards.

Political Commentary

Blowback

There are probably more loathsome human beings, but it’s hard to imagine one that came as close to becoming president as Senator John Kerry.

And you know, this insulting-the-troops thing has to be driving him nuts, because he probably was taking a slam at Bush, but it backfired. A smart politician would apologize, and say that he didn’t intend any insult to the troops themselves, but Kerry’s not a smart politician. I don’t think that going on the offensive (and I mean that in more than one way, with his comment about Tony Snow and Rush Limbaugh) is going to play well with the independent and moderates, regardless of how much it gives orgasms to the net roots. In particular, when he talks about how he’s always supported the troops, it just provides another opportunity for his opponents to remind people of the 1972 Senate testimony, in which he accused them of being war criminals.

And if this story develops legs like a centipede, and extends for another week into the election, and the Dems don’t do as well as they are currently drooling for, guess who will get the blame? Not that he ever had a prayer, but that will be the end of any hope, even on his own part, that he will get the Dem nomination again.

[Update a few minutes later]

Kerry obviously never learned the first lesson of holes (i.e., when in one, stop digging). Now he’s insulted the troops again:

I am a retired US Navy Senior Chief who spent 21 years serving in the nuclear navy. I read Kerry’s statement and took it as an insult. I just heard his press conference and now take offense that he thinks I’m “crazy” because I was insulted by his remarks last night.

As others have said, like Howard Dean, he’s a gift to Republicans that just keeps on giving.

You have to wonder just how powerful Rove’s mind-control beams are to get them to behave this way.

[Update]

For those wondering what this is about, here’s the video on youtube.com. And as one commenter pointed out, if he meant to insult Bush, that’s kind of ironic, considering that the president has a degree from Yale and an MBA from Harvard, with better grades than Kerry got.

[Update about 4:37 PM EST]

Bush is going to make a speech shortly that had been previously planned, but he will now take the opportunity to respond to Kerry’s remarks. Time to put on some popcorn.

[Update a little before 6 Eastern]

Austin Bay has further thoughts:

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Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!