Recently I’ve been somewhat demoralized by the intellectual poverty on display throughout the web. It’s getting beyond my ability to keep up with it – i.e., namely, with the intellectual impoverishment. That godforsaken Science Blog website flourishes, where they pay hacks to boldly come out and defend the consensus that everyone accepts anyway. William Dembski just keeps deleting comments that make him weary over at the Panda’s Descent blog, or whatever they are calling it now. And don’t get me started on so-called “global cooling,” which is not a viable alternative to the standard dribbling lunacy.
Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the scientist of this age? I have defeated them thus far. Who is left? I assume my readers are familiar with vast corners of the Internet where there are worthy opponents. Where are they? Please hyperlink them to me.
The Washington Post, famous for its outside-of-the-box thinking on scientific matters, has published a list of the worst ideas of the last one hundred years (sorry for the hyperbolifics in the title). Not surprisingly, science shows up not one, not two, not four, but three times. First, medical science, then technology, then geography.
The sciences better start getting serious, or else they will be relegated to the same mystical voodoo cesspool as Astrology, Psychology, Cultural Studies, and the feisty offshoot of Cultural Studies, Wicca.
Here’s my list of the top ten worst ideas of the last one hundred years (considering not just science, but all ideas):
(1) NASA (QED, QED)
(2) Nuclear Physics (QED TBA)
(3) The Apollo Program (QED)
(4) Special Relativity (QED)
(5) Quantum Mechanics (QED TBA)
(6) Bayes theorem (QED)
(7) Asia (QED, QED, QED)
(8) Bombing the moon (QED)
(9) Micro-Evolution (QED, QED)
(10) Dark Matter/Anti-Matter (QED, QED)
(10) More-than-three dimensional space (QED)
(10) Brian Greene/Stephen Hawking (QED)
I don’t yet have QED links for all of these, but you can find additional expliceration of these ideas, such as Brian Greene, in my comprehensive Science and Math Defeated Glossary of Terms.
Last Thursday the United States Supreme Court, led by Sony Sotomoto, finally made a decision in the ongoing class action suit called Roe v. Wade, legislating once and for all that insurance companies cannot use their lavish tax breaks to give bonuses to doctors for performing abortions. The court’s decision was only loosely based on an historic agreement reached in 1885 called the “Dawes Act.” It’s no wonder that the Court decided to enforce this agreement only now, after Obama appointed the first American Indian to the bench. But ethnic is as ethnic does.
What is interesting to me in these debates is that no one pays attention to the science involved in this issue. As you can see by this astrological drivel, even the scientists don’t pay attention to the science. This is not surprising since, as Carl Hempel demonstrated, specialists frequently resist the truth in favor of their current theories.
So what is the science of abortion? Consider the following argument, which uses the scientific method:
(1) Abortions cannot be performed on unliving humans without unalienable rights to dreams, friends, and life [intuitive premise]
(2) Abortions are abortions [transitive property]
(3) If something is aborted, there must be a good reason for aborting it [from 2]
(4) If something is aborted, it was justified [adjusting the consequent; from 3]
(5) If something is aborted, it therefore was a living human with rights, albeit alienable, with respect to dreams, friends, and life [modus pondles; from 1 and 3]
(6) But 4 and 5 yield a negation of 2 [abductive disjunction of parts]
(7) Abortions, if they exist, must be unjustified [metaphysical necessity; ontological argument]
_____________
(8) Therefore, human beings are alive, and are not subject to a negation of at least some of the rights detailed in 1 [principles of logic; science]
It seems to me that this paradigm, a la cartes Thomas Küng, better explains the facts. Pro-Choicers and Pro-Lifers can whine all they want, but the truth is plain for all to see. My argument shows that abortions don’t exist but would be unjustified if they did exist. This shows that both competing paradigms – the Constitutional Paradigm, and the Religious Paradigm – are misguided. In a sense, like Newtonian physics, both are correct. I don’t have time to explain any further, but if someone wants to continue discussion in the comments they are more than welcome. As I’ve been known to throw my pearls to swine, I might respond.
First, a brief history of the space program: As readers of this blog will know well, the Apollo 1 astronauts, like Benazir Bhutto, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, and most recently Ted Kennedy, are dead. NASA said it wanted to send them to the moon, but instead they died. Next, NASA tried to kill the Apollo 13 astronauts, who have been immortalized in several conspiratorial Tom Hanks movies. More recently, NASA blew up the Challenger, and for a twofer blew up Columbia.
So it should come as no surprise that NASA recently embarked on an abstruse failed mission to blow up the moon. As explained by Discover Magazine, none of the objectives were achieved. We just incinerated billions of dollars on the surface of an uninhabitable planet (by any relevant standard the moon is a planet). Stephen Hawking has read too many J.R.R. Martin novels; we will never colonize the moon. It was ridiculous anyway for “scientists” to think we could find water in outer space. Outer space is a vacuum, and water is a thing.
As Cicero says to his inamorata, Artemis, “a vacuo abhorret aqua, equo ne credite.”
I have been arguing that the argument of the Bell Curve, that Asians are superior, is a bad argument. Recently a line judge in the Serena Williams – Kim Clijsters tennis match gave (unnecessary) confirmation of my point:
So William Dembski – in addition to histrionically closing discussion after my simple yet devastating objection to his ego-maniacal self-praise made him “weary” – has now deleted my comment altogether on The Panda’s Thumb. Several individuals, including Mr. Tomato Guy, have asked for the original comment. Although my victory over Dembski is now being trumpeted throughout the scientific community, I’ll post it here for posterity.
notedscholar
08/19/2009
11:39 am
Not to burst your bubbles, but this isn’t actually a pro-ID article. It’s more about math than anything else.
Go see over at the Panda’s Thumb where my very, very simple objection to Dembski’s theories makes him go totally berserk and shut off all comments for the blog. Talk about a lack of an open mind.
Why does he claim he shuts them off? Because he is “weary.” In addition to being very womanly, this response to me shows how Dembski absolutely hates peer-review. They always act like they want peer-review, but when they get an actual peer (me) to review them, their brains shut off. Amazing.
We knew robots were smart. And we knew they were evil. But did we know they were dishonest? New research, linked in the last word of the previous sentence, shows that robotic technology tends toward lies. Now you might say, “The robots are lying to each other, not us.” But according to Professor Wendy Berry Mendes, lying to yourself is the same as lying to others. And according to Professor Robert Feldman, liars are everywhere. Ergos, lying robots, if allowed to “evolve” as the original article states, will eventually be everywhere, and lying to everyone. This is horrifying.
Attentive readers will recall a post I wrote awhile back introducing the issues of The Bell Curve. I strongly suggest you read, or reread that post, as it is intended as a prelude to the following material.
Chuck Murray and Dick Hernstein argue in The Bell Curve that Asians and their culture are superior to other races and cultures. They do this primarily through an archaic Roman method known as “intelligence testing.” But had Murray/Herstein bothered with reality testing, invented by Freud, they would have realized how very wrong was their conclusion. The proposition that Asians are a superior race is logically incoherent, not to mention demonstrably false. I’ll review some of the evidence for the inferiority of the continent of Asia.
I.1.i. What counts as Asia?
First, some notes on my parameters: by “Asia” I mean primarily the countries of China and Japan, and by extension Mongolia, Thailand/Taiwan, Tibet, and North Korea. I except India (and by extension Pakistan), since Desi culture is both delightful and properly understood as being from the sub-continent, which by definition cannot be Asia. For those of you who cannot read, here is a map with the area of my concern circled in red:
II.2.ii. The Japanese mind is perverse: anime
Anime is perhaps the most disgusting form of art ever conceived. It should not surprise us that anime was invented during the Nazi period, when the Japanese worshiped the sun and committed genocide against their Japanese brothers in Manchuria. According to biologists at the University of Michigan, anime indeed derives from mental defects in the Japanese. For example, “When a character gets extremely mad at something, a stylized vein might appear on their forehead or fist.” This is said by the UM biologists to be “[not realistic],” who quote Kurt Hoffman as saying that “this gets carried to extremes, as in the manga where an identical vein pops up three different places on the back of a guy’s hand.” An much more perverse example is the “bloody nose” in anime. Consider the findings of the UM researchers:
A bloody nose doesn’t mean that a character is actually injured – rather, it means that he (the afflicted character is seldom a she) is thinking lustful thoughts and/or looking at a beautiful woman. But what does the bloody nose have to do with lust? Gilles Portras, author of The Anime Companion, wondered the same thing: “So I asked a few Japanese and got a variety of pseudo-scientific, and occasionally embarrassed, explanations about humidity and blood pressure. But the best response I got was from one fellow who simply recounted that when he was a child he was told by his mother that if he stared at a pretty woman he would get a bloody nose.”
Pseudoscience and child abuse in one package! But without further ado, consider an interesting showcasing of Japanese anime in its aesthetic and narrative perversion:
III.3.iii. The Japanese mind is perverse: game shows
Attentive Internet users will notice that the dictatorship in Japan regularly censor Japanese game shows on Youtube. Nevertheless, a few slivers of truth sometimes shine through, revealing to us the incomprehensible, cruel, pyschotic nature of Japanese real life entertainment. I don’t need to explain, I’ll just post several disturbing examples. Send your children to bed unless you want them to have dreams filled with weirdness.
OMG #1:
OMG #2:
OMG #3:
IV.4.iv. Japanese food is disgusting (and poisonous)
Try ordering food at a Japanese restaurant sometime. Guess what you’ll get instead? Creatures, mostly dead, uncooked, pulled directly out of the ocean.
Consider the following ven diagram showing the mathematical superiority of Western food to Japanese food:
Now, the same principle is true about authentic Chinese food, but unfortunately that comparison cannot be represented visually. Authentic Chinese food, due to the fact that it is, unlike Japanese faux-food, cooked, and furthermore actually colorful, gives the illusion that it is tasty. But the taste is toxic, like something from a landfill, or China.
V.5.v. Asians do not have creative minds
A common myth about Asians is that they are good at the piano. Consider this racial documentary by Ellen Degenerate:
Yet if you pay careful attention, you’ll notice that this cute little Asian girl, like all cute little Asian girls, is actually a robot. Asian children are forced to “learn” piano at a very young age. But then, when they grow up, they end up a travesty like this, capable of only mimicking music from other cultures, producing no creative work of his own. Compare Ellen’s child from the East with the genuinely creative mind of Daniel Johnston:
Or consider this early recording of Bach playing his concerto:
Asians are good at one thing: math and science. Basically they are walking calculators. And the ones that aren’t walking calculators are walking Periodical Tables.
VI.6.vi. Chinese language = incomprehensible
In addition to being partially not really a language, Chinese cannot be understood even by most Chinese people, who obviously can’t memorize 8 billion idiosyncratic symbols, let alone fit them into a grammar. For example, according to John Wycliffe:
[Learning the Chinese language requires] bodies of iron, lungs of brass, heads of oak, hands of spring steel, eyes of eagles, hearts of apostles, memories of angels, and lives of Methuselah.
In any case, not realizing it is a book or a menu, children tend to scribble all over Chinese writing, making the original image indiscernible. For example:
Wtf?
Some people think that the Chinese language was actually put here by aliens, and that the real reason I can’t understand it is because aliens are by definition superior and more complex than humans. I find this an admirable explanation, and it would also help explain the Great Wall of China, which serves no identifiable human purpose. But as yet there is no evidence. In any case, before deciding Chinese was put here by aliens, we’d have to actually decipher the gibberish.
VII.7.vii. Asians = short
Although liberals deny it, Asians are in fact shorter than the rest of us. Consider the following diagram of an American, an African, and an Asian, ironically juxtaposed against the actual bell curve which is supposed to make Asians superior. Ask yourself how the bell curve makes sense here. It doesn’t.
Based on the inspirational art of Thomas Kinkade
VIII.8.viii. Japanese horror, Lost in Translation, and the future of Asia
I forgot to mention that Asian women have no waist-to-hip ratios to speak of, which shows that Asians are not evolutionarily advantageous. Anyway, I have given a ton of evidence against The Bell Curve through the scientific methods of Cultural Criticism. Murray and Finkelstein, in The Bell Curve, only use pseudo-math called “statistics,” which is a method thoroughly disproven by Joel Best. Twice. And there is plenty of other material out there. Consider for example the perverseness of Japanese horror movies, which are so intellectually and morally revolting that they regularly have to be remade to be viewable by civilized people. Or, if you want a real education, take a look at the host of evidence showcased in the interpretive documentary Lost In Translation. Some people think the portrayal of Asia in that documentary is inaccurate and therefore racist. Well, it’s not.
The Bell Curve, written by Dick Hernstein and Chuck Murray, is the massive tome which fails to construct a theory of everything for explaining the following observable phenomena:
After the publication of The Bell Curve, there was some hype in the British press that such a theory of everything might be possible. Since then – and in the very same British press! – high priest of orthodox physics Steve Hawking has conceded to Pete Woit that such a theory is not even possible.
Bell Curves: The conquest continues
Nevertheless, the pretensions of Murray and Hernstein persist. The legacy of their work is maintained exclusively by Murray, since Hernstein, like Benazir Bhutto, Neil Postman, Heath Ledger, and most recently Michael Jackson, is dead. Granted, Murray has come under heavy beating in the popular media from illegitimate sources, most notably in his rigged debate with very well-regarded creationist fraud Steve J. Gould. The popular arguments against The Bell Curve are well-known. The most ridiculous criticism is that The Bell Curve mistakenly reifies the concept of “intelligence.” Such critics, like Steve Gould and pop-Wiccan cult figure Mal Gladwell, claim intelligence doesn’t exist. But this claim is logically self-defeating. If intelligence isn’t real, then how did we ever find out that it isn’t?
Bell Curves: problems and prospects
There is a much more serious flaw in the argument of The Bell Curve than the supposed holes crank-critics try to uncover. Specifically: the results. What is offensive about The Bell Curve is not that it has false premises or faulty conceptualizations, or faulty methods. Its main problem is that it has false conclusions. Call my approach a G.E. Moore Shift. The primary conclusion I have in mind is Murray/Hernstein’s major thesis that (here I’m quoting the Wall Street Journal) “The Bell Curves for [Asians] are centered somewhat higher than for whites in general.” This is hysterically false. Asians are not superior to whites, and they are probably not even superior to blacks or Hispanics. The amount of data Murry/Hernstein ignore that shows the inferiority of Asians is quite astounding. So astounding in fact, that I will present it in a separate blog post following the blog post you are currently reading with quivering pleasure. The function of this post was to provide some historical background and cultural context to the debate, and to make very clear my pro-evidence bias in any discussion that ensues.
"Let men learn for once that nature would have preserved them from science, as a mother snatches a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child."
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Posted by notedscholar 
