Generation War Archive

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They Have Made Their Point, They Have to Go Now (or: How to Speak Fundamentalist)

By
Dark Sevier
– November 9, 2011

The Global Occupy Movement has spread to over 1,000 cities. As days turn into months, the number of people on the street steadily increases. Momentum seems to be building, not waning. The Occupation has arrived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I think that what we are witnessing with this movement, and the corporate media reaction to it, is the cultural retirement party for an old social map printed in black and white, lacking the interactive apps of the new maps — whereas the Occupiers serve as a welcoming committee for the arrival of options, of other ways to be in this world. It would serve us well, we human types, to address this cognitive gap. I believe that it is not only possible to communicate with the cognitively impaired, but, as we have allowed them to run amok through the halls of power, it is now imperative that we do.

I googled “They made their point,” and “They should go,” and “Occupy.” This is some of what came up;

“They made their point—only I’m not sure if they knew what that point was—no one else did. Apparently, it wasn’t all that important at the time of the start of the movement .” – Steve Rose, blogger/cop

“They made their point. Probably about time to go home.” – Otto Maddox, self described dork

“Maybe it’s time for the children to go home. They made their point, and they can continue their protests and activism, but the time for the campout is over.” – Rob Port, angry person

“They made their point, people acknowledged it, now why don’t they go do something useful?” – some forum commenter, being useless.

“That’s the great thing about this country, you can stand up and say what you want, but I think they made their point,” – Asian businessman that joked to a cop, “Bring out the tear gas and call it a day.”

“They made their point now get out and get back to living. Lets stop this NOW.” – Rosie

“They made their point, but now, they are overstaying their welcome.” – Larry

“They made their point…Which is they have none…Why the press covers this story is beyond me…Just kill ‘em.Time to move on…” – LiberalsRDopes, angry person

“They made their point,” – Sgt. Limbert of the Mission Police Station

“They made their point but are now becoming irrelevant, ok….got your message, now go back to work, school or your bong, but stop costing taxpayers money that has to be diverted from other programs to police these love-ins.” – rjag, Angry Canadian

I’ll venture to say that “their point” has not been made, nor will it be for some time, because of the difference in the way in which one interprets what a “point” is. On the one hand, the occupiers come from a place of realizing the wisdom of sustainable growth. Conversely, the naysayers, rather than admitting an inability to grasp the meaning or implications of something new and different emerging in the political environment, invoke a cultural banishment spell (such as “They made their point”) to put it out of their minds. It’s a recusal from the dialogue under the premise of some higher cultural authority, or sense of “normalcy.” I think that is my favorite response to the Occupations, and I hear it often. It’s that irony thing that I like so much. It reveals a lot about the person that utters it, and the cognitive maps in play. The purpose of slogans like “They’ve made their point” is to reduce and marginalize anything seen as a threat to the status quo or their bourgeois personal identity — which often, in these types of cases, are one in the same. “You’ve made your point” used in the examples above, translates roughly into “I’m tired of hearing your nonsense, and/or I’m ill-equipped to respond intelligently.” It can be seen as a self-defense mechanism employed by a threatened creature. If seen this way, compassion for the opposition comes more easily.

The rhetoric of 99% vs. 1% has a use. Of course, a Movement of 100% would be really nifty for a bit, but not possible, nor desirable. For those “We’re-All-One” purists that have a problem with the divisive function of the 99% slogan, may I remind you of the Red Vs. Blue wedgie that has had us on our toes for the past decade? I’d say surgically cutting out a 1% cancerous tumor is a big improvement over chainsawing the country down the middle. There’s magic in taking out and isolating just one percentage point. For a moment, the 99% have an opportunity to imagine that their individual causes can be joined with a greater cause. I see the 99% icon as symbolic of dethroning a monarchy, or aristocracy. We are “in the meantime” now. This is the moment when power shifts.

This is not a protest, and the people are not protesters. This is, as the name implies, an Occupation. The Occupiers are not there to do anything as much as they are there because of what has been done. This is a direct consequence of unchecked greedy causes. The people that just want this to go away are afraid. Of course, there is the fear of the “1%,” the CorportateBankerLobbyistMedia cabal and the authorities that serve them. That fear says Mission Accomplished. But there is another fear, on the other end of the spectrum, a fear and anxiety around daring to hope that real, meaningful change in the consciousness of the human endeavor is possible. Maybe not everyone would describe it that way. Here’s another way: who doesn’t want to live a more authentic existence? If given a choice between surviving and thriving, what would you pick? We can have this discussion now, and those choices are available. Endeavoring to understand how we live in the world together is the new sexy. “OMG, did you see how huge her ethnobotanical-socioeconomic comprehension was? That was hot.”

There are a large number of Americans that want what we all want, they just don’t want it to be complex. This condition of narrowness, which manifests as various forms of fundamentalism, has little to no capacity for irony, metaphor, or a spectrum of possibilities. Yes or no, good or bad, black or white. Think binary. The neocon revolution was only made possible by the crass manipulation of the fundamentalist mindset. The spectrum of possibilities that color the Occupy movement gets lost in the monolithic shadow of Good and Bad.

It might be helpful to imagine a kind of cultural deafness that monotheists, fundamentalists, and the like, suffer from, and like many that suffer a diminishing of one capability, another capability is enhanced. Those that seem the most resistant and/or uninformed about our socioeconomic/sociopolitical situation, will be the ones that muscle the corrections through, once it becomes clear that that is what MUST be done. Meanwhile, they will defend what they “know,” right or wrong. They want no part in “maybe” or “perhaps.”

Some people can change their mind easily. Some can try on a philosophy and take it for a test drive, and then just as easily step out of it. For people like this, it may be hard to imagine how a fundamentalist operating system works. But it’s really pretty simple: fundamentalists identify themselves with their beliefs and ideas, which are defended as a part of the self. Asking a fundamentalist to see something from someone else’s perspective is like asking them to exchange their eyeballs. But what they lack in adaptive facility, they more than make up for in manual effectiveness. They get’er done. Finding an appreciation for the form and function of the fundamentalist portion of the 99% serves everyone.

If the intellectual elite and and the progressive left are the brains and heart of the country, then the fundamentalists and their kind are the muscle and bones. The muscle and bones want to respond to correct impulses that lead to their strengthening and growth. They are not concerned with why or how. The neocons led them along by dangling a bible on a stick for thirty years. I think the muscle and bones need to be treated better than that (and that doesn’t mean taunting them by dangling Dawkins instead). Like we have provided handicapped spaces for the infirm, and braille on the elevators and ATMs to accommodate the blind, let us endeavor to translate the complexity and beauty of this Occupation into a simple binary message for the cognitively impaired.

For those planning to become more directly involved in the overhaul of American representative government, as well as any other cultural overhaul that might be timely, might I suggest learning to speak Fundamentalist, as translators are desperately needed at this time. Many Americans suffer the same cultural ills but cannot coordinate to correct them due to cognitive incompatibilities. I don’t think we can expect our frightened dichotomous brothers and sisters to be the ones to initiate a broader understanding of our condition. Do you?

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Combating Canada’s Plague of “Out-of-Control Young People”

By
Ben Nolan
– September 21, 2011

Canada has finally come around to the awesomeness of the American justice system and passed a, by all accounts, “sweeping” crime bill designed to “toughen punishments for a range of offenders, from drug dealers to sexual predators to what Justice Minister Rob Nicholson calls “out-of-control young people.””

Examples:

Additional penalties to combat serious and organized drug crimes, particularly when they involve youth, including increasing the maximum penalty for possession and production of drugs such as marijuana from seven to 14 years, factoring in security, health and safety concerns arising from marijuana grow-ops.

This will naturally let us win our war on drugs just like America has. Excessive prison sentences make bad kids good.

A higher cost and more strict eligibility criteria for applying for a criminal pardon

Forgiveness is for rich people.

The lifting of publication bans on the names of violent young offenders.

A.k.a. encouraging the press to create resentful pariahs out of already emotionally unstable youth for the sake of tabloid news content!

Sadism makes great juvenile criminal justice policy! That’s what Science says! (No it doesn’t.)

In other news…

The gap between the rich and the rest is growing ever wider — with the chasm increasing at a faster pace in Canada than in the United States.

[snip]

Its global analysis found that Canada has had the fourth-largest increase in income inequality among its peers. Between the mid-nineties and late 2000s, income inequality rose in 10 of 17 peer countries — including Canada. It remained unchanged in Japan and Norway, and declined in five countries.

Sigh.

3

College Students: Not Necessarily Altogether Too Bright

By
Tom OHare
– September 15, 2011

K. So let’s say you’re a university professor, and you’re talking one day in class about, oh, I dunno… intellectual ivory tower matters… and you’re doing, like, a thought experiment — or something equally crazy and academic!!! — and, perhaps maybe suppose it’s about “opinions” (whatever those are). And let’s say you’re playing Farmville on the old Facebooks (amirite? i’mrite) when you hear your professor say, and here I use the scholarly quotation methodology, “Jews should be sterilized.” Do you:

a) Assume that this is a genuine sentiment your Jewish professor is espousing before the class, and launch a national media campaign against him denouncing his outrageous beliefs?

b) Assume that because you’ve been playing Farmville you might have missed some relevant context?

c) Ignore it, because “no big deal” (you play an anti-Semite in this scenario).

Ding, ding, ding! The answer is A, sheeple.

Yesterday, we brought you the story of Sarah Grunfeld, the 22 year-old student at York University who ran out and publicly accused her (Jewish) sociology professor of anti-Semitism when he said the phrase “Jews should be sterilized”—as an example of a bad opinion. Grunfeld’s reasoning: “The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’ still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.”

So we would be remiss if we did not bring you the following STATEMENT from Sarah Grunfeld, which B’nai Brith Canada is circulating, apparently under the misguided notion that Sarah Grunfeld is deserving of sympathy. If she apologized for the simple misunderstanding, then sure. But Sarah Grunfeld is doubling down on her outrage. And victimhood!

The worst part of Grunfeld’s aforementioned STATEMENT is the opening paragraph, because it shows what a detestable twit she is. Here I quote:

TORONTO, 14 September 2011 : Sarah Grunfeld, fourth year York University student has made the following statement relating to the recent incident in Professor Cameron Johnston’s class at York University, and has asked B’nai Brith Canada to circulate it to interested parties on her behalf. This statement of her position is onlyto be used in its entirety…

She’s kind of asking for anything that follows with a salvo like that. To which I say, Come at me, Sarah Grunfeld. Bring the pain!

Here is her statement, as it should have read verbatim.

I stand by my initial concern… that all Jews should be sterilized[.]

I have since been grossly misquoted and ridiculed by the media… to assign blame to me… for [t]his “miscommunication”.

This is in spite of the fact that in a meeting with Martin Singer, Dean, (Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies at York) and Rhonda Lenton (Vice Provost Academic), I was assured that they believed [this] was ‘terribly regretful’, and that they expected and would encourage… an unambiguous in-class apology.

It has been a very painful experience for me to see how the university has closed ranks and reneged on its assurances to me. I understand that there may have been a miscommunication, but… [t]he media has been complicit in allowing a false interpretation of my actions to be circulated widely, which can only have a chilling effect on the ability of students to have any kind of a voice on campus.

END OF STUDENT STATEMENT

Fucking context. How does it work?

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The NYTimes Guide to Memes

By
Tom OHare
– September 9, 2011

Via M. Bouffant (who points out that Goatse is missing from the list — oh, and they forgot Pedobear, too, while we’re at it), the Times compiles a list of Internet memes for all Teh Oldz struggling to make sense of what their children are laughing at on the Internet all day. It’s a pretty weak list, but the snobbery on display in some of the comments more than makes up for it.

Jeffrey of Seattle replies to the article:

“But there are plenty of other people who aren’t getting the references at cocktail parties and in the late-night comedians’ monologues.”

I guess that would be the case because people under 20, the primary audience for this juvenilia, don’t attend cocktail parties.

Thank heavens!

Keith, from Oxford (Ohio, not England) sez:

Wow! I was aware of almost all of these and find none of it funny. So if you want to really waste your life (if it already isn’t) watch these. And if you are at a cocktail party where this is being discussed, leave now, you really don’t want to know these people!

Watching viral videos = wasting your life. Got it!

Bill Smith from La Cruces, New Mexico doesn’t seem to realize that in the time it took to post his comment, he could have Googled the answer himself:

Great summary Pogue, but you could have done us over 70s a service by defining a “meme.”

Another Jeff, this one from New Jersey, thinks it’s still too soon for Hitler jokes:

There is nothing funny about Hitler and spoofing (thus trivializing his atrocities) is not funny either. Awful.

For shame, Internet!

Lastly, we have “Smarten up” from Maine (pseudonym? — We Report, You Decide!), who argues that not understanding something is a mark of erudition, contra the Enlightenment:

There is a lot to be said for real-world experience, something most under-20s have yet to acquire.

I consider myself sophisticated BECAUSE I don’t get these jokes…they are just silly.

There you have it, folks. Your New York Times readership, distilled in the comments section. Too lazy to Google simple queries, and certain that their ignorance of pop cultural phenomena justifies their contempt for them.

This is why Tom Friedman, David Brooks, et al still have jobs, btw.

Goodbye, cruel world!

8

The Best Amongst The Poor Are Never Grateful

By
Ben Nolan
– August 10, 2011

This and the featured image were drawn from the InFocus blog at the Atlantic. Click to see their slideshow on the London riots

From the post that’s at the top of my Reddit FP right now:

These riots are not about race, they’re not about the death of Mark Duggan (aka Starrish Mark), they’re the lower-class scum bags taking advantage of a terrible incident. I should make it clear, not all lower-class families are scum, there are some rather unfortunate people on the lower side of the margin, it is not these people I am calling scum; It is the benefit scroungers, the typical council house family that doesn’t work, sells drugs, buys drugs and has 5-6 children and uses the benefits from those children as income.

That’s who you’re talking about, eh? Flaw: selling drugs is work.

Please, stop making excuses for these people. They are not a majority black; it’s not a race issue, they are not rioting for anything in particular, It’s a large number of uneducated, poor, chavvy low-lifes using the death of a man in order to justify what they’re doing.

And even if they were, I guess you think they’re uneducated because they’re lazy?

Not sure what this guy is arguing. Seems kinda like he’s saying that if it were a race thing, it would be justified, but because it’s a class thing, it’s not. That would be stupid, so let’s just pretend that’s not what it seems like he’s arguing.

From one of the top comments by a dude going by WarLizard:

If they’d marched to the seat of government, I could see this as a political protest, but when they steal and burn their own neighborhood businesses it’s just unfocused rage.

Now, as to the question of why there is so much rage, it could be frustration from poverty, hatred of authority, or a thousand different reasons.

The fact remains that there are poor people all over the world who are mistreated and don’t react like this.

So these guys are just a shitty kind of poor people and that’s the problem?

Funny that the attitude here exhibited kinda makes me want to go out and break a window.

Quick point: Civil rights were never something “focused.” It just seems like it in retrospect because its been reduced to a brand.

These riots, like the most violent expressions of rage at the height of the civil rights conflicts, are a reaction to an incredibly complex and not-too-coherent-itself system that perpetuates class injustice; that’s been set up such that any “legitimate” form of protest will be ineffectual — the product of a science in social domination that continues to be refined all across the developed world (e.g. pricing the poor out of access to the justice system in Canada and the US, or the “security” apparatus’ systematic subversion of the protests at last summer’s G20 in Toronto, and how much exactly does it cost to run a successful political campaign anywhere these days?).

They don’t need to be so subtle in the developing world. Or maybe, in light of what’s happening in the Middle East, they ought to start thinking about it.

As for what counts as the good kind of poor people, here’s Oscar:

The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be regretted. We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. No; a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest.

And here’s where I want WarLizard and his three-hundred and thirty-eight (as of now) up-voters to really pay attention…

As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid. I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under these conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.

Am I happy that the riots are happening? No. Do I think they’re going to result in something constructive? Who knows? Maybe, maybe (probably?) not. But they’ve pulled the curtain back and shown us the extent of the vulgarity of the classicism in British society. Unignorable. It’s going to happen in America too and maybe eventually in Canada, and I have a feeling it’s going to be even uglier.

Somehow it’s been forgotten that the cynical reason we had the social safety net (remember that thing we’ve been hacking to pieces for the last 30 years?) was to avert this kind of inevitable and destructive venting of rage and sustain a private property-based system. If anything constructive is going to come out of all this, it’s that maybe we’ll start to remember again.

MLK for good measure:

(hat-tip)

PS – Despair and impotence.

Update: Thought I’d look up the young adult unemployment rate in the UK:

Yeah guys, this is about nothing.

Detail of note: Check out the difference between the ratios of young adult vs. 25+ unemployment in the ’93 versus the current peak.

The class war is generational.

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The Generation War, Ctd.

By
Ben Nolan
– August 5, 2011

Robert Samuelson over at the occasionally not infuriating WaPo:

By now, it’s obvious that we need to rewrite the social contract that, over the past half-century, has transformed the federal government’s main task into transferring income from workers to retirees. In 1960, national defense was the government’s main job; it constituted 52 percent of federal outlays. In 2011 — even with two wars — it is 20 percent and falling. Meanwhile, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other retiree programs constitute roughly half of non-interest federal spending.

These transfers have become so huge that, unless checked, they will sabotage America’s future. The facts are known: By 2035, the 65-and-over population will nearly double, and health costs remain uncontrolled; the combination automatically expands federal spending (as a share of the economy) by about one-third from 2005 levels.

Add to that the fact that it’s old people that watch Fox News, go to Tea Party rallies and vote en masse, and an already ugly picture turns liver spotted, withered, and enfeebling.

Meanwhile, here’s the OECD on young adult unemployment:

The most recent data show that in the three years to the third quarter of 2010, unemployment among young people in the labour force aged 15/16-24 increased by 5.5 percentage points in the OECD area as awhole, but by 6.3 percentage points in Europe and by more (7.4 percentage points) in the United States (Figure 1). In the third quarter of 2010, youth unemployment rates in the United States and Europe, at 18.2% and 21.1% respectively, are close to 25-year record-high levels.

21.1% of people between 16 and 24 who want to be working were unemployed in the third quarter of 2010. Odds that’s gone down? And to make a comparison I’ve made before:

File:US Unemployment 1910-1960.gif

(source)

Current rates of young adult unemployment are pretty damn close to the peak unemployment rate during the Great Depression.

The Star…

“It really raised the flag about the possibility of a lost generation,” Sandell said.

Or at least of one indentured to its entitled, negligent and hysterical elders.

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Today in the American Economy

By
Tom OHare
– July 8, 2011

The jobs report is out. Hahaha, no I didn’t read it. But other people did, and it’s bad. Here’s Krugman’s initial reaction:

Ugh. That was a seriously ugly jobs report (pdf). Almost no job creation, with slow private-sector growth offset by falling public-sector employment; a falling employment-population ratio; and (I don’t know how many people have picked this up), an actual decline in wages, albeit a small one.

Unemployment leapt up to 9.2%, and yet, as Krugman noted yesterday, the President has basically ceded the responsibility of defining the terms of our national economic debate to Republicans, with their belt-tightening, and their bootstrap lifter-upper-ing, and their bullshit, bullshit, bullshit:

One striking example of this rightward shift came in last weekend’s presidential address, in which Mr. Obama had this to say about the economics of the budget: “Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.”

That’s three of the right’s favorite economic fallacies in just two sentences. No, the government shouldn’t budget the way families do; on the contrary, trying to balance the budget in times of economic distress is a recipe for deepening the slump. Spending cuts right now wouldn’t “put the economy on sounder footing.” They would reduce growth and raise unemployment. And last but not least, businesses aren’t holding back because they lack confidence in government policies; they’re holding back because they don’t have enough customers — a problem that would be made worse, not better, by short-term spending cuts.

It’s impossible to run controlled macroeconomic experiments, so in place of them we look to history for parallels. Right now, we’re re-living something like a miniature version of the Great Depression — high unemployment, no private job creation, super-low inflation, and overall economic malaise. (And I know, I know, the parallels aren’t perfect — none are. So sue me.) The sad part is that, unlike our political elites of the 1930′s, today’s Galtian overlords have accepted our current national shittiness as the new normal, while one of our major political parties is actively trying everything it can think of to make things worse so that Michele “Crazy-Eyes” Bachmann can get elected and bring about the rapture in 2012, or something. So instead of at least getting cool infrastructure projects out of the widespread horror — your Hoover Dams, your hike-able national parks, etc etc — we twiddle thumbs as the country both literally and figuratively crumbles.

Have I said this all before? It bears repeating.

UPDATE FOR THE HELL OF IT: Also, what Felix Salmon said.

“Spend less money, create more jobs” is the kind of world one normally finds only in Woody Allen movies, and it’s a profoundly unserious stance for any politician to take. Spending cuts, whether they’re implemented by the public sector or the private sector, are never going to create jobs. And there’s simply no magical ju-jitsu whereby government spending cuts get reversed and amplified, becoming larger private-sector spending increases.

Boehner’s rhetoric, here, is a cynical play on our nation’s economic illiteracy. But the jobs crisis is far too big and too important to become a tactical political football. Now more than ever, it’s the job of government to come together and to do something constructive to create high-quality, long-term employment. Fast. Instead, the House majority is giving us aggressively harmful stupidity. Today’s a bad day in the annals of job statistics. But it’s equally bad in the annals of public service.

Yup.

0

Quellenkritik

By
Ben Nolan
– June 14, 2011

This article has apparently been getting forwarded around by old people that should know better:

The Truth About Greenhouse Gases: The dubious science of the climate crusaders

The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I want to discuss a contemporary moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. The “climate crusade” is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types—even children’s crusades—all based on contested science and dubious claims.

Note before anything that Firstthings.com is an ecumenical journal focused on creating a “religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.” Obviously a one-stop shop for science news and opinion.

I’m as scandalized as one has the energy left to be scandalized about climate denial can still be by the name in the from-line of the e-mail containing this link. Can’t say anything specific, but it was a major player on (former chair of) the purportedly anti-climate change committee of a major international professional organization. He found the article “sobering,” which is presumably why he mass-forwarded it to everyone on the committee’s mailing list. I found it to be transparently a huge sack covered in holes leaking the shit it’s full of, but I’ll get back to that in a sec if I can build up a tolerance for the smell.

The author of the article is one William Happer who appears to be the “Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University.” Specifically (from wiki), “William Happer is a physicist who has specialised in the study of optics and spectroscopy.” RELEVANT. The Princeton part is impressive.

I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. Think that’s impressive? It’s nothing. Between oil money and every credentialed climate “skeptic” on this planet, there’s only one. Let’s find Happer’s! *double-yoo double-yoo double-yoo dot gee oh oh…* you know the rest….

Link:

Happer has been on the board of the George C. Marshall Institute since at least 2002, and is currently its director.  The institute receives a sizable portion of its funding from ExxonMobil.  Out of an operating budget of about $800,000, an average of $91,428 per year from 2001-07 comes directly from ExxonMobil.  They also receive $250,000 per year from the Scaife oil fortune, and we see almost half of the Institute is funded by oil money.

DING DING DONG.

I’d rather go play basketball than spend the next half-hour pointing out the holes in his seeping shit bag of an article. (If you really want me to, I’ll do it, but please don’t ask me to unless you really really want me to.)

Before signing off though, Happer made his biggest splash as a anthropogenic climate change “skeptic” (not that it really matters whether or not we’re causing it if it’s happening, which it fucking is) pushing a petition that the American Physical Society (APS) soften its stated affirmative position on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Here’s how that worked out:

Despite seven months of intense effort to recruit physicists to sign a politically motivated petition disputing anthropogenic climate change, a mere, 0.45% of theAmerican Physical Society‘s 47,000 members signed on.

It’s a humiliating defeat for the climate change Deniers who make such false claims as ”many scientists dispute’ and ‘there is no consensus. The Petition drive was announced in the prestigous journal Nature, APS publications, numerous popular and electronic media, as well as heavily promoted by the petition organizers. Despite all of that effort and publicity, a mere 0.45% was all that they could manage.

Consider that the success rate for Nigerian email scams is estimated to be0.1% to 0.2%, ie roughly speaking about the same.

It’s a good post. With charts!

aps2You should read it.

2

What Should the Internet Be? Or, A Wormhole and an Echo Chamber Walk into a Bar…

By
Tom OHare
– May 16, 2011

I was browsing on Reddit this morning when I found this (sorry, no link: I upvoted it and it disappeared):

That’s Eli Pariser of MoveOn.org fame, and he’s discussing the various ways in which our interactions with the web are, for lack of a better term, less random than they used to be. In “tl;dr” form: With the algorithmic personalization of search, part of the initial appeal of the Internet is being relegated to artifact-status. The simple fact of the matter is that the web companies from which we glean information about the world are monitoring our behaviors and adjusting our search results accordingly (largely for the sake of monetization, which Pariser doesn’t go into in the above discussion, but which I took to be the implicit subtext to the whole thing). This means that there are fewer opportunities to engage with voices you disagree with, which… well… I’ll let you figure out the implications to living in an echo chamber for yourself.

Contrast Pariser with this from Eric Schmidt, Google’s Executive Chairman:

Today, you’re [sic] phone knows who you are, where you are, where — where you’re going, to some degree, because it can see your path. And with that and with your permission, it’s possible for software and software developers to predict where you’re going to go, to suggest people you should meet, to suggest activities and so forth. So ultimately what happens is the mobile phone does what it does best, which is remember everything and make suggestions. And then you can be just a better human and have a good time.

On the one hand, I can see where Schmidt is coming from: Smartphones are fun and cool and futuristic, and all these crazy apps are really wild and crazy and will become even wilder and even crazier as the future gets cooler and funner! On the other hand, yikes! I don’t want my phone to “know” enough about me that it’s predicting where I’m going to go, and I most certainly don’t want it to make suggestions for my social life.

In a very real way, we’ve already begun the process of personalized search — the question now isn’t whether or not we want it at all, but how far we want it to go.

I’m not sure I have an answer for that. But color me skeptical.

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2011 isn’t like 1993

By
Ben Nolan
– May 3, 2011

The CBC’s “Vote Compass” places you on the chart at right based on your answers to a series of questions on major policy values and priorities. (Take the quiz!) There are all kinds of problems with mapping people, policies, and parties onto a matrix of two ideological dimensions (better than one dimension, though), but in general, I think their placement of the parties is pretty fair. (You can read about the method they used here.)

What I want to get to, though, is this: 39.6% of Canadian voters just gave a majority government to the blue guys wayyyy to the bottom right. Now, and for the next five years, the 60.4% who voted for that bundle at the top left are going to have to live with the blue folks’ leader (Stephen Harper) having far more power over their country than Bush ever did in America (if he goes crazy dictator, the Governor General — who he appointed — could steps in, but with a majority Conservative-appointed Senate, there are no real institutional checks on his agenda, especially not once he conservativizes the Supreme Court).

How did they manage that feat, you ask? Our head of government is the leader of the party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons. Seats are allocated on the basis of 308 first-past-the-post riding votes. So, to answer your question: The way the votes split, of course, disproportionately favoured the Conservatives.

This sort of thing is a totally foreseeable consequence of how our democracy is set up. And, as the people who like to find ideological equivalences to everything have been enthusiastically pointing out, it’s happened before, in 1993, to the Liberals’ benefit (and also the Bloc’s) and to the old Progressive Conservatives’ loss.

It’s true that (Liberal leader) Jean Chretien benefited from vote splitting between the old Progressive Conservatives and the insurgent Reform Party on the right. BUT, the degree and one-sidedness by which the majority who didn’t vote for him were ideologically alienated from their new Prime Minister wasn’t nearly as dramatic as what last night’s results have stuck us with for the next half decade.

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