The Kingdom of Douche

In a land very close to where you are and in a time very close to now was the Kingdom of Douche.  The Kingdom of Douche was impoverished by a great war that had been raging for hundreds of generations.  The two sides are known as the Lords of Right and the Lords of Wrong.  Both groups are totally convinced of the correctness of their views and simply couldn’t allow any part of what the other side thought was true to be considered correct.

Both sides have their own holy books that espouse the teachings they believe in.  To spread the teachings each side has an elitist class of educators who where deemed to be the only ones qualified to spread the sacred word. For each side, any utterance of something that sounded anything like what the other side taught was immediate grounds for condemnation and ridicule.

Each faction claimes that their views are proven fact.  The only explanation for stating something that didn’t conform to their proven facts is that the person stating these untruths must be defective in some way.  Both groups have a great fear of defectiveness.  For if a defective could be correct about something they said, then surely that meant that there was something wrong with what the non-defectives said.

In the early days of the Great War everybody lived in the vicinity of what was known as the greater metropolitan city of Correctness.  The city started out as a small group of people that agreed with each other. 

Everybody around Correctness has the same problem.  They didn’t have all the things they wanted.  It was just too much work to run around and find all the things they thought where needed.  There where simply not enough hours in the day.  The only practical thing a person could do was to choose the things most important to them and spend all their time looking for those things.

This had a major problem.  It meant that a person could never get those less important things.  This made the people very unhappy.  They felt that it was very unfair the world would only let them get so few things that made them happy and yet denied them so many things they thought it would be good to have.

They had noticed that if you spend all your time looking for one thing, over time you get very good at finding that one thing.  In fact you get so good at it that you can find so much of what you are looking for that you can never use all of it.  The same thing could be said of the people that make things.  The longer they made something the better and faster they got at making it.  Before long, they could make things so fast and of such high quality that they could never use all the things they made.

At the founding of the city of Correctness, a small group decided that it would be a good idea to cooperate with each other.  If one person looked around for raw materials and another used those raw materials to make something, the two could trade with each other and both where better off.  This idea caught wind like a wild fire.

The first thing they found was there was one minor problem with their plans.  Sometimes what they got when they traded was not quite the quality they had been expecting.  Some traders tried to meet some minimum level of requirements for a trade, but sold then at a very low price.  Others sold very high quality things, but they generally wanted much more for the trade.  And as one would expect, there where many people that tried to sell low quality things at very high prices.

Anybody that had gotten the short end of one of these not so fair trades would feel cheated and want to reverse the trade.  As one would expect, the person that got the better end of the bargain would not want to reverse the trade.  It became common to hear "All sales final".  And so began the Great War.

Everybody agreed that trade was a good thing.  But sometimes trade was not such a good thing.  So they started to work out what was fair and what was not fair.  As they got around to agreeing on something they wrote it down in a book and declared it the correct way of doing things.

Over time the book got bigger and bigger.  As generations came and went, they added more and more to the Big Book as it was called.  However, as new generations where born a problem arose.  The things that had been agreed upon by past generations, where not agreed to by some members of the new generation.

This was a threat to the authority of the people that agreed with the Big Book.  This was especially true for the people that taught the Big Book to the young.  Any time, if a person young or old could disagree with the Big Book, that meant the students could turn the tables on the educators and rightfully claim the teachers where stupid and ignorant.  Without the order of the teacher being the authority and students being expected to accept whatever the teacher was espousing, it was clear that anarchy would ensue.

So to quell this propensity for nonconformity in the young, they invented the idea of punishment.  If a student was to be such a douche bag that they disagreed with a teacher, the teacher had the right to be a douche bag themselves and do something the student didn’t like.

At first this seemed to work quite well.  All of a sudden, not so many where willing to publicly state that the teachers where wrong.  Emboldened by this discovery, the Big Book took on a new role in the society.  It was now the Law.  Anybody that disagreed with the Big Book could be subject to punishment.

At first simply saying you disagreed with the Big Book could easily get you killed.  That period of time is known as the Uber-Douche period.  During this time a single leader known as the Uber-Douche was the sole person that was allowed to decide if someone had violated the Big Book and was therefore subject to punishment or death.

For a while, this worked quite well.  The people of Correctness prospered as their standard of living got better and better.  They where getting more and more stuff to make them happy.  Life was good.  But there was a problem. People had just learned not to say there was something wrong with the Big Book.

But one day they ran into a real problem.  With their population growing and everybody needing more and more stuff, the natural resources in the area of Correctness started to get depleted.  This meant that the gathers in the society needed to journey farther and farther away from Correctness to find what the people needed.

Eventually, the gatherers strayed into the lands of other Uber-Douches.  According to the Big Book of the people of Correctness, the correct thing for a gatherer to do was to gather so it could be traded with other people in Correctness and nobody else.  But just like in the land of Correctness, taking something without giving something in return was a crime.  So the first of the gatherers to reach the new lands where simply killed.

This was a real threat to the way of life for the people of Correctness so their Uber-Douche ordered that
the people of Correctness would embark on a great crusade to rid the world of false Uber-Douches. This of course also happened in the other kingdoms, so there where many generations of war between rival Uber-Douches.

Eventually the people got tired of the perpetual wars and the Uber-Douches began to fall out of favor.  Those doubts about the correctness of the Big Book started to surface again. People began to understand that the older wisdom of cooperation was much more beneficial than constantly warring with your neighbors.  So trade started between the various lands and the wars began to die down.

As the members of the various lands began to trade with each other, they also began to talk about their societies.  Everyone was surprised to find that each land had its own Big Book and there where lots of similarities between them.  For some, the differences where confirmation that those underlying doubts about the Big Book where justified.

This formed the basis of the time known as the Great Reconciliation.  Lands that where close together, seemed to have very similar Big Books.  None was really better than any other, but all of them had good ideas that none of the others had.  The great thinkers of the various lands started to work together to identity all the things in common between all the great Big Books.  They even went so far as to find all the good things that where just in one of the Big Books.

From all of this they created a new master Big Book known as the “Good Words”.  And just as before, a group of clergy was formed to teach the Good Words to the young.  This time the land of Correctness was much larger.  Because of this, the idea of Uber-Douches just couldn’t be feasible anymore.  A single person could not decide everything, so a whole series of Demi-Douches was created to act like the Uber-Douche for some small regions.

Since each Demi-Douche couldn’t add to any other Big Books than the local one, groups of the Demi-Douches would get together periodically and argue over what new additions should be added to the great “Good Words” document.

But just like the original Big Books had detractors, the Good Words book had its detractors.  Eventually the Good Words started to include things that people could easily demonstrate as simply incorrect.  It was no longer a question of what you could imagine, but one of what you could demonstrate to others.

Very quickly this new class of thinkers, known as the Demonstrators, began to realize that their demonstrations really didn’t show they where right.  They could only show when somebody else was wrong.  Instead of claiming what they thought was right they focused on finding all the things in the Good Words that where wrong.

This lead to many more years of war and bloodshed.  But no matter how hard the followers of the Good Words tried, they couldn’t refute what the Demonstrators where showing.  The success of the things the Demonstrators where finding brought the old doubts back to the surface with a vengeance.

Because the Demonstrators where very good at what they did, they where very good at making weapons.  They made bigger and bigger weapons.  For a time, even the followers of the Good Words started to use what the Demonstrators had found to destroy the non-believers.  In the long run both sides found that continuing to make bigger and bigger weapons would only lead to their opponents making bigger and bigger weapons.  The only outcome would be for both sides to totally destroy each other.  So a truce was called.

The agreement was that each group would only talk about the things they believed.  For example the Demonstrators would only claim the Good Words was wrong when they could demonstrate that incorrectness.  On the other had, the followers of the Good Words could not punish people just because they disagreed with the Good Words.

This created the age of the Lords of Right and Lords of Wrong.  For the Lords of Right, the book of Good Words was the only absolute statement of truth.  On the other had where the Lords of Wrong that believed the only absolute things where the things that had been demonstrated as wrong.  This worked of a little while. 

But as successive generations where born, the non-conformity of the young popped up once again.  Some young of the Lords of Right began to assert the correctness the Good Words again and called for the punishment of the non-faithful.  In response, some of the young from the Lords of Wrong began to claim the Good Words was wrong even about things they couldn’t demonstrate it.

As the Lords of Right began to learn more and more about what the Lords of Wrong where saying, they noticed a little problem.  Nothing the Lords of Wrong ever said was an absolute.  By their own admission, the Lords of Wrong always claimed that anything they said was subject to being falsified.  If someone would come along and show something was wrong with what they said they would change their opinion.

So the kids of Lords of Right, the “Rightites”, asked some questions specifically designed to confound the radical young of the Lords of Wrong.  First they asked “Do you believe in ideas you cannot demonstrate”?  The “Wrongite” kiddies quickly said no, they didn’t believe in something that could not be demonstrated.

With the trap laid, the Rightites began their attack.  Please demonstrate that light moving between Alpha-Centuri and Wolf 359 is moving a constant speed.  The Wrongites where taken aback at this question.  It was an obvious attack on one of their most precious theories.  Of course they couldn’t get there to actually measure the speed so they could never demonstrate it.  They knew their pet theory said the speed of light was constant and they suddenly realized their pet theory was making claims that could not be demonstrated.

What was the poor Wrongite going to do to counter the sacrilegious claims of those low life Rightites?  They chose to end the conversation.  They began to claim the Righties where stupid, uneducated, irrational, deluded, dishonest, and any other derogatory term they could think of. The Righties walked away laughing at how gullible the Wrongites had been.

The Wrongites didn’t like this very much.  They went back to their laboratories and started working on a response.  The older more experienced Lords of Wrong tried to tell them they should have just admitted it was belief that has no supporting evidence, but the kiddies didn’t like that either.  Only those low life Rightites believe unfounded ideas.

So they began to try to change the definitions of terms to make their position correct.  Falsifiable no longer would mean, not an absolute.  From now one falsifiable would mean that in principle, if you could imagine a way to falsify something, it was a valid statement.  Once you had valid statement, until someone actually performed the falsification, the statement would be an absolute.

There had always been a group of people that disagreed with the Good Words.  For years they had been called the Agooders. They had seemed to consistently come up with ideas that openly opposed the Lords of Right.  Not many people knew much about the Agooders, so they assumed the Agooders where primarily a group of people opposed to the Gooders.

So the Wrongites began to call themselves Agooders.  They also started to say that an Agooder was a person that didn’t believe the Good Words.  One group even admitted they where too stupid to make up their minds so they would be called Agnostic Agooders.  The one thing all these Wrongites had in common is that all agreed that there was something wrong with the Lords of Right.

What the Wrongites had failed to see was what the real Agooders had been saying all along.  When you demand that your position is an absolute certainty you are member of the Lords of Right.  You are claiming you are right and anything that opposes you is wrong.  If you say you only believe in things that can be demonstrated and are therefore a Lord of Wrong, when you cannot demonstrate your position you are simply a lying sack of shit and people will see you for what you are.

Those Amoral Agooders have a point.  If you are going declare things good or bad, you have a morality.  If you speak of morality you are a religious kook that is simply declaring your opponents bad and your friends good.  So just admit you are a member of the Lords of Right.

If you are want to claim you are a Lord of Wrong. Fine, there is nothing wrong with you until you take the classroom environment and try to apply it to the real world.  We are not all your students.  When you claim you are right and cannot demonstrate it to OUR satisfaction, you are no longed a Lord of Wrong.  You have become a traitor and joined the Lords of Right.

For the reality has always been that those old time hard core Agooders have NEVER agreed with the Lords of Right or the Lords of Wrong.  They realize that both sides have their correct points and incorrect points.  Choosing to be one or the other is the act of a religious kook whether they say they are a Lord of Right or a Lord of Wrong.  To the Agooder they are both douche bags, hence it is called the Kingdom of Douche.

The dishonesty of an evolution fan.

I recently had an exchange with an evolution fan that highlights some serious problems with evolution.  First the idiot asked the question “So do you think evolution occurs?” I responded with a comment saying that his question was overly broad and he needed to get more specific if I was going to answer the question.

My point was that evolution is a very broad subject with some parts that are very well established and other parts are pure speculation.  His question is a kin to a theist question of “Do you believe in what the bible says?”  It was an obvious attempt to paint me as one of those evil creationists and a video he made after the exchange confirmed my suspicion.

First he attempted to send me a video he had made where he tried to lay out ground rules for talking about evolution.  In the video he made claims that evolution is an absolute certainty and it was unacceptable to even suggest that the theory was wrong.  Then he started demanding that any challenge to evolution had to be made with an alternative explanation that was supported by evidence.

I tried to point out to him that I was not claiming anything.  I was just pointing out that some parts of modern evolutionary thinking are well established and others have no supporting evidence what so ever.  Needless to say, he was not very happy with that response.  For him it was a simple black or white question and no shade of gray was acceptable.

When he asked what parts of evolution I disagreed with, I listed a few of the most common objections.  For example, classifying fossils by their morphology is many times claimed to be evidence of evolution.  I tried to point out that for evolution to be valid there would have to be a demonstrated genetic relationship between the fossils and that once the fossils get old enough, you don’t have any genetic material to compare.

He even admitted that we cannot get genetic information from the older fossils.  But that didn’t stop him from asserting that they where still evolutionarily related.  When I pushed him to show how two different species with similar body shapes had to be evolutionarily related he continued to fall back on “Well they have similar morphology”.

As I pushed him with the difference between an ancestral relationship and a simple classification relationship he began to go off the deep end.  Obviously I was trying to get him to demonstrate that there was a genetic relationship between the fossils he claimed where related and he couldn’t do it because he had already admitted that there was no genetic material to compare.

This gets at a big flaw in evolution theory.  The assumption that similar body shapes must mean there is some kind of genetic relationship.  While this may be an assumption that is stronger than most claims, it is by no means an absolute certainty.

If two species developed in the same environment and used similar strategies to move around and collect food, it only makes sense that they would develop similar body shapes.  While it may be possible for them to be genetically related, that is by no means a certainty.  Assuming the genetic relationship when it has not been demonstrated with a comparison of the genetic material is intellectual dishonesty at best.

As I pushed him to show the parent/child relationships that supported his claim that the species where genetically related he began to claim that ancestral relationships where irrelevant and the shape of the fossils was all that mattered.  He claimed that we are not talking about parent/child relationships we are talking about a comparison of species.  So how does evolution work without reproduction?

So he was trying to assert that offspring from one species was not relevant to an evolutionary relationship with another species.  Of course he never proposed any mechanism by which the evolutionary relationship could be accomplished without the genetic relationship.  But I guess he thinks the rocks on a bottom of a fast flowing stream are evolutionarily related because they have similar shapes.

The point here is that the genetic relationship required for evolution to be correct has never been demonstrated with fossils of any significant age.  Making the assumption that the genetic relationship is present when no comparisons have been made is the worst kind of scientific fraud that can be created.  We call it fabricating evidence.

If he would simply admit he has no genetic evidence of the relationship between the species he claims are evolutionarily related there wouldn’t be a problem other than his claim of the certainty of evolution.

Besides his assertion that evolution was a certainty, when it clearly is not, he claimed that any objection to evolution must be backed up with evidence.  Never once did I make a claim that would require any evidence to support it.  All I was saying is that the evidence used to support evolution was not sufficient to justify a claim of certainty.

This is no different than a claim that the evidence used to support the teachings in the bible is not sufficient to support the existence of a god.  His response was very similar to a typical fundamentalist theist’s demand that an opponent must produce evidence that a god doesn’t exist.

When I brought up the reality that the vast majority of the population does not accept evolution, he started to claim science is not a democracy.  But still he claimed that there was a consensus in the scientific community that evolution was correct.

So how is that any different from a theist claiming there is consensus in the theist community that god exists?  If it’s not a democracy than the number of scientists that agree with the position is simply not relevant.

His excuse for his claim was that just because the general population doesn’t understand evolution doesn’t make it wrong.  However I was not claiming it was wrong. I was claiming was that all of it is not supported by the evidence. Once again, how is this any different than theists claiming that just because most people don’t understand the bible doesn’t make the bible is wrong?

Simply put, he seems to be having an identity problem.  I was stating that the evidence does not support evolution.  In other words, I don’t find the evidence convincing enough for me to accept all of evolution.  He on the other hand is saying that yes the evidence is sufficient.  So tell me how is his assessment of the evidence in any way relevant to my assessment of the evidence?

He believes evolution is supported by the evidence.  I don’t believe it is supported by the evidence.  We have a simple disagreement about what to believe.  I am asking for him to present evidence that will convince me and he even admits he cannot provide the evidence I am asking for.

So this all boils down to him asserting I am wrong and that I am claiming evolution is not correct when all I am doing is saying the theory is not convincing.  Doesn’t his position sound an awful lot like a fundamentalist theist position that demands you believe the same way they do?

He is abandoning all pretenses that his position is based on evidence and raising it to the level of what can only be described as a religion.  He is demanding that I accept his religion and claiming that because I don’t I am wrong.  He does this while claiming he follows the scientific method that only accepts ideas that are supported with evidence.  Yet he admits he has no evidence to support a particular aspect of his position.

In effect, he is throwing a temper tantrum because somebody didn’t agree with the stupidity that he pushing.  In all actuality is he really pissed because his argument is so weak and he as invested a great deal of his self worth into the assertion that his position is correct.

He claimed he has no vested interest in the correctness of his position yet he is willing to go to great lengths to show I am wrong.  The old saying is “I think he protests too much”.  My question is “Why does he feel such a need to show I am wrong simply because I disagree with him?”

To me it looks like he is engaging in a high school level say the right things to be in the cool crowd type of behavior. The actual correctness of what he is saying is no longer relevant.  If it pleases the crowd he wants to be popular with, it’s correct and if not, it must be wrong.

His final act was to block me so I could not post responses to his comments.  I guess I just do too much damage to his self esteem.