“We British are used to following women commanders in war” - Boudica of the Iceni

VIA Pharyngula Loretta Kemsey has just published an excellent example of utter horseshit that tries to call evolution sexist, because Charles Darwin was a sexist in the 19th century. Pretty much like most people of his era.

This is straight up ad-hominem and doesn’t actually demonstrate anything, particularly in the face of further supporting evidence for evolution that has corrected his error.

In other words to adopt this stance is to ignore the fact that there has been one heck of a lot of work on evolution since Darwin’s day, and we have largely retained the bits he was right about and gotten rid of the bits where he was wrong.

And while there are modern sexists who think biology excuses them, maths and engineering are fields where you have one heck of a lot of sexists, yet we do not deny that 2+2=4.

Now lets talk about the history of sexism for a minute.

The quote up top there is a famous one from Boudica of the Iceni in her war with the Romans – you know one of the biggest cultural influences in the West given their propensity to conquer everything in sight.  The Romans of the era were not noted for their love of female independence.

This would be just under 2000 years before Darwin was born.

Christianity also pre-dates Darwin and was the dominant cultural frame of his era. The Anglican Church recently very nearly split on whether women could be priests. This is in an era where sexism is an anathema. Now go back to an era where a woman being allowed to speak in church was considered controversial.

Dr John Gill is quoted in Wikipedia saying the following

In Gen_3:16, “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee”. By this the apostle would signify, that the reason why women are not to speak in the church, or to preach and teach publicly, or be concerned in the ministerial function, is, because this is an act of power, and authority; of rule and government, and so contrary to that subjection which God in his law requires of women unto men. The extraordinary instances of Deborah, Huldah, and Anna, must not be drawn into a rule or example in such cases

Catherine Bushnell, the founder of feminist theology was only born in 1856, Charles Darwin was born in 1809. If we are going to blame anything for the sexism of Victorian England, it is going to have to be prevailing attitudes that essentially descended from Roman and Christian sources.

Are we going to argue that because so much of law is based on Roman concepts, and because of Christianity’s role in establishing centralised authority in Europe during the middle ages that we should all be anarchists?

* On a personal aside, this will be my last blog post as I am going over to a column format.

The ANC Youth League has a bad habit of making claims about companies, that leave the said companies going “Wha?”

Remember when the ANCYL were claiming “Mr Rupert” owned Media24? And how Mr Rupert pointed out that he didn’t?

Anyway the latest example is – Anglo American. It turns out that they have zero intention of mining the land held by the Bantu Bonke settlement, they sold their prospecting rights to an empowerment company a while back.

This may seem like a small issue, but the ANCYL at the moment is currently protesting for mine nationalization, and this is the standard of research they bring into their case – yet they are taken seriously.

And note Malema wasn’t lying, he just didn’t care. The ANCYL has never cared about facts. Facts are for people who actually want to solve problems, not exploit them.

The ANCYL is currently marching for “Economic freedom” – which for them means basically eliminating private property rights.

After all as Kris Kristofferson sang - freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, nothing ain’t worth nothing but it’s free.

And once they find that nationalising the mines and the farms doesn’t work, they will start looking at other industries.

The freedom we desire is not the freedom of poverty – but the freedom to choose what you deal in and who you deal with. That freedom comes with private property.

We are all quite aware of the economic problems plaguing our country, and we kind of need some real solutions to those problems. Marches that call for a frankly Orwellian concept of freedom aren’t going to present them.

Welcome to Oakland

Don’t dare resist

The long arm of the law

Ends in a hand,

That hand is shaped into a fist

H/T: Phyrangula

A while back Greta Christina did an article on William Lane Craig pointing out that he was an esteemed theologian and philosopher of religion who defended Biblical genocide as being good, because God ordered it.

The instant reaction in the comments by religious left commenters was to dismiss Craig as a loony fringe nutball who isn’t really representative of theology or anything all that impressive. Fair enough.

Now of course Richard Dawkins is refusing to debate William Lane Craig because of his apologist stance for Biblical genocide, and religious commentators are saying Richard Dawkins is being anti-intellectual in his refusal to debate that esteemed theologian and philosopher of religion.

So yeah there is a reason I don’t have much respect for the editorial writing religious left. When it is convenient someone is a champion, the second it is not that same someone is a nutjob nobody really listens to. 

Now the whole thing is this: Craig is a past master of the Gish gallop – that is when you spout off a whole load of rubbish arguments knowing each one takes time to refute, so your opponent can’t get to all of them and still present his or her argument.

This is a winning debate strategy, particularly if you focus your bullshit on things which aren’t central to your opponent’s field. Lord Monckton does it the whole time and has quite a winning streak debating climate scientists.

It is not however terribly convincing once you remove time constraints. This is why Monckton isn’t directing climate research – and why once Craig’s arguments get brought up in online arguments they tend to fail horribly. Once you remove time constraints and add in the obsessive compulsive nature of flamewars, the flaws become pwnage material.

It is also why Dawkins’ charge about Craig being a professional debater has bite.

H/T: Butterflies and Wheels

The Democratic Alliance is arguing that Pravin Gordhan should cut government fat to encourage growth. Personally I think cutting government fat would have the opposite effect.

One of the major problems people have in understanding how the world economy is working out, is they are stuck in national economy mindsets and thus focus on localised recessions.

In a localised recession what a government does is cut its spending in order to boost demand for jobs, lowering wages and giving its companies a competitive edge in foreign markets.

The drop in local demand is made up for by taking more global demand and yay, you theoretically get out of the doldrums and back to making money.

We have over 20% unemployment at any given time. When times are good, we get down to 19%. Demand for jobs is not particularly low, which is why we need minimum wages in order to protect our workers. 

Also think about it – what happens when the recession is no longer local and you have everybody cutting benefits in order to cut wages?

Suddenly that local drop in demand isn’t being balanced by taking up more global demand. Global demand is itself dropping. 

As investment is built on expectations of future demand leading to profits, investment confidence falls because of the very acts being introduced in the name of boosting confidence.

This is part of what the world is seeing in Ireland, which entered the recession in surplus.

Since adopting austerity measures it has ended up with a situation where its economy is not recovering, and so it ends up with the EU pressuring it to introduce more austerity measures.

What we need at the moment is a Keynsian approach – not cutting government spending but expanding it. We need to boost local demand in order to boost local manufacturing.

That means not spending less on the NYDA, but spending more in order to get it working the way it is supposed to. That means spending more on municipalities in order to catch up on the maintanance that our country has fallen behind on, and that means looking for new avenues for public investment.

We don’t need to cut the fat so much as spread it around.

Orac has a post up discussing alternative medicine, and how we can’t say it killed Steve Jobs.

There are a few things that got me thinking in his post – but the biggest was the gap between stupidity and stupid ideas.

Steve Jobs I always viewed with amusement. His company buys components from factories so rotten they have to install suicide nets just to cut their staff turnover – yet he sold the idea of Apple being some sort of cultural icon for the modern hippy equivelant.

He was a lot of things, stupid not being one of them – and yet he fell for alternative medicine because he sounds to have had a horror of surgery. 

His reasoning was overcome by his personal issues, something that happens to the best and the brightest of us.

And it reminds the rest of us that just because someone is highly intelligent, it doesn’t mean everything they believe in all sincerity is one hundred percent to be trusted.

It highlights why that particular form to the appeal to authority is so dangerous – because very smart people often believe very stupid things.

One of the primary hypocrisies in South Africa, is our crime situation. 

Namely that you will get people moaning heavily about how bad crime is in our country in one breath.

And in the very next, right after being caught committing a crime they will argue “So what, you drink and drive, everyone does things illegal so what is the big deal?”

This was said by a man who was illegally fishing for great white sharks after being caught.

A guy who probably shouts racist epithets as taxis cut him off in traffic, moans about the crime situation and wouldn’t be nearly as relaxed if say, someone came and stole his car.

That man is the exact problem with South Africa – the attitude that the law is the law only when other people violate it. Without our acceptance of criminality in ourselves there would be no criminality.

We cannot expect to stop crime in this country so long as we are content to be criminals – and those sharks are protected for a reason. That is the big deal.

Judge Isaac Madondo has said that he figures Indians didn’t suffer the same through apartheid, and thus appointing one as judge president for KZN would fail to address historic imbalances.

The trouble with playing the Oppression Olympics is whoever wins tends to get to be the next oppressor.

The Afrikaaner Nationalists for example, won the Oppression Olympics back when the English stuck their families in concentration camps. The result was Apartheid.

Moamer Gaddafi won the Oppression Olympics – and started oppressing his people to the point where they had to rebel against him.

In Egypt the Oppression Olympics is playing out in real time, as Islamic hardliners are taking a splendid run at it while planning their oppression of the Christians.

The German National Socialists won it back when the world forced them to sign the Treaty of Versailes – the result being the holocaust.

There has never been an authoritarian dictator yet who hasn’t understood the power of playing up the image of being a greater victim than thou – that is why the Rwandan genocide was accompanied by so much anti-Tutsi propaganda.

And there has never been an instance where such plays have ended well – because it is all tribalism. It is all saying “My tribe demands redress for its grievances, and as  you are not in my tribe you are who we demand it from.”

And so long as we have oppressors and the oppressed, we will continue to play it even as it kills us. Even as it leads to our own oppression.