Where did you find right wing optimism?

Our nation is dying, while others are multiplying like rabbits. The true faith lies in ruins, while false religions are spreading like wildfire.Our culture is vanishing under flood of Hollywood filth. Our history is smeared and slandered by liberal liars. Our leaders are either corrupt incompetents or willful traitors. The end is near.

When I read and listen to today's right wing, there is nothing than doom and despair all the time.

Let's suppose -- for I am no expert on the history, nor am I well placed to evaluate your expertise -- that you're right, and that indeed the US in the early 1950s was stuffed with communist infiltrators and communism-sympathizers. And that McCarthy was not successful in changing this situation.

It seems to me that the US did rather well for itself over those years and the ones that followed, in terms of prosperity and progress and international influence and happiness and just about any other metric you might care to name.

Would our hypothetical history-reviewing rationalist, then, also conclude that communist infiltration -- even on the grand scale you say it achieved in McCarthy's time -- was not such a bad thing?

From your first link:

The massacre of the Rhineland Jews by the People's Crusade, and other associated persecutions, were condemned by the leaders and officials of the Catholic Church. The bishops of Mainz, Speyer, and Worms had attempted to protect the Jews of those towns within the walls of their own palaces, but the People's Crusade broke in to slaughter them. Fifty years later when St. Bernard of Clairvaux was urging recruitment for the Second Crusade, he specifically criticized the attacks on Jews which occurred in the First Crusade. [...] Albert of Aachen's own view was that the People's Crusade were uncontrollable semi-Christianized country-folk (citing the "goose incident", which Hebrew chronicles corroborate), who massacred hundreds of Jewish women and children, and that the People's Crusade ultimately got what they deserved when they were themselves promptly slaughtered by Muslim forces as soon as they set foot in Asia Minor.

So your ancestors were killed by stupid peasants, not the Church.

Few remember the Albigensian Crusade which resulted in the complete destruction of the Cathars.

What? Everyone remembers the Albigensian Crusade. "Kill them all, God will know His own." And if heretics won't repent you should expel them or kill them. I agree with the Church on that one. There are demons who would mislead the people, you can't just let them get away with it. You know what happens when you don't kill the heretics? Communism. And communism killed way more people than the Church ever did.

Peasants who were Catholics, taught by Catholic doctrine and engaged in a Crusade started by the Catholic Church. Yet you don't see such mobs systematically destroying entire Jewish villages in Protestant areas, and you don't see it in Russian Orthodox areas until the 1500s.

Protestantism didn't even exist until the 1500s. I don't see why/how you're making the comparison.

A bunch of peasants got out of hand, directly went against the wishes of the Church, and killed some people. (Not very many, either, in the grand scheme of things.) When it comes to crimes against humanity, this is about a 1.1 on a scale of 1 to 10 for the Church, maybe about 3 for the peasants.

There may be an illusion of transparency here. Very few people remember where that phrase came from even if they've heard some version.

Hm, fair enough, but I was under the impression that most intelligent people at least knew that the Church had killed all the Cathars, and that's why Cathars don't exist anymore.

And if heretics won't repent you should expel them or kill them.

Somehow a lot of other religions have managed ok without doing that.

Managed what okay? No religion has managed to be as awesome as Catholicism, either. Catholics are responsible for universities.

I'm wondering if I'm misreading what you are saying here.. Are you arguing that the Catholic Church should kill Catholic heretics and groups that disagree because otherwise other groups who will be more violent will arise?

Well, they shouldn't do it anymore, for obvious reasons. But at that time it was a good idea. The Reformation led to a shift in values and political structures that reached one climax with the French revolution, heights never before seen with the Nazi camps and Soviet gulags, and will likely reach yet another climax with uFAI. The rise of atheism was the rise of sheer unadulterated Evil. It might have been better had the Church just killed all the protesters when they had the chance. But this is idle political speculation about counterfactual histories, so I mean, I'm probably horrifically wrong. But I could be horrifically right. It's hard to tell.

(ETA: By the way, I basically never get into "my side is better than your side" fights, and this fight is clearly inconsequential, so I'm mostly just having fun with it. Apologies if you were expecting me to be serious.)

Heh, you really think that's squick? When I read that article I thought it was so incredibly self-evident that it was as interesting as pointing out the sky is blue. Women like Alicorn are the exception; most women are incredibly stupid, and quite useless without a strong male presence guiding them.

Now personally I have low tolerance for histrionic behaviour. I put my foot down at the first sign of it, and they turn from a whining scold into an a bubbly eager sex partner. Women aren't happy with too much freedom; it makes their brain tubes hurt. They prefer to be around a strong male who lays down the rules, and rewards them for good behaviour.

I mean, jeez, have you seen how women behave in the workplace? They crave the occasional spanking.

For the record I'm currently dating two very sexy women, who are far too young for me. One's relatively intelligent (I'm not an Alpha guy, I'm a Sigma - I hate picking up). And both of them come like firehoses while they're with me. I think my track record speaks to the validity of my opinion. I like women - I just don't respect them.

Edit: My major disagreement with Ferdinand is that he doesn't fully understand Austrian economics.

Edit2: One of the comments on the post is describes the costs of not punishing your woman for misbehaviour:

"The truth is that sometimes it’s best for a man to hit his woman to get her to behave, just like Sean Connery said. There are two main problems today: 1) Society has taught men to be ashamed for disciplining their women, and 2) Men with guns are always at the ready to take men away who dare discipline their women. So the actual effect of this is that women have become more abusive, more controlling, more crazy in relationships, because few men are willing to lay down the law with them. So they keep going on in their lives, entitled, never being called on their bullshit, never being disciplined like they need to be."

Edit3: Karma sink for saying the unspeakable in a thread about the unspeakable.

IMHO, the best "test of irrationality" would be acceptance of alternative medicine.

It matters little whether you believe in global warming, but belief in homeopathy, faith healing or anything else that makes you to delay the official thing, will make difference in your life, and not for the better.

but MM actually goes ahead and describes what the world would look like for this to be true - there would be a Palestinian lobby which dwarfs AIPAC and J-Street in size. And he doesn't notice the world he's describing isn't our own.

That is simply false. MM explains, or perhaps rationalizes, why the Palestinian lobby does not exist: He says that the Palestinian lobby does not exist, because the Palestinians are a proxy of the state department. According to MM the Palestinian lobby does not exist, because the Palestinians do not really exist as a group capable of rationally and selfishly following their own interests.

Which might be just rationalizing away an inconvenient fact, but does explain the curious anomaly that the Palestinians don't rationally and selfishly follow their own collective interests.

It would be helpful if you narrowed down to a specific claim which you consider to be gratuitously and obviously wrong.

For instance, your quote contains the claim that, of the regimes described, only Israel has survived to this day. Is it your contention that Franquista Spain has survived to this day, or that Israel has not survived? If that is not your contention, then you do not, after all, object to the whole quote, but object to only part of it. And yet you dropped the whole thing into your comment, apparently expecting your reader to know what section of the quote you object to.

Sorry, but that sounds like motivated stopping to me. Coming up with ways by which blind evolution and guiding divinity might be compatible isn't really hard at all.

For one, a gene mutation can only be selected for once it exists. Whether a mutation comes into existence or not is a random process. God could influence the mutations that come into existence.

Secondly, the course of evolution is determined by the environment. Put life in a cold environment, and it will evolve to have adaptations for the cold. God could manipulate the environment to select for the adaptations He wants. There are a lot of papers arguing that the evolution of intelligent, tool-using life requires a very specific environment, which God could have helped arrange.

Thirdly, in addition to choosing the environment, God could influence what happens in the environment, for instance by causing catastrophes that lead to population bottlenecks, helping select specific traits by influencing who survives.

This is consistent with the Toba catastrophe theory that suggests that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 15,000 individuals[4] when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change.

Fourthly, there's genetic drift, again essentially a random process.

Vigorous debates occurred over the relative importance of natural selection versus neutral processes, including genetic drift. Ronald Fisher held the view that genetic drift plays at the most a minor role in evolution, and this remained the dominant view for several decades. In 1968 Motoo Kimura rekindled the debate with his neutral theory of molecular evolution, which claims that most instances where a genetic change spreads across a population (although not necessarily changes in phenotypes) are caused by genetic drift.

...and these were just ones I could come up with off the top of my head.

There's still no shortage of Christians making metaethical arguments for Christianity, or at least for theism. Sure, such arguments should be dead -- they should always have been dead, evo psych or no evo psych -- but alas, what should be and what is are quite different things.