Category Archives: Political Commentary

General Science, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space

Sesquicentennial

44 Comments

It’s been a hundred and fifty years since Darwin first presented his thesis. Charles Johnson has some thoughts. I may have some as well, later. Or not.

[A minute or so later]

Well, actually, I do now, in light of Lileks’ comments this morning, in which he pointed out the simplistic, stilted views of many across the political spectrum. I’ll repeat:

Really, if one wants to cling, bitterly, to the notion that a believe [sic] in lower taxes and strong foreign policy and greater individual freedom re: speech and property automatically translates to a crimpled, reductive, censorious view of pop culture, go right ahead.

Similarly, if one wants to cling, bitterly, to the notion that a concern about Islamism, and an inability to realize what an evil stupid fascist criminal George Bush is translates to a belief that the world was created by Jehovah six thousand some years ago, complete with dinosaur bones, go right ahead.

Before 911, Charles Johnson was a Democrat, and a jazz musician. Almost seven years ago, he got mugged by reality. That, combined with some scary things that were happening at a mosque near his home in Culver City resulted in a change in emphasis at his web site. Now many of the left wingnuts who read LGF stupidly assume that he’s a “right” wingnut. Yet here he is, defending science from places like the Discovery Institute, on a semi-daily basis.

I get the same idiotic treatment, much of the time. I’ve often had discussions on Usenet whereupon, when I argue that maybe it wasn’t necessarily a bad idea to remove Saddam Hussein’s boot from the neck of the Iraqi people, and that I don’t believe that George Bush personally planted the charges in the Twin Towers, I am told to go back to whatever holler I came from and play with my snakes, and am informed that my belief in a Christian God, and my lack of belief in evolution is just more evidence of my irredeemable stupidity, despite the fact neither religion or science had been on the discussion table.

I then take pleasure in informing them that I am an agnostic and for practical purposes an atheist, and that I am a firm believer in evolutionary theory, it being the best one available to explain the existing body of evidence. Whereupon, I am sometimes called a liar. Really. It’s projection, I think.

Same thing often happens here, in fact. I tell people that I’m not a Republican, and have never been, nor am I a conservative, and I’m accused of lying about my true beliefs and political affiliation.

C’est la vie. There’s no reasoning with some folks.

In any event, happy birthday to a controversial but powerful (as Dennett says, absolutely corrosive, cutting through centuries of ignorance) scientific theory. Expect me to continue to defend it here, and Charles to defend it there.

[Late evening update]

Well, Iowahawk has the comment du jour:

I’m a dope-smoking atheist writer for a San Francisco lowbrow culture mag; I also enjoy seeing 7th century genocidal terrorist shitbags getting waterboarded. I really don’t see the contradiction.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

More WALL-E Thoughts

9 Comments

Lileks discusses the grief that he’s gotten over the fact that he enjoyed the movie:

Shannen Coffin at the Corner notes that you never know how much hate mail you’ll get until you take on a Pixar film. I’d add that the opposite is oddly true as well: I got a lot of very negative email about the review, some of which had to do with “shilling” (as one writer put it) for Disney, but most of which had to do with buying an eco-scary / anti-capitalist agenda because the characters were cute. Apparently I can write for years and demonstrate skepticism towards catastrophic doom-mongering, and it counts for nil. Ah well. Look, I think “JFK” is a pretty good piece of filmmaking. Its ideas are rubbish and its effect pernicious, but I still think it’s a compelling work. Doesn’t mean I believe a single frame.

Sometimes you separate the ideas from the movie, sometimes you can’t, sometimes you shouldn’t, and sometimes you don’t want to because you approve of the ideas. Asking me to reject Wall-E because its unrealistic premise has contemporary overtones is like asking me to swear off Star Trek because Roddenberry wanted a post-religious collectivist one-world government that eschewed money and property.

He also chides Andrew Sullivan for stereotyping:

Apparently Andrew Sullivan took note of the review, and while I appreciate the patronage, this rankles a bit:

“Well Lileks loved it. Not all conservatives are stupid ideologues.”

And not all liberals are stupid anti-consumerists who spaz out when someone praises the Works of Walt! Who’d have thunk it. Really, if one wants to cling, bitterly, to the notion that a believe in lower taxes and strong foreign policy and greater individual freedom re: speech and property automatically translates to a crimpled, reductive, censorious view of pop culture, go right ahead.

Last night, I watched the end of Ratatouille, and afterward was a history of Pixar. Interesting stuff. It was a great example of the powerful synergy you can get when you successfully meld C. P. Snow’s two cultures and combine traditional animators with computer geeks.

As good as they’re getting at this stuff, though, I don’t think that it’s the death of 2-D animation. I suspect that as the 3-D stuff continues to asymptotically approach verisimilitude, there will be rebellious young turks who want to draw cartoons, and so the cycle will begin anew.

In any event, the foofaraw makes me want to see the movie in the theater, something I haven’t done with a Pixar movie since Toy Story (though I wanted to with Ratatouille).

Political Commentary

How We Regained Our Rights

6 Comments

Steve Chapman explains:

Gun control didn’t work…Laws allowing concealed weapons proliferated–with no ill effects…The Second Amendment got a second look.

Yes, it was pretty much that simple. Of course, a lot of people (like Juan Williams) will persist in the delusion, in the face of all the counter evidence, that gun control works, and that increasing availability will result in a blood bath. But at least now, they won’t be able any more to enact their delusions into laws that affect the rest of us.

Economics, Political Commentary

The View From Obamaland

19 Comments

Who dare call it fascism? Jeffrey Lord does:

…when faced with a disagreeable problem (in this case the lack of jobs) the answer for Obama always seems to get back to the manipulation of the political process to achieve the desired result.

Are Obamalanders uncomfortable with the free-market driven success of talk radio? Then they will “figure out ways to use the political process” to shut it down. In the case of talk radio, how else to explain the threatening Reid-Obama letter to Rush Limbaugh’s business partner? How else does one explain the attempt to retrieve the “Fairness Doctrine” from the dustbin of history? These are nothing more or less than the “use of the political process” to subvert someone else’s freedom. Period.

Are Obamaland followers hostile to oil? Do they hate SUVs? Do they think you have no right to heat or cool your own home beyond what they consider politically correct? Do they think you should pay $5 — or $6 or $7 or $8 or more — for gas at the pump to ensure you conform to the Obamaland world-view? Yes, they do think all of this and their Obamaland answer is inevitable. They will “use the political process” to stop drilling off shore in its tracks. So too with stopping the use of oil shale or ANWR or anything else that even hints at allowing average Americans their basic freedom to drive whatever vehicle wherever they damn well please whenever they damn well please. In Obamaland it is not only perfectly acceptable, it is gospel from the secular bible that they must use the political process to stop refineries from being built, to keep nuclear power plants from being built, to keep coal from being burned. Use the political process to forcibly mandate the temperature inside every single American home. As a matter of fact, why not just go all the way and nationalize the oil companies — this actually being suggested by Obamaland’s New York Congressman Maurice Hinchey.

He also has the full quote from Obama that I’d missed part of the first time around:

“We can’t drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times, whether we’re living in the desert or we’re living in the tundra, and then just expect every other country is going to say OK, you know, you guys go ahead keep on using 25 percent of the world’s energy, even though you only account for 3 percent of the population, and we’ll be fine. Don’t worry about us. That’s not leadership.”

This is economic idiocy. Why in the world would energy consumption be expected to correlate with population? Yes, we have much higher per-capita energy usage than much of the world (e.g., Africa). But we also produce much greater wealth per capita than much of the world, and much of that wealth goes to make the world wealthier, in many ways. The notion that we should only use energy in proportion to our population is economic ignorance of the first rank. In other words, it’s exactly what I would expect from a Democrat, and particularly Obama. Though to be fair, there are a lot of economically ignorant Republicans as well, including their current standard bearer, by his own admission. But unlike Obama, he at least admits it.

Political Commentary

The Thirties Again?

10 Comments

Arthur Silber has concerns about the Obama cult:

People had better wake the hell up, and they had better study some history very damned fast. I have sometimes remarked, and I repeat the warning here, that the twentieth century was a nonstop train of horrors — yet in one sense, the most terrible and horrifying aspect of the twentieth century is that we learned absolutely nothing from it.

Among the horrors of the twentieth century were several notable leaders who initiated events that led to slaughter and destruction on an ungraspably monumental scale. These charismatic leaders evoked a response from their followers almost identical to that called forth by Obama. These leaders specialized in “personal stories of political conversion.” Doesn’t anyone see the connection? Doesn’t anyone remember any of this?