Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Mann Suit And Free Expression

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I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but Charles Cooke has a long essay in the latest issue of National Review:

The law of defamation is useful for awarding civil damages against those who peddle outright lies — that is, against those who do real damage to a person’s reputation by abusing plain facts that can be easily verified and adjudicated in court. In such cases as it is claimed that Jones beats his wife or Smith is a drug addict, the relevant facts fall easily within the competence of a civil tribunal, and litigation does not threaten to impose a chill on the public discourse. But when a plaintiff files a libel suit involving a matter of political or scientific controversy, the calculus is quite different indeed. When the merits of a libel claim implicate contested questions of science and statistical methodology, judges and juries are so ill suited to pronounce a verdict that allowing the public authority to have the final say is inconsistent with the very concept of free inquiry. The whole point of the scientific enterprise is to resolve controversies through open debate, not through the final decree of government officials.

Even where no verdict of guilt is ultimately pronounced, allowing litigation over criticisms of the validity of scientific research has a deleterious effect on the public discourse. It prompts critics to trim their sails in order to avoid the cost and headache of a lawsuit, thus establishing a climate of fear and quiet rather than of boisterous agitation and open discussion. Hanging the prospect of punishment above the heads of participants in scientific disputes serves not to yield greater accuracy but to invite censorship, the toning down of rhetoric, and the avoidance of hyperbole — of anything, indeed, that could invite a libel complaint. Which is to say that it shuts up the dissenters.

Which is, of course, the entire point.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Is The World Running Out Of Resources?

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Matt Ridley says “no”:

I have lived among both tribes. I studied various forms of ecology in an academic setting for seven years and then worked at the Economist magazine for eight years. When I was an ecologist (in the academic sense of the word, not the political one, though I also had antinuclear stickers on my car), I very much espoused the carrying-capacity viewpoint—that there were limits to growth. I nowadays lean to the view that there are no limits because we can invent new ways of doing more with less.

This disagreement goes to the heart of many current political issues and explains much about why people disagree about environmental policy. In the climate debate, for example, pessimists see a limit to the atmosphere’s capacity to cope with extra carbon dioxide without rapid warming. So a continuing increase in emissions if economic growth continues will eventually accelerate warming to dangerous rates. But optimists see economic growth leading to technological change that would result in the use of lower-carbon energy. That would allow warming to level off long before it does much harm.

I made a similar point about nine years ago:

The only hope for the planet is to get more of it to operate on the principles of the market, and individual choice. There are two competing approaches. The first is responding hysterically to problems that won’t occur for many decades (Kyoto being a prime example) which will reduce current wealth to the point that if and when those problems actually occur, we won’t have the financial wherewithal to be able to deal with them. The second is to use those resources wisely, per their most productive uses (i.e., responding to market pricing) to create the wealth necessary to create new resources.

There are many things wrong with our current approach to such things (e.g., the fishery problem), but the nostrums proposed by most “environmentalists” (who tend to be socialists and command economists in green clothing, even if many don’t recognize that) would make things worse, not better. Headlines like that in the Guardian article, implying that resources are a static quantity, of which we’ve already used two thirds, are just the kinds of misinformation that lead to flawed policy decisions, and reduction of wealth, and ultimately reductions of “resources.”

The problem is that the environmental movement has been hijacked by socialists and others completely ignorant of technology and economics.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The SF “Community”

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…has apparently become community organized:

I’ve said for a long time that the awards are biased against authors because of their personal beliefs. Authors can either cheer lead for left wing causes, or they can keep their mouth shut. Open disagreement is not tolerated and will result in being sabotaged and slandered. Message or identity politics has become far more important than entertainment or quality. I was attacked for saying this. I knew that when an admitted right winger got in they would be maligned and politicked against, not for the quality of their art but rather for their unacceptable beliefs.

This is one of (though not the only one) reasons that I don’t read as much SF as I did when I was younger. The best way to fight this nonsense, of course, is to buy Larry’s books.

[Monday-morning update]

An open letter to the SFWA:

The mission of SFWA was to act as a professional organization, to enhance the prestige of writers in our genre, to deter fraud, and to give mutual aid and support to our professional dreams.

It was out of loyalty to this mission that I so eagerly joined SFWA immediately upon my first professional sales, and the reason why I was so proud to associate with the luminaries and bold trailblazers in a genre I thought we all loved.

When SFWA first departed from that mission, I continued for a time to hope the change was not permanent. Recent events have made it clear that there is not reasonable basis for that hope.

Instead of enhancing the prestige of the genre, the leadership seems bent on holding us up to the jeers of all fair-minded men by behaving as gossips, whiners, and petty totalitarians, and by supporting a political agenda irrelevant to science fiction.

Instead of men who treat each other with professionalism and respect, I find a mob of perpetually outraged gray-haired juveniles.

Instead of receiving aid to my writing career, I find organized attempts to harass my readers and hurt my sales figures.

Instead of finding an organization for the mutual support of Science Fiction writers, I find an organization for the support of Political Correctness.

Instead of friends, I find ideologues bent on jihad against all who do not meekly conform to their Orwellian and hellish philosophy.

Politics trumps Science Fiction in the modern SFWA.

Sounds like it’s time for an alternate organization.

[Update a while later]

[Bumped]

More thoughts from Glenn Reynolds, over at USA Today.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Oligarchy In The 21st Century

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Shocker: It’s not rich conservatives who run the world:

There you have it: A wealthy Democratic donor admits he funds candidates to improve his bottom line. And yet I hear from the Senate floor no denunciations of his attempts to buy American democracy, no labeling of him as un-American. I have not received a piece of direct mail soliciting donations to fight David L. Cohen’s hijacking of the political process, nor do I wake up every day to investigations of the Cohen political and charitable network. Why?

It’s a rhetorical question, of course.

[Monday-morning update]

Related thoughts from Ed Driscoll.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Thoughts On The Mann Suit

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…from Conrad Black, including commentary on the current sad state of the American legal profession:

…the American legal profession is a suffocating cartel that saps 10 percent of American GDP and through its members in legislatures and regulatory authorities adds 4,000 statutes and regulations a year to the law books, steadily tightening its strangulation of American life, all and always in the name of a society of laws and the ever more equitable refinement of civilization. It would have been impossible and unreasonable to anticipate that so perceptive and spontaneous and fearless an observer as Steyn would not steadily broaden his range of fire, as he has. At one point Steyn began filing motions on his own behalf—the best written court documents you may ever read—that drip with disdain for the judicial process. He quotes Lady MacBeth and describes various pieces of the case using phrases such as “multi-car pileup,” “zombie-like,” “Potemkin hearing” and “meretricious folderol.” It would have been equally unreasonable not to foresee that the authorities upon whom his withering fire descended would not resent this deserved if unaccustomed hostility, and whatever one may think of Mann, he cannot be faulted tactically for trying to tuck himself under the wing of an affronted legal establishment. That does not justify Mann’s infliction of the hockey stick upon the world (like the great Montreal Canadiens point-man Bernard “Boom Boom” Geoffrion lowering—with considerable but probably not sufficient provocation—the real article onto the cranium of a New York Ranger forward sixty years ago) any more than it whitewashes Mann’s own insults. He has dismissed the immensely respected Danish scientist and intellectual Bjorn Lomborg as “a career fossil fuel industry apologist”; Judith Curry, co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences and an honored member of the National Research Council’s climate research committee, as a “serial climate disinformer”; Australian journalist Andrew Bolt as a “villainous” threat to the planet who is paid by Rupert Murdoch “to lie to the public” (Mann apologized for this one after Bolt — in solidarity with Steyn — threatened a lawsuit); and the rest of us as mere “climate change deniers.”

It’s well worth a weekend read.