I’m not religious, nor am I a proponent of intelligent design (ID). But I am amused by alleged rationalists who think strident disbelief makes them enlightened primates rather than obnoxious atheistic evangelists. It interests me terribly that such people are so unhinged and emotional about their allegedly rational views. I scratch my chin and puff on my pipe when alleged free-thinkers fret about children being brainwashed with religion but have no qualms when the state forces ideological conformity on young minds.

The delusion that one must be an atheist to be a first-rate scientist is common among professional atheists. I can think of several religious Nobel Prize-winning physicists offhand: Abdus Salam, Joe Taylor, Bill Phillips, Antony Hewish, and C. H. Townes. There are doubtless more if you care to look.

An even more preposterous (yet widely held) delusion is the idea that teaching the standard model of evolution is necessary to produce the next generation of young scientists. Evolutionary biology has very little connection to other fields of scientific enquiry, including most of biology. I also know at least one very talented and productive scientist who has issues with the standard evolutionary model: David Snoke. I worked for him briefly. The subject never came up in the past, as it’s not particularly relevant when plugging in lasers and aligning copper oxide crystals. Considering the recent creationism controversy in Tennessee, I thought it might be of interest to hear from an intelligent ID advocate.

Professor Snoke has an impressive publications list. He’s also a genuinely nice guy, which is not something I can say for a lot of folks with much shorter publications lists.

What kind of science are you working on these days?
Solid-state optics, Exciton and Polariton physics; primarily experimental with some theory and numerics work.

What are your main scientific beefs with evolution?
Define what you mean by “evolution!” People mean many things when they use the word. Some people define evolution as simply change over time, which very few people would disagree with. But others mean that undirected processes can explain everything that has happened from the time of the Big Bang. Do I believe that organisms change over time as a result of natural selection? Certainly! But I don’t think that this is the only mechanism. For example, nobody has a serious model which can actually explain the origins of life, and natural selection can’t work until simple life exists with something like 30,000 biological machines. There are also messy issues with phylogenetic trees and horizontal gene transfer: Much present evolutionary theory is in a turmoil because of this. Clearly natural selection is a mechanism with much explanatory power, but it is not the only mechanism. The work by ID people to show that natural selection can’t explain a lot of things is generally good science; shooting down theories is an activity which has a long history in science; it is part of the process.

Do you think some kind of directed evolution could be compatible with the Bible?
Certainly many in the ID community believe something like this. I am not persuaded by the strong version of this: the idea that everything was rigged at the Big Bang to end up the way it presently is. Some “Young Earth creationists” worry that the first chapters of Genesis must give exact history. I don’t think our interpretation of the Bible or the present scientific consensus is sacrosanct. The scientific consensus may be wrong; but if science tells us some new things, that can motivate us to look at the Bible in other ways.

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Do you think being a Christian has made you a better scientist?
Well, if you have all your chips invested in being a successful scientist, it’s much more difficult to admit that you are wrong. Being a Christian allows me to be humble about cases when my views might be wrong, which allows more self-correction. It also allows me to be skeptical and ask questions that an atheist might not think to ask. Like the person from Missouri, I can say “show me” in regard to evolutionary theories.

Other than writing a paper with Michael Behe, do your ideas about ID inform any other areas of research?
Certainly; a recent example is an article to be published in Annals of Physics where I and my coworkers derive the second law of thermodynamics from quantum field theory considerations. The genesis of this idea came about from some intelligent-design arguments I was thinking about. I’m also presently working on a numerical project relating to combinatorial optimization, which was originally inspired by some ID ideas.

Do you have problems with other scientists because of your views?
When talking with people in the physics world, there is generally respect for religion. Many physicists are religious; evangelical Christians, Jewish people, Catholics, Muslims. It’s rare to get a push back to the idea of an “ordering principle.” Scientists know that the world is orderly. Some scientists seem to hold deistic beliefs; the idea that there is something more, some ordering principle, but they don’t feel comfortable saying “God” or adopting religious beliefs.

Do you know any non-Christian creationists?
By “creationists” I assume you mean people who believe we can see the hand of God in nature, that not everything can be explained by undirected random processes. There are quite a few associated with the Discovery Institute. Gerald Schroeder is a well-known Jewish scholar, as is David Berlinski, who has agnostic leanings. Antony Flew is a deist who converted from atheism in part because of intelligent-design arguments. Michael Denton is an agnostic, and I believe a Platonist, who believes that ideas exist independently and instantiate themselves. Most people who are interested in ID have very complex views that are difficult to reduce to a sound bite. Journalists like to comment as if everything were a football game. They seem to see the debate as between two teams, with Dawkins-type evolutionists on one side and Young Earth creationists on the other. The real world is much more complex than this. There are theistic evolutionists like the evangelical Francis Collins, ID-friendly evolutionists like the Catholic Michael Behe, and people who might insert a few miracles at certain times, such as evangelical chemist Fritz Schaefer.

What do you think of “Internet skeptics?”
I don’t go to blog or discussion-group types of things very much; I have a day job and many responsibilities and interests. This sort of activity also seems to appeal to a particular personality type. It seems to be a rule on such things that the guy who writes the most “wins,” which isn’t a very good way at arriving at the truth. There are, of course, many Christians who engage in this sort of thing; the personality type who likes this sort of thing isn’t restricted to Internet skeptics.

How do you react with dumb people try to be condescending toward you because you’re religious?
Well, it doesn’t happen very often. In most circles I travel in, people are aware that I am a physics professor. Occasionally you’ll have to hold your tongue at a party when someone rants about “stupid evangelical Christians.”

The modern age offers no refuge from the state. The world’s habitable unpopulated regions are firmly under sovereign nations’ regulation. There is still adventure to be had in the world, but there’s no frontier, no place to carve out a new way of life free from the state’s meddlings.

Over the last 50 years various dreamers have tried to fill this freedom vacuum. One idea is to build a large ship or ocean platform in international waters and experiment with new systems of government. Called seasteading, it has recently been revived by the Seasteading Institute and its CEO, Patri Friedman. Iconoclastic venture capitalist Peter Thiel has blessed the think tank with his loot and his good name.

The engineering isn’t out of reach; the Soviets were building cities in the middle of oceans decades ago. A big question is how such a micro-nation would make enough money to support the structure and inhabitants. Aquaculture is an obvious if unexciting solution. More in the libertarian spirit are subversions of nearby nations’ laws. Gambling barges have existed for some time, and ideas as colorful as offshore brothels and plastic-surgery hospitals have been floated. One of the more promising schemes is using an offshore startup incubator to further debauch the H-1B process for obtaining cheap labor. It is not clear why this would work any better than less literal offshoring (and it has been tried), but it seems less likely to incur the wrath of the great powers.

Seasteading has a historical antecedent which still exists: Sealand, whose structure is based on British sea fort that had been built for air defense in World War II. An eccentric British adventurer named Paddy Roy Bates took over the fort, declared it a sovereign kingdom in 1967, and based its economy on illegal radio advertising. The British legal system has taken a largely beneficent view of Sealand; the British do love their eccentrics. Despite its diminutive size, Sealand has had a colorful history. There have been attacks, coups, governments in exile, and fires. It is regularly brought up as a potential data haven for websites in legal difficulty such as WikiLeaks or Pirate Bay.

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Seasteading and related ideas have been common in libertarian circles over the years. There are a half-dozen or so examples of attempts at this sort of thing, with varying levels of comedic puissance. One example seems most comparable to the modern efforts. As with the Seasteading Institute, it was started by libertarians and funded by a wealthy benefactor (in this case, Michael Oliver). Unlike the Seasteading Institute, these guys actually got beyond the kaffeeklatsch stage.

Their first project, the Republic of Minerva, was a 15-acre platform and tower built on a South Pacific coral reef in 1972. The idea was to make money issuing flags of convenience to ships and perhaps open a Sin City-style seaside resort to take advantage of the fine climate. Unfortunately, they announced their New Jerusalem to regional governments as well as potential investors. A local heavyweight, King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV of Tonga, decided that new land was his, despite it being 260 miles from Tonga. Reports differ as to the Republic of Minerva’s conquest, but it allegedly was a festive affair with brass-band accompaniment. No Minervans were present to contest the invasion. The Tongans didn’t stay the night; there isn’t much to do on an otherwise uninhabited coral reef.

Michael Oliver later started a group called the Phoenix Foundation with famed investment advisor Harry D. Schultz and objectivist pinup boy Nathaniel Branden. The goal was to set up a South Pacific libertarian paradise on an island called Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides. The New Hebrides was set for independence from its British/French condominium in 1980, and the Oliver gang was backing a local pro-independence group. This time, it almost worked: The French recognized their independence on June 3, 1980. The rest of the newly independent New Hebrides didn’t think much of this, so they obtained military assistance from the mighty nation of Papua New Guinea and crushed the libertarian rebellion in the appropriately named Coconut War.

Michael Oliver’s efforts ought to be an object lesson to would-be seasteaders. You can’t have a real country without actual human beings who have skin in the game. In fact, you need bona-fide desperados who are willing to fight for their freedom, which is presumably why Mr. Oliver became interested in backing local rebels.

It’s not so clear that libertarians have a clear grasp of human nature. If the libertarians won the Coconut War, their libertarian paradise in the New Hebrides would probably have ended up much like the rest of the New Hebrides, as there weren’t many libertarians living there.

Seasteading has libertarian goals, but some kind of central planning system is needed to manage large, man-made structures. Whether you call it “taxes” or “use fees” isn’t going to matter much to the captive audience that lives there. Opportunists are going to be extremely interested in what you’re up to in your libertarian paradise. If it’s offensively illegal, they’re probably going to squash it as the authorities eventually did in Hong Kong’s anarcho-capitalist paradise of Kowloon Walled City. Considering the experiences of Mr. Oliver and his associates, diplomats and a well-organized militia would seem essential (if expensive) ingredients. Until libertarians are willing to fight for their liberty, the idea seems unlikely to work.

In The Odyssey, Theoclymenus asks of Telemachus, “Among men, who are you? Tell me also of your city and parents.” Old-fashioned folks who haven’t been poisoned by the current age will ask similar questions. The answers are generally more revealing than what passes for modern small talk. These days, one can answer questions such as this by spitting into a test tube.

Genetic anthropology is a new field made possible by the availability of inexpensive DNA microarray chips. Physical anthropologists have speculated for over a century as to the origins of different tribes of men based on anthropomorphic measurements, paleoanthropology, linguistics, archeology, and studying place names. My modest studies of the Anglo Saxon language indicate that the physical anthropologists of over 100 years ago knew rather a lot about recent human origins in well-studied places such as Great Britain. With the advent of cheap gene sequencing, researchers are able to study prehistoric human migrations in the absence of other kinds of evidence. New knowledge about one’s origins also becomes available to the individual almost as soon as it is available to the scientific community.

Amateur genealogists were early adopters of this technology. Folks interested in their patrilineal line could get their Y chromosome sequenced. For the matrilineal line there are mitochondrial DNA tests. In both cases, the DNA is passed down the respective lines unchanged, excepting for chance mutations. Other genealogical tests compare “autosomal DNA” (AKA the part of your genetic code which doesn’t relate to sex) to folks who submitted their genetic code to the database. This is useful for finding distant cousins who could potentially fill you in on blank spots on the family tree.

According to my testing service, my Y chromosome (haplogroup R1b1a2a1a1*) originates from a Stone Age Atlantis in the North Sea known as “Doggerland.” Much as I’d love to imagine myself as a man from some forgotten Atlantis, this story is almost certainly fanciful nonsense. Doggerland is real, but the idea that my particular Y chromosome has something to do with it originated in a discussion on an online forum. It is not based on any deep analysis of empirical data; it was an individual’s guess based on incomplete data, and many well-informed people think it was a bad guess. At present, nobody really knows the tribe from which my Y chromosome is derived. Thus far, we only know that they were Northern European: Celts, Saxons, or pre-Indo-European aboriginals, with the prevailing wisdom leaning toward Germans. As my Y-chromosome group is fairly common in Scotland and my name is supposed to be Scottish (a people made up of Celts, Germans, and aboriginals), I’ll split the difference. One interesting negative result from the Y chromosome test: Though my Scottish clan was allegedly founded by a son of the legendary 5th-century Irish King Niall of the Nine Hostages, my Y chromosome indicates that I’m not a direct descendant of his.

My mitochondrial DNA group is ostensibly of “black Irish” extraction. According to the testing service, the same group (H6a) is scattered around Europe with peaks in the Middle East and Caucasus. Oddly, everyone in the testing service’s special-interest group for H6a was of Irish or Scandinavian extraction. This means that either the research is inaccurate or not many Middle Easterners and Georgians use the testing service.

My autosomal DNA results netted several distant cousins from the Hoffman side of my mother’s family. Grandpa always maintained that the Hoffmans were ordinary Germans, but the big noses in the family pictures had us wondering if they might be from one of Israel’s lost tribes. My distant Hoffman cousins informed me that the Hoffmans were ordinary gentile Germans originally from Bavaria. So much for my Israeli passport.

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The tests give some broad ideas as to your overall ancestry using autosomal DNA. My results revealed something fairly obvious from my family history and the mirror: I’m a white guy whose ancestors are from Western Europe. I have no apparent African, Asian, or American Indian ancestry. I was hoping to know more fine detail, such as my percentage of German versus Celt à la Cavalli-Sforza, but the available online tests aren’t that specific and the research behind the tests is still underway. There are other tools available for the numerate, but they are not specific enough to classify a man as an Englishman versus a Scot. They do well at telling the difference between a Japanese and a Nigerian, however.

One of the more amusing results of the autosomal-DNA tests: I am allegedly 3% Neanderthal. I am in the 95th percentile of Neanderthality among human beings. If true, this makes every woman I have been involved with eerily prescient about my heritage. The results were available shortly after the research hit the newspapers, making it an exciting feature of the testing service, but there are reasons to be skeptical of the idea. Whatever the ultimate results of the Neanderthal hybridization hypothesis, folks who have had their genes sequenced will eventually know whether or not their ancestors were Neanderthals.

While I wax skeptical as to some of the results the commercial testing services yield, this work is very much in flux. These tests do get the broad strokes right. For people who have only vague ideas as to their ancestry, the results will be enlightening. The results can be very specific if you happen to have won the luck of the genetic draw and have a bloodline which is well-documented and studied.

Fairly crude algorithms present the commercial results, with copy written by people who don’t fully understand the methodology behind the results nor, for that matter, the subject itself. This situation will improve with time; the testing services have only been around for a few years. The open-source tools and databases for analyzing your genetic history are also improving. Hundreds of scientists are feverishly at work on this subject, and new results are published daily.

At some point, we’ll know things such as who comprised the Iron Age Hallstatt culture or who the Bronze Age Beaker people really were. We’ll also be able to pinpoint their modern descendants. More importantly, we as individuals will know where we fit into the historical tapestry. We’ll no longer be amorphously “white,” “black,” or “brown.” We will be able to see the lines of our people back to before recorded history.

Anglo Saxon helmet, British Museum

Intelligent people worry that our new “meritocratic” elite may become a hereditary caste. Charles Murray sees something ominous in the fact that for 25% of modern married couples, both partners have a college degree, whereas only 3% did in 1960. He and others worry that such assortative mating will produce a caste of high-IQ overlords. I have no such worries. I’m worried that American college graduates are becoming more obviously birdbrained by the year.

It is true that a certain kind of college-educated numskull is now more likely to mate with other college-educated dunderheads. That doesn’t mean they’re particularly intelligent. When we compare them to the elites or even average people from a few years ago, it’s not entirely clear the modern college graduate learns much that is identifiable as knowledge. 

People used to learn measurable things in college and high school. My parents, who were poverty-stricken working-class people, learned Anglo-Saxon and Latin as a part of their high school education. Many college graduates in English literature were required to learn Anglo-Saxon until fairly recently; as a result, the subject was often required in high school as well. Thanks to Murray’s “new elites,” I had several years’ worth of high-school health and social-studies classes which taught me exactly nothing worth knowing.

I recently taught myself some Anglo-Saxon to see what I was missing. It’s not particularly challenging; much easier than Latin.

It gave me a new appreciation for English as a Germanic language, for its grammar and evolution since the Dark Ages, and for modern English’s dynamism and expressiveness. Old English is a crude language. It lacks entire concepts we now take for granted and retains primitive notions and structure we have long since discarded. Old English reminds me of a rustic plow compared to modern English’s vast combine harvester. The old thing is more beautiful and more human in spirit and scale than the new thing, but it’s not as efficient and useful.

One learns interesting history while learning a dead language. While most people think of the Anglo-Saxons as laconic, mustachioed bumpkins, they were a seafaring nation—well-traveled and with cousins all over Europe. The first passage I read in the old tongue was a travelogue. The author complained about a lack of beer in old Estonia. Our early Anglo-Saxon tourist found that the Estonian mead made up for it. A familiarity with Anglo-Saxon also gives a fair lead up on Old Norse, Old Dutch, Gothic, and Old High German. The Germanic tribes are very close relatives. This fact is rarely mentioned these days, and it is probably a sort of thought crime to notice.

Anglo-Saxon poetry is beautiful in ways that modern English poetry can’t be. It is alliterative and has an appealingly different rhythm from modern English. I find it deeply moving in the same way I find visual Anglo-Saxon art to be beautiful. It uses a rich type of metaphor and allusion called “kenning,” which is primal and evocative. An Anglo-Saxon poet wouldn’t “share his feelings about ocean travel”; he would “unlock his breast-hoard about taking the road of the whales.” This isn’t the light, Latinate beauty of what most people consider “classic art”; it is the rude, vital beauty of people with a deep aesthetic sense and limited descriptive vocabulary. From the looks of them, modern college graduates could use a little rude vitality. An encounter with the old skalds might put a little pink in their sallow cheeks.

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The Old English poets convey emotions which are virtually inexpressible in modern English. The poems “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer” from the Exeter Book express melancholy feelings of loss and exile which no modern poet can match. Such depths of feeling are kryptonite to the ironic scurrying roaches that trouble Charles Murray. Most SWPL types would probably seek medical attention after reading such things, mistaking depth of emotion for mental illness. Early literary inoculation might save more future medical bills than that high-school health class. 

Old English literature is suffused with sensibilities and values sorely lacking among modern “elites.” The Anglo-Saxons had heroes. They weren’t the sort of fist-shaking, lip-quivering victims and agitators fashionable as ‘heroes’ in modern academic curricula. The Anglo-Saxons valued strength, fortitude, gravitas, and physical valor. They laughed at adversity, danger, and fate. Our modern ‘elites’ would rather wallow in minor inconveniences.

The Anglo-Saxons knew there were villains, enemies, and monsters in the world, and they knew what to do with them. They also knew that they lived in a civilization that had regressed from what came before them, and they were acutely aware of the loss. This is something that the iPhone-clutching bipeds who make up our college-educated “elite” haven’t managed to figure out yet, despite their broad ignorance of formerly commonplace knowledge such as Anglo-Saxon literature. 

I’m not sure what modern college graduates learn outside of the hard sciences and engineering disciplines. I’m guessing a lot of it is cultural-Marxist palaver, which probably is helpful for social climbers. However, I do not think such baloney is a sign of intelligence. The ability to master such “knowledge” is more of a sign of gullibility and bloodless apathy than intelligence. I’d guess that assortative mating between modern college graduates will produce an upper middle class of emotionally stunted credulous imbeciles. That seems more worrisome than any hypothetical new caste system.

Across the nation, the question resounds: “Are corporations people?” To a man of strict political principles this is obviously a yes or no question. But I’ve never been afflicted with anything resembling political principles, so I must resort to facts.

The court case which introduced the idea of “corporate personhood” to the general public was 2010’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. It basically said that corporations have the same free-speech rights as human beings, which somehow got mangled into the false “corporations are people” meme.

The McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 had limited “soft money” spent by organizations to within 60 days of an election or 30 days of a primary. “Soft money” is that which is donated to non-candidates who may take a stand on an issue relating to someone’s candidacy. “Hard money” donated to politicians has been regulated longer than there has been a Federal Election Commission (FEC). Campaign finance has been an issue in America since 1883 at least, and it was considered problematic before then.

McCain-Feingold’s purpose was to limit large contributions to political parties, which allowed big donors to bypass “hard money” limits already set by law. This gave rise to the 527 corporation, an IRS-designated tax-free political corporation which is not a political party or an FEC-registered political action committee. These have been around for years but became more popular immediately after McCain-Feingold passed. Some are right-wing, most famously Citizens United and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Some are left-wing: MoveOn.org (until 2008) or the Service Employees Union. There are complex rules about how a 527 may take donations and how they spend money to avoid fines or loss of their tax-free status. There are also non-527 political-advocacy corporations: the NRA and the NAACP, for example. Are the NRA and NAACP people?

Citizens United produced a film about Hillary Clinton. They did this within a period of time covered by the McCain-Feingold Act for primaries, presumably because they preferred Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton. The film itself wasn’t considered campaign advertising; we haven’t yet reached the level of insanity where films are monitored for political content. It was the ads for the film which were considered campaign advertising. Ironically, Citizens United had complained about the ads for Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 back in the 2004 election under the same rule, and the FEC ignored the complaint. Michael Moore is not a corporation, though he weighs more than many of them.

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The Supreme Court decided that the ads for Citizens United’s propaganda film about Hillary Clinton were constitutionally protected political speech. If a non-527 organization such as Michael Moore had done this as he did in 2004, it wouldn’t have mattered. Media outlets can be purchased by anyone. Let’s say the Washington Post, CNN, or Michael Moore supported Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008. Does any law limit the amount of money they spend supporting Barack Obama in their newspaper, TV station, website, or movie studio? There are no such laws; the First Amendment explicitly protects journalism and media advocacy. Media outlets can blather and editorialize all they like, whenever they like. They aren’t even required to make a profit: Many of them do not and are subsidized by wealthy patrons who presumably throw their money at such ventures to influence elections. McCain-Feingold explicitly allowed for such “media outlets” to editorialize all they like. The Supreme Court decision gives some of this vast power to 527 corporations, other corporations, and unions. The result is you don’t have to own The New York Times to influence an election; you can contribute to a corporation or a union which will buy an ad for you.

Imagine for a moment what the world would be like if the Supreme Court voted the other way. As far as I can tell, the result would be a slight increase in the mass media’s power and a slight decrease in that of political activists, unions, and corporations. Nothing else would change appreciably. Vast sums would still be spent on political campaigns. Lobbyists and unsavory political-pressure groups would still have tremendous influence on the laws passed. Corporations, media elites, and foreign agents would still have preposterous amounts of control over American policy. Thoughtful critics of the Citizens United decision agree.

Unfortunately, most in the media (the party who lost this decision, ultimately) have distorted the problem down to a mindless soundbite: “Are corporations people?” I don’t think corporations are actual or legal people, nor does anyone else with a lick of sense. If corporations were people, Google and Microsoft owe a lot of back taxes, and they need to build a prison big enough to house MF Global. If there was ever a corporation which represented people, Citizens United would certainly qualify, as would the Service Employees Union. I think the SEU and Citizens United represent people better than CNN or The Wall Street Journal do. I also think groups such as the SEU and Citizens United have considerably less power than mass-media outlets, even after the Supreme Court decision.

This decision should cause thoughtful citizens to pause and think about how modern political sausage gets made. It should get people scratching their heads about the byzantine legal regulations involved in an election, as well as the wretched and disgusting ways in which powerful interests and political activists manipulate them. It should inspire folks to think about the centers of power in our society and how the media has deceived us about its own power and interests in this issue. Instead, we are distracted with red-herring phrases about whether or not Google is someone I can punch in the throat.

From Francis Fukuyama to Barack Obama to The New Yorker, nobody to the left of Joe Bageant seems to understand why poor white hillbillies prefer Republican oligarchs to the glorious rainbow coalition of the condescending. They wonder why the white working class lost the loving feeling they used to have for the Democratic Party.

Perhaps like a modern-day Squanto, I can help the lefties understand my tribe. I was born to the lower middle class and spent a couple of adult years living the life. I score a 63 in Charles Murray’s “bubble quiz,” which puts me into the “first generation middle class with working class parents” category. When I was a boy, people around me came from intact families, went to Catholic Church, knew people in the military, and worked jobs which soil the hands. They enjoyed pastimes such as deer hunting, mud bogging, and backyard wrestling. We were dimly aware of a hostile tribe in the nearby college town. These were folks who drank coffee with foam in it, who thought so little of the average hayseed that they would walk out in front of a moving pickup truck. The latte-sippers didn’t control the Democratic Party in those days: Working-class white men such as Tip O’Neill did, and everyone in my town voted for the Party of the Working Man.

The latte tribe insists that working-class peckerwoods are voting against their economic interests when they vote for Republican candidates. This may be true, but it doesn’t mean that voting for the tax-and-condescend party would be a vote for the economic interests of the world’s Archie Bunkers. NAFTA was a Clinton Administration achievement, after all. Why should Archie vote for the Meathead party that shipped his job to Mexico? Economists of all political stripes have also noted that low-income working families tend to pay an appreciable portion of their earnings in taxes. Maybe they get it all back in “services” somehow, but the working poor notice how the non-working poor live off the state without doing any work. They take it personally that working harder is penalized while left-wing policies reward being lazy and dependent. Palefaced plebeians also dislike the latte-tribe concept of “white privilege,” which says the Obama daughters should be given legal preference over poor white kids.

The latte tribe are rabid tub-thumpers for the current immigration tidal wave. Mass immigration is very obviously against the interests of all working citizens who aren’t government bureaucrats. Why do we need a million legal immigrants a year when the U6 unemployment rate stands at 15%? The sweatshop wing of the Republican Party is also pro-immigration, but at least the Republicans aren’t completely hostile to citizens who would prefer we have fewer immigrants. Modern Democrats think those who aren’t so enthusiastic about the immigration tsunami are evil irrational racists rather than folks who are looking after their self-interest.

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Compounding the problem is the fact that the white working classes have lost many of their old-fashioned American virtues. Charles Murray documents this in his latest book, and it’s fairly obvious when I visit my hometown on holidays.

It is inarguable that latter-day progressive ideas are partially responsible for this. They think that single motherhood is a respectable profession which should be state-subsidized. This may seem like a clever idea to folks who don’t have to put up with the consequences. But watching the fruit of this “alternative family arrangement” steal your car and knock up your daughter might cause the most vacuous of hayseeds to have a few abstract thoughts on the subject. Members of the latte tribe may think religion is evil and should be abolished, but religion keeps many of the working folks happy and relatively virtuous. While collegiate leftists may enjoy recreational drug use, “youthful experimentation” doesn’t go so well when it becomes a Cheech and Chong lifestyle for townies with no future. Palefaced proletarians lack the kind of education it takes to make up elaborate excuses for this sort of thing. They notice whose fancy-pants cultural Marxist ideas turned their friends and family into degenerates.

Your average member of the lunchpailetariat is acutely aware that those who are presently in charge of the Democratic Party hate him. Rednecks are villainized in the media, in academia, and in the private lives of folks who think they know better because of their sociology class. Many of the problems minorities experience in American society are laid at the feet of working-class white people. The irony is that these pallid scapegoats are politically powerless, unlike the latte tribe that demonizes them. Hating rednecks is the anti-Semitism of Democratic asses.

On the rare occasion when Democrats attempt to communicate with their white Neanderthal brethren, it is broadcast on a carrier wave of pure condescension. The left has a sort of collective Tourette syndrome involving frequent mention of sexism, racism, and gay rights. These subjects are meaningless to hourly laborers who lack the leisure time to nurse nihilistic resentments against Western Civilization.

The corporate oligarchs and neocon goons who control the Republican Party obviously have financial and political interests which are not aligned with those of the white working classes. But they also do not demonize or condescend to peckerwoods who drive pickups and go fishing. It isn’t that Republican ideas are great for the lunchpailetariat or anyone else, but their lack of seething hostility makes them preferable to Democrats.

Lefties should only be confused about the white proles who still vote for them. The left’s “Why don’t you loooove me anymore?” routine with the white working class reminds me of a friend’s crazy-ex-girlfriend story. She cheated on him, lit his car on fire, and gave him the clap. She used to get drunk and scream into his answering machine at 4AM. Then she wondered why he never called back.

Leo Strauss

My first exposure to Straussian ideas was in college via a photocopy handout of passages from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. It was an eerie experience. The instructor seemed nervous, as if we were Soviet dissidents passing around samizdat literature. It was somewhat heartening at the time. I had wondered if there were any remaining liberal-arts practitioners who weren’t trying to prostitute the great authors to some unpleasant political cause. After reading Paul Gottfried’s latest book, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America, it seems my youthful optimism was misplaced.

Leo Strauss and his students occupy a peculiar place in American letters. The fact that they are vaguely “pro-American” in rhetoric makes them somewhat out of the ordinary. Their associations with neoconservative think tanks and policymakers and their subsequent demonization by leftists makes them unique. Their techniques and substance, however, are not unusual in modern academia, nor is it odd that their work is highly politicized.

The Straussian technique of “esoteric reading” is based on the idea that classical philosophers hid their true meanings behind a web of deceit to avoid political prosecution and spooking the herd. This trick allows the Straussian to make use of prestigious texts which explicitly disagree with modern felicities, including texts which disagree with Straussian political philosophy.

Ironically, contemporary liberal critics of the Straussians use the idea of esotericism to condemn the Straussians as secret fascists. The totality of evidence for this idea seems to be a brief association between Leo Strauss and German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. The idea that a Jewish refugee from Nazi-era Germany tried to foster a new American fascist movement apparently never seems absurd to such critics. My esoteric reading of this idea: Modern leftists need to acquaint themselves with a thesaurus and work out their “fascist” issues by watching some B movies.

While the Straussians’ leftist critics portray this interpretive technique as something sinister, it isn’t any worse than reading other silly ideas into the classics—a skill at which leftists are comfortably adept. The “esoteric reading” technique is not unlike that used by leftist cretins who read feminist or Marxist ideas into Shakespeare. Straussians view great writers as being secret advocates for modern social democracy, which isn’t the same as viewing the great writers as sources of timeless wisdom. It is a form of relativism, albeit one slightly less distasteful than reading more unseemly modern political conceits into the classical canon. The Straussians’ “universalism” is the idea that modern multicultural social democracy (without some of the counterculture’s excesses) is a Panglossian “best of all possible worlds.” This idea reaches its apotheosis with Fukuyama’s untimely End of History thesis.

The Straussians are firmly opposed to “historicism,” which in its rudest form is the idea that thoughts should be contextualized within the era that they were conceived. The Straussians denounce the entire idea of historical context as “nihilistic.” The idea is that since many harmful thinkers have employed “historicism,” one must avoid it for fear of coming to similarly ignominious conclusions. Confronting texts on their merits has some appeal, but when combined with Straussian esotericist interpretations, it seems the sheerest folly. It is useful to note that Plato was an Athenian aristocrat and Churchill an Englishman of his time, just as it is useful for Professor Gottfried to note that Leo Strauss was a German Jewish refugee of Nazism with views that such an experience may have colored.

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While Gottfried’s book documents the Straussians’ rise to the halls of power, he doesn’t speculate as to why this group became so influential. How did they become the neoconservatives’ intellectual codpiece?

For one, the Straussians use the familiar technique of ignoring their most serious critics while engaging with loonies who make them look better by comparison. It is difficult to lose an intellectual battle in which you refuse to engage. They also have a worldview that’s fairly appealing to modern Americans. While I find most of their political ideas to be silly, their affection for classical authors makes them more appealing than the available academic alternatives. Harking back to my original exposure to Bloom, I can understand the appeal. Since the Straussians vocally and vigorously defend their favorite version of Western Civilization, one could mistake their views for something resembling common sense. While casting Locke as a secret atheist FDR Democrat is unappealing, it seems better than depicting him as a secret Marxist feminist or a racist sexist man-pig, which is the type of intellectual Twinkie peddled in contemporary academia. I find it difficult to accept that “historicism” is an inherently “nihilist” idea, but when confronted with historicist and relativist excesses, I’m tempted to take a bite of that particular Straussian MoonPie.

For all the attempted demonization of Straussians as occult fascists, it is easy for a Straussian to look upon himself as a “good guy.” The Straussian worldview’s soft leftism is widely popular in the general population. It has been a component of mainstream American ideology for decades. Lionizing FDR and Lincoln as heroes effectively lionizes the contemporary American ruling class. The power of the “good guy badge” shouldn’t be underestimated. Most people can only abide demonization when compensated by some other moral bauble which allows them to feel superior to their accusers. Status games are tremendously important in selling ideas.

While many high-profile Straussians are intellectually accomplished, Straussian dialectic makes only modest cognitive demands on its adherent. This is important when trying to market worldviews to modern students. An actual understanding of Spinoza and his relevance to contemporary life is difficult. Parroting some nonsense about Spinoza being an esoteric atheistic social democrat requires very little imagination, bravery, or knowledge. Esotericism in general is the refuge of nincompoops, whether it takes the form of Freudian penis jokes, feminist interpretations of classical writers, or being able to smugly marvel at the glories of a Mondrian painting which looks like lavatory tiles. Esotericism allows one to wallow in feelings of superiority over the rude masses without actually knowing anything. Dispensing with historicism also unburdens the Straussian from familiarity with too many difficult or inconvenient historical facts. This method of thinking is appealingly simple and makes very few serious demands of the would-be Straussian intellectual.

Gottfried’s book provides a balanced overview of Straussian ideas, their historical context, and their position in political and academic life. It is not a vehemently critical polemic and is far more respectful in tone than what I’ve written above. Professor Gottfried engages with Straussian ideas in meticulous detail and with gentlemanly reserve. He doesn’t attempt to fit Strauss and his followers with jackboots, as the unbearably daffy Shadia Drury and her fellow travelers do. As such, his book is likely to please nobody with an emotional attachment to the subject.

This is the time of year when we celebrate the national religion of consumerism. Future archeologists might presume we were propitiating some kind of subterranean god by purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of consumer items and burying them underground a few years later.

Planned obsolescence and rent-seeking have been with us for decades, but this is one thing at which Western Civilization is still making significant advancements. I suspect it is because people have become more servile and less canny than our ancestors. Relentless marketing treats people like indistinguishable earthworms: a hole in each end and nothing of consequence in between. People get used to it and start acting like earthworms. People pay for junk because their lives are made of junk. They have junk “relationships,” junky houses, junky politicians, junky conversations, junky dreams, and they pay for it all with junk money.

Consumerism makes up something north of half of the American economy, depending on how you slice the numbers. Much of this involves replacing stuff which disintegrated due to planned obsolescence or paying for things nobody should have to pay for. Modern economic theory demands we keep money circulating so economists can declare that we are not, in fact, in an economic depression. I can see the logic in this. I just don’t want to play on the dumb consumer hamster wheel.

It’s obvious that capitalistic consumerism is a good economic system compared to the alternatives, but it has failed the consumer in many ways. Here are five obvious failures.

1) Batteries you can’t change. The latest fashion in laptops are “ultra-lights” without changeable batteries. This means when your battery dies, you have to throw it away. If they still offer the replacement service when your battery dies, maybe they’ll change it for you—for at least $150. Every laptop I’ve ever owned has had the battery die in about a year and a half. Why would I buy a laptop with ultra-strong “gorilla glass” when I know the battery is going to die soon and I can’t replace it? Cellular telephones and e-book readers: same thing. Unless you derive a significant part of your self-esteem from having the latest nerd dildo every year, it seems better to buy one with a changeable battery.

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2) Cheap clothes that fall apart. I’ve got a pair of 60-year-old cap-toe oxford shoes that are near-perfect after decades of hard use. I had a modern pair of the same shoes from the same company that dissolved into a puddle of minced cow product within a year. The old pair of shoes cost a lot more when new; Americans built them. The new shoes were constructed by slave labor somewhere in China. I’m happy to pay extra for stuff that won’t turn into dog food in a year or two, but obviously there is a market for walking around in shoe-like potted meat product.

3) Charging me money for entertainment made by dead people. Copyright and intellectual property laws exist to protect creative people who make life better for everyone. Since 1998, these laws have been extended out to infinity to serve the interests of uncreative copyright holders who appear to be among the most revolting totalitarian human beings afflicting the planet. Why should anyone in the 21st century profit from the concept of “Zorro”? Why should anyone profit from Outer Limits episodes made 50 years ago? Why should anyone pay royalties to sing “Happy Birthday?” Call me crazy, but I don’t feel like giving money to vultures feasting on cultural carcasses. I think Zorro and Mickey Mouse should be public domain. Anyone who wants to make a freaking Zorro or Mickey Mouse comic book should be able to do so. Tapeworms who squat on “intellectual property” that has become part of the cultural patrimony serve less purpose than biological parasites. People who invent useful things are only given 20 years to profit from their patents; why should Gershwin’s "heirs" profit from some music he wrote 90 years ago?

4) Appliances designed by morons. I am not asking much here. When you make a blender, make it so it can chop up ice cubes. If my blender can’t chop up ice cubes, it’s not a blender. It’s a simulacrum of a blender. I have yet to find a 21st-century blender that can chop ice. The last one had more horsepower than the lathe I keep in my kitchen for cutting up titanium. The blender was a beastly chromed thing that looked like it belonged to a Mafioso tasked with getting rid of bodies. When I took it apart to see why it chumped out making a strawberry daiquiri, I noticed the threads which connected the motor to the spinny-cutty thing were made out of cheap pot metal, and so they dissolved faster than the ice cubes.

5) Appliances designed for morons. It is pretty funny having a .45 caliber rifle with this inscribed on the barrel: “Warning: misuse may cause injury or death—follow warnings and instructions in owner’s manual.” It is less funny that I can’t buy a new one which doesn’t attempt to inform subhumans that guns can kill. Is anybody discouraged from sticking their face under a running lawnmower because of the warning label? Can people that stupid read warning labels, and if they can’t, why should we save them? Some tribe of cretinous busybodies is ultimately responsible for putting warning labels on guns and lawnmowers. If they want to do some good for the consumer, I suggest they start with suing blender manufacturers for false advertising.

F-35

The F-35 is the latest marvel brought to us by the military-industrial complex. It’s presently years behind deployment schedule. It is also the most expensive military procurement program in American history. The projected cost of an F-35 will go as high as $185 million if you believe the Wikipedia entry. The F-35 program, including production and operation, could cost taxpayers around a trillion dollars.

The F-35 is expected to do everything. It is supposed to be used in different roles by the Navy, Marines, and Air Force, something no jet aircraft has accomplished by fiat. We tried and failed at this “one plane to rule them all” concept before with Robert McNamara’s bizarro F-111, a plane so bad it was nicknamed the “Aardvark.”

Even the military admits the F-35 is riddled with horrendous design flaws, such as the wings potentially falling off. In an incredible display of military intelligence, the defense department put the project on probation a few months ago. The Marines say they don’t want the Marines “brand…weakened” if the F-35B program fails. I’m trying to imagine a real Marine like Chesty Puller worrying about “brand weakness.”

The role the F-35B fulfills is one of close air support: blowing up bad guys on the ground who are harassing the troops. The best close air support aircraft in the present inventory is the unloved A-10 Warthog, a jet which the Air Force has been trying to kill for decades because it is low-tech, slow, and has an unglamorous role supporting the ground pounders. The A-10 works well in part because it goes slow and because of its armor. It can get very close so it can see its target. The A-10 also has a Brobdingnagian cannon with which to smite the enemy. The plane was designed around the cannon and the 1,200 rounds of ammunition it carries. The F-35B has no cannon. Despite its alleged purpose as a close air support aircraft, the F-35B only has a cannon as an add-on accessory, and the add-on can only carry 200 rounds of significantly less potent ammunition. Bolt-on guns don’t work any better than bolt-on boobs; they tend to point in the wrong direction.

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Ask any grunt on the ground if he’d rather call in close air support from a fragile F-16 traveling at close to the speed of sound, a helicopter (the Army’s close air support choice) or the Warthog. They’ll pick the A-10 if they can get it. Yet the Pentagon wants a bunch of F-35s; supersonic, high-flying, cannonless, radar-proof fighters with virtually no resistance to small arms fire.

The best close air support in the Vietnam War didn’t come from the supersonic blunderbusses the military-industrial complex was turning out at the time, it came from the WWII-era Douglas A-1 Skyraider, nicknamed the Spad. This was a 1940s design which ended up being the most useful aircraft in the Vietnam War, mostly because it wasn’t a fragile, supersonic wonder weapon. Like the A-10, it was heavily armored, slow-moving, and had lots of big guns with plenty of ammunition. If we need new close support aircraft for the Marines, it seems more sensible to me to build or refurbish a tough plane with lots of armor and guns on it. This has been proven in combat multiple times. We do not need a stealthy, supersonic, gunless monstrosity.

The F-35 wouldn’t be a great idea even if it was cheap and wonderful. Assuming everything else works, there isn’t much of a wing on the thing. Wings help airplanes turn. The issue with turning is a serious one. Our Air Force had a hard time in Vietnam against outdated Soviet fighters in part because we didn’t have any fighter planes which could turn. A lone genius named John Boyd eventually figured out what was going wrong and helped the Air Force develop our present generation of jet fighters, which are actually very good at turning and shooting down other jets. They say the F-35 is supposed to be good at turning, but the fact that it has the same wing loading as an F-105 makes me doubt this. They also said it would be cheap and delivered on time.

The F-35 program should be a national scandal. It is unarguably a very costly design which solves nonexistent problems. Worst of all, we’ve invested so much money in the damn fool thing, we don’t have any viable alternatives to replace our aging air fleet. Even the Soviet Union, a nation mad enough to use central planning to determine how many toilet-paper rolls to produce each year, used multiple design bureaus to come up with their fighter planes. Somehow, central planning’s disadvantages are lost on modern America.

The present European financial crisis seems absurdly complicated to the outside observer as well as to some inside observers. But the reality is fairly simple if you look at it the right way: Leave all ideology and economic theory aside, follow the money, and count things.

In finance, we have this thing called a bond. A bond is a loan’s business end. When you own a bond, you own someone else’s debt. If this sounds like Slavery Lite, that’s because historically it was. We’re a lot nicer about things now: People who make the loans are expected to assume risk and practice due diligence, because enslaving or imprisoning debtors isn’t as fashionable as it used to be. You can force delinquent debtors to declare bankruptcy and liquidate their assets, but you can’t actually own people anymore. You can only own their bonds, at least in Europe.

A fundamental rule in finance is that you are supposed to get more interest for risky investments. The investor deserves something to compensate for the risk of losing his investment. The guy who needed the money has to pay the investor for the risk he is taking. That’s why loan sharks in the “alternative debt” business demand such high rates of return on their high-risk investments. This isn’t an ad-hoc rule; it is something close to a mathematical law.

If you have some money and want a relatively safe, predictable investment, a bond is a good way to go. Bonds are an old-person investment. Old people don’t generally want to take large risks such as starting a company or investing in stocks; they only want to be paid some interest on their acquired wealth. It’s old-people money that goes into making loans, and it is generally young people to whom the loans are made.

This arrangement is the essence of finance and capitalism. Finance is the loaning of money from the old and wealthy to the young and poor. This arrangement has worked very well historically. Energetic young people with good ideas need money to turn their ideas into reality. Old people who have accumulated money tend to be canny and wise and can make smart loans to the right young people. Everyone benefits from this arrangement. Experienced older people allocate resources to productive people on a very decentralized basis. Investors are getting paid for being old and wise and knowing their community, which is as it should be. Stupid investors are penalized by making loans which default, thus relieving them of their burden of wealth. Secretive, inept, or corrupt people don’t generally get loans under this system, which is also as it should be.

The problem with global finance right now is that there are too many old and wealthy people and not enough productive young people, so the financial arrangement’s balance is broken. There are too many people who want to make loans and not enough productive people worthy of loans. Because of this, the money also gets loaned to non-productive people. Worse, it gets loaned at very low interest rates, even to the non-productive, because people who want to make loans compete with each other to give a loan to…somebody. We saw this at work in our housing crisis. We are now seeing it play out in Europe.

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The Germans excel at industry, hard work, and invention. Making a loan to Germans is fairly low-risk unless they happen to be fighting a war. Historically, the Italian, Spanish, and Greek nations have been much higher credit risks. Their governments tend to do things such as print money to pay off government debt—something that is no longer an option thanks to the euro. Steve Sailer has made some interesting points about high-social-trust versus low-trust societies, but it doesn’t matter why this is true. It is only important that people realize the German nation pays its bills more reliably than Greeks or Italians do.

But Germany, like every other industrialized nation, has a demographic problem: There are not enough productive young Germans in whom to invest. The aging population has a particularly large pile of capital to loan as a result of their productivity. So they made loans to other nations who are under the Deutsche Mark, which is the technical term used for the “euro.” There isn’t a real problem with the Italians and Greeks and Spaniards using the Deutsche Mark other than the fact that they can no longer print money to pay their debts. The problem comes from loaning Marks to such people as if they were actually Germans. Unfortunately, the ever-punctilious Germans are now just as punctilious about political correctness as they are about obeying traffic regulations, so they clicked their heels together and started making loans to the unworthy.

While my sympathies are with those industrious, stone-faced, rule-obsessed Germans, their bankers made bad loans at good loan prices. I can sympathize with German frustrations, but I can’t empathize, because the German bankers were schlemiels for making these loans. What kind of dumbkopf can’t tell the difference between a German and an Italian? Since when does the “blank slate” theory of human nature apply to banking?

There is such a thing as “moral hazard” on both ends of the financial process. The “homeowners” who can’t pay their mortgages shouldn’t get free houses. The people who made bad loans to the Greek and Italian (and Portuguese and Spanish) governments should also be punished for their stupidity. For the system to function properly, people making loans must be allowed to fail. As a clever wag noted, “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.” I feel sorry for the German taxpayers and retirees who trusted their experts and are on the hook for the bill, but if they want to hang someone, I suggest starting with their bankers and politicians. The Italians are just being Italians.

The impending euro catastrophe is only the beginning. The future will bring many such events. From the eurozone to Asia, the industrialized nations are failing to make the only real investment people can make: creating a new generation of useful citizens who can keep civilization’s wheels spinning. The situation with the euro has brought it to the surface more quickly there, but it is the same everywhere else with shrinking populations.

A few years ago I received a telephone call from a college fundraising creep looking for a handout. I don’t have any money to spare, but I innocently inquired how they’d use my hypothetical contribution. The first thing that came to her mind was their new Hindu Department. Since I’m still annoyed I never learned the Latin and Anglo-Saxon my parents were taught in high school, that wasn’t much of a selling point for me. She pointed to a glorious new program where one could text-message questions to a physics lecturer, “like Twitter.” I couldn’t see the purpose in this unless the Physics Department was afflicted with quadriplegic mutes unable to raise their mitts in the air like we did in the old days. They’ve never called me back. 

Perhaps I am a greedy grouch who should fork over my hard-earned dough to perpetuate the rich marbling of useless administrators at my old university. Maybe I should fork over some payola for professors of make-believe subjects who are hostile to everything I hold dear. Possibly I really should pay for the mute flipper babies in my old Physics Department who can’t raise their hands to ask a stupid question. You’re never going to get me to willingly pay for flâneurs who pretend to be scientists. Those guys really harsh my hairdo.

A couple of perfumed princes of academia made the news a few months ago for publishing the idea that space aliens might cross the vastness of space to blow up the Earth because too many rednecks drive big trucks. The authors are from the Penn State Geography and Meteorology Departments and a NASA planetary-science division.

This paper’s authors seem to have gotten their ideas from one of the later, preachier Star Trek franchises. In fact, the authors of this paper explicitly and repeatedly reference Star Trek in their paper, along with other pop-culture sources such as District 9, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Independence Day, War of the Worlds, and the deservedly obscure movie K-Pax. The wacky idea that aliens might wipe us out because we don’t listen to the dire warnings in The New York Times’ editorial page is admittedly only one of this paper’s several peculiar speculations, but the entire thing is polluted with the same sort of mush-headed thinking one finds in popular science-fiction television. The paper’s authors seem to think a hypothetical spacefaring race of all-powerful aliens would also value “diversity” (yes, they use the word—four times) as highly as modern white American academics. They think it unlikely that spacefaring races of alien beings would not be terribly aggressive—except when it comes to people polluting the ecosphere. These learned men also suppose that aliens are concerned with SWPL virtue words such as “sustainability.” This vacuous word is used a whopping 30 times in a 33-page paper. I’m not sure what “sustainability” actually means, though in the common usage it seems to have something to do with eating gruel and driving a lousy car.

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The paper never mentions how interstellar travel could actually work. Humans have a pretty good idea of how to cross interstellar space; it is something theoretically possible with current technology. It involves building really enormous objects; things the size of aircraft carriers or much larger. It also involves spraying radioactive waste all over the place. Launching such things into orbit, even with chemical rockets, pollutes the atmosphere. So does building things the size of aircraft carriers. It has been speculated that a really advanced spacefaring race would build giant space elevators or enclose the sun in a Dyson sphere rather than relying on rockets, but such ideas do not seem real Gaia-friendly to me. Yet the fellows who wrote this bit of speculation seem to think our hypothetical race of fastidious space aliens are willing to commit interstellar genocide because we have too many Buick farts in our atmosphere.

Putting aside the actual physics of space flight, we presently know things about spacefaring races such as the Russians and the Chinese. They don’t tend to be too concerned about sustainability or how much SUV stink is in the atmosphere. By contrast, America is now a land run by gruesome risk-averse “diversity” ninnies like these hypothetical environmentalist aliens. Since such spiritless geldings took over the management of the planet’s most technologically advanced nation, we’ve consistently failed at manned space exploration. Why would an alien race with such an inward-looking philosophy develop space flight? Why would they develop planet-destroying technology? How would they actually get here? Will these super-advanced beings cross the enormity of interstellar space using good intentions and non-polluting pixie dust?

It is possible I am experiencing a failure of imagination by constraining myself with the known laws of physics and observations about human culture. Maybe our hypothetical environmentalist godlike aliens will develop pixie-dust death-ray technology. It is a much smaller intellectual leap to suppose that aliens able to violate the known laws of physics might have rather different psychological makeups from SWPL academic ticks. Your average Xhosa tribesman (or even your average Mexican cabdriver) thinks differently from the soy-latte-and-Prius crowd, even though they share the same basic biological heritage. Wouldn’t chlorine-breathing octopus creatures able to violate the laws of physics be even more psychologically different? It seems to me they would be, well, even more alien than world-sick creeps who wish electric death on the environmentally unaware. My own pet theory is that when the space-jockeying cephalopods show up, they’ll inform us that Lemmy of Motörhead is our most spiritually advanced human being. Crossing the vastness of space to smoke methedrine and leer at sleazy women with Lemmy makes about as much sense to me as the idea that aliens with godlike powers are genocidally concerned that we are not recycling our coffee grounds properly.

I think that paper would be appropriate for an obscure blog post or an article in a science-fiction fanzine. But I don’t think anyone on the public dole should publish such silliness, nor should they expect us to pay for “peer-reviewed” nonsense. Keep this paper in mind the next time your old university rings you up for a handout or some creep tries to frighten you with horror stories about the defunding of scientific research. A great deal of “scientific research” consists of welfare for people who should be engaged in productive private-sector work repairing computers or picking potatoes.

Rebecca Watson aka Skepchick

One of the things I miss about academia is the spectacle of alleged savants fighting like a couple of sandbox toddlers. Thanks to the Internet, such crass entertainments are available whenever I miss working with geeks. Consider the recent Richard Dawkins Elevatordämmerung.

Our protagonist in this non-event: a self-declared “Skepchick.” The woman, Rebecca Watson, is also a feminist. She had given a sermon to a group of “skeptics” on their moral failures as sexists who notice she is a girl when she is at skepticism conferences. This sort of behavior apparently “sexualizes” her as a unique individual, makes her uncomfortable, and generally scares away women skeptics everywhere. This is a common sentiment among shy women who participate in nerdy sausage festivals such as the skepticism movement. It’s less common that said women also publish semi-nude photographs of themselves in pin-up calendars dedicated to the same nerdy sausage festival.

Skepchick took video umbrage with the fact that one of her atheistic colleagues awkwardly asked her back to his room for a cup of coffee after her homily on sexism. He made his pathetic offer while in an elevator with her after a 4AM bar closeout, which suggests that he is probably as socially inept as she is. Princess Skepchick expected more chivalry from a bar populated with convention-going atheist nerds. I can empathize with such sentiments, much as I can empathize with people who visit Muslim countries and miss bacon.

Some other lady member of the skepticism movement pointed out that Skepchick was being kind of a ninny, and an Internet catfight ensued. Then Professor Dawkins weighed in on the subject. It was a fairly incoherent ejaculation posted in some blog’s comments section, the sort of thing you type into the Internet machine when confronted with a bunch of bird-brained arguments over the sinfulness of propositioning girls in elevators. The good Professor Dawkins blathered something about mutilated Muslim clitorises and suggested everyone get over it and find something better to discuss. Why should anybody care?

Apparently a lot of people care. Dozens of “skeptical movement” white knights leaped to the fair maiden’s defense, denouncing Dawkins as a no-good skunk who probably kicks puppies. Feminist harridans blasted Dawkins as an evil man-pig. Dawkins tried to fight back, but his rhetorical skills were not up to the task of arguing with fellow atheists. The New Statesman figures Dawkins is kaput unless he repents and begs forgiveness.

The Skepchick has called for the head of Richard Dawkins. She dropped the big one, informing him that he is the most loathsome of creatures: the privileged old white man. Being something of a skeptic myself, I find it hard not to notice that young Anglosphere women are easily the most privileged people in the known universe. They’re so privileged that even pie-faced, cabbage-brained ones such Rebecca Watson may be able to ruin a world-famous author’s reputation. Dawkins helped found the shabby movement which gives her the adoration of nerdy dudes who respect her intellect but still wouldn’t mind seeing her topless. Because she has a hoo-ha and can use scary words such as “sexism,” some people accord her moral power comparable to that of Pope Urban VII. What was Dawkins’s blasphemy—that the world doesn’t revolve around some creepy attention-whoring nerd girl’s mild social discomforts? Apparently it does.

I don’t think much of Dawkins. His ideas on evolution are laughable and mostly popularize those of William Hamilton. He is a decent essayist, and his hatred of religion makes him popular with certain kinds of over-emotional atheists, but otherwise, he’s the type of smug bigot who gives unbelievers a bad name. I find his searing hatred of religious people to be childish and disgusting. The fact that Dawkins is being undermined by fellow hater-atheists is delicately ironic. I suppose the more advanced religions kill their gods after all; atheism’s true believers are no different.

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The “skepticism movement” originated with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, featuring guys such as Martin Gardner, Carl Sagan, and the Amazing Randi, to promote scientific inquiry into crazy ideas. It focused on dreary but necessary expert debunking of popular nonsense such as homeopathy or the concept of aliens crossing interstellar space’s vastness to anally probe fat waitresses in Peoria. While the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry still does its thing, the movement it hatched appears to have degenerated into a social club where groups of people drink beer and kvetch about creationists. It’s like a church social for atheists.

Despite their self-proclaimed skepticism, they don’t seem to be skeptical about much of anything. If it wasn’t obvious already, this incident demonstrates that they are not hardheaded skeptics bringing the light of reason to the ignorant masses. They’re merely another identity movement for propping up the upper-middle-class booboisie’s self-esteem. They’re such easy marks, they have meetings where they are hectored by saucy-photograph-publishing blockheads about sexual objectification and sexism in the skepticism movement—with zero skeptical comments.

Anyone who sits through any feminist lecture—unless required by employment contract or law to acquiesce to this indignity—without asking a few hard questions hasn’t a skeptical bone in their entire meatsack. Anyone who sits through a lecture on the evil, nasty sexualization of women given by a creep who publishes saucy pin-up photographs of herself is a drooling retard who would swallow anything. Such persons are at least as credulous as yokels who listen uncomplainingly to cosmology seminars given at the Creation Museum. But unlike feminists, creationists don’t have the majesty of the law and upper-middle-class social opprobrium forcing people to listen to them, making the “skeptical movement” both uncritical and cowardly.

Worthy of skeptical attention is the Skepchick idea that there are fewer lady skeptics than man skeptics because man skeptics are too sexist. Rather than enduring critical analysis, such ideas are embraced with gaping credulity. The fact that such lectures are considered serious fodder for a “skepticism convention” demonstrates they are not very sexist as a group. It also implies there is some secret reserve of women interested in skepticism movements who hold off on joining because of sexism. I don’t believe this any more than I believe sexism is what keeps women from becoming inventors. Am I supposed to believe that of all God’s creatures, there is no such thing as sexual dimorphism in human beings? Maybe most women aren’t interested in a bunch of nerds kvetching about credulous religious people because they’re too busy checking their horoscopes. Maybe most women don’t like being around atheist geeks with poor social skills. And even though men and women are exactly the same, women have special concerns you absolutely must respect and obey, or you’re an evil, nasty, sexist rapebot.

The idea that Miz Skepchick doesn’t want to be “sexualized” is laughably insane. She sells semi-nude calendars featuring herself and the other Skepchicks. If she doesn’t enjoy male attention in her shabby subculture, why does she do this? Obviously, she enjoys the immense sexual power she has over this tribe of sexually deprived nerdlings. Her main complaint seems to be that her girlie powers of “sexualization” have unpleasant consequences, one of which is the fact that men whom she does not find attractive might awkwardly hit on her in an elevator.

Welcome to my world, Miz Skepchick. I’m not even subculturally famous, but girls I do not find attractive hit on me all the time. Yes, it is often disagreeable, but I don’t deny the ego trip. I also don’t think human biology should be reformed to mitigate the mild dismay I experience when some humanoid wildebeest makes cow eyes and sits too close to me in the coffee shop. I don’t think women need to be hectored into making sure I feel 100% comfortable at all times merely because women occasionally ruin men’s lives with false rape claims, stalking behaviors, legal theft of a man’s assets, and occasional murders. Skepchick is trying to ruin Dawkins’s life right now…for what?

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to be skeptical of such claims. You do, however, need to be a vertebrate and actually skeptical. As far as I can tell, everyone in the current “skeptical movement” is a gullible jellyfish.

“Hypocrisie est un hommage que la vice rend à la vertu.”

La Rochefoucauld was right. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. More to the point, virtue deserves tribute. I tire of nincompoops raising a quivering finger at folks whose morality may not be 100% consistent. I grow weary of those who think the mere observation of hypocrisy means something. I yawn and roll my eyes at the killjoys who seem to think that the mere existence of hypocrisy somehow discredits the idea that one should at least attempt to act ethically.

The argument seems to be that if you reveal someone is a hypocrite in any way, no matter how tenuous, they’ll dissolve into an embarrassed puddle of goo like the Wicked Witch of the West when splashed with a bucket of water. What kind of reasoning is that? Looks to me like the kind of highfalutin disputation used by spoiled, foot-stomping, semi-sentient adolescents on their parents. It’s a textbook example of the ad hominem logical fallacy. Pointing out that someone is a hypocrite is analytically equivalent to calling them a pooty-head or mentioning they are fat and smell like paste. Except being a hypocrite is actually a good thing.

I admire hypocrisy: the more brazen, the better. It makes people strive toward something better than what they are. Hypocrisy is just faking it until you make it. The anti-hypocrites would prefer that everyone wallow in their vices rather than attempting to become better people. But virtue of any kind is impossible without some hypocrisy. Being against hypocrisy is moral nihilism.

The way the rhetorical game works for the hypocrite-hunters, you can be an extremely bad person as long as you’re consistent about it: sort of like Barney Frank. You’re not allowed to encourage people to be good or even vaguely sensible without being saintlike in your perfection. In fact, if you’re a big enough hypocrite, your opinions don’t count at all. Hypocrites are often considered nonpersons, much like racists, believers in sexual dimorphism, and other modern thought criminals.

A few years ago, media ding-dongs went into foaming paroxysms of ecstasy when it turned out that former American “Drug Czar” William Bennett likes to gamble. Or that like many rich people, Al Gore is a fat guy who, despite preaching the virtues of living small, owns large houses, a private jet, and boats with hot tubs in them. Or that Rush Limbaugh was addicted to drugs. Why is any of that interesting? Drugs are still bad and you should avoid them, lest you end up muttering to yourself like Charlie Sheen or a Berkeley City Council member. Gambling…so what? Bennett may be an annoying neocon gasbag, but he is right that people should have more virtues such as self-discipline. Apparently he had enough personal restraint that gambling was never a problem in his personal life. Sure, Al Gore has giant houses and a jet; that doesn’t mean folks shouldn’t be frugal and modest, even if the fat moron can’t manage a halfway decent hair-shirt routine to impress the rubes. Personally, I find Al Gore contemptible because the man can’t even cadge a handjob from a paid middle-aged masseuse, but I don’t mind that he has boats with hot tubs yet wants other liberals to eat gruel. The inventor of the Internet can apparently use all the help he can get with the ladies. The fact that Rush Limbaugh has no self-control with his pill stash doesn’t mean you should start shooting heroin or cut any slack for people who do, or that none of his other opinions have merit. Laugh at Rush for his melodramatic rants or his portly figure, but he obviously knows something about drug problems.

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The idea of denouncing hypocrites seems to be that we are all scumbags and should get on with the business of marinating in squalor without ever feeling guilty about it. This is the mental trapeze act modern people use to feel superior to, say, Victorians or Mormons. But Victorian culture was morally, intellectually, and sartorially superior to our own decadent civilization. Moderns comfort themselves with the fact that the Victorians were unarguably hypocrites. I’d rather people hypocritically try to behave like non-scumbags like the Victorians did. Yes, this involves committing other adolescent sins such as “being judgmental,” “not being cool,” and hypocrisy. Is it worth attempting the impossible feat of living a hypocrisy-free life for fear that some superannuated teenager will call you on it?

Being comfortable with hypocrisy is a sign of adulthood rather than bad character. The grownup world is complicated. Actions are contextual. People make mistakes and differ in their ability to handle difficult situations just as they differ in their ability to handle strong drink. I used to make it a habit to run around with tattooed strippers with plastic boobs, among numerous other inadvisable things of which I’m considerably less proud. The only lasting ill effects I suffered were a few scars and some mild psychological trauma. Am I a hypocrite if I tell my younger, more innocent friends to stay away from women like that, or am I a man who knows why it might be a bad idea? Grownups know that everyone has the hypocrisy cooties and that spraying yourself with hypocrisy repellent doesn’t help matters. What helps is passing on expert advice to the inexperienced. Trust me on the tattooed-stripper thing: It isn’t worth the trouble. Mostly.

Morality and the social cohesion that goes along with it are measurably rotting in America and the rest of the West, but hot damn, we’re less hypocritical about our failings now! How is this an improvement on being a hypocrite? Call me a hypocritical idealist, but it seems to me if people were more worried about being denounced as villainous wastrels with bad habits rather than hypocrites, they might behave a little better.

I’m a hypocrite in countless obvious ways. So are most people reading this. Anyone who isn’t a hypocrite is either a saint or a degenerate; either way, non-hypocrites should probably be shot on sight. Hypocrite-haters need a new vacuous argument to ease their juvenile feelings of inadequacy. I’d suggest taking up the Shakespearean insult generator and a Roget’s Thesaurus, but the effort required would likely only confuse them. The whole Holden Caulfield act was weak sauce when it got started, and it’s even more watery soup now.