Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Global Warming

28 Comments

When it’s a good thing:

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.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Cybershaming In The Science Fiction Community

109 Comments

It can get very ugly when the Left starts to eat its own:

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.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Paula Deen

4 Comments

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.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

“If It Saves One Life”

39 Comments

Some thoughts on the economic irrationality and political demagoguery of the phrase:

The problem with the “if it saves just one life” standard, other than being outlandishly stupid, is that it fails to take into account scarcity, which is fundamental to the human condition. Are 200 lives worth $2 billion? Of course they are; life is priceless. But scarcity is real. There are very good reasons that we do not require, for example, that all of the safety features found on the $100,000 Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan be made mandatory on all vehicles. Would doing save even one life? Yes, it probably would save many lives: While President Obama attempts to derive political benefit from fear-mongering about violent crime, which has been in a long and steady decline, automotive deaths are a much more significant problem. Reducing automotive deaths by one-third would save as many lives as eliminating all murders involving firearms.

If you want to follow that line of thought a little farther down the rabbit hole, consider that the number of children killed in back-over accidents annually is less than the number of people struck by subway cars in New York City in a typical year. Should we retrofit the nation’s metros with barriers? It would save lives.

Someone should write a book about this sort of trade off.

In addition to the other critique, it’s also worth pointing out the ever-present hypocrisy of the Left. Banning abortion would save not just a single life, but millions of lives per year. What’s stopping them?

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Real Inconvenient Truth

25 Comments

Over at The Economist, long one of the publications beating the drum for radical cuts in our carbon output, Will Wilkinson notes the cooling of the “consensus.”

Mr Cohn does his best to affirm that the urgent necessity of acting to retard warming has not abated, as does Brad Plumer of the Washington Post, as does this newspaper. But there’s no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meagre prospects of these policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency. Whether or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment has cried wolf.

Dramatic warming may exact a terrible price in terms of human welfare, especially in poorer countries. But cutting emissions enough to put a real dent in warming may also put a real dent in economic growth. This could also exact a terrible humanitarian price, especially in poorer countries. Given the so-far unfathomed complexity of global climate and the tenuousness of our grasp on the full set of relevant physical mechanisms, I have favoured waiting a decade or two in order to test and improve the empirical reliability of our climate models, while also allowing the economies of the less-developed parts of the world to grow unhindered, improving their position to adapt to whatever heavy weather may come their way. I have been told repeatedly that “we cannot afford to wait”. More distressingly, my brand of sceptical empiricism has been often met with a bludgeoning dogmatism about the authority of scientific consensus.

My emphasis. Those who have been hysterically advocating carbon reduction on the basis of computer models that are, bluntly, crap (I’m looking at you, Saint Al), completely ignore the very real economic consequences of their nostrums, particularly for the poorest for whom economic growth is essential. But the president continues to jack up our energy prices by fiat.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Just Because You’re Paranoid

12 Comments

…doesn’t mean that no one is out to get you.

I haven’t heard anything about the actual investigation into the Hastings crash. Are they treating it as an accident, or a potential crime scene? One of the many ways in which the Vince Foster investigation was completely botched (including by Ken Starr) was because the park police initially assumed it was a suicide, which is not how you’re supposed to treat such things, and thus lost the chain of custody on key parts of the evidence.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!