"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.