Kool-Aid or Diet Coke?

I know I should stay away from politics, for my own sanity's sake. I know it is poison, and yet, how can I? It's not a matter of addiction - although, in my case, there is some of that, too - but if I stay away, I will have no voice and will thus let somone else speak on my behalf... "Those absent are wrong" ("Nieobecni nie maja racji"), said the chairman of the Union of the Socialist Youth of Poland, sometime in the 80's. What he meant by it is that the voices of those who are not participating do not count and can be dismissed, as if they were plainly wrong. I remember disagreeing with him (only in my mind, of course - there was no opportunity for open disagreement), because not participating was the only way of saying "no". What else can you do but refuse to participate in elections where the only candidates were those from the communist party and its puppet associations? Yes, you could go to the polls, cross all the candidates out, write "F..k you!" on the ballot, and deposit it in the ballot box. (That's what I did the first and only time my father forced me to go and "vote"). However, the only outcome of that "protest" was that the state-controlled media could say the next day that "98 percent of Poles went to the polls yesterday to express the will of the people in our socialist democracy". (Sadly, those phony numbers were used by some "intellectuals" in the West to point out the sorry state of Western democracies, where the participation was mere 60 percent or less...)

I know how divisive politics can be, yet for some years after arriving in the US I have been quite angry at the fact that politics was almost never discussed: not at a work, not at parties, not with friends... It was so different from Poland, where politics was a very frequent topic of conversation, even in times, when openly griping about communism could land one in hot water. There was no time that was not right for talking politics. I remember heated discussions - well, quarrels really - at the Christmas Eve dinner at my grandmother's, where there seemed to be 10 different opinions among the 8 of us... And so I saw the reluctance of Americans to openly broach the subject of their political views as a sign of cowardice. Now I know better and see it as a sign of maturity and good judgment.

Perhaps it is a cultural difference, or a matter of not having been accustomed to democracy long enough, but Poles seem to have a very hard time disagreeing amicably with each other over politics. It's tearing not only the country apart, but families and friends as well. I just read this cautionary tale in the blog by a Polish writer and journalist, Malgorzata Karolina Piekarska. Unfortunately, it is in Polish, so let me summarize it for you:

She invited a bunch of close friends to a party at her home. Unfortunately, it fell on an "election weekend", so the conversation inevitably (?) drifted toward the candidates and their platforms:

"It started with watching the Prime Minister's speech. With timid comments. [...] With time, the comments became more and more blunt. Finally, the guests started openly expressing their views. [...] I was called into the kitchen. Here, my two married friends were arguing. He'll vote differently than she, because he's smart and she's dumb. He'll probably divorce her, because he no longer has respect for her. Doesn't matter that they have a child. [...] She is stupid and her views are stupid and harmful. [...] In the melee, for the first time, it got to male-on-female fights for political reasons - kicks, name-calling, even pulling each other's hair! Nobody was dancing. Almost everybody was arguing. One of the guests, on wobbly legs, showed his political adversaries his genitals. I swear that my friends are educated people. This is the so-called intellectual elite of the country."

Although she doesn't say that any divorce proceedings were started as a result of these fights, some friendships did suffer damage, possibly irreparable. When I think about how badly Americans are now divided along the political fault lines, and what issues are at stake in this division, I feel grateful that we still seem to have a good measure of civility left, that all this shouting and name calling is only temporary, and is already starting to subside. Perhaps the blessing lies in our short attention spans, or that we learned not to take politics and (especially) politicians seriously - whatever it is, given the number of guns in private hands, I'm really, really glad we know when to pull back and talk about the weather. :-)

Tolerancjonizm

A couple of weeks ago I heard a recorded lecture by a Polish feminist about the "new lines of tolerance and intolerance in Europe". She used the word "tolerancjonizm" ("tolerantionism" in English?), which I haven't heard before. She spoke of it with disdain - or at least that's how I understood her tone - as a term coined by the right wing in Poland in order to give a name to what it sees a the ideology of "tolerance for its own sake" emanating from the Western Europe.

It struck me as a very adequate term, probably better than its somewhat broader (and poorly translatable into Polish) alternative of "political correctness". Indeed, we seem to be living in the age of the "dictatorship of tolerance", which replaced the "dictatorship of proletariat" as the modus operandi of the Left. Like with the former, here too some are "more equal than others", more worthy of tolerance. Thus, having a statue of Virgin Mary on display, covered in elephant dung, should be tolerated as art, while there is no tolerance for a few cartoons ridiculing the moslem prophet Muhammad. (On the other hand, it's OK to show tolerance toward those, who demand death penalty for the cartoonists who "offend islam".) Displays of hatred towards the United States on American college campuses are to be tolerated. Not so much the patriotic (read "jingoistic") or conservative views on those same campuses. Signs of islamic oppression of women, such as hijab and forced marriages are perfectly tolerable facets of someone's culture (saying otherwise amounts to nothing more than "cultural imperialism"). On the other hand, telling a female colleague at work that she looks "sexy" is grounds for firing of the hapless male who would say such a vile thing. (Zero tolerance for sexual harassment!)

Of course, a lot of these double standards are driven by fear of the "moslem street", which has been known to fly into murderous rage at the slightest provocation. But most of it is driven by the nihilistic desire to dilute and undermine Western civilization, with no regard to what it will be replaced with. It is a consequence of the narcissism that permeates our culture: "apres moi, le deluge!" seems to be the attitude ot the XXth Century's Western Man. (Not XXIst century's - I hope the new generation is smarter and better than we, the self-absorbed baby-boomers. If not, we're in trouble.)

What's really scary about global warming?

I feel very conflicted about the "global warming" meme being shoved down our collective throats. On the one hand, I'm convinced that this is a gigantic hoax driven in part by well-meaning people, but largely by anti-Western, anti-capitalist ideologies I'm extremely wary of. On the other hand, won't the good that may come out of that, like alternative energy and cleaner environment, outweigh the bad? Well, that's exactly what I'm afraid of - that it will not. For one thing, the benefits are yet to be realized, but there are already plenty of very troubling signs that evoke terrible associations for me. After all, wasn't the premise of communism a benevolent one? To distribute wealth more equally, to stop exploitation of one person by another, to introduce rational planning into the volatile nature of capitalist economy... And look what we ended up with.

I'm not saying that the global warming hysteria will lead to a revolution, a world socialist government, or gulags.  (I'm also not saying that it won't.) However, the attempts to silence and vilify the skeptics are extremely troubling. As is the politicization of science, the involvement of government bureaucracies, the enormous amounts of money that will be extracted from societies for all kinds of hare-brained ideas that, in the best of circumstances, will have very little effect, and in the worst, will cause irreparable damage.

Yes, I always hated the SUVs, considering them an idiotic fad that refused to go away. I don't think of myself as a tree-hugger (although I was one in my teenage years and early adulthood), but at the same time I don't like cars very much, and the notion that a single person could be burning so much gas moving his/her ass in a humongous car from one place to another was making me genuinely angry. Especially after 9/11, when it became painfully clear what our gas money had been paying for...

I would really welcome a much better public transit system in the US, and much smaller cars. I think I wrote about this before, but George W. Bush wasted a tremendous opportunity by not rallying the country around the idea of energy conservation and independence in response to the 9/11 carnage. Previous attempts by Presidents Ford and Carter to lower our dependence on foreign oil failed, because the OPEC countries responded by pumping more oil and lowering its price, thus making alternative energy sources badly uneconomical. Tying this to national security in the wake of the terrorist attack would have insulated this project - at least to some extent - from such economic pressures. The Americans would have swallowed $2 or $3 per gallon, if they knew that the revenue would go toward building energy independence. Now our only hope is that the price will stay high long enough for alternative energy to take hold, and that OPEC will not be able to increase production to kill it. (At the same time, it would be even worse if the price of oil got much higher, forcing the world's economy into a nosedive... It is a tough balancing act and we will need all the luck we can get.)

I cringe imagining government bureaucrats all over the world rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the windfall the global warming scare will produce. They will be relevant again! The public is virtually begging for more onerous regulations,  bigger taxes, more intrusions into their personal choices - let's give it to them! Governments are like those gigantic steam engines of the past: hard to get them going, but once they are in motion you have to keep feeding them, and it's awfully hard to make them stop or turn around. Remember these three idiotic questions the airline agents were required to ask years and years after the "Lockerbie bombing"?  "Who packed your bags?", "Have these bags been under your complete control since the time you packed them?", "Has anyone given you anything to bring on board?". It mast have been pretty evident to anybody with half a brain how ridiculously ineffective was this method of thwarting terrorism (was even a single bombing prevented because of this measure??) and yet it took 15 (or more?) years until finally the US government decided to let go of it. (Imagine my shock when I heard those questions last November, before boarding a plane at Schiphol in Amsterdam... They are still doing it. How sad and annoying.)

Another example: the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which is doing grave damage to American competitiveness, yet nobody has the guts to pull the plug on it. My point is that once you open the door for the government to regulate, you will have to live with the consequences for many, many years, even if it turns out that these regulations were ill-advised to begin with. This scares me much more than a change of a couple of degrees in average temperatures.

Quote of the week

The ideologies of "self-esteem" and "multiculturalism" are two sides of the same nihilistic coin. "Self-esteem" devalues achievement and responsibility, which are the sources of genuine self-respect. And "multiculturalism" it is merely a pose of opposition to one's own culture; it entails no real regard for different cultures. -- James Taranto

Malice or stupidity?

I'm normally extremely skeptical of conspiracy theories, but when I think about the Daylight Savings Time I have a hard time resisting the temptation of thinking about it as a grand experiment of governments to see how far they could go in pushing harebrained schemes on their subjects without eliciting massive protests. I'm sorry, but I just can't see any other benefits to this massive disruption of all things that depend on time as measureb by clocks. Energy savings? There might be some, but they probably pale in comparison to time, money, and energy wasted in preparation and response to the time shift.

This year provides an especially egregious example of that waste. A small handful of countries including USA and Canada, decided to extend the DST by several weeks at the beginning and end of that period. Since almost all aspects of our lives are now heavily dependent on computers, and those in turn depend on their clocks, the impact of that decision is enormous. I run a small IT shop in a relatively small part of a large university, but our group already spent many hours dealing with the change in DST: learning about the implications and steps we needed to take; obtaining, testing and applying patches; informing users; dealing with computer problems that arouse due to the patches, etc... I'm sure there will be more disruption and time wasted when the DST rolls in this weekend... I just pray that at least a few congressmen will miss a few very important events due to the havoc they unleashed, but I'm afraid that the diligence and hard work of their IT people will shield them from the consequences of their stupidity.

I'm not an economist and don't have hard data, but if someone were to calculate the economic cost of the change in the DST, I suspect it would be staggering, even in the IT-related costs alone. It may well be more costly and disruptive than the infamous "Y2K bug", because that one affected mostly older, large-scale systems, while the current problem will impact all kinds of devices, including personal PCs, PDAs, phones, etc. So why isn't it getting the same level of media attention as Y2K? Why is the IT industry swallowing this bitter and costly pill without so much as a whine? I think that this is at least in part due to the out-of-proportion frenzy that was whipped up the last time around. The Y2K bug, which was supposed to bring the post-industrial nations to their knees (remember the stories about seemingly intelligent people stacking up supplies and moving out of cities and into primitive cabins so as to avoid the mayhem that was to follow?), fizzled, and so both the media and the IT people are now afraid to even bring up the subject of DST, so as not to be seen as Chicken Littles yet again. That's why the US Congress will get away with making the stupidest and costliest mistake since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The real tragedy is: that'll only encourage them.

A masterpiece of a con

I wanted to write a post about how I hate hypocrisy and hypocrites, and point to this story about Al Gore, the Oscar-winning crusader for the environment, whose Knoxville, Tennessee, mansion consumes 20 times more electricity than an average American household. However, the more information about this gets uncovered by inquisitive bloggers, the harder it becomes not to admire Gore for his devilish cleverness. Get this:

1. Gore's mansion used so much natural gas and electricity in 2006, that his energy bill for that year was $30,000


2. Gore buys "carbon offsets" (a modern form of indulgencies) to compensate for his use of carbon-based energy sources


3. He buys those offsets from a company called Generation Investment Management


4. Gore is a chairman of that company and owns its stock


5. In other words, it is like me issuing a speeding ticket every time I go 100 mph on a highway, and writing a check to myself.

If that isn't a clever, clever scheme, I don't know what is. Gore may still be a hypocrite, but he's also much more than that: he's a brilliant con man. There is nothing particularly impressive about profiting from any public fad or hysteria of the moment. What is impressive is double-dipping: profiting from whipping up that hysteria (e.g. by making a blokbuster "documentary", getting an Oscar, being paid for speeches), and then positioning yourself to make tons of money from the gullible public. In some sense it's akin to a dishonest stockbroker talking up some worthless stock in some chat rooms, and then making a killing by selling it to the suckers. It is however, much more elaborate and intelligent a con - it is a masterpiece of the genre. I've always had a soft pot for mastery. If I could be assured that Gore would use his considerable skill for the benefit of the United States and not merely for personal enrichment and aggrandizement, I'd vote for him in a heartbeat.

Selective sensitivity

Some Polish people are pretty upset about a relatively unfunny cartoon that recently appeared in The New Yorker: one boy says to another, "My parents named me Zbigniew because they were drunk." I'm guessing that what the author of this cartoon found funny was this hard to pronounce name - obviously, someone must have been off their rocker to give that name to a child. The trouble is, that's a fairly popular Polish name, so the Polish equivalent of this cartoon would (in translation) read something like, "My parents named me Sean, because they were drunk." Funny? You decide.

The thing wouldn't be worth two seconds of attention, if it weren't for the selective sensitivity adopted by the Western media of late. Do you think the editors of The New Yorker would have published the cartoon, if the name being made fun of was "Obama?" Or "Shlomo?" Or "Mohammed"? Or "Kfume"? I seriously doubt it. Especially, if the cartoon would even so little as hint at something that might be objectionable to the "perpetually offended", i.e. muslims.

It's not the joke itself, but the context of cowardice surrounding it, that is so offensive. This is what happens when you start sacrificing the right of free speech and free expression on the altar of "sensitivity" (read: "fear"). You can't say anything disparaging or funny about women, because it's "sexist". Racial minorities will accuse you of "racism", if you dare to make fun of them. Then come the various ethnic groups. Pretty soon you find that the only people you can make fun of are abstract white men with no religious or ethnic affilliation. That's the world we're already living in. Do you find that funny?

"Terrifying political correctness"

Here is Vaclav Klaus again, commenting on the responses to his interview:

I am getting a lot of reactions from the U.S. to my Friday interview in "Hospodářské noviny" where I talked about the global warming, among other things. Someone has distributed the interview to many internet servers and I have pleased many American non-Al-Gores by my statements because they feel as a minority that is under the pressure of a terrifying political correctness in the U.S. It is crucial to call things by the right name.

The phrase "terrifying political correctness" has struck a nerve with me, because it is terrifying indeed. How it emasculates people! In all my 27 years of living in the socialist Poland I did not see people as afraid to say what's on their minds as I am witnessing in the United States, a country that seems attached to the idea of "free speech" as no other country in the world. On the one hand, you can of course openly curse and vilify this country not only with impunity, but to the applause of many "progressive" Americans. On the other hand, stating that women may be less genetically predisposed for interest in science than men may spell the end of your career, even if you're a president of Harvard, unless you hurry and apologize profusely. Political correctness is worse than secret police, because it gets internalized, so you always carry it with you - the police at least leave you alone from time to time.

Vaclav Klaus on the myth of global warming

Being from Eastern Europe it is impossible not to feel a sense of pride when hearing leaders like Vaclav Klaus bluntly say things that no politician in the West would dare to say. Here is Klaus in a recent interview, speaking about "global warming":

Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It's neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses. This is clearly such an incredible failure of so many people, from journalists to politicians. If the European Commission is instantly going to buy such a trick, we have another very good reason to think that the countries themselves, not the Commission, should be deciding about similar issues.

One can only hope that a decade in the EU will not turn all of of them into spineless worms like so many of their Western counterparts.

War dividends

I know it is going to sound cynical, because there is a lot of human tragedy underneath all this, but the war in Iraq and the mess in the Middle East have produced a number of benefits for the United States (and for the rest of the world, to some extent). To name just the big ones:

1. Re-igniting the ancient feud between the Shia and the Sunni. As long as they keep duking it out amongst themselves, they will have less energy and resources left to dish it out to the Great Satan. Similarly with the other various factions: Hamas vs. Fatah in Palestine, Hizbollah in Lebabon. The rest of the world is much better off when the murderous attention of muslims is focused inward.


2. With Iran now scaring its Sunni neighbors shiiteless (or should it be "shiiteful"?), they are looking to the US as the only stabilizing force capable of keeping the deranged Iranian leadership in check. The Europeans have proved (yet again) completely helpless, and Bush is sending signal after signal that he's not going to lift a finger against Iran - one can only imagine the sense of vulnerability of countries like Saudi Arabia.


3. The fairly dramatic rise in oil prices apparently had negligible effect on the US economy, which is remarkably strong. While the higher prices were a huge windfall to the oil-producing countries, they also - and more importantly - demonstrated that the global economy is not as vulnerable to disruption coming from the Middle East as it appeared to be in the seventies. If the interest in alternative energy sources is sustained and leads to technological innovation and consumer adoption, this vulnerability will be reduced even further, to the point when (as Spengler points out in his piece), sudden disappearance of the entire Middle East may well go unnoticed.


4. If Abu Ghraib was such a public relations nightmare for the United States, imagine what the relentless carnage unleashed on innocent civilians by assorted islamic fanatics must be doing to their image in the world, including the so-called "Arab street". One would have to be completely brain dead not to feel a profound cognitive and emotional distress upon being relentlessly bombarded by news of muslims slaughtering other muslims by busload, while the "infidels" are emerging relatively unscathed from the bloodbath.


5. The power that the United States now solely wields on the global stage only increased, with many countries - including the enemies of the US - now realizing what mayhem would be unleashed if the only superpower were to disengage from the world. If we withdrew from Iraq next week, the brutal slaughter that would engulf that country would be on par with the Rwandan genocide.

Hopeless but not serious

A blunt, honest look at the irrelevance of the Middle East's instability for the rest of the world:

 "The economic significance of the Shi'ites of Iraq and Lebanon is negligible; the Palestinians represent a net drain on the world economy, as consumers of subsidies. If space aliens were to transport all of them to another planet Tuesday next, world markets would not notice." (Spengler in Asia Times)

72 virgins

This is clever and hilarious: 72 Virgins by Steve Martin. My favorites:

Virgin No. 7: Here, I’ll just pull down your zipper. Oh, sorry!

Virgin No. 9: It was a garlic-and-onion pizza. Why?

Virgin No. 10: . . . so I see Heath, and he goes, “Like, what are you doing here?,” and I go, “I’m hangin’ out,” so he goes, “Like, what?” . . . 

Virgin No. 14: I’m eighty-four. So what?

Virgin No. 16: Even I know that’s tiny.

Virgin No. 17: “Do it”? Meaning what?

Virgin No. 30: You are in?

Virgin No. 38: I’m Zania, from the planet Xeron. My vagina is on my foot.

Virgin No. 39: It’s a lesion, and, no, I don’t know what kind.

Virgin No. 45: When you’re done, you should really check out how cool this ceiling is.

Virgin No. 56: I think I found it. Is that it? Oh. Is this it? Oh, this must be it. No?

Virgin No. 58: Those are my testicles.

A new low

Just when you thought that Western cowardice vis-a-vis islam couldn't get any worse, along comes YouTube and shows that it is possible to set a new low:

An atheist commentator, Nick Gisburne, has been posting videos presenting his logical arguments against Christianity, but when he tried the same with islam, YouTube removed his video and... canceled his account. His "offense" wasn't even on par with the famous Dutch cartoons - he wasn't openly ridiculing islam or its holy cows, he was merely quoting from quran to make a point. Of course, as a private company, YouTube has the right to say what can or can not be posted on its servers - but isn't their selectiveness at least a little suspicious? Would they be showing the same amount of "sensitivity" toward Christianity, if Christians went on a rampage every time somebody in the West said something "disparaging" about their religion? (Moslems slaughtering other moslems and blowing up their mosques apparently isn't offensive enough to cause mass demonstrations, but that's another story.) Is it just a coincidence that YouTube is now owned by Google, the same spineless company that meekly agreed to carry water for Chinese censors??

Evolution of stupidity

A friend sent me a link to a lecture by the geneticist Roman Giertych, a well known (at least in Poland, if not in Europe) critic of evolutionism. (Un?)fortunately, this lecture is in Polish, and so unless you speak the language, you're out of luck. Or, rather, a lucky bastard, as Prof. Giertych is a living proof that you can amass a bunch of Ph.D.s and still be an idiot. Listening to him was a mild perhaps, but nevertheless a torture. Painful as it is for me to admit, after this experience I now understand the anger and hostility of people like Richard Dawkins much better. This doesn't make Dawkins less of an arrogant asshole, but at least I can see why he is so pissed off - it truly is a travesty that people like Giertych are allowed to call themselves "scientists" and thus gain instant credibility with their audiences, which they then proceed to bullshit with religious mumbo-jumbo.

As the imaginary god is my witness, I did genuinely try to approach this with an open mind. I've been very disilussioned with the politicization and dogmatization of science, where voices straying from the currently reigning dogma - whether it is "global warming" or "educational benefits of diversity" or evolutionism - are viciously attacked, ridiculed, supressed. And yet, listening to Mr. Giertych I found myself longing for a sort of credentialing body for scientists, which would have the authority to ban a person whose conduct or pronouncements are damaging to science, from calling himself a "scientist".

It isn't to say that the entire lecture was nonsense. In fact, Giertych has brought up some interesting points, including examples of sloppy, tendentious science. At the same time, it quickly became pretty clear that he was making these points not to lead his audience to truth, but to confuse and twist the truth in order to cast doubt on science and present it as just a system of belief, not much different from religion. He was shockingly disingenuous and manipulative. For example, he talked at length about the eruption of Mount St. Helen in Washington State and how geologists were supposedly stunned after discovering that this catasprophe had produced, in a matter of days, such ordering of geological materials that until then had been widely believed to require centuries. His conclusion? Well, maybe the Great Canyon was formed in the matter of months and not millienia, as claimed?

Even assuming that the geological "surprise" of Mount St. Helen was indeed such a huge surprise for geologists, I seriously doubt that it invalidated all the previous research and methods of geological dating, as Giertych seems to be suggesting. He jumps to a conclusion (or at least wants his audience to do that) that this one event and the anomaly it produced is not an anomaly, but evidence of how this must have happend in all the other cases of stratification. His purpose is clear: the Bible says that the Earth was created a few thousand years ago, so let's cast doubt on the evidence that it took much, much longer. Never mind that the evidence is ovewhelming - we'll just show one hole and the gullible and the biased will just see that hole and nothing else.

What about carbon dating? Oh, this is just a minor dissonance that Giertych just glides through, mumbling about "known problems with carbon dating". An example of these problems? The Turin Shroud. Now, what about this shroud, Professor? Wasn't it examined by two independent research labs, both of whom concluded that this was a medieval forgery? So wherein lies the "problem" with carbon dating, Professor? Oh, the Church says that the shroud has the image of Christ imprinted on it, and that doesn't square with the lab results, so these results must clearly be off... We just can't trust carbon dating, can we?

And so it goes. Perhaps the most revealing example of Giertych's illogic came in his answer to a question from the audience, when he contrasted science and the Church: it is science that keeps changing and whose theories are being proven wrong time and again; the Church's teachings stay the same. Hard as it is to fathom, Giertych actually believes that this makes science inferior! Science is only searching for the truth; religion already knows the truth - so there you go. You can ridicule the evolutionists, who still haven't found the "missing link", but the talking bush and the immaculate conception are not subject to scrutiny - these are facts. The Bible says so.

One thing I would like to give Giertych credit for is that he at least didn't seem to be especially concerned about sticking to the Intelligent-Designs-is-not-Creationism line. At least that's a sliver of intellectual honesty. On the other hand, he gave his talk at the catholic Stefan Wyszynski University, to an audience probably more sympathetic to creationism than evolutionism, so he could afford to be less careful.