There is no one stupider than the political animal who mistakes his ideology for truth. That goes for the “left” and the “right.” If you don’t think that a right-wing politician would use the power of government to destroy individual constitutional rights, you haven’t been paying attention during the Bush years. If you don’t think that a left-leaning democratically elected leader would use right-wing laws to justify torture, you haven’t been paying attention to 20th-century history.

Everyone who supports the use of torture and intimidation in a “war on terror” is a jackass.

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: July 2, 2008

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. [The New York Times]

Related:

Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From the Air Force Prisoners of War (pdf)

Documents Released at Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing on SERE Tactics (pdf)

Once again, “evolutionary medicine” reveals itself as fraudulent, since simian-to-human evolutionary theory fails to explain actual epidemiology. Real science is dependent on inconvenient realities:

Researchers had assumed that because most monkey species infected with SIV don’t get sick, the virus has been coevolving with the primates for millions of years, allowing the host and pathogen to peaceably coexist. If that were the case, the branching of the monkey family tree should match the branching of the SIV tree. But last year, University of Arizona, Tucson, graduate student Joel Wertheim, his adviser, Michael Worobey, and colleagues found that not to be the case for the African green monkey and its SIV. “The work suggested that the virus was not millions of years old,” Wertheim said at the meeting….

The Worobey group is “applying state-of-the-art tools and controlling for a lot of important issues” in shedding light on the origins of the AIDS epidemic, says John Logsdon Jr., an evolutionary biologist at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. These studies are also helping us understand how HIV works, says David Hillis, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas, Austin. For example, AIDS experts have assumed that the disease is so severe in humans–yet less so in most monkeys–because humans have not had the time to evolve the proper defenses against the virus that many other primates have. “But the origins are around the same order of magnitude,” and still the monkeys don’t get sick, says Hillis. “It points out that there are other directions we need to go to understand [virulence].”

For years, simian-to-human evolutionary fraud has misled epidemiologists. However, after analyzing empirical data, they come to new conclusions. What a surprise!

Scientists! Gaia is calling you to a life of superstitious worship and piety:

The YEC dude sure looks like a loser. Of course, if he is afraid of the the Earth, Cosmos, Nature, and Life goddesses, he is a loser, Christian or not.

If he is like most of the superstitious, shallow-minded Christians who don’t actually read the Bible, but instead spend most of their time watching football, listening to babbling faith healers, and quoting Rush Limbaugh, he will die as a miserable loser after wasting his life promoting national salvation through Republican politicians, Republican judges, and Republican schools.

If you’re a pagan evolutionist and you know one of these Christian losers, I will happily join you in mocking him.

How the new torture methods are taught at universities:

I learned that you can make a mouse “depressed” by dunking it repeatedly in cold water, by giving it electrical shocks over and over again, by subjecting it to “chronic forced swimming,” or making it experience “social defeat,” by putting a mean mouse in its cage.

Oops, my mistake. I copied the wrong part. Here are the new torture methods for universities:

[N]o matter where I go, no matter what I learn or try to do, my mind always runs along the same old grooves, much like a rat that has been trained, all its pitiable life, to run one eternal maze. And that all the thoughts in my own one-track rat-trap of a mind lead back to … Hillary Clinton. …

[W]hen we were spoken to by women …  the boundaries dissolved. We were all immediately drawn into relationships.

How much of this had to do with the fact that the women tended to speak more relationally (“I think,” “I feel”), I don’t know. I don’t know if it was created by the fact that the women — to varying degrees — turned the story of their work into personal narratives.

It’s not about Science. It’s all about morality and making the world safe for paganism again.

Andrew misleads the flock, suggesting that this is an historic moment for evolutionism:

Even though Ventastega is likely an evolutionary dead-end, the finding sheds new details on the evolutionary transition from fish to tetrapods…. Scientists don’t think four-legged creatures are directly evolved from Ventastega…. One question that scientists are trying to figure out is why fish started to develop what would later become legs.

No natural selection here. No evolutionary process. Nothing to report here.

Andrew, you’re an idiot. An “evolutionary dead-end” does not constitute a transitional fossil. However, if anyone wants to come up with an imaginary explanation, feel free to tell me.

When was this ever not true?

I would like to point out that America has become a nation of fence sitters. Instead of holding strong to a personal conviction, we see which way the wind blows and then go with the flow.

[WAYNE STEWART]

One of the most startling problems with phony conservatism is the pretense that somehow people have “changed,” usually quite recently. For example, the unhealthy obsession with 1950s culture that pervaded the 1980s was embarassingly stupid. Today, the overt historical ignorance of “conservative” commentators is still on display.

The reactionary belief that human nature has recently changed for the worse is the flip side of the romantic belief that human nature will soon change for the better. Both are symptomatic of insular, egotistical idealism.

Science Without Experiments by Jim Manzi

This article boils down the problem I have with the holier-than-thou rationalizers who constantly use Science as a club to beat down everyone they hate. If you can’t prove your claim with an indisputable real-life demonstration in front of me, then your claim is not “empirical.” It is an expression of your faith, and your faith in the power and glory of your non-empirical theory means about as much to me as faith in Marduk or Molech.

The beat goes on in this daisy chain of online commentary:

Holiday in Hellmouth [James Wood]

A History of Theodicy [Ross Douthat]

Terrified By Freedom [Daniel Larison]

Wood and Larison seem to agree that the “problem of evil” is essentially the outcry of a disillusioned adolescent, a “rebel believer” who would rather call himself an atheist than admit that God isn’t Santa Claus and does give each individual person freedom of conscience. This is apparently what happened with my own father.

Douthat calls for a sociological/historical analysis of why more people seem to be whining about it now than before.

I doubt that more people are complaining about injustice than in the past. It is more likely that communications technology has sped up the process of complaining, so that more people can hear complaints and responses. Thus there is more pseudo-intellectual analysis of social trends and evidence of more insecurity on the part of both rebels and reactionaries.

As one commenter for the above articles noted, an authentic atheist isn’t really concerned with the “problem of evil,” since evil should be seen as primarily an artificial concept if you don’t believe in monarchical theism. The problem of evil is primarily a challenge to the believer in fairytale gods, and his reaction is to hold his breath until he turns blue.

From David Coppedge:

There is a view of science that doubts man’s ability to comprehend reality as it is.  The job of science, many have argued, is to organize experience to give us a degree of explanation, prediction and control – not to comprehend reality.  This is a pragmatic view.  If by using the equations of quantum mechanics we can make lasers and geiger counters and cell phones, and explain why a spectrum has broad emission lines, that’s all fine and good.  It may have nothing to do with reality.  Why?  Because there is no way we can get outside of our experience to compare our theories with reality and see if there is a good fit.  A corollary is that scientific knowledge is never universal, timeless, necessary and certain.  It is only tentative.  It is the best we can do for now.

Generally, real scientists can’t stop complaining about philosophers and their useless, non-empirical speculations. However, when it comes to some particularly satisfying “theories of everything,” philosophy is just too tempting.

And for uneducated, superstitious Science worshippers, a satisfyingly complex and esoteric “theory of everything” may be their only reason for living. Thus we have the modern “scientific” fields of inquiry such as evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, astrobiology, computational evolutionary biology, cosmology, and string theory.