Ah, so this is what really happened with that flotilla full of “humanitarian aid” for the Palestinians:
In May, a ship full of civilians—but not full of humanitarian aid—sailed from Turkey to join the Free Gaza flotilla. Having warned the Mavi Marmara that it would not be allowed to breach the blockade, Israeli commandos raided the ship….
In billing the flotilla as a humanitarian mission, the IHH—the expedition’s Islamist sponsor—exploited the Turks’ Achilles heel: their generosity. Turks think of themselves as charitable and compassionate, as indeed they are. They genuinely believe, because this is what has been reported here, that the Palestinians are starving….
Israeli officials had invited the ship to disembark at Ashdod and deliver the aid overland.
I’ve been slowly—or is it rapidly?—coming to the conclusion that PZ Myers is every bit as much of an idiot as is Sam Harris. Observe:
While most of PZ Myers’ comments (in his blog post entitled “Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain” posted on Pharyngula on August 17, 2010) do not deserve a response, I do want to set the record straight, as he completely mischaracterizes my thesis….
Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn’t at my talk), goes on to claim that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies—from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain.
I mentioned the genome in a completely different context. I presented a number of arguments as to why the design of the brain is not as complex as some theorists have advocated. This is to respond to the notion that it would require trillions of lines of code to create a comparable system. The argument from the amount of information in the genome is one of several such arguments. It is not a proposed strategy for accomplishing reverse-engineering. It is an argument from information theory, which Myers obviously does not understand….
[S]ome of my critics claim that I underestimate the complexity of the problem. I have studied these issues for over four decades, so I believe I have a good appreciation for the level of challenge. What I would say is that my critics underestimate the power of the exponential growth of information technology.
Halfway through the genome project, the project’s original critics were still going strong, pointing out that we were halfway through the 15 year project and only 1 percent of the genome had been identified. The project was declared a failure by many skeptics at this point. But the project had been doubling in price-performance and capacity every year, and at one percent it was only seven doublings (at one year per doubling) away from completion. It was indeed completed seven years later.
As I’ve noted in the past, it’s typical for Kurzweil’s critics (like mine) to have to put so pathetically little thought into the subject that they think he’s the one who’s overlooking the obvious. This is Myers—who, having done research in neuroscience, has even less excuse—proving himself to be a complete fool in exactly that way:
[Ray Kurzweil is] actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti….
[Kurzweil thinks] that we’ll be able to write software that simulates all the functions of the human brain. He’s not just speculating optimistically, though: he’s building his case on such awfully bad logic that I’m surprised anyone still pays attention to that kook….
Kurzweil knows nothing about how the brain works….
We haven’t even solved the sequence-to-protein-folding problem, which is an essential first step to executing Kurzweil’s clueless algorithm….
It’s an insanely complicated situation, and Kurzweil thinks he can reduce it to a triviality.
To simplify it so a computer science guy can get it, Kurzweil has everything completely wrong….
I’ll make one more prediction. The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat, Kurzweil, no matter how uninformed and ridiculous his claims get.
And, of course, all the drooling liberal-atheist PZ fanboys can’t wait to lap it all up … with, grrr, the obligatory “software engineering isn’t real engineering” idiocy/pissing-contest. As one notes:
Oh yes. Another opportunity to post the Mitch Kapor quote that I love so much about Kurzweil and the Singularity kooks:
“It’s intelligent design for the IQ 140 people. This proposition that we’re heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different—it’s fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic arm-waving can’t obscure that fact for me, no matter what numbers he marshals in favor of it. He’s very good at having a lot of curves that point up to the right.”
That would be the same Mitch Kapor who said, of Ken Wilber’s magnum-quack-opus Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, “This book changes everything.” Heh.
So I guess Kurzweil’s curves would point to the Upper Right Quadrant then, in Kapor’s view, eh?
And Wilber himself has, of course, endorsed Michael Behe’s writings on … yep, Intelligent Design. Heh.
Not to mention that Kapor is listed in the acknowledgments section for people who “offered support or feedback” for “all the books that kw has written since Grace and Grit,” along with … yes, Deepak Chopra!
“After reading Wilber, it’s impossible to imagine looking at the world the same way again.”—Mitchell Kapor, founder of Lotus, Inc.
And what is Wilber’s view of the future? Basically an endorsement of Kurzweil’s Singularity, with the evolution of consciousness on top of that—a future that will be even more “unimaginably different” from how it is today:
These are some of Wilber’s other (explicitly fictional) musings on related subjects:
Code Project AQAL began as the join [sic] effort of literally hundreds of social scientists and researchers from around the world. They also called it “The Human Consciousness Project” (HCP). Much like the Human Genome Project, which had mapped all the genes of human DNA, the HCP was a complete mapping of human consciousness—any and all of its levels, lines, states, and types, as reported over the last several millennia. This involved hundreds of cultural experts, spiritual teachers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists—and a dozen Cray supercomputers parallel processing this information from all over the world, with enough meta-analyses to attempt to spot any recurring patterns. The result is said to be the entire spectrum of consciousness fully mapped for the first time in history….
“The Code appears to be the Code to the entire Kosmos,” as a senior researcher, who asked to be anonymous, said. “It makes sense if you think about it,” the source continued. “If humans are part of the universe, then when the Code to the former was discovered, it would be the Code to the latter as well—the Code for one is the Code for the other. What the AQAL Code gives us seems to be the basic structure or pattern of the known universe, as [sic] least as we understand it so far.”
The novel suggests that the Singularity event that we’ve heard so much about will take place on two fronts—on the technological front (in the manifest world), and on the cultural front (in the inner worlds).
Finally, Wilber’s novel suggests that while there are ample reasons to be concerned with the frightening events currently unfolding in our world, in the end, after 10 percent of the world has transitioned to the next level of development, a Singularity event will happen and when it does, it will be good, wonderful, rapturous, and “off the wall” (beyond anything we can currently envision).
“Religious impulse,” indeed. (Didn’t Wilber also once do an “Integral 1-2-3″ sort of thing? If so, I just got the connection between that and Lotus 1-2-3!)
Anyway, as a brighter commenter notes, on Myers’ thread:
Change some terms and PZ’s post right here would read like a papal condemnation of a heterodoxy.
Precisely. As I’ve noted previously, PZ would make a fine cult-follower … and makes a pretty good cult leader, too. Though, of course, that point is lost, utterly lost, on the lock-step fanboys.
I came across Ken Wilber, the brilliant psychologist-philosopher. In this blog I want to scream in dismay at the atrocity of such incredibly delusional genius….
Ken Wilber’s influence on humanity is an atrocity worse than the Holocaust.
Wow, that’s even more over-the-top than I’ve ever been!
“Ken Wilber: Worse Than the Holocaust.” I like how it sounds (this best said in a Mel Brooks or Harvey Korman voice).
The New York Times has declared that the proposed mosque will be nothing less than “a monument to tolerance.” It goes without saying that tolerance is a value to which we should all be deeply committed. Nor can we ignore the fact that many who oppose the construction of this mosque embody all that is terrifyingly askew in conservative America—“birthers,” those sincerely awaiting the Rapture, opportunistic Republican politicians, and utter lunatics who yearn to see Sarah Palin become the next president of the United States (note that Palin herself probably falls into several of these categories).
That, from an idiot—who could aspire to being a mere “lunatic”—who not only speaks complimentarily of the ideas of the New Age quack Ken Wilber, but has even guested on Wilber’s Integral Naked bully pulpit; and who further touts the “exquisite ravings” of the psychedelic drug-addled, “not even wrong” world-class fool Terence McKenna. For those, you see, are the embarrassing categories into which Harris himself trips and falls.
In all seriousness, as I’ve noted before, Palin would have a better chance of keeping her religious foolishness out of her political-office decisions, than Harris would:
Harris’s tolerance for Terence McKenna’s psychedelic-induced “exquisite ravings” is just as crazy, and nearly as potentially dangerous, as are any Christian Rapture expectations. For, if the many-worlds cosmos really was peopled with “self-transforming machine elves” who can communicate with us in altered states of consciousness … how might those communications from higher beings affect Harris’s own decision-making, should he (god forbid) ever be placed in a position of responsibility?
People like Sarah Palin understand the separation of Church and State well enough to not try and force their own religious beliefs onto others in that context. By contrast, to truly embrace integral spirituality is, by its very nature, to attempt to apply it to every aspect of life. Would you want someone with that kind of belief system to be holding an elected office, where he would necessarily have to try to bring his spiritual/religious beliefs into government? I sure wouldn’t.
[S]ince the end of World War II, Europe has been tormented by a need to repent.
Brooding over its past crimes (slavery, imperialism, fascism, communism), Europe sees its history as a series of murders and depredations that culminated in two global conflicts. The average European, male or female, is an extremely sensitive being, always ready to feel pity for the world’s sorrows and to take responsibility for them, always asking what the North can do for the South rather than asking what the South can do for itself. Those born after World War II are endowed with the certainty of belonging to the dregs of humanity, an execrable civilization that has dominated and pillaged most of the world for centuries in the name of the superiority of the white man. Since 9/11, for example, a majority of Europeans have felt, despite our sympathy for the victims, that the Americans got what they deserved. The same reasoning prevailed with respect to the terrorist attacks on Madrid in 2004 and on London in 2005, when many good souls, on both the right and the left, portrayed the attackers as unfortunate people protesting Europe’s insolent wealth, its aggression in Iraq or Afghanistan, or its way of life….
Since the time of the conquistadors, Europe has perfected the art of joining progress and cruelty. But a civilization responsible for the worst atrocities as well as the most sublime accomplishments cannot understand itself solely in terms of guilt. The suspicion that colors our most brilliant successes always risks degenerating into self-hatred and facile defeatism. We now live on self-denunciation, as if permanently indebted to the poor, the destitute, to immigrants—as if our only duty were expiation, endless expiation, restoring without limit what we had taken from humanity from the beginning….
The United States, despite its own faults, retains the capacity to combine self-criticism with self-affirmation, demonstrating a pride that we lack. But Europe’s worst enemy is Europe itself, with its penitential view of its past, its corrosive guilt, and a scrupulousness taken to the point of paralysis.
So (liberal) Europeans supposedly feel guilty about WWII, and (liberal) Americans feel guilty about their history of slavery; and both feel guilty about their history of imperialism/colonialism.
Canada, by contrast, has never had slavery; on the contrary, we were at the northern end of the Underground Railroad, receiving the fleeing slaves from the U.S. We’re a British/French colony that’s effectively independent of Her Majesty, giving only lip service to the Monarchy. We don’t start wars—though when the U.S. tried to invade us in 1812, we won—and although we’re still fighting in Afghanistan, we weren’t fooled by GWB into supporting his invasion of Iraq.
So really, aside from the standard near-genocide of the aboriginals (yawn), we have nothing to feel guilty about.
Yet we’ve long been world-leaders in political correctness, in instituting “hate speech” laws, in adopting an official policy of multiculturalism, in “socialized medicine,” and in insisting on self-destructively high levels of immigration (and family reunification in that, to bring the dregs over that couldn’t pass the initial criteria for getting into the country), to the point where I for one cannot walk to the subway in the morning without seeing at least one Muslim woman in a headscarf.
That behavior on the part of us Canucks and our elected representatives is essentially indistinguishable from what the Europeans and Americans are doing; but it clearly isn’t driven by any of the sources of “liberal guilt” that get blamed for their policies. So … then what makes you think that “guilt” is the primary driving force behind the actions of the Brits and ‘mericans, either?
What could the primary motivation be instead? Perceived fairness, maybe? (Even in cases where colonialism was the best thing that could have happened to suttee-burying and human-sacrificing savage countries like India, it was still a nasty business, e.g., with British colonials calling the Indians “dogs,” and meaning it.) You know, one of the five or so significant and tested categories where liberals differ from conservatives? (Hint: Guilt is not one of them, nor is status-striving. And the desire for fairness is in no way the same thing as mere guilt, even if the perpetration of unfairness could indeed lead to feelings of guilt.) Coupled with a populist blank-slate ideology, maybe? Plus the implicit “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” deals made between various minority-interest groups, so that they’ll all get treated “fairly” (never mind that “fairness” in the blank-slate ideology equates to equality of outcomes, not merely equality of opportunities) … and the “domino” fear (not altogether unfounded) that if conservatives were to succeed in rolling back gay-marriage or immigrant rights, they’ll next turn their attention to rolling back women’s rights, and then the rights of blacks, right up to the point where they’ve re-instituted sodomy laws, Christian women keep their heads covered, and what you do in your own bedroom is the Church’s business, just like God wants it to be. You really can’t let them get away with anything: If you don’t speak up when they’re trying to take away the rights of gays, next thing you know they’ll be trying to take your rights away, too, so there is a very real need for women and minorities to stand together, against the typically Bible-driven crap that our conservatives try to get away with.
I have, by now, come to the not-reluctant conclusion that none of the people I’m aware of who are writing about the “psychology of liberal politics” have even the first fucking clue as to what they’re talking about. Even the professional psychiatristTheodore Dalrymple does nothing more competent than pull one-dimensional “explanations” out of his ass, passing them off as if they could actually be supported by the facts. And the Steveosphere … oy: Why do people “malnourish” themselves with vegetarian diets? Guilt (and status-signaling); or else they just enjoy suffering! Why do they care about the environment? Guilt (and status-signaling). Etc., etc., etc.
Madison and his advisers believed that conquest of Canada would be easy and that economic coercion would force the British to come to terms by cutting off the food supply for their West Indies colonies. Furthermore, possession of Canada would be a valuable bargaining chip. Frontiersmen demanded the seizure of Canada not because they wanted the land, but because the British were thought to be arming the Indians and thereby blocking settlement of the West. As Horsman concluded, “The idea of conquering Canada had been present since at least 1807 as a means of forcing England to change her policy at sea. The conquest of Canada was primarily a means of waging war, not a reason for starting it.” Hickey flatly stated, “The desire to annex Canada did not bring on the war.” Brown concluded, “The purpose of the Canadian expedition was to serve negotiation, not to annex Canada.” Burt, a leading Canadian scholar, agreed completely, noting that Foster—the British minister to Washington—also rejected the argument that annexation of Canada was a war goal. However, the general American public opinion was that a war with Canada would barely be a war at all. The U.S had a population of 7 million and an army of 35,000. Canada had barely 5000 British regulars and about 4000 militia defending it. The American public paid the war little attention, considering it a completion of the American Revolutionary War.
The majority of the inhabitants of Upper Canada (Ontario) were either exiles from the United States (United Empire Loyalists) or postwar immigrants. The Loyalists were hostile to union with the U.S., while the other settlers seem to have been uninterested. The Canadian colonies were thinly populated and only lightly defended by the British Army. Americans then believed that many in Upper Canada would rise up and greet a United States invading army as liberators, which did not happen. One reason American forces retreated after one successful battle inside Canada was that they could not obtain supplies from the locals. But the possibility of local assistance suggested an easy conquest, as former President Thomas Jefferson seemed to believe in 1812: “The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us the experience for the attack on Halifax, the next and final expulsion of England from the American continent.”
Europe sent armies, missionaries, and merchants to distant lands, but also invented anthropology, which is a way of seeing through others’ eyes, of standing at some distance from oneself in order to approach the stranger. The colonial adventure died of this fundamental contradiction: the subjection of continents to the laws of a mother country that at the same time taught its subjects the idea of a nation’s right to govern itself. In demanding independence, the colonies were applying to their masters the very rules that they had learned from them.
Hmm, yet another reason why colonialism was the best thing that ever happened to those countries—trading a few years of foreign rule for a “common enemy” which the people could unite and rise against, typically erecting a democracy in its aftermath, which they didn’t have before the unwanted occupation.
Would India be a democracy today if it wasn’t for the British rule which not only gave them the democratic example, but also provided a common enemy for all of their factions and castes to unite against? I very much doubt it (though admittedly, I’ve done near-zero research on all this).
A perfect meritocracy would probably be a truly nasty place. It’s bad enough that many people suspect that homeless people did something to deserve their situation (and to be brutally honest, some did). Imagine what society could be like if you knew beyond doubt that people who were down and out deserved it, and that people who were low on the salary scale or the social pecking order were there because they deserved to be. Nobody would lift a finger to help them; in fact people would likely compound their misery by rubbing their lowliness in their faces. On the other hand, societies ruled excessively by fatalism or chance, like hereditary aristocracies or clan societies, where family status takes precedence over individual achievement, tend to encourage the delusion that people have earned something when they have merely been lucky. Also, people who didn’t get lucky may get the idea that striving for improvement is pointless. But a mixture of causality and chance mitigates both extremes. A visible linkage of effort and outcome encourages people to try to improve their lives, but a healthy dose of chance reminds people that they can’t afford to be too smug; that with a different set of circumstances their lives could have been quite different. While chance creates some injustices—talented people often don’t get the breaks and far less qualified people do—it’s not hard to see that a society with perfect meritocracy might end up being far more unjust than what we have now.
Uh, hate to break it to you, Steve, but I’ve already had my “lowliness” rubbed in my face by chubby Engineering Economics profs (back in my bearded, sweatpants-wearing, best-in-class university days), tubby conservative MBAs in airports, homophobic goat-fucking Muslims, braindead white pig-fuckers, too-stupid-to-live niggers, and everything in between: in each case, morons who were convinced that I was below them, and who couldn’t wait to push me down even further.
Nor do I recall anyone “lifting a finger” to help me out, during those difficult periods. (Nor did I lazily benefit from any social programs.) On the contrary, the flaws that Dutch is hypothesizing in meritocracy already exist aplenty in our present system, where the injustice is being perpetrated exactly by the people who are the most prejudiced failures, without even the potential to do anything of importance in the world, and who need more than anything to be reminded of how preciously little they have to contribute to society. Democracy has taught them otherwise, and allowed them to laughably imagine that their opinions are worth sharing, even on topics which they know absolutely nothing about; feudalism, at least, wouldn’t have encouraged them in that delusion (“Bloody peasants!”), nor would a perfect meritocracy do so.
If you have the tools to rise to the top, you’ll find a way to crawl out of the filth, regardless of where you started, even while those “above” you are doing their best to push you down farther: When the world kicks you in the teeth, you get back up, see a dentist, and make your plans for how to hit back harder.
So: “Making it worse?” I don’t think so. No, the biggest “victims” of a perfect meritocracy would be the people in our world who have risen, economically, far above where their talent and intelligence should place them (e.g., unionized pig-fuckers, and all recipients of affirmative action, including every Woman’s Studies and Black Studies prof); and the biggest beneficiaries would be the merit-bearing people who are “unlucky” today (and unable or unwilling to qualify as members of an “oppressed minority”), and already being crapped on by the world’s utterly worthless, two-digit-IQ proles of all races, for that.
Interestingly, this is how Dutch expects America to unfold over the coming decades:
I can recall how Iran degenerated from a modern society to a medieval one in barely a generation, and how we gave up on going to the moon and now have large numbers of people who don’t believe it happened at all. I can see it happening here, slowly. We start off where most Americans are now, as passive consumers of the fruits of science with no real understanding of how they work. As more Americans live in urban settings, cut off from nature, and live increasingly in virtual reality worlds, they will see less and less need for science education. For a while, we’ll cover our shortfall of scientists, engineers and technologists from outside [ironically, given that big business in America has been crying for years about a supposed "skilled labor shortage"—as a ruse for pushing wages down—when there has not yet ever been anything even remotely resembling that], but as the society becomes increasingly self-satisfied and anti-intellectual, as the rewards for science lag behind those for less productive jobs, and other nations overtake the U.S., eventually the U.S. will stop being an attractive destination for scientists, engineers and technologists. One by one, we’ll begin abandoning scientific enterprises….
Eventually, we’ll reach the point where the technological degradation begins to pinch. We will probably, to some extent, stratify into a society of haves who can afford the conveniences we now take for granted and have nots who can’t. [Biotechnologies will make that gap even larger than Dutch imagines.] More likely, as services get more scarce, people will decide to abandon some luxuries to be able to afford others. As the economy stagnates, people will insist that the state supply their life support needs. They’ll want the rich to supply that money and the rich will do the predictable thing: leave or quit earning. People with the energy and motivation to do science will seek their fortunes elsewhere. [Presumably in India, China, Singapore, etc.] People will certainly decide they have better things to spend money on than taxes for schools. We’ll decide that vocational training is cheaper and faster, and you don’t need to know whether the earth goes around the sun to cut a 2×4 or install a motherboard. We’ll decide we don’t need liberal education. As the rest of the world advances, we probably won’t fall below the global lowest common denominator, but bear in mind that countries near the global mean for GDP per capita include Mexico, Brazil, Iran, Turkey and Russia.
And a perfect meritocracy (with no welfare net to sink into, low taxes, the pressure to keep learning, and big rewards for tech knowledge) would be worse?
Plus, if you take out the step where “people will insist that the state supply their life support needs,” the rich don’t need to leave, right? How much of the downward spiral would that arrest?
Of the millions who claim to be deadly serious about Saving the World from global warming by limiting carbon emissions, how many are truly sincere?
There’s one surefire test: Do they demand reductions in immigration to the U.S.?
Answer: almost none of them do.
By precisely the same token, any conservatives who are “truly sincere” about their politics would conserve finite natural resources, and do their best to limit dependence on foreign resources (e.g., by buying local, thus saving the oil which would otherwise be used in transporting the goods). As Steven Dutch put it:
Petroleum is finite, and therefore we will eventually run out of it. Running out is not the real problem—running short is. Those spikes in price at the pump are signs we can hear the slurping sound at the end of the straw. Sooner or later, we will have to find some other source of energy. The only alternatives on the horizon are sunlight in some form (wind, photoelectric, biomass) or some other form of stored energy (nuclear, geothermal, fusion). Hydrogen can fall in either category—if we develop a good photocatalyst or use solar power for electrolysis, it’s basically sunlight. If we use nuclear or geothermal power for the electrolysis then the hydrogen is non-solar stored energy. Fusion, as a cynic pointed out, is the energy source of the future and always will be.
Then there is our economic and military vulnerability to petroleum shortages. Equally important is the power that petroleum gives to lunatic fringe movements to threaten Western civilization. On that grounds alone, developing alternatives to petroleum ought to be a supreme matter of national security….
“Conservatism” and “conserve” come from the same root. You don’t unnecessarily squander limited resources you may need later. In fact you don’t unnecessarily squander anything—period. You keep your debt limited to the minimum necessary. You pay your bills. If you get an unexpected windfall, you manage it carefully to stretch it out. You treat things in your care like they’re your own.
So completely apart from global warming, fossil fuels are finite and will have a finite lifetime, and we have no practical substitute ready to replace them. Therefore we need to manage them carefully to maximize their lifetime. First we need to extend the lifetime of the resources themselves, and second, we need to buy time to develop alternatives and bring them on line. Doing so will reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a side result.
It’s a painfully amusing irony that most of the people who are lambasting Republicans for abandoning their traditional fiscal restraint, simultaneously pretend that finite resources are not a problem. We would have neither an energy crisis nor a global warming problem if conservatives treated fossil fuels the way they claim money should be treated. (For that matter, we wouldn’t be reeling from the collapse of the sub-prime lending market if conservatives had treated money the way they claim money should be treated.)
You plan for the worst case. You don’t necessarily assume the worst case, but you have a plan if it happens. So even conservatives who regard the war in Iraq as a fiasco nevertheless tend to advocate gritting our teeth and slugging it out, because the worst case scenarios from losing or retreating are much worse than the present [c. 2008] mess.
But when it comes to climate change, the same people see nothing but rainbows and fuzzy bunny rabbits, or warm beaches and palm trees. Terrorist attacks and global Sharia law? Well, those are likely outcomes of retreating from Iraq. Sea level rise, more droughts and severe weather from global warming? That’s just fear-mongering.
How many members-in-good-standing of the Steveosphere, including Sailer himself, even attempt to pass that “surefire” conservative test, of treating finite resources responsibly?
Answer: almost none of them do. Because, you see, to adopt any of those behaviors would be to step dangerously close to becoming the evil Liberal Other; and one must guard against that, at all costs.
The same thing applies, in my opinion, when gay liberals respond to the fact that Muslims in Amsterdam are beating up gays in broad daylight, by saying, “So don’t go to Amsterdam!” It’s not so much that they value multiculturalism and the “tolerance of intolerance” over their own survival, or can’t see that those intolerant groups aren’t holding up their end of the “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” deal that the various “oppressed minority” groups implicitly make with each other; it’s rather that to adopt the means necessary to preserve themselves would simultaneously put them in league with the Evil Conservative Other. (I’m open to better explanations of that real-life response, I just haven’t seen any, so I’ve had to come up with my own.)
Sailer’s line of attack, above, is actually a blatant cheapshot, predicated on the idea that environmental groups are generally aware of the environmental effects of unskilled immigration. Speaking as someone who worked for a year in a natural foods store back in Winnipeg a decade ago, and who didn’t encounter that (immigration-environmentalism) idea until I discovered Sailer’s blog several years ago, I think it’s safe to say that the (valid) relation of Third World immigration to environmentalism would be news to most of the people working in that field. That is, their consideration (or lack of same) of that is no “surefire test” of their motives—not even close—and Sailer’s claim that it is, is actually quite an intellectually dishonest position which is, ironically, being used to call the sincerity of environmentalists into question. ‘Cause, see, if they’re not “sincere” (by Sailer’s idiotic and predictably one-dimensional criteria) then environmentalism can be dismissed as just a scam purveyed by leftists—a “green tree with red roots”—with no implications for how its ideas should change any “true conservative’s” behaviors.
Mark Williams, the tea party leader who wrote a blog post this week calling the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) racist, has been “expelled” from the National Tea Party Federation.
Williams wrote the blog post on Thursday in response to the NAACP’s Tuesday declaration accusing the tea party movement of tolerating racist elements in its midst…. It was written as an imaginary letter to President Abraham Lincoln and accused the NAACP of being racist for using the word “colored” in its name.
Heh, wish I had thought of that. Last I heard, it stood for “Niggers Are Always Causing Problems,” or “Niggers Are Always Cocking Pistols,” or “Niggers Always Angry at Caucasian People”!
This reminded me of an all-time classic Bloom County comic strip, from back in my youth:
Mom: That’s the most adorable little colored girl playing outside.
Steve: “Colored”? You’re saying “colored people” in 1988? You know better, Ma.
Mom: Then why the “National Association for Colored People? I don’t think Negroes mind at all.
Steve: Don’t say “Negroes,” Ma! You can’t say “Negroes”!
Mom: Can I say “United Negro College Fund”?
Steve: You are baiting me, Ma!
Dad: That’s it. We’re leaving.
Mom: Stay put, Reginald. “Mister Socially Sensitive” isn’t finished shaming his parents into enlightenment.
Steve: Everybody just calm down. Let’s agree to use the the New-Age term “People of Color.”
Mom: People of Color.
Steve: People of Color.
Mom: Colored people.
Steve: NO!!
Dad: We’re leaving.
Me, I’ll be happy to use whatever motherfucking word the whining little fuzzy-wuzzy shit-monkeys prefer … provided that they can stop changing their minds every few fucking years about the words they decree are “okay” for other people to use.
Christ, you’d think they were a bunch of goddamned feminists….
This is by far the wisest and most-insightful foray into political opinions that I’ve seen from any skeptic, much less Phil Plait:
I am in many ways an individual libertarian (I think people should have far more personal freedom than they do in this country), a social liberal (I think one of the many roles of government is to help those who cannot help themselves, and to do what individuals and corporations cannot do or cannot be trusted to do), and a governmental conservative (in the actual sense of the old party; I want a government that is big enough to do what it needs to do and no bigger).
I also understand that ideas sometimes have boundaries in practice.
Freedoms are tricky things. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. The old adage saying “Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose” is wrong and dumb; in fact the act of swinging your fist at all is a threat.
I want a government that’ll help when it’s needed, but won’t when it’s not, because I know that a lot of people will take advantage of a government that is set up to help them.
I know our economy should have the freedom it needs to grow. But I also know it needs to be regulated because people are greedy, and people with nearly unlimited power and resources will sometimes spectacularly abuse them to the detriment of the country and the planet.
I loathe the idea of killing, but I know that there are bad guys out there, and we need a strong military to keep them at bay.
I hate paying taxes. But I love our highway system, clean water, and space exploration.
I think that people have the right to defend themselves, their family, their property… and that’s why they have the right to bear arms. But I also know that many people aren’t wise enough and emotionally stable enough to own a gun, and that’s why I don’t think everyone has the right to bear every arm.
I think that everyone has the right to speak their mind. But I think many loud voices right now belong to hateful, mean, bigoted, small-minded hypocrites who will say anything to get themselves noticed or to push their agenda. I also know they all have the right, the freedom to say the terrible things they do. But I have the right, and we have the duty, to counter their speech with my own voice.
So what do we do?
We need to teach people to think. To understand that there are balances in life, nuances, corollaries to decisions.
It was a day of unprecedented chaos in downtown Toronto as roving bands of G20 protesters set fire to police vehicles and smashed windows Saturday despite a $1-billion security tab and thousands of police at the ready….
A thick plume of dark grey smoke hovered above the city’s financial district at Bay and King streets after three police vehicles were set ablaze….
The hospitals on University Avenue, where the march began, and the Eaton Centre shopping mall were put under lockdown. There were reports of looting at the mall, a popular tourist attraction. Downtown subway lines and commuter trains were shut down at the request of police at the height of the violence….
[A] renegade group of about 50 people left a trail of destruction down Queen Street West in the heart of the city as they targeted symbols of power, authority and capitalism.
Bank windows were smashed with hammers. Rocks were thrown through several Starbucks coffee houses. TV vans were smashed. Mailboxes were flipped and chucked at windows.
One protester threw a pickaxe through the window of a bank tower like a tomahawk as his posse roared its approval.
“Bomb the Banks,” was spray painted on walls.
Wow, I missed all of that: I was inside all weekend, reading.
While outside, it was “the Sixties all over again”!
Something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there….
Last I heard, it stood for “Niggers Are Always Causing Problems,” or “Niggers Are Always Cocking Pistols,” or “Niggers Always Angry at Caucasian People”!
