Kate Plus Eight Minus Jon

My wife-to-be in three short months was watching the season premier of Jon and Kate Plus Eight last night on TLC.  Toddlers don’t do it for me so I generally abstain, but I’ve caught a few episodes over the years.  I empathize with Jon.  I really do.  What a champion.  Most men would buckle under the pressure of playing Vice Den Mother to six screaming toddlers.  The amount that man has sacrificed on a daily basis is staggering.

Of course, throughout these last five years, Kate has barely noticed.  Gee, I wonder why their marriage might be on the rocks.

Watching Jon’s solo interviews was so telling.  He was speaking loud and clear.  He had to quit his job to become a stay at home dad to 6 toddlers so his wife could bask in the limelight and give a nationwide book and speaking tour.  She might as well have put his balls on the chopping block and hacked them off with a rusty spoon.  Listen up, ladies: if you’re looking for a marriage killer, look no further than pulling a heist like this on your husband.

It was bad enough that he endured letting the entire country watch his wife treat him like a servant on national TV.  Depriving him of his career because “we make more money from my book tour than your IT job” and turning him into a nanny was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

If I were in Jon’s boots and Kate even suggested such a thing, I’d probably hit her in front of the cameras.

Jon and Kate + 8 is a classic example of what happens when an unrestrained matriarch is allowed to dominate the household.  Kate admitted point blanc without provocation that she “wakes up for my kids, does everything for my kids, exists for my kids.”  Most mothers would say the same thing.  Suppose you’re this woman’s husband and creator of her children and you’re listening to her say this.  She doesn’t wake up for you, she doesn’t live for you, she doesn’t exist for you.  She exists for the children you gave her (and, if TLC hadn’t stepped in and enabled Kate to make a living off celebrity status, you generally pay for), without even acknowledging your existence let alone the fact that the children aren’t hers alone, but are hers and yours.  How do you suppose this makes Jon feel?

“I might as well be in prison”, noted Jon about his current lifestyle.  It’s true.

Kate treats Jon like a servant in his own house.  She was already a matriarch in personality but at the very least, Jon had a job and was paying the bills.  Now that he has been relegated to a house frau, his value has decreased even further.  The result?  Divorce.  Inevitable, soul crushing divorce.  Not even a hero like Jon can put up with that immense load of bullshit.

You might try to chalk this up to the stresses of a roof with 8 children beneath it, but let me draw your attention to the Duggars.

There is no question that Jimbob Duggar is the patriarch of his household.  King of his castle.  He and his loyal wife Michelle are Biblical literaists when it comes to children – they took an obscure passage in the Bible along the lines of, “children are a blessing; blessed be the man who hath a quiver full of them” and translated that to mean let’s have 20 children.  Fortunately for Jimbob and Michelle Duggar, they follow the rest of the Bible’s teachings as well.  Michelle is a good upstanding Christian woman and she obeys her husband.  The result?  No divorce.  And they have something like 18 or 19 children now.  Jon and Kate are amateurs by comparison.

Patriarchy works.  Matriarchy doesn’t.  Why”

Biology, plan and simple.  Sexual psychology is a powerful factor.  When it is ignored, one or both of the sexes in the marriage is miserable.  Miserable people do not make good spouses.  Men’s first instinct when miserable is to go to bars and hit on young hot girls.  Nothing comforts a man more than scoring a hot girl.  No matter how sour his mood or how dire his straits, a man buries all his sorrows in hot snatch.  Women can never truly appreciate this, nor should they – their sexual psychology drives them to hate this kind of behavior, especially in their spouses.

Patriarchy works because it is much more important to a man to feel like the head of a household than it is for a woman to feel that way – in fact, most women prefer to delegate that responsibility to someone else.  Women can wake up, live, and exist for their children.  Men cannot.  It takes more than a cute toddler to satisfy a man’s psychological well being.  Women – particularly mothers – do not understand this.  Kate Gosselyn has quite successfully robbed Jon of everything that makes him a man, and he is miserable.  Michelle Duggar lets Jimbob Duggar feel and act like a man, and he is happy.  He will keep giving Michelle what she needs because she is giving him what he needs.  Kate could take a lesson from Michelle Duggar.

The other possibility is that it’s all just a big ratings act, and they’re both perfectly happy and it’s just a ploy to keep people watching.   I doubt it.  Normandy took less planning than would have been required of this pair to architect such a farce.  I give it six months.

Atheist Life vs. Religious Life

What a douche.

1.  “Atheists can make moral decisions based on the specific context.”

I shouldn’t really need to go much further than this.  This is the classic attitude of the moral relativist.  In my experience, 99% of atheists became moral relativists first and atheists second.  The example this bozo used was, “suppose Nazis asked you if you were hiding Jews in your attic.  If you were a Christian you would have to tell them the truth because God says Thou Shalt Not Lie!!!!!11″  Yeah, kid, you got us there.  Does anyone seriously think this is smart?  The simplest counter to this example is merely this: suppose the Nazis also obeyed God’s commandments.  Then you wouldn’t need to lie, would you?  Check.  Mate.  Idiot.

This simple point illustrates everything that is wrong with moral relativism.  Watch me turn your argument against you in one easy step:

Atheism is great because you don’t adhere to any morality other than your own, which means that if you feel all right with killing Jews, gypsies, gays, or whoever else crosses you for any reason whatsoever, then it’s perfectly fine – you have the freedom to make that moral judgment in context.  The context being that the leader of your country who imposes laws instructs you that you must kill Jews or you are a criminal and can yourself be killed.

I can’t believe that there are people out there who don’t see both sides of the coin on this issue.  Moral relativism is a double edged sword.  I believe the evidence strongly shows that more often than not it is used to justify evil behaviors than it is used as a rationale behind good ones.  The very words “good” and “evil” have no meaning whatsoever when you live your life under the mantra that you’re free to make “moral decisions based on the context.”  That merely means that what is good one day might not be good the next.

2.  “Atheists can experience healthy outrage at the outrageous without questioning God’s plan.”

Who says religious people aren’t outraged?  Who says that religious people don’t question God’s plan?  I would also ask this simple question: when an atheist is outraged “at the outrageous”, to whom or to what do they direct said outrage?  Bad luck?  We must see things differently, because that sounds ridiculous to me.

It’s not okay to question an intangible God’s plan, but it is okay to be outraged “at the outrageous?”  When we’re talking about getting angry with intangibility, aren’t we on the same side of the debate, here?  At least religious people give a name to the cause of their misfortune.

Religious people are comforted by the idea behind the concept of “God’s plan”, always taken with the understanding that God’s plan is his alone to decide – because it means that there was some purpose in at all.  If bad things have to happen, if they at least happen to serve some greater purpose, it makes their deaths hard to bear.  The atheist insinuates that God is somehow punishing us when be takes loved ones, or curses us with afflictions, or hardships, or whatever, and that instead of taking comfort in understanding that we are serving God, he instead suggests we should just take our lumps with no comfort at all.

3.  “Atheists have the power to accept people as who they are.”

Why is that a good thing?  Do you accept Warren Jeffs, Adolf Hitler, and Jack the Ripper as who they are?

No, you put them in prison.

Oh, I see.  You accept people for who they are as long as they fit a number of categories that have now grown to be socially acceptable, like homosexuality.  Will pedophiles and murders be in vogue next season?   Only time will tell!

I guess this falls under the header of the making “moral judgments in context”, that context being whatever everyone else tells you to think.  So you take your cultural cues from MTV’s The Real World about who you should accept, but religious people aren’t allowed to take their cultural cues from traditional western culture, which is based on religion?

QED.  Next!

4.  “Atheists can approach people without the feeling of having an agenda.”

Says the guy posting a pro-atheism, anti-religious video on YouTube.  Seriously, do you hear yourself speaking?  YOU DO HAVE AN AGENDA.   Your agenda is to promote atheism at the expense of theism.  Now you’re just lying.  But I guess in this context, it’s okay to lie, right?

5.  “Atheists do not live with the fear of Hell.”

Which, of course, only adds to the “do as you go” attitude about morality.  When you fear nothing, you have no reason to alter your behaviors to avoid that which you fear.  There is nothing wrong with a good dose of fear if it makes you behave in a way generally agreed upon to be more conducive to social living.

Atheists hate hell because it stops them from doing whatever they want whenever they want and then inventing the morality which justifies themselves ex post facto.  If there’s a hell, most atheists are probably going there, and they know it.  That’s why hell must not exist.

6.  “Atheists raise free thinking children.”

So do religious people, apparently.  A huge number of atheists on YouTube declare their religious street creds by talking about how they were raised in Bible study and then suddenly “broke free” when they had some kind of intellectual epiphany and became an atheist.  Translation: I wanted to rebel against my parents and strike out on my own against their oppressive rules like, don’t be a whore, but the Goth lifestyle wasn’t for me.

7.  “Atheists do good deeds not because it’s mandated, but because it arises freely from their own sense of good will.”

The only problem here is that the facts demonstrably prove that religious people are vastly more likely to give money to charity than atheists.

Pro tip: money talks, bullshit walks.  It doesn’t matter why someone gave to charity, it only matters that they did.  $100 doesn’t become a $1000 when it’s given “not because it’s mandatory, but because it arises freely from one’s sense of good will” but I promise you that $0 does become $100 when it’s given because it’s mandatory.  I think about this fact every time I look at federal withholding on my pay stubs biweekly.

8.  “Atheists know the true meaning of forgiveness and love.”

Except they don’t.  Again, this attitude that something like forgiveness, which is required in the Bible, is only genuine when it is not required, is ridiculous.

Is the air in your lungs only genuine when you choose to breathe, or does it oxygenate your blood while you’re asleep, too?

This is such a stupid, pompous attitude to take.  “Oh, only I know what it means to forgive.  When you say that you forgive me for being a douche on YouTube, you’re only saying it because the Bible says you have to and you don’t really mean it.”

Give me a break.  The Bible tells us that we must forgive specifically because everyone knows that human nature is to not forgive.  Many of the Bible’s tenets are tenets because they do not arise naturally in most human beings.  This nonsense about how atheists do it out of the goodness of their hearts is true for only a small number of people in a small number of cases.

Forgiveness is an important concept in religion and is often emphasized because it is well known that human beings make mistakes.  A lot of mistakes.  Just as you make mistakes, so do others.  If you don’t forgive yourself, and them, violence and hostility ensues.  At the very least, you lose a functional society when nobody forgives each other.  There is nothing wrong or less genuine about mandatory forgiveness than voluntary forgiveness.

Again, results talk and bullshit walks.  If the effect of forgiveness is that any thought of revenge or retribution is eliminated, it doesn’t matter whether that result came from within (self) or from without (the teachings of religion).

Of course, I would also ask why an atheist would ever need to forgive anyone for anything.  According to the atheist, everyone is entitled to his or her moral judgment taken in context.  Why must I forgive someone for something when they did nothing wrong according to their own moral judgment taken in context?  Who am I to judge their morals?

Forgiveness is only relevant when everyone agrees on what should and should not need to be forgiven, in other words, some moral authority, which the atheist established in point #1 is nonexistent in atheist life.

8.  “Atheists accept that things that are still unknown are simply still unknown.”

Except for the existence of God, which atheists know definitively to be false.

9.  “Atheists know that sin doesn’t exist, and can do everything that religion teaches as sin.”

The image associated with this quote, by the way, is two elephants humping.

Why don’t you just come out and say it.  Atheists can have gay sex because there’s no such thing as sin.

The atheist has now just thrown away any chance of being taken seriously.  That whole spiel about forgiveness is irrelevant.  There’s no sin, so there’s nothing to be forgiven ever.  Yes, atheists; do what you please.

Let me ask you, Mr. Atheist: is pedophilia a sin?  How about bestiality?  How about polygamy?  How about lying?  Murder?  Cheating?  Stealing?  Oh wait, “Of course I’m not talking about murder.”

No, of course not.  Again you assume some kind of universal morality even though you’ve already ruled that out as a weakness of the religious.

In the long list of things traditionally considered sins, “kinky sex” and “murder’ both among them, you’ve chosen only to eliminate “kinky sex” from the list of sins.  “Murder” still makes the cut.  Why?

I suspect, aside from what I’ve already suggested which is that the culture he was born into has decided that kinky sex is okay, is that he himself does not want any restrictions on the kind of sex he has.  Since religion imparts those restrictions, he has to choose, and kinky sex trumps Sunday morning church services in the “fun” category.  God forbid we do anything that isn’t fun, ever.

As usual, another totally undisciplined, spoiled little pimple on the ass that is modern American culture.  Whatever, it’s your hot body, you do what you want!

10.  “Atheists have the freedom to think for themselves.”

Except you don’t.  Free thinking is one of the greatest myths in the world today.  You are a product of the culture you were born into.  Your definition of “free thinking” means you’re free to put whatever bullshit you want on YouTube and you can read whatever books you want without being stoned to death.  But that still doesn’t qualify as free thinking.  There are human beings alive today who are incapable of disambiguating a color into anything more resolute than “green”, “yellow”, and “brown”.  Red would be called “brown.”  Blue would be called “green.”  Their culture only has 3 words for color, so that’s how they think.

You think you’re a free thinker because you’re blinded by your own cultural worldview.  The truth is you’re just parroting the progressive pro-science anti-tradition crap that hundreds of other people have said and thought before, which makes you no better than the millions of people who are parroting the conservative pro-tradition pro-religion crap that millions of other people have said before.

11.  “Atheists know that it is not wrong to change your mind.”

Of course not.  Adopting this attitude preemptively makes you impervious to any accusation of stupidity when everything you believe today is proven wrong tomorrow.  Could you imagine what would happen if all the publications from the 1970′s about global cooling were revered as a sacred text today in a world where global cooling is no longer the science du jour?  How ridiculous!  All those “global cooling” nutjobs would be laughed at in YouTube videos because everybody knows that the earth is warming, not cooling.

Changing your mind – and confessing an open ended, unconditional willingness to do so when the wind suits you – or your own stupidity necessitates it – is a hallmark of the unprincipled.

12.  “Atheists do not use God as an excuse.  We take full responsibility for our own actions.”

No, you don’t need any excuses because you are a moral relativist and nothing is ever bad.  The responsibility you take is the responsibility to invent some ridiculous rationale to justify whatever it is you did.  Did you know that Osama bin Laden is simply misunderstood, came from a troubled home, and was molested as a child?  And on, and on.

The people who use God as an excuse would have done what they were going to do anyway.  The biggest mass murderers in history were all atheists.  Adolf Hitler.  Joseph Stalin.  Mao Ze Dong.  Pol Pot.  Kim Il Sun.  Kim Jong-il.  Check.  Mate.  Idiot.

13.  “We no longer have to view man as being in a fallen state.”

The fallen state is a state of believing you have the knowledge of good and evil.  In other words, being a moral relativist.

14.  “Actions are more important than words.”

Except when it comes to giving to charity, for example, in which words like, “you’re only doing it because you’re madated by the Bible” is more important than putting $100 to charity because you’re mandated to by the Bible.

15.  “We don’t ask for a God to step in and ask for help for us or others.”

Except when atheists are dying on the battle field, in which case even non-religious people – even atheists – beg for their mommies and/or the God they say they don’t believe in.  There are millions of documented cases of non-religious people praying to God in their final moments.  Nothing cuts through the bullshit like impending death.

And… drum roll please… in closing:

16.  “Atheists can read Harry Potter!”

….

….

….

Idiot.

Protip: “Rationalists” Are a Myth

I constantly hear people use the “I’m a rationalist!”  or, “God is illogical!” argument to defeat theists.

I graduated from the University of Maryland.  I have a degree in Computer Science.  At the time, the minimum SAT score for acceptance into that program was 1300 (out of 1600).  The recommended score was 1350.  That is well to the right of the bell curve – the average score being somewhere around 1000.  The people in this program were much brighter than average.

The second math course in the CS curriculum was called “Discrete Structures” or something like that.  One of the major course components was deductive reasoning, i.e., formal logic.  If A implies B and B implies C, then A implies C.  Et cetera.

The failure rate for this course was over 50%.  It was considered the Computer Science weed out course.

Granted, the course had other, harder components (inductive proofs, for example).  But I just want you to think about this for a minute: over 50% of students who scored in the 75th or higher percentile on the SATs could not pass a course about logic, reasoning, and proofs.  By the way, to even take this course you had to pass Honors Calculus 2.

And you’re telling me that the average human being is a “rationalist”?  Uses “logic”?  Give me a break. 

Reasoning and logic are harder than most people think.  Chances are that the people who are claiming to be “rational” don’t have the slightest freaking clue.  Their premises are retarded, their thinking is probably flawed, and none of the arguments for anything are likely to stand up to scrutiny.

Just keep that in mind the next time you claim to be rational, or believe someone when they say they are.  Especially when someone with a liberal arts degree who never took an advanced math course and probably couldn’t get through calculus is saying it.

Spin? Look no further:

So apparently Gallup’s latest polls on the topic suggest that more people in this country are pro-life than are pro-choice.

You want a classic example of spin?  Take a look at this commentary.  Don’t feel like reading?  Let me paraphrase:

“The country is finally realizing that the grand social experiment of legal abortion isn’t as wonderful as Roe v. Wade would have you believe.  But don’t worry.  Even though people self identify as pro-life, they’re not really pro-life, for all the following reasons: blah, blah, blah.”

Seriously.  That entire article is about trying to find reasons why the Gallup poll misrepresents the American opinion on the subject.  I dare you to find an editorial written by anyone employed by any major media outlet ever that does the same thing with the pro-choice numbers, in other words, spin them around so that despite the poll results the author concludes that the country is still actually pro-life.

You might as well not bother because you won’t.  The only people you might see doing something like that are employed by Fox News, because they are the only source that isn’t biased leftward.

Note to the media: your time as cultural arbiters has come to end because of people like me and the millions of others who read and write blogs.  Stop wasting your time; nobody reads your little Time magazine or whatever it’s called.

Who the Fuck is Farrah Fawcett?

And why do I give a shit?

I am sick and tired of hearing about some old washed up hag who was never that pretty even in her heyday.  She’s dying of cancer?  Who the fuck cares?  Who the fuck is Farrah Fawcett?

Apparently she’s the “face of a generation.”  I’ve never heard of her.  I guess that means said generation is entirely irrelevant.  Good riddance.

Men Like War

I’ve concluded that the reason Palestine refuses peace with Israel even when Israel has made extremely generous offers time and time again is simple: Palestine, like most of the Middle East, is populated with a huge swell of young men.

A swell of young men who have cultural and financial barriers to marriage.  In a culture where a girl caught at Make Out Point is burined neck deep in sand and stoned to death until dead, it’s tough for these young men bursting with testosterone to put their energies where Western young men do – namely getting laid, and finding a job, preferably a white collar one with the largest money-to-effort ratio possible, to finance their life styles.

There is no question in my mind that if I were a young man living in Palestine, I would be firing rockets into Israel for no other reason than for the sake of fighting.  Had I no prospects of a comfortable lifestyle with food in my belly, pussy on my dick, and air conditioning, I think fighting, especially if it’s for some cause considered great by my culture, would be my second choice.

The reason the west has a hard time understanding this is simple.  Our culture has been pussified by years of feminist and PC indoctrination.  We take toy guns away from our little boys and suspend them from school for 10 days if they get into a fight with one another on a playground.  In Palestine, children’s shows teach young boys how to kill Jews.  I’m not lying.

We don’t let our boys be boys so, unless their fathers (many of whom divorced their mothers and do not even live with them) strongly intervene, as mine did, and teach them how to be men in spite of this feminized culture we’ve created for ourselves by letting women vote, they grow up to be pussies like Barack Obama who bow to foreign kings and apologize for America picking on the little guys instead of demanding that King Saudi bow to him instead since we have all the money, all the guns, the hottest women, and are the undisputed kings of the world.  If only we acted like it…

Anyway, you’re not going to get peace from Hamas or Palestine as long as their culture remains powerful and masculine.  How else can you explain how a bunch of backwards miscreants who live in mud brick houses and fight with nothing more sophisticated than automatic rifles left over from the Cold War haven’t been completely exterminated by the country they constantly antagonize, who is equipped with unmanned aerial assault vehicles and nuclear weapons?  Israel holds back because they, like us, are a pussified western culture that values gay shit like diplomacy and understanding.

If men ruled Israel they would have eradicated Hamas the first time a rocket hit an Israeli.  They probably would have used chemical weapons on them and enjoyed it.  But no.  Instead they give them a billion dollars in food aid and invite them to a peace conference.  Hamas laughs, and then promptly busies itself with firing more rockets at Israel — too busy, in fact, to come to the peace conference.

The saddest part of all is that many men who read this post have been so thoroughly indoctrinated by our feminized culture that they’ll actually attempt to claim that manliness is not about fighting, killing, and war, but instead will use words like “rational”, “civilized” or “diplomacy” which are all code words for pussy.  Our culture is so far gone that even men have forgotten what it’s like to be a man.

What a shame.

Daniel Hannan is my Hero

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLD2IF7njhY

This man is brilliant.  Why couldn’t this man have run against Barack Obama?

If you want to hear what a real conservative politican sounds like, listen to this man.  He foreshadows the future if Barack Obama has his way.

Prejean: So what?

I’ve got to hand it to the gay movement.  The duplicity they exhibit - and the fact that most gays involved in this movement would themselves quite honestly not understand, admit, or even see their own duplicity – is staggering.

First, let’s understand their basic premise.  And please correct me if I’m wrong.

Essentially, gays are up in arms because they feel that they are denied rights in the same vein that blacks, and before them women, were denied based on some biological fact they did not choose, in this case, sexual orientation.

This boils down to tolerance and equality.  Right?

You can probably see where I’m going with this.  But I’ll go there anyway because it needs to be said.

One of my biggest problems with anyone who preaches “tolerance” and “equality”, such as pretty much everyone involved in pro-gay activism, is how selectively it’s applied.  The gays need more flexible marriage rights to include them, but the polygamists don’t.  The gays need society to accept their sexual practices but zoophiles don’t.  I’ve met very few people – straight or gay – who purport, without prompting, what I consider a self consistent attitude toward tolerance and equality.  In short, I believe you need to be a solid social libertarian – for everyone – to be taken seriously as a pro-gay-rights supporter.

So, naturally, after Miss California came out against their cause – gay marriage – which is much different than something like interracial marriage, which I’ll talk about in some later post – she had to be destroyed, despite the fact that she holds the majority view in California.  The media, which conveniently for gays has a representation of gays well above the national statistical average in the general population – has descended upon Miss California and the smear campaign has begun.  Not content merely to respectfully disagree in an open forum and make a civil case like civil people do, the gay community unleashed the hounds, did some drudging, and is currently taking Carrie Prejean through the mud.

In effect, they’re attempting to ruin her career.  Of course, this is socially acceptable because it’s not a real career.  Carrie Prejean was born pretty and is a pageant princess.  It’s not like she works in a coal mine, right?  Any money she wins in pageants will probably just be wasted on frivolity, right?  So it’s totally okay to attempt to use any means necessary to deprive Ms. Prejean her career.  It’s comforting to remind ourselves that she’s just a backwards bigot, like the other 52.99999% of California, and has no business representing California in anything like a minor leagues pageant as she parrots the majority opinion.  It’s also comforting to remind ourselves that jealousy plays absolutely no part in this purely rights-based, intellectual discussion of gay discrimination.

Smear tactics aside, what I find so outrageously duplicitous about this whole thing – and the very point I want to make here is this:

Accusing Carrie Prejean of violating a moral system which she believes in while simultaneously attempting to actively destroy that moral system which you and your movement does not believe in as a reason to denunciate her is vastly more hypocritical than any moral misstep she made by taking pictures more conservative than Miley Cyrus’s scandalous cover shoot last year.

Put in simpler terms: gays clearly do not believe in any kind of biblical or traditional western moral system which condemns, among other things, sodomy.  Otherwise, they would not engage in any kind of homosexual sex, all of which is considered sodomy and was until recently illegal in all western nations.  Carrie Prejean believes in, or at least publicly proclaims to believe in, traditional values, which condemns, among other things, unmodesty.  We’re going to go apples for apples on this one, buggering your neighbor is a graver violation of traditional moral values than showing your bare back and some side boob during a modeling photoshoot for which you were paid and bore absolutely zero sexual connotations whatsoever.  But that’s not even the point.  The point is that if you completely disregard traditional moral values yourself, which you must do to be homosexual or support homosexuals, then how can you possibly apply those same values to Carrie Prejean as a method for stripping her Miss California title?  Who’s the hypocrite here?  If you are committing graver sins under those laws on a daily basis, who’s worse?  And who are you to call foul?

This whole thing is ridiculous.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and I’ve asked myself an interesting question.

Have you ever heard that in the old days, before modern medical science, people believed that your heart, not your head, was the organ responsible for the personality, actions, thought, and self?

I bet you thought to yourself, “how ridiculous!  how good of us to know better today!”  I know I did, the first time I heard it.

In hindsight, I am beginning to think more and more that they were right.  Our brains are clearly an accessory.

Sunspots?

Fact: global cooling is caused by low sunspot activity.

Fact: observed sunspot activity is low, and might stay that way.

Fact: we have no prayer in hell of determining neither how severe the sunspot low will be (and therefore how dramatic a cooling the Earth will experience) nor how long it will last.

Fact: Barack Obama will still tax me today for something that may or may not happen tomorrow.

Fact: if we are entering a sunspot low, burning greenhouse gasses today will save millions of lives tomorrow because warmer temperatures equate to a longer growing season which equate to larger crops which equate to feeding the hungry.

Fact: do you still believe in global warming?  Seriously?

I do not understand these GW alarmists.  I really don’t.  They have as much blind faith in the certainty of human-caused global doom as any religious person does in their God, while at the same time claiming their truths are based in science.  Mmmhmm.  Be careful guys, the earth is dying!  (Thanks to us and our CO2!)  But, P.S., if the sunspot activity stops, glaciers will cover all of Europe.

Idiots.  You believe what you want to believe.  Don’t berate me for wanting not to believe your nonsense.

Torture

Is it okay to kill 1 to save 1,000?  Do the ends justify the means?  Is shooting a combatant on the battlefield outright more or less cruel than torturing him?

These are tough questions, but the anwers are not so tough.

Let’s tackle the last one first, since it’s a basis for the others.  One of the big debates over this Gitmo nonsense is that by bringing them into Cuba to waterboard them, which as many people have already accurately pointed out is done to our own troops to prepare them to handle it because other nations will do it to them if they are caught, we actually spared the lives of these people since we could have simply shot them.  We chose not to shoot them because they had information we wanted, and they are worth more to us alive than dead.  This is not hard to understand.  Of course, it leaves a sour taste in your mouth if you happen to be predisposed against wars and killing in general, but for the purpose of this excerise, whether or not you agree with the war itself is irrelevant; the war is a fact, and by rights, our soldiers could have shot every single one of the Gitmo detainees outright.  Had they, your delicate sensitivities would have missed the chance to put your panties in a bunch over waterboarding some terrorists.

It’s very easy to imagine torture so horrific that death would be preferrable by many people.  However, most people – even those who were tortured in the most horrific manner, and may have wished for death as they were being tortured – are glad that they were not killed.  Life is a precious thing, and even when it seems like it’s better to lose it, most people, in hindsight, conclude that they were wrong to ask for it to be taken.

The torture discussed in the news lately was hardly torture so horrific that the Gitmo detainees were wishing for death for no other reason than the torture itself.  Don’t forget that many of these prisoners want nothing more than to die in Allah’s service, so their pleas for death are disingenuous as a direct consequence of torture.

As a result, I think the overwhelming majority of Americans, when given the choice to suffer CIA torture or be killed on the spot, would choose CIA torture any day of the week and twice on Sunday.  Hmm… waterboarding or death…. not a very hard choice, is it?

So, as far as some kind of moral objection to kiling or causing harm, in this case we’re talking about the lesser of two evils.  Even if you object to both practices, it shouldn’t be hard to admit that waterboarding is less evil than execution.

So, when we ask the first question again with a bit of context – is it okay to kill 1 to save 1,000 – we can stage it again by asking whether it is okay to waterboard 1 to save 1,000.

A simple thought experiment can show that the answer is clearly yes.  It is better to kill 1 person than to kill 999 people.  Again, it is the lesser of two evils.

And 1,000 is merely an arbitrary.  What if I asked, instead, if it’s better to kill 1 person to save every other living person, including you than to let that 1 person live on moral grounds.  Even the most moral of people would be criminals to stand by their so-called morality of “thou shalt not kill” and let billions of people die for no other reason than to appease a contrived sense of conscience.  As an aside, what I find funny about people who claim that killing is wrong no matter how many lives it saves are usually also the first to tell me about moral relativism.

The reason this is not so simple is that it is impossible to tell whether killing 1 person will save 999 until you’ve already killed him.  Now replace the verb “kill” with “torture” and you have the essence of the debate.

The question really boils down to whether or not you’re willing to take the chance.  How certain do you need to be that torturing a prisoner will save lives?  It appears most liberals seem to think the answer is 100%, and even then, it’s still wrong (but shooting them outright on the battle field is somehow less wrong).

This opinion also seems to be directly related to the death penalty debate.  Our justice system is not 100% perfect because human beings are not 100% perfect and a certain, low percent of death row inmates have been wrongfully convicted.  Most death penalty opponents exploit this fact to suggest that it’s better never to inflict the death penalty than to accidently inflict it on the innocent, even when the incidence of such is extremely low.

I’ve already written about that topic before, and my opinion on it and torture is essentially the same.  It is impossible to be 100% correct about anything more complex than mathematics.  I am willing to take the chance that an innocent person, even someone such as myself, will be subjected to CIA torture if it means that innocent lives are saved in the process.  As they say, if you want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs.

It seems that it’s okay to not torture random people unconnected to your life and let a thousand other random people unconnected to your life die in a terrorist attack, but I’d bet my bottom dollar that 99.99999% of human beings on this planet would be willing to relentlessly torture any other human being to save the lives of their own children.  Morals and principles are a luxury of the childless, so I think this entire debate is kind of stupid.