cheese it, the cops!

stoning the experts

cb draws my attention to this stone by gary gutting, which previously i had proposed to ignore. now let me say that as far as my personal evaluation of climate change has gone (not that it matters either way in terms of actual change in the climate), "climategate" and the subsequent chastening has tempered my hostile response, and i am less sceptical than once i was. but let me make a few observations that might make one think twice on this particular issue. first off, as i've argued elaborately (there's a 20-page academic paper where that slice came from), consensus can be extremely distorting with regard to people's commitment to truth, whether among experts or non. i feel that that is particularly true in this case, in which the moral weight dropped on everyone by the non-expert community (as gutting defines 'expert') was overwhelming (e.g. by al gore). there was a phase in which even 'experts' seemed to be competing for who could issue the most dire predictions, because that was a measure of that expert's personal goodness. indeed, until they sort of realized that predicting the end of the world by 2005 would backfire in 2006, they thought they could motivate people to action by hyperbole. as in any community of inquirers there are all kinds of pressures exterior to the truth of the question, and what and who gets funded, or what and who gets published where, are clearly at stake. the experts' health insurance is at stake. now, the fact that, if true, the only rational response appeared to be a full realization of leftist political goals (e.g. whole new taxes and a world regulatory regime), and that most academics (more or less all, really) are leftists, had to make you wonder if the research was skewed by wishful thinking. on the other hand it is worth remarking that the same thing should make you sceptical of climate-change deniers of the right.

what i said in 2005 and what i'll say now is that i'm waiting (though i have other things to do) for the hysteria to ebb, and then i'll try to evaluate the evidence as best i can and try to form some kind of opinion. it's never a good idea, prof. gutting, simply to defer to expert opinion where there are things actually at stake. really, think about what that would have entailed in ancient athens, or medieval europe, or in 1820, or in 1920, etc. you've got at a minimum to focus critically on how an expert consensus is arrived at and enforced. and this is a hard and complicated case, to which myriad data are relevant (one symptom of this is that, though there is a consensus among experts that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, there is much disagreement about its pace and effects).

and i think that, as in the last x hundreds of thousands of years, we had better conceive ourselves to be adapting to a volatile environment rather than preserving a natural balance. we want the thing to hold steady, but it never did before. 

i really do have the luxury of a wait-and-see attitude, because like i say, my action is not going to have any detectible effect either way. but i am slowly rounding to the climate-change consensus, i spose.

here are little slices i've written about this over the years. funny that the search doesn't seem to turn up stuff before about 2008.

after midnight in paris

there has never been a clearer expression of provincialism than americans' obsession with paris, which just seems to redouble every few years. hasn't this gone on long enough? the food! the wine! the angst! the sex! the pseudo-sophistication and clumsily simulated identities! honestly i'm tired of paris in the 20s: fatigued by hemingway and stein, exhausted by picasso, etc. even if these people weren't excruciatingly overrated, there surely could be no point in writing or thinking about them any more, after infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters have worked them through for decades. i'd be more interested in south-eastern north dakota regionalism of the same period, and its influence in alberta. 

can't lose what you ain't never had

clinton says assad has lost his legitimacy. not of course because he keeps shooting and interning and torturing his own citizens, but because he sent some tomoato-throwers to the us embassy. outrageous!

a fresh take on democracy

the knesset passes a law making it a crime to call for a boycott of israel. as a response, i'd suggest boycotting the state of israel. some crimes are easy and fun! and some crimes are right.

crime wave, contd.

the fearsome crime wave continues here in new freedom, pa. theresa and rickard koller were arrested for trying to bust their own golden lab out the animal shelter.

headline

romney's deal-closing skills appeal to jewish voters. also his gleeful gold-hoarding and penchant for usury. 

deal with it

this thing of presidential candidates signing pledges on this and that seems wacky to me. be that as it may, the trad marriage pledge signed by bachmann and santorum said this: "a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President." i've seen a bunch of talking heads (as also salon, etc) summarizing this passage as saying that african-american families were better off in slavery than they are in freedom. how insanely offensive! but of course that's not what this says exactly.

it's a factual assertion, and your moral repugnance for it is neither here nor there as regards its truth. it might be false. it might be extremely hard actually to evaluate the evidence for it. there might be true things that no one should ever say, though that would be disturbing. there might be some obscurities around important terms - such as 'household' or 'african-american' - which could use some clarification. it might not matter whether it's true or not. but it does not endorse slavery, and the question of whether or not it's true does not depend on your anti-racist, anti-slavery, or anti-marriage-is-between-one-man-and-one-woman opinions.

this is a good example of credibility-index-type problems. through their ideological spectacles, people don't seem even to be able to see what that sentence says - they cannot paraphrase or summarize it accurately - and they do not regard evidence as relevant to its evaluation, though it is a flat factual assertion and only actual statistical evidence bears on its truth.

pussies at war

speaking of 'thank you for your service': i've been pondering this question of drones, soon to be joined by a host of robotic military devices operated from remote locations. now we've paid a mighty price for the cult of the warrior, of course. and as we see every day from every politician, the cult continues still and is still largely a propaganda device to recruit people into wars. now there was a time when being a good warrior required tremendous physical skill and courage, when you had to be ready actually to stand there with a sword and withstand a charge, and in which to kill you had to face the person you killed. war is perhaps not the very best human invention, but you can understand why people were proud to be able to participate in some ways, and also why doing it extremely well could be regarded as admirable on several different levels.

i often think that technology doesn't make as much difference as people think it does. but that's definitely not true in war. firearms immediately increased the distance between the combatants, made it much more morally possible to kill, and of course much easier to kill many more people. each step in military hardware - artillery, the tank, the airplane - increased this effect.participating in a war by lying in a muddy trench while shells fall and mustard gas wafts here and there is not much like repelling a viking raid. being one in an army of hundreds of thousands can't possibly inculcate the same sort of warrior ethos. really, you're there in that trench just to be part of the wave of numbers; your personal characteristics don't matter all that much. 

but the drone thing takes this to a new level. the warriors are sitting in cubicles in nevada looking at pictures; they face no risks and display no courage. so now let's say wars begin more and more to be fought by machine proxies, especially by the great powers (local guerilla movements are not going to have access to these technologies for a long time). this will make it absolutely clear that there is nothing admirable per se about serving in the military; indeed, killing people from remote locations with a machine might well be represented as an act of cowardice. 

so, oddly, the whole idea is not at all compatible with the macho warlikeness, which was already getting to be anachronistic with regard to the actual militaries of great powers. now people who are using machines to fight you from a remote location are cowards. but people who put their bodies on the line to fight machines are going to be displaying unspeakable courage. pursuing this course we will, by this standard at least, be gutless pussies fighting actual men.  though men like machines, all the techno prostheses are incompatible with a traditional masculinity.

i've often said that, as problematic as it is, masculinity has many admirable features. i don't think it's compatible with operating robots to kill actual human bodies. as we segue into a bureaucratic killing machine in which computer geeks in beehive office complexes unleash a storm of death somewhere in the third world, we might actually want to hold on to a few rock-jawed, ready-to-die soldiers. because if critiques of robotic war as shameful come from this quarter, they will be hard to ignore. however, the momentum is irresistible and could only be interrupted by budgetary collapse. root for default, y'all. 

 

against trollops

hate to say it, but i more or less agree with this, a piece by the 'president of the national fatherhood initiative' which asks why we don't alot a bit of the blame for misbehaving men to the women they misbehave with. now, of course, if it's a rapist - a la (allegedly) dsk - then blaming the victim is out of the question. also of course, power differentials create the possibilities of one or another extent of coercion, which reduces the agency of the people coerced. but no one is forcing a young woman to undergo plastic surgery, dress in as little as possible, and try to seduce tiger woods (or, you know, musicians, actors, politician, rich persons), in order to enhance her self-esteem or professional opportunities or cashflow or to achieve some sort of notoriety. i just have to say that i'm against using sex this way. and i might say i often feel kind of...sexually manipulated by women, many of whom seem to value sexual attention above nearly anything else (i'm definitely not rich or powerful, however).

power and money and fame are aphrodisiacs, i guess, at least for many women. actually i don't think they really have an aphrodisiac effect; they just suggest that you could use sex to get power and money out of this chump. anyway, if power and money have an aphrodisiac effect on you, i suggest that this is a failure of your character, and you ought to get busy in therapy or something. the world would obviously be a better place if power and money were sexually repulsive.

though some of the 'other women' are victims to one degree or another, many are really not, and the fact that we just informally don't hold the (admittedly, usually young) women responsible at all says either that they are not moral agents, or that, having sex for power or money - or to feel the flattery of power and money - is normative for young women. since what is really normative for young women is that their whole predicament is described by themselves and their sub-culture as a self-esteem drama, and getting the governor's attention and screwing him enhances your self-esteem, it's actually a wholesome activity.

by interns

"on the shoulders of the shuttle, america will continue to dream." i guess when the nasa budget started to decline, the first layoff was its writer.

love of subordination

well, you'd have to say that the left/right split in american politics has gotten pretty direct and pretty raw. the right is signing pledges for no new taxes and spending reductions. it's extremely rigid and doctrinaire. but i guess i find even more strange and disturbing and fundamentalist the position of people like paul krugman, who also speaks, for example, for msnbc pundits etc: i think krugman thinks that government spending and the taxation to drive it are morally good in themselves. it almost doesn't matter what you spend it on: krugman just believes - and in this he follows the drift of the left for a century - that a very large state is self-evidently morally good. i have to say that the idea that it's obvious you should increase government spending as debt rises above gdp just seems fundamentalist: the state will save us; sacrifice your firstborn unto it. the very idea that we'd even talk about medicare is completely anathema. like the whole left, he squawks about "an end to Medicare’s status as a program available in full to all Americans, regardless of income." by which, oddly enough, he means the very rich, people on whom he also thinks there should be much higher taxes. he prescribes increased government spending as the solution to unemployment. well, one might try to find out just how efficient government spending is in creating jobs overall. for example, let's say we increased medicare or social security spending. is that an engine of job growth?

i'm just telling you that whatever the circumstances, whatever the problem, krugman will recommend more government spending. and that will tell you what he really is and what he really wants: subordination of every aspect of human life to the state. this is why it's not at all implausible or mere rhetoric to connect this position historically to stalin, say. really, ask yourself in what circumstances paul krugman would call for a decrease in government spending. say we were running surpluses, for instance. he wouldn't be recommending tax cuts. and then notice that 'government spending' isn't an abstraction: it comes from actually extracting money from the economy (or borrowing it) and then, among other things, controlling what people do through the application of that $$.

 

bury the underground

alright. you've been going to lou reed shows for decades, and every time, you came out, thinking, "well, that sucked.' he didn't seem to care. he only 'sang' one 'note.' he hasn't written a decent song since 1973. he appeared bitter and incoherent. and every time you came out saying, but it was lou reed!' or 'that's part of the persona' or something, like this reviewer for the guardian: well, that really, really blew. but the band was ok! three stars. guess what, though? tomorrow is running out of parties. 10. 9. 8...

thank you for your cervix

am i the only one getting tired of 'thank you for your service'? the left people and politicians on tv are even more elaborate in the ceremonial bow than the right. now they're not only thanking commander thad allen or whomever it may be, but also casey anthony jurors.

cheat your children well

se you're actually creating a situation where the only sane thing to do is cheat. "Of the 56 schools that were examined, cheating was discovered in 44 of them — that’s more than 78 percent — and 178 teachers and principals were found to have cheated on standardized tests." nor are schools run by michelle rhee immune. the assessment instruments are completely external to the process; the goal is not built into the activity, but imposed. the assessment regime is mechanized; it requires no agency. it's not particularly invented or administered by anyone; no one is really responsible for its content; there's no one holding people accountable; people are just enacting routines. the regime does not have a human face. it's like stealing from exxon-mobil; how bad do you really feel? and people's livelihoods depend on it. if you thought another school was cheating and was going to take your money, you'd cheat too; it actually has nothing to do what anyone's actually learning. anyway, i think it's likely that the whole thing could crash, based not on its palpable pedagogical bankruptcy, but on cheating administrators.

keepin it country

i must say i've noticed an amazing anti-rural turn of late. hitchens just ridicules the whole idea of a small town here; that's so over. "environmentalists" have been quick to point out that stacking people like cordword in concrete boxes minimizes their carbon emissions. i like the flava of the 'it gets better' campaign: you might live in some godforsaken backwater in kentucky, where you are oppressed by the narrow-minded bigots who are your friends and family. come to sanfran or nyc where everyone loves everyone just as they are!