Given that climate change is a mixture of curses and blessings, any policy addressing it is going to involve trade-offs. Slowing it down, for example, would hurt some, help others. It’s not clear why a cold, Arctic-reliant country like Russia whose economy is linked to the oil and gas trade would find a benefit in cooperating with efforts to stop climate change. It also appears that human activities like farming are better able to adjust to temperature variations than some pessimists would have us believe. Crops like soya, corn and wheat can be bred (or genetically modified) to grow in warmer and dryer conditions at a modest cost.
Greens, many impelled by emotional overreactions or a deep inner belief that unfettered capitalism is a terrible thing, have tried to simplify the discussion about the earth’s changing climate into a morality play. They’ve overstated the evidence that favors worst-case scenarios, argued for top down, bureaucratic solutions that don’t work, and when critics object to these policies they lash out at their critics as ‘science deniers.’
Because they have other agendas, and because for them, it’s a religion. You can pay for a hell of a lot of mitigation with all of the wealth that’s being opened up in the Arctic, but it doesn’t give them the requisite amount of control.
The virtually thoughtless piling on is perhaps the most appalling. So many of the criticizers whose comments I have come across admit they haven’t even read the columns in question. Once the ball of shunning and shaming got rolling, hundreds of onlookers, alerted by social media, jumped on the bandwagon, attracted by the enticing glow of participating in shared moral outrage. Moral preening is on overload; industry professionals and would-be professionals frantically signal to each other that they are right-thinkers. According to the mau-mauers, Mike and Barry did not merely misspeak (miswrite?); they did not have decent-enough intentions which were ruined by Paleolithic habits and blinkered upbringings; they are morally suspect, malign and vicious and evil. It’s burn the witch! all over again, but this time on a pyre of blog posts and Tweets.
I mentioned before that I completely understand the vehemence of Barry’s reaction to all this. One sadly ironic aspect of this brouhaha is that Barry is a lifelong man of the Left. He was staunchly antiwar during the Vietnam era (see early stories such as “Final War”), and his dream president was (and remains) Eugene McCarthy. I fully believe, based on his writings about Alice Sheldon and Judith Merril, that Barry considers himself a feminist, and an avid one. Condemnation from one’s “own side” always burns hotter in one’s craw than condemnation from “the other guys,” which can be easily rationalized away; just as criticism (especially when viewed as unfair) from one’s own family hurts much worse than criticism from relative strangers. Forty years ago (and in all the years since), Barry was a fierce advocate of the New Wave in science fiction, whose practitioners (with the sole exception of R. A. Lafferty) were all politically aligned with the Left, as opposed to old-timers such as John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein. Now Barry must feel as though the children of the Revolution are eating their elders (as so frequently happens, it seems).
This is actually one reason that I don’t read anywhere near as much SF as I did when I was a kid.
I’ve never been a big fan, but I really don’t understand what all the fuss is about (particularly since she seems to be a big Obama supporter). As far as I can tell she seems to be guilty of using the N-word (apparently long ago, in private, describing to her husband someone who had stolen from her), and of considering casting blacks as slaves at a recreation of an antebellum wedding party. I’m certainly not shocked that a woman who grew up in the south in the fifties and sixties would have that word in her vocabulary (which I presume is what she meant by her “yes, of course” in sworn testimony), or that she might deploy it under stressful circumstances. And as for the slavery reenactment, how does this differ from hiring actors for a movie about the period? It’s not like she proposed to actually enslave them. And as almost always, the reportage on this has been sensationalist and awful.
She made a mistake with her abject apologies, I think. She should have simply explained the circumstances, to pre-empt all of the nonsense.
Maybe. He certainly sounded like a good candidate, given his weight, though we don’t really know what his other stats were, probably for privacy reasons. I think that the doctor quoted is just speculating, and his credibility went down with me when I read this:
A holiday heart attack is a surprisingly common phenomenon, said Dr. Crandall, chief of the cardiac transplant program at the world-renowned Palm Beach Cardiovascular Clinic.
“Heart attacks often manifest on holidays when you’re not eating the normal meals,” he said. “You eat excessively, indulging in high fatty foods, and this causes the blood to thicken. The result is a blood clot, which can rupture, resulting in the blockage of blood flow to the heart, causing heart attack and sudden death.”
Do “high fatty foods” really “cause the blood to thicken”? Is there any actual empirical evidence for this? Or is it just nutritionally ignorant lipophobia?
I’m not in favor of obscenity trials, except when children are involved. You can make the case that a talented photographer forces us to confront adolescent sexuality by taking pictures of naked young people, and I can make the case that he’s a creep, because there has to be something . . . askew in an adult’s makeup to find this a compelling subject that must be expressed explicitly. There is something lacking in the hearts of people who dasn’t admit to themselves that the artist might be trusting the critical establishment to give him cover precisely because he dresses up his dank needs as Art.
If someone wants to protest child abuse, well: a painting of a child with haunted eyes, a dim room, a figure in the background. Color, composition, tone, shadow, the horrible truth implied with all the power Western representational art accumulated over the centuries.
Or, you can glue pictures you got from a google search, printed out and cut up and pasted on screen grabs from porno movies. Because you’re working in the new vernacular, the new global interconnected web of mysterious source material given meaning by recontextualization.
Also, you can’t draw worth a damn, so that whole “painting” thing is off the table.
No one skewers pretentious “transgressives” like Lileks.
He takes the lead in fighting this stupid bill on “comprehensive immigration reform”:
It’s time for the ants to swing into action. The Gang of 8 bill can still be stopped. But there are not many days left to scare away the fence-sitting senatorial swing votes. Again, it’s not that they don’t know what the issues are. It’s not that they don’t have a pretty good understanding of what the polls say about public opinion (voters are split on the idea of reform, but they overwhelmingly want border enforcement to come first). It’s that they are insufficiently scared that a vote for the Gang’s complicated mess-whatever they think of it – will bring them punishment at the polls.
They need to be scared. Here are two ways to do it.