Brooks Mythicists have a point

Well, now I’m confused. It turns out that the historicity of the Bush years can be reasonably called into question.

Of course as every high-school student knows, almost all of the original digital and analog records of the Guild of Pundits during that period were destroyed during the Great Discontinuity — the early 21st century’s Elite media’s last ditch effort to evade accountability for their crimes. And what few fragments we do have from that time come down to us filtered through the fun-house mirrors of surviving backups of the “fuckingblogs”.

In particular, one figure stands out as implausible: David Brooks.

And as the original events have been sifted and re-sifted by popular culture, fan fiction and hermeneutics, the academic world has more-or-less evenly divided itself into two, irreconcilable orthodoxies — the Historical Brooks versus the Fictional Brooks — each of which finds strong support for its own theory in the literature itself.

Based on the radically divergent accounts of writings attributed to him during a single decade, roughly half of all professional media historians — The Historicals — subscribe to theory that “David Brooks” in an amalgamation of several real but wildly different people. The other half — The Fictionals — maintain that since so much of what he was alleged to have written was so obviously false and absurd, “David Brooks” had to be a literary contrivance: something analogous to Poe’s nameless recounter of “The Telltale Heart” or Greta Van Sustern — a fictional narrator whose own pathological unreliability is integral to the story.

Both sides have good arguments.

Obviously, (the Historicals conclude) like “Alan Smithee” or “Tom Freed Man”, “David Brooks” must have been some sort of collective pen-name behind which dregs of the Punditry Guild could shout all kinds of shameful craziness while avoiding the professional consequences of saying remarkably stupid thing in public.

But (the Fictionals rejoin very effectively) it is the very ludicrousness of “David Brooks”‘s “opinions” which argue most strongly against it being the name — or pseudonym — of any real person or persons. Consider that, in order to make the argument that the United States government is incapable of competently operating a national health-care system with mandates, “David Brooks” simply ignores the fact that the United States government of that era was already operating a very efficient and beloved national health-care system (with mandates!) which was known as Medicare and, at the time, had over 49 million beneficiaries.

I don’t know how to decide. This might help: a fellow atheist and trained historian, Eddie Marcus, contacted me and offered to explain how historians make decisions about the historicity of a different weird, unbelievable person, Jesus. I’m willing to listen — it might help me make up my mind about this bizarre “David Brooks” character — so we’re doing a hangout on Wednesday at 7am Central time, or 8pm Perth time (the hour is a compromise to find a reasonable time when both of us are awake). I’d say “Join us”, but I think that’s only going to reasonably apply to Australians and Asians. So, “Join us, Australians! Half of us will be speaking English properly!” The rest of you can tune in after it’s all over.

A great loss to the world

Brazil has suffered a terrible loss.

Brazil’s oldest and most important historical and scientific museum has been consumed by fire, and much of its archive of 20m items is believed to have been destroyed.

The fire at Rio de Janeiro’s 200-year-old National Museum began after it closed to the public on Sunday and raged into the night. There were no reports of injuries, but the loss to Brazilian science, history and culture was incalculable, two of its vice-directors said.

Imagine if the Smithsonian burned down. It’s not replaceable.

The media are reporting that the cause of this fire was neglect — the museum had “fallen into disrepair”, and that it had only recently managed to land support for a fire prevention project. I might be more favorable to conservatives if they were actually interested in preserving what the nation has, and less interested in looting what we’ve got to benefit the wealthy (I know nothing about the leanings of the Brazilian government; this is a general statement about the neglect I see when conservatives are in power in my country.)

I think one important role of the federal government is to shut down the NRA

A core function of government is to provide for the safety and security of its citizens, according to the NRA. The NRA does not make me feel safe, therefore the organization ought to be dismantled.

Especially when they’ve got loons saying nonsense like this:

Texas is asking to spend federal Department of Education grant money to buy firearms for teachers that have gone through the states school marshal program. Teachers trained to carry firearms in school, in firearms, and the state needs permission to use federal money to do that. As you can imagine, the left is melting down. Anti-gunner’s outrage that the government would soon be funding firearms to put in the hands of educators. I would argue — of all the things schools use federal grant money for, this may be the most legitimate. It falls into the core functions of the federal government, provide for the safety and security of its citizens. In fact, using federal tax dollars to buy guns for teachers is more in line, and more in the boundaries of what the federal money should be used for than even textbooks or after-school programs. Guns in the hands of good guys has a direct impact on our safety, a core function of government.

Although he does have one point: education is not one of the core rights granted in the bill of rights. That’s more of a failure of the Constitution than an excuse to shut down education, and it’s certainly not a justification for arguing that educators ought to be supplied with guns before books.

How to prove you’re not a genius

Jeffery Ford is a genius. How do we know? He tells us so.

Jeffery Ford is an author, TED speaker and frequent guest on numerous talk radio shows. He was honored in Michigan’s House of Representatives for winning a global election to become the World Genius Directory’s 2016 Genius of the Year for America (which includes both the North and South American continents).

Whoa. I’ve always wanted to be a genius. I looked up this World Genius Directory to find out how. It’s maintained by a guy named Jason Betts, an Australian who seems to do nothing but churn out “intelligence tests”, some of which are free to lure you in, others that cost a dollar, and some that cost tens of dollars. To get on the World Genius directory, you have to get a high score on one of his tests, and mail him $11 (I think that’s the important criterion).

I’m already dubious about his qualifications. But then he went and wrote this article, “Here’s Why Leftists Truly Hate Conservatives”, and confirmed the value of weird online IQ tests.

There’s only one thing that leftists hate as much as America, and that’s the millions of fact-based, faith-based conservatives who are the human embodiment of everything that makes America and the entire Western world far superior to every other country and culture that has ever existed.

It’s the first paragraph, and I’m already whooping it up! You can’t be both fact-based and faith-based — those are contradictory. I also have to question the assertion that America is a superior nation in all things. If we were, how come we don’t have universal health care, and how did Trump get elected?

Leftists hate conservatives because they are damned by any comparison with them. Conservatives believe in personal accountability and in the power of the individual to make a profound difference in our world. The left doesn’t believe in the power of the individual anywhere near as much as it believes in the absolute power of the collectivist state — where everyone suffers equally and are rewarded for their efforts minimally.

Unlike capitalism, where the individual can go to work for Walmart or Amazon and be treated with respect and a living wage.

Just as the 9/11 hijackers hated America for its freedoms, so too does the American leftist hate us for subjecting them to the high risks that are inherent in a free capitalist society and that is precisely why they have been working night and day for decades now to destroy our country.

They hated us for our freedom? What is this, 2001? No, they hated us because we did not follow their religion, and because we’d exploited and bombed the Middle East and wrecked their homes, to simplify it in another way.

The left has successfully laid waste to our nation’s educational system. Over time, they have covertly transformed our educational system from being one of the best in the world into an indoctrination system that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud.

Spoken as if conservatives had ever supported the public school system, and weren’t wallowing in denial of science.

One of the left’s greatest victories over America has been its infiltration and domination of almost every important aspect of our news media. But all is not lost. As a matter of fact, conservatives are closer to winning the hearts and minds of the vast majority of American people than ever before.

Say what? What liberal news media?

You guys go have fun with this loon. I’m just going to mourn the fact that apparently I can’t become a genius by mailing $11 to some wacko in Australia.

The well-deserved destruction of Silent Sam

Police stand guard after the confederate statue known as Silent Sam was toppled by protesters on campus at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, N.C., Monday, Aug. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

Silent Sam was a Confederate war memorial at the University of North Carolina, that was dedicated to the Southern students who went to war for the Confederacy. It got toppled. There are many who are trying to argue the usual crap — it’s erasing history! Good people on both sides! The war was about state’s rights, not slavery! — you know, all the usual noise. So let’s unerase some history and go back to the statue’s unveiling in 1913, and the speech by Julian Carr. Carr was a white supremacist who supported the KKK, made his money with tobacco manufacturing, thought lynchings were a praiseworthy event, and was just generally a terrible human being.

His speech is interminable and overwrought, with much praise for the noble and heroic sons of the South who gave their life, and the dutiful and devout beautiful Southern women who supported them. There are poems in it, and classical allusions. I shall skip over those to the parts that are most discordant today.

The present generation, I am persuaded, scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the welfare of the Anglo Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war, when the facts are, that their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South – When “the bottom rail was on top” all over the Southern states, and to-day, as a consequence the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States – Praise God.

Look at him, practicing Identity Politics! I guess the Civil War was actually about propping up the superiority of his narrow branch of white people. But then he gets personal.

I trust I may be pardoned for one allusion, howbeit it is rather personal. One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel shot gun under my head.

<jaw dropped>

He said that? He was proud of whipping a woman in public?

OK. Tear it down. Tear ’em all down.

Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.

Michael Cohen pleaded guilty on 8 counts, Paul Manafort was found guilty on 8 tax and bank fraud charges.

“Today he stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election,” Davis added. “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?”

Good question.


Guess how Fox is handling the convictions?

That War on Christmas is always a great distraction.

History is hard

One of the more horrible things I can imagine is listening to a debate between Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro, two awful people. It happened. In my vast wisdom, I have simply refused to listen to it. Apparently, they swapped historical arguments back and forth, though, and someone with historical training felt obligated to listen, and ripped them both apart for their ignorance of history.

Contrary to Harris’ silly “bridges” analogy, all of these early scientific thinkers came from a tradition that saw “the Book of Nature” as complimentary to “the Book of Scripture” (i.e. the Bible). This tradition stretched back to the earliest Christian thinkers. This is why Galileo (who was not particularly devout) could quote Tertullian (who was not especially scientifically-minded) as saying “We conclude that God is known first through Nature, and then again, more particularly, by doctrine; by Nature in His works, and by doctrine in His revealed word.” (Adversus Marcionem, I.18). The two elements were intricately and essentially interlinked.

But Harris knows nothing of all this. Just as Harris knows nothing of the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire. Or the place of science in the Islamic world. Or the complexities and nuances of the Galileo Affair. Or medieval universities. Or … anything much about history. And this is why, as with Sagan or Hawking or Tyson or Dawkins, when a scientist speaks about their field of science, they are worth listening to. But when they opine about history they usually have little idea what they are talking about, and that is even if they are not labouring under Harris’ clear ideological biases. His near total ignorance coupled with those crippling biases means what he has to say on these and most other historical subjects is mostly complete garbage.

Well, but, Harris has negligible understanding of science, so there’s not much he has the qualifications to talk about, and Ben Shapiro has even less, so what else can they do but babble ignorantly on topics in which they have no expertise? History is just one among many subjects they can only mangle. But hey, Travis Pangburn will charge $500/head to people who want to listen to them. By libertarian standards of truth, they must be right.

Seriously, though, Tim O’Neill is making an important point. Most of us have expertise in something, but we should be careful about assuming our knowledge of one thing means we have knowledge of all things. Some epistemic humility is always warranted. I’ve inflicted this quote from Augustine on my students many times:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

I’ve noticed two kinds of Christians: those who insist that the Bible is absolutely true, and therefore evidence that contradicts it must be reinterpreted to conform, and those who recognize that the Bible is not a full description of the world, and therefore if evidence is found that contradicts it, their understanding of the Bible must be reinterpreted. Personally, I detest both, the first for obvious reasons and the second because they’ve ‘mended’ a flawed document to the point where it’s ridiculously threadbare, but at least one can have a rational discussion with the latter.

I had to dig further into this guy’s writings, and came across his criticisms of the Jesus mythicists, in particular his rebuttal to the “argument from silence”, which claims that Jesus should have been mentioned in many historical sources if he had existed, but he isn’t, so he didn’t. Most telling was his listing of the feeble number of brief mentions of the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in classical records — if the Romans didn’t leave us many documents of this colossal disaster in their backyard, why should we expect them to have mentioned some minor Jewish preacher off in some provincial backwater? He also points out how rare it was for any writings to have survived from 2000 years ago, which lit up a lightbulb floating above my head.

This is exactly the same as the common creationist argument that if evolution were true, we ought to be neck deep in tyrannosaur and stegosaur and diplodocid bones, and because the fossil record is so spotty and incomplete, evolution is false. Never mind that taphonomy shows that finding the bones of a dead animal surviving for even a decade is rare and requires unusual conditions.

OK, I have no problem accepting O’Neill’s argument. But now I’m left with confusion; I’ve never delved deeply into the mythicist literature, and now I don’t understand what the “historical Jesus” means. I don’t believe in the existence of a water-walking, fig-tree-killing, fish-cloning resurrection man who died and came back to life and then whooshed up into the sky. My version of Jesus mythicism is that he was, at best, a radical Jewish preacher who was executed and then inspired decades of fan-fiction that got built up into the New Testament.

O’Neill’s explanation for the absence of Jesus in contemporary documents is in part that he was a minor figure in a small, out-of-the-way region who was understandably ignored by the authorities of the time, and lists alternative explanations for the silence about him.

Fitzgerald finds it significant that Gallio did not mention “this amazing Jesus character” to his brother and concludes this means Jesus did not exist. He does not bother to consider alternatives, such as (i) Jesus existed but was not so “amazing” as Fitzgerald keeps assuming he has to have been if he existed, (ii) Jesus existed but a learned Roman official did not regard people like him as very interesting or important, (iii) Jesus existed and Gallio did mention him to his brother but Seneca did not regard people like him as very interesting or important or even (iv) the whole Gallio-Paul trial scene is a piece of fiction reported or even created by the writer of Acts to emphasise Paul’s credibility. Fitzgerald skips over all these quite plausible alternatives and leaps gymnastically straight to the conclusion Jesus did not exist.

Now I have to recalibrate. What does “Jesus mythicist” mean? Apparently, rejecting the idea of the Son of God wandering about Galilee, and thinking that many of the tales that sprang up around him were confabulations, does not make one a Jesus mythicist. I also don’t know what the “historical Jesus” means. If I die, and a hundred years later the actual events of my life are forgotten and all that survives are legends of my astonishing sexual prowess and my ability to breathe underwater, what does the “historical PZ” refer to? Does it matter if my birth certificate is unearthed (and framed and mounted in a shrine, of course)? Would people point to it and gasp that it proves the stories were all true <swoon>?

Jeez, I’m glad I’m not a historian. What a mess they have to deal with.

It’s a war over education

Keep this in mind when you see so-called intellectuals like the gang at PragerU, or Jordan Peterson, or just about any Republican, demonizing universities as the domain of cultural Marxists with entire disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that need to be razed to the ground. They’re not stupid. They know exactly what they’re doing. Wrecking the electorate’s ability to think and process information is what keeps them rich and in power.