Asians marry before they have children, so the kids have two parents
This article is written by the far-left radical Nicholas Kristof, writing in the radically-leftist New York Times. (A former newspaper)
Excerpt:
THIS is an awkward question, but here goes: Why are Asian-Americans so successful in America?
It’s no secret that Asian-Americans are disproportionately stars in American schools, and even in American society as a whole. Census data show that Americans of Asian heritage earn more than other groups, including whites. Asian-Americans also have higher educational attainment than any other group.
[…]Does the success of Asian-Americans suggest that the age of discrimination is behind us?
A new scholarly book, “The Asian American Achievement Paradox,” by Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, notes that Asian-American immigrants in recent decades have started with one advantage: They are highly educated, more so even than the average American. These immigrants are disproportionately doctors, research scientists and other highly educated professionals.
It’s not surprising that the children of Asian-American doctors would flourish in the United States. But Lee and Zhou note that kids of working-class Asian-Americans often also thrive, showing remarkable upward mobility.
Part of the problem is that non-Asian Americans take a passive view of life, believing that high grades come to those who are naturally smart – not to those who work harder:
There’s also evidence that Americans believe that A’s go to smart kids, while Asians are more likely to think that they go to hard workers… Asian-American kids are allowed no excuse for getting B’s — or even an A-. The joke is that an A- is an “Asian F.”
And, as the image I posted above shows, Asian girls are given boundaries on their sexuality, causing them to choose men who will be good husbands and fathers, and making those men marry before being given sex – factors proven to improve marital stability:
Strong two-parent families are a factor, too. Divorce rates are much lower for many Asian-American communities than for Americans as a whole, and there’s evidence that two-parent households are less likely to sink into poverty and also have better outcomes for boys in particular.
So, let’s be real – if white racial discrimination held non-white groups back, then Asians would be in the same situation as blacks and hispanics. But Asians are not being held back, because of their strong marriage culture and focus on hard work. Whites don’t hold anyone back. This is just a myth that Democrats use to make blacks (and hispanics) think that they need government to save them from the bogeyman. Asians don’t need saving, and neither should any other non-white groups.
We can start by shaming women of all races who choose to have sex with men who are not ready for marriage. There are lots of men out there who are willing to marry, and that should be what women are looking for most if all in a man. That change alone will probably erase most of the achievement gap between different racial groups. Does anyone have the courage to tell young women (of all races) to be more responsible with their sexual decisions? The out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks is over 70%. This causes massive poverty and crime in the black community. Does anyone have the courage to tell blacks that they are doing this to themselves?
It was probably a good idea for the U.S. government to construct massive hospitals to deal with all the expected Coronavirus patients. But now, these hospitals are being dismantled, and almost all of them never saw a single Wuhan Coronavirus patient. This story was reported by far-left National Public Radio, which is about as far left as you can go, except for North Korea.
As hospitals were overrun by coronavirus patients in other parts of the world, the Army Corps of Engineers mobilized in the U.S., hiring private contractors to build emergency field hospitals around the country.
The endeavor cost more than $660 million, according to an NPR analysis of federal spending records.
But nearly four months into the pandemic, most of these facilities haven’t treated a single patient.
The Army Corps of Engineers has contracted with private companies to turn convention centers and other sites into emergency field hospitals. Federal spending totaled more than $660 million. Most of these facilities haven’t treated a single COVID-19 patient. Some haven’t opened. Others have closed but could reopen if there’s a resurgence in cases. This data on some of the biggest projects is current as of Monday.
Things are also going well for states that have re-opened early.
Florida has an excellent governor and it looks like he did the best job of balancing the need to lock down with the need for a quick re-opening to save his state’s economy.
Restaurants are seating patrons for the first time in weeks. Shops are cautiously welcoming back customers. And state parks are opening their gates.
As Florida looks to rebound from the crisis wrought by the novel coronavirus, so, too, does Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Florida’s Republican governor is slowly opening the state, a month after he shut it down amid national criticism for his response to the novel coronavirus outbreak that has so far killed at least 1,399 people in Florida and infected more than 36,000.
The move — at a date when early models incorrectly predicted Florida would experience a peak in infections — isn’t without risk. Florida continues to see sickness and death, particularly in hard-hit South Florida. But after avoiding worst-case predictions in March and April, DeSantis has, in May, positioned himself as a conservative coronavirus success story.
“DeSantis right now has been able to thread that needle between overreacting and following the facts,” said Rob Schmidt, a Republican Miami-based pollster with the firm McLaughlin & Associates.
And Georgia also re-opened early, but their Republican governor seems to have timed it right as well.
THE number of Georgia patients hospitalized due to the coronavirus has fallen to its lowest total in weeks, Gov. Brian Kemp said Saturday as the state’s death toll from COVID-19 reached at least 1,400.
Kemp tweeted Saturday morning that 1,203 patients were currently hospitalized, the lowest number since the state started reporting the figure on April 8.
He also noted that Saturday’s total of 897 ventilators in use across the state was the lowest number since early April.
“We will win this fight together!” the Republican governor tweeted.
Those states that re-open early will have much better economic growth than Democrat-run states like Michigan, New York, etc. that remain in lockdown mode. I sure hope that the blue states don’t come begging for money from red states after they kill their own economies. I’m in a red state, we’re open, and I don’t want my money being used for socialists who make decisions with their feelings rather than with facts.
This is an accurate protrayal of what went down in this debate
I was very excited to see a recent debate by Christian philosopher William Lane Craig against atheist astronomer Jeff Hester. When I summarize a debate, I do a fair, objective summary if the atheist is intelligent and informed, as with Peter Millican, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong or Austin Dacey. But the following summary is rated VS for Very Snarky, and you’ll soon see why.
The debate itself starts at 29 minutes:
The audio is very poor.
Dr. Craig’s opening speech
Dr. Craig went first, and he presented 4 arguments, as well as the ontological argument which I won’t summarize or discuss. He later added another argument for theism from the existence of the universe that does not require an origin of the universe.
A1. Counter-examples
Theists who are elite scientists cannot be “irrational”, for example: Allan Sandage, Gustav Tammann, George Ellis, Don Page, Christopher Isham
A2. Kalam cosmological argument
Whatever begins to exist requires a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe requires a cause.
A3. Fine-tuning of the universe to permit complex intelligent life
The fine-tuning of the universe is due either to physical necessity, chance or design.
It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
Therefore it is due to design.
A4. Moral argument
If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
Objective moral values and duties do exist.
Therefore, God exists.
Dr. Hester’s opening speech
Dr. Hester went second and presented two arguments which both committed the genetic fallacy, a logical fallacy that makes the arguments have no force.
Hester starts his opening speech by asserting that Albert Einstein was irrational, because he denied quantum mechanics.
Hester explains that he became an atheist at 15. This would have been before the evidence for the origin of the universe became widespread, before we had very many examples of fine-tuning, before the discovery that the origin of life problem is a problem of the origin of complex, specifed information, etc. What kind of reasons can a 15-year-old child have for becoming an atheist? It’s hard to say, but I would suspect that they were psychological. Children often desire autonomy from moral authorities. They want to be free to pursue pleasure. They don’t want to be thought of as superstitious and morally straight by their non-religious peers.
Later on in the debate, Hester volunteers that he hated his father because his father professed to be a Christian, but he was focused on his career and making money. In the absence of any arguments for atheism, it’s reasonable to speculate that Hester became an atheist for psychological reasons. And as we’ll see, just like the typical 15-year-old child, he has no rational basis for atheism. What’s astonishing is how he continues to hold to the atheism of his teens when it has been falsified over and over by scientific discoveries in the years since.
Dr. Craig’s deductive arguments do have premises that reach a conclusion through the laws of logic. On the contrary, he just asserts that God exists as his conclusion, and then says that this assertion is the best explanation of a gap in our scientific knowledge. Some of the gaps in our scientific knowledge he uses in his arguments are: 1) he doesn’t understand why the Sun moves through the sky, so God exists, 2) he doesn’t understand why the wind blows, so God exists.
What counts as “rational” are things that have not been disproved. The progress of science has shown that the universe did not need a casuse in order to begin to exist, and also there is no cosmic fine-tuning.
A1. The success of evolution in the software industry proves that there is no God
All hardware and software is developed using genetic algorithms that exactly match Darwinian processes. All the major computer companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. are just generating products using mutation and selection to evolve products over long periods of time. If you look over a typical software engineering degree, it’s all about Darwinian evolution, and nothing about design patterns, object-oriented design, etc.
This widespread use of evolution in the software industry undermines all of the arguments for God’s existence. Evolution caused the origin of the universe. Evolution explains why the universe is fine-tuned for life. Evolution, which requires replication already be in place in order to work, explains the origin of the first self-replicating organism.
A2. Theist’s view of the world is just a result of peer pressure from their tribes
All of Dr. Craig’s logical arguments supported by scientific evidence don’t matter, because he got them from a primitive tribe of Christians that existed 2000 years ago. Everyone gets their view of origins, morality, meaning in life, death, etc. from their tribes. Except me, I’m getting my beliefs from reason and evidence because I’m a smart atheist. I don’t have an atheist tribe in the university that would sanction me if I disagreed with nonsense like homosexuality is 100% genetic, transgenderism, man-made catastrophic global warming, fully naturalistic evolution, aliens seeded the Earth with life, infanticide is moral, socialism works, overpopulation will cause mass starvation, nuclear winter, etc. Also, my argument isn’t the genetic fallacy at all, because smart atheists don’t commit elementary logical fallacies that even a first-year philosophy student would know.
A3. Our brains evolved so our rational faculties are unreliable, so God does not exist
The logical reasoning that Dr. Craig uses to argue for theism are all nonsense, because human minds just have an illusion of consciousness, an illusion of rationality, and an illusion of free will. Everything Dr. Craig says is just deluded nonsense caused by chemicals in his brain. He has cognitive biases the undermine all his logical arguments and scientific evidence. He just invented an imaginary friend with super powers. Except me, I’m a smart atheist, so I actually have real consciousness, real reasoning powers, and no cognitive biases. Also, my argument isn’t the genetic fallacy at all, because my arguments would not get an F in a first-year philosophy course.
Discussion
I’m not going to summarize everything in the discussion, or the question and answer time. I’m just going to list out some of the more interesting points.
Dr. Craig asks him how it is that he has managed to escape these biases from tribalism, projection, etc. He talks about how brave and noble atheist rebels are. The moderator asks him the same question. He repeats how brave and noble atheist rebels are.
Dr. Hester is asked whether he affirms a causeless beginning of the universe or an eternal universe. He replies he states that the universe came into being without a cause, because causality doesn’t apply to the beignning of the universe. He also asserts with explanation that Borde, Guth and Vilenkin have undermined the kalam cosmological argument, mentioning a web site.
Dr. Craig replied to this phantom argument after the debate on Facebook:
Speaking of which, although I haven’t had time to consult the website mentioned by Dr. Hester concerning Guth and Vilenkin on the kalam cosmological argument, I know the work of these two gentlemen well enough to predict what one will find there. Since neither one is yet a theist (so much, by the way, for the dreaded confirmation bias!), they have to reject at least one of the premises of the kalam cosmological argument.
Guth wants to deny premiss (2) The universe began to exist–for which Vilenkin has rebuked him. Guth would avoid the implications of their theorem by holding our hope for the Carroll-Chen model, which denies the single condition of the BGV theorem. This gambit is, however, unsuccessful, since the Carroll-Chen model does so only by positing a reversal of the arrow of time at some point in the finite past. This is not only highly non-physical, but fails to avert the universe’s beginning, since that time-reversed, mirror universe is no sense in our past. The model really postulates two different universes with a common beginning.
So Vilenkin is forced to deny premiss (1) Whatever begins to exists has a cause. He says that if the positive energy associated with matter exactly counterbalances the negative energy associated with gravity, then the net sum of the energy is zero, and so the conservation of energy is not violated if the universe pops into being from nothing! But this is like saying that if your assets exactly balance your debts, then your net worth is zero, and so there does not need to be a cause of your financial situation! As Christopher Isham points out, there still needs to be “ontic seeding” in order to create the positive and negative energy in the first place, even if on balance their sum is zero.
Dr. Hester is asked how he explains the evidence for fine-tuning. He literally says that “Life is fine-tuned for the Universe”, i.e. – that evolution will create living beings regardless of the laws of physics, constants, etc. For example, he thinks that in a universe with a weaker stong force, which would have only hyrogen atoms, evolution would still evolve life. And in a universe that recollapses in a hot fireball, and never forms stars or planets, evolution would produce life. Physicist Luke Barnes, who was commenting on the YouTube chat for the video, said this:
“Life is fine-tuned for the Universe” – complete ignorance of the field. Read a book.
Hester tries to cite Jeremy England to try to argue for life appearing regardless of what the laws of physics are. Barnes comments:
Jeremy England’s work supports no such claim.
Hester appealed to the multiverse, which faces numerous theoretical and observational difficulties. For example, the multiverse models have to have some mechanism to spawn different universes, but these mechanisms themselves require fine-tuning, as Robin Collins argues. And the multiverse is falsified observationally by the Boltzmann brains problem. It was so ironic that Hester claimed to be so committed to testing theories. The mutliverse theory cannot be tested experimentally, and must be accepted on faith.
Dr. Hester is asked how he grounds morality on atheism. He says there are no objective moral values and duties. He instead lists off a bunch of Christian beliefs which he thinks are objectively wrong. Even his statements about these moral issues are misinformed. For example, he asserts that homosexuality is causally determined by biology, but this is contradicted by identical twin studies that have a rate of 20-40% where both twins are gay.
Dr. Hester is asked about free will, which is required in order to make moral choices. He denies the existence of free will, which undermines his earlier statements about morality. Morality is only possible if humans can make free choices to act in accordance with a moral standard. So, he claims that Christians are immoral, then he claims that they have no freedom to act other than they do.
Dr. Hester also volunteered that his father believed in the prosperity gospel, and tithed in order to be rewarded with money by God. Dr. Craig immediately says “no wonder you’re in rebellion against Christianity”. Indeed.
Dr. Hester is asked about his view that human beings are unable to unable to perceive the world objectively. How is he able to perceive the world objectively, when all of the rest of us are unable to? His response is that he is just smarter than everyone else because his ideas have never been falsified by testing.
Scoring the debate
Dr. Craig’s 5 arguments went unrefuted. Hester’s argument about genetic algorithms was ludicrous to anyone who understands software engineering. His arguments about tribalism and unreliable mental faculties were self-refuting, and committed the genetic fallcy. At several points, Hester denied mainstream science in favor of untested and untestable speculations. It was the worst defeat of atheism I have ever witnessed. He was uninformed and arrogant. He didn’t know what he was talking about, and he tried to resort to speculative, mystical bullshit to cover up his failure to meet Dr. Craig’s challenge.
