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.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Detroit

17 Comments

Fellow Michiganian Michael Barone explains why he went from “liberal” to conservative:

Cavanagh was bright, young, liberal, and charming. He had been elected in 1961 at age 33 with virtually unanimous support from blacks and with substantial support from white homeowners—then the majority of Detroit voters—and he was reelected by a wide margin in 1965. He and Martin Luther King, Jr., led a civil rights march of 100,000 down Woodward Avenue in June 1963. He was one of the first mayors to set up an antipoverty program and believed that city governments could do more than provide routine services; they could lift people, especially black people, out of poverty and into productive lives. Liberal policies promised to produce something like heaven. Instead they produced something more closely resembling hell. You can get an idea of what happened to Detroit by looking at some numbers. The Census counted 1,849,568 people in Detroit in 1950, including me. It counted 713,777 in 2010.

To get a feel for what this particular hell is like, you should read Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy…

His book opens as he notices in the ice at the bottom of an elevator shaft in one of Detroit’s many, many abandoned buildings the feet of a corpse. We see him having a drink with Council President Pro Tem Monica Conyers, the congressman’s wife who later went to jail for bribery—and stopping off before to see the 13-year-old girl who, while attending a council session, criticized Conyers for calling the council president “Shrek.” He makes the mistake of stopping for gas on the east side (“semi-lawless and crazy”) and escapes being robbed by two goons when he pulls a gun from his glove compartment. He hangs out with honest guys whose job is to cope with the city’s violent murders and arson-set fires—”murder dick” Mike Carlisle; firefighters Mike Nevin, who is unjustly sacked, and Walt Harris, who says grace at firehouse meals and dies in a fire set by an arsonist for $20. Detroit is no longer the nation’s murder capital—though, LeDuff notes, police officials systematically undercount homicides—and Halloween is no longer Devil’s Night (with 810 arsons in 1984). But the good guys are fighting uphill. City and county buildings are dilapidated; firemen have to bring their own toilet paper to work and don’t have water pressure to put out a fire set in their own firehouse; the morgue doesn’t have room for all the bodies.

Dan Austin’s Lost Detroit (2010), a book highlighting a dozen of the city’s abandoned architectural landmarks, shows photos of the old Packard plant, closed since 1956, where young men drive cars to the top and then pitch them to the ground, trees growing inside what were once downtown office buildings, and a grand 1920s downtown theater whose interior is now used as a parking lot (without many cars). LeDuff helps you see the rot. As he goes about his rounds he shows you “neck-high grass that went ignored and the garbage heaps that went uncollected,” “sewers backed up into houses,” and the disgusting disrepair of public buildings.

Socialism never works, really, but the anti-science Left always returns to it, because many see it as a route to power, and there is a flaw in human nature to which it irrationally appeals for the uneducated.

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