In defense of local regulation

Many “conservatives” have lamented a recent court decision refusing to overturn gun control laws recently passed in New York and Connecticut. Granted many of these people are worthless neocons, but I’ve seen even genuine conservatives lament the laws of these states. This is understandable, since most proponents of gun control in America are leftists, but considered in itself, is there a conservative position on gun control?

Directly, I’d answer in the negative, it’s an issue which can legitimately be left up to communities to decide on their own. But this brings up an issue which of importance to conservatives, communities should be able to regulate things associated with vice (guns, alcohol, etc.). Like with the dry counties in Arkansas, I don’t have any particular problem with alcohol, but I’m glad that localities are free to set their own standards with respect to such things. By the same token, I’m glad that New York and Connecticut are free to legislate their communal standards.

Stop and Frisk

Until a few years ago, New York City had a policy whereby if a police officer reasonably suspected someone of illegally carrying a gun, he could stop them and briefly frisk them for one. If he found one, and they didn’t have a carry permit, they were off to prison. Coupled with New York’s may-issue permit laws, and New York City’s extremely restricted issuance of them, this effectively reduced crime, by getting criminals put in prison, and making the ones still on the street wary of illegally carrying guns. But of course, now they’ve abandoned it because “racism”. I’d say the decision to abandon it failed, because of the spiking crime rates, but given that it was a practice that only caused more than minor inconvenience to criminals, what other purpose could thee have been in abolishing it?

Evolution

Is evolution a scientific theory?

The answer is no, and here’s why:

In order to be a scientific theory, a proposition must be empirically verifiable and falsifiable. Evolution is neither (this is the same reason that String Theory is not science, by the way). Evolution cannot be experimentally verified, and we have never actually observed species transformation. Moreover, it also cannot possibly be falsified, for any discovery made, any fossil dug up, would simply be incorporated into evolution, even if contrary to prior versions of the theory.

Now, it is true that science can be done within the framework of evolution, in the sense that specific versions of evolution theory can be scientifically falsified, but evolution itself, cannot be falsified, and thus is not science. Note that this is true of creationism as well, it itself is not scientifically verifiable or falsifiable, although specific versions of it are.

So now that we’ve got it clear that evolution and creationism are both philosophy, not science, the question is, which is a better philosophical position?

Well, consider the implications of evolution. According to evolution, my hundred thousandth cousin is a monkey, and my hundred billionth cousin is a bacterium. So in other words, there’s not really any such thing as species, only wildly different races. And metaphysically, it requires that there is no distinct teleological qualities to which various creatures are directed, expect perhaps simply being alive (note here that this is radically opposed to the set of assumptions governing how biologists deal with practical questions in their field).

So having shown that evolution is a philosophical idea, I have also shown that it is an idiotic philosophy.

Gender and maturity

When I was a young child, my friends and I often played games on a boys vs. girls basis. This makes sense, young children don’t have sexual desires for the opposite sex, so it would follow that they’d group with their own gender, since the opposite gender is, well, different. But of course, with maturity all that went away, as boys and girls grow up and stop seeing each other on an out-group basis. But of course, not everyone grows up, most do, but not all. The ones who grew up are called adults, the boys who didn’t are called men’s rights activists, and the girls who didn’t are called feminists.

The Solemnity of Christ the President

This Sunday we celebrated the solemnity of Christ the President. We call Christ our President as an expression of the type of authority Christ has over everything. His authority not emanating from his Father, but being the result of election or the will of the people. It’s interesting to note that this is the imagery Christians have used from early times, even though the Roman Empire in which Christianity arose was legally a monarchy. Yet from the earliest times, the Christian ideal of democracy has been present, indeed it was not until after Rome became Christian that it legally became a democracy again. And of course, it is no coincidence that nearly all of the Christian states throughout history have been democracies, and the form of government associated with secularism was monarchy. Also, of course, there’s the fact that the Church itself is organized on democratic lines. These facts should serve to dissuade anyone taken in by Christian Monarchism.

Muhammad was a pedophile

Just saying . . .

“If we don’t let refugees in ISIS will have won” and other absurd babbling

I’ve often heard this line from those on the left (and from that portion of the right which is retarded). That if we don’t allow ourselves to be invaded by millions of refugees, we’ll be giving ISIS victory. There are three possibilities here:

A. The people saying this are retarded,
B. This phrase has some meaning, or
C. This phrase is just a slogan, no more meaningful than “marriage is about hearts not parts” or any other leftist idiocies

Now, A is out, because the people saying this aren’t retarded, at least not all of them are. So let’s explore option B:

First, let’s consider the literal meaning of the phrase, that if we don’t take in “refugees” ISIS will successfully establish a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. There is absolutely no logical connection between “Europe rejecting Muslim invaders” and “ISIS winning the Iraq and Syria civil wars”, so unless option A is actually correct, this can’t be what they mean.

But perhaps they mean that if we don’t submit to invasion, ISIS will win the ideological war, that is they will accomplish their propaganda goals. Well, ISIS’s goal in terms of getting people to believe a certain way is to get everyone to be a Salafi Muslim (or dead). So is it a reasonable opinion that us excluding the invaders will result in us all becoming Salafists, well no, it’s not, at all. So that’s out.

Now, is there any other possible meaning of “win” that they could be using? Certainly, there are a bunch, one can win a bet, which is N/A, one can win an argument, which isn’t it either, one can win a board game, which also is completely irrelevant, and there are a bunch of other meanings of “win”, none of which make “If we don’t let refugees in ISIS will have won” a reasonable statement.

So then, it seems that both A and B are out, so it must be C, this phrase is not intended to have an actual meaning in the English language, but exists only as a means of confusing the masses and shouting down sane policy proposals.