Jim Pinkerton has an interesting piece on implicit bias. He says the concept is being promoted to make it easier to sue for racial discrimination.

In a little-known book that came out a few years ago, titled LBJ: From Mastermind to the Colossus, the author Philip K. Nelson writes persuasively about the Liberty incident. According to him, Lyndon Johnson dearly wanted to go down in history as a “great” president. Looking at other presidents who achieved that status, he believed that greatness required victory in war. By 1967 the already unpopular Vietnam war seemed unlikely to provide that victory.

In his quest for a military victory, Johnson conceived of the idea of an American naval vessel being sunk in the eastern Mediterranean with the loss of all hands, and that this would be blamed on Egypt, and would be a pretext for the US invading Egypt. Israel did indeed carry out the attack, not because they saw the Liberty or the US Navy as a hostile presence, and not by mistake, but at the urging of the head of state of their most important ally. So by this telling, Israel is not the villain of the piece; that would be President Johnson.

Somewhat manufactured? It’s completely manufactured. I read that Sen. McCaskill weighed in on it, taking the side of the black protesters. Everything about this story is unbelievable if taken at face value: the racist incidents that practically scream “hoax”, a black jock going on a hunger strike, the charge that the university administration was unresponsive to allegations of racism. If I had to take a wild guess, I would say that Wolfe was not a committed lefty, and as a white man, this was a way some idealogues could get rid of him.

I would say that for both Russian men in the 1990s and working class white American men today, drugs and alcohol are symptoms, not the cause. Both groups grew up with a sense of themselves as mainstays of great political forces, and both came to feel disinherited. Offhand I can’t think of any other population groups who have had reason to feel a similar sense of disinheritance.

One evening a few years ago I went to an open house at my son’s school. In one of the classes students each made ten statements about themselves on posterboard. One of my son’s friends, whose parents divorced some years earlier, had as his #1 statement: “My parents are divorced, and have been since I was 6.” I have to think there was a lot of pain that led to that statement.

Fred is right about the government not liking to use email. I think it’s because they don’t want people to have a convenient record of their often high-handed or slipshod communications. A few years ago the Dept. of Labor audited my employer’s payroll practices. Everything was done either by mail, in person, or on the phone. Half way through the audit we didn’t hear from them for literally over a year. In the end they made some trivial findings and we had to issue adjustment payments totaling about $800 for the two year period being audited.

The certainty that so many people have that vaccines have no significant downside for the general population is very disturbing to me. Not the belief, mind you, just the certainty. In my experience the anti-vaccine segment is not “stupid” as Mr. Khan suggests, it has doubts about the integrity of our institutions, and is more willing than most to draw their own conclusions. I would like very much to see a large scale study of the general health of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated populations. This shouldn’t be a very difficult study to do. Several religious groups – Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Orthodox Jews, the Amish – as well as many others who decide for non-religious reasons, have chosen not to vaccinate. A systematic comparison of rates of crib death, food allergies, autism, asthma, childhood cancer, measles, meningitis, etc. among the vaccinated and unvaccinated would go a long way to putting this controversy to rest, depending on the results. But I don’t expect the study to be funded. I suspect the authorities (i.e. the CDC and the corporations with which it’s in a symbiotic relationship) are afraid of what they might find out. There is a host of immune related disorders that have increased dramatically in the last generation, along with increased vaccinations.

There is a widespread faith in the integrity of science. For areas such as physics and astronomy I think the faith is warranted. But where the profit motive comes into play, for example in medical research, the journalist’s creed of ‘follow the money’ makes sense.

In George Will’s latest column he openly compared Putin to Adolf Hitler. We can roll our eyes at yet another example of this trite and overworked accusation. But does anyone ever survive the accusation? With a bigfoot commentator like Will using language like that, I hope Putin has some top notch security.

I don’t think John Williams gives hedonics their due. We often hear that average real wages in America haven’t increased since the mid ’70s. And yet life has improved since then in innumerable ways: houses are bigger, cars run better, coffee tastes better, lawns are greener, fresh produce is more varied, TV reception is sharper. And anyone reading this could easily give other examples. These technological improvements are, I think, much more significant than those of the previous 40 years (the ’30s to the ’70s) at least as they affect daily life. This increasing pace of innovation represents a source of increased “wealth”, and one that we all share in.

I certainly agree that the increasing national debt, and the deteriorating balance sheet of the average American household, are matters of serious concern, and which could possibly lead to widespread poverty, depending on events. But for now people, although straining, are enjoying an improved lifestyle. This is probably why there isn’t more protest or outrage.

Anyway, I think Mr. Williams would be more persuasive if, instead of just rolling forward the 1970s methodology for calculating inflation, he gave due credit to the increasing benefits of technology.

razib wrote: ” …so i’m an agnostic on many gods, and an atheist on a subset of those. …”
Actually, you and I may be saying almost the same thing, but just in different words: I’m about 99.99% confident that the “God of Abraham” does not exist (i.e. the traditional Judeo-Christian-Muslim God, who sits up at night deciding which sparrows are going to fall out of the sky the next day). That ‘God’was almost certainly created by Man in Man’s image & likeness, rather than the other way around.
I’m also extremely confident that everything which has happened in the universe during the last 14 billion years (including the evolution of the human brain*) can be explained by a few simple laws of Physics, without recourse to anything supernatural.
But on the other hand, the idea that the Big Bang itself may have been engineered by some superior Being for some rational purpose seems at least as plausible as the alternative explanation of “Well, Duh, it just happened by random chance.”
* P.S. >> Does everybody here already know the definition of Hydrogen: “A colorless, odorless gas which, if you have enough of it and leave it alone for a long enough time, will spontaneously turn into Human Beings.” ??

Thanks for the excellent review. I’m afraid it re-inforces my decision not to spend money on the book, though. My impression of Dawkins, based on his earlier stuff, is that he is a shrill, strident, irrational, dogmatic fundamentalist — exactly like the people that he attacks, except that his Belief System happens to be 180 degrees opposite to theirs.
By the way, Razib, just out of curiousity: Why do you call yourself an atheist rather than an agnostic?? I would argue that it is orders of magnitude beyond the capabilities of the human brain to *ever* know for certain whether God exists or not.

Can somebody give me a quick History lesson here:
At what point in the evolution of Christianity did the Trinity start to become such a central concept?? When did Jesus stop being thought of as just the son of a God (a very commonplace thing in Greek/Roman mythology) and start being thought of as an actual God? And when (& how) did the “Holy Spirit” stop being an abstract emotion, and become a distinct, autonomous “Person” ?