ideonexus.com

This is a play on my blogpost about Environmentalism as Religion.<TOUNG-IN-CHEEK>

NeoConservatives believe in the fantasy that all governmental regulations on the market are bad! Bad! BAD! BAD! BAAAD!!! If benevolent corporations like Microsoft, ExxonMobil, and AT&T were just allowed to do whatever they want there would be Universal Health Care and no poverty. Plus everybody would live in their very own mansion and own a pony! Therefore we should “drown the government in a bath tub.”

When confronted with a massive trade deficit that’s industrializing China while deindustrializing the United States, the Invisible Hand’s devout members argue that a society that owns more stuff is more responsible than one that produces said stuff.

When confronted with the out-of-control Neocon-approved deficit spending, the Invisible Handers reply that the Prophet “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” The fact that people and governments can spend money they don’t have, just proves the rational logic of the market system!

When confronted with a slew of competition-squashing big Telecom abuses, the Cult of the Invisible Hand counters that Telecoms wouldn’t need to use dirty tactics to sabotage their competitors and hoard their vast wealth if they didn’t have to pay taxes.

And when archetype conservative William F. Buckley Jr. admits that he would like to see the abolition of cigarettes and compares cigarette manufacturers to the Nazis who manufactured Zyklon B gas to execute Jews… Well, Buckley is a “Paleoconservative” and obviously hates America.

With complete, unquestioning faith in the Invisible Hand, it will solve all the world’s ills for us! This means complete rejection of the consensus pragmatic approach to Mixed-Market Economies, which applies a well-balanced combination of free-market incentives moderated with governmental regulations to produce a stable market that ensures maximal fair competition and does not run out of control. That’s just silly!!!

</TOUNG-IN-CHEEK>

Despite all their lambasting of Environmentalism, the last thing Anti-Environment pundits want to do is engage in a scientific debate on global warming, collapsing ecosystems, pollution, or overtaxing natural resources. That’s because they don’t have any science to support their side of the political aisle.

So what do you do when you don’t have facts to back up your arguments? You go on the attack and you go meta on your opponents’ assi*. Using mischaracterizations, metaphorical conceptualization, and free association, you substitute your opponent’s factually-based arguments with a faith-based fantasies, lumping them in with the Flat-Earthers, Scientologists, Heavens Gaters, and Reganomicers.

Conservative pundits attack Environmentalism as a sacrificial cult. Michael Crichton dismisses it as “a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.” Demagogues have even secured the domain name environmentalism.com to attack environmentalism as a religious belief.

The “Environmentalism as Religion” argument goes something like this:

Environmentalists believe people should make sacrifices to save the Earth; therefore, Environmentalists put the Earth above people; therefore, they see the Earth as their god (or goddess), and wish to sacrifice people to it.

How far can you stretch a metaphor before it finally snaps??? Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s a direct quote:

Environmentalism is not about a desire to have cleaner water and air. It is now a full-fledged religion, and its main tenet is “raw nature” as god-like, and Mankind as a plague infecting it. If you support environmentalism, the fact is that you’re supporting an idealogy (sic) that promotes the destruction of Mankind - and concretely, that includes yourself and everyone you care about. (environmentalism.com)

What’s grotesque and dangerous about this sort of Post-Modern Deconstructionist Ideological Relativism is that it’s a form of rhetoric whose intention is to call into question all scientific knowledge. If we’re going to call concern for environmental health based on scientific evidence a religion, then we can call believing in any scientific fact a religion.

Environmental Science tells us that we are apes, and that a web of life so complex we understand only a fraction of it supports our existence. This same Science logically conjectures that we should #$&% with that web of life as little as possible until we know more about it.

The anti-environment movement says that collapsing fish stocks don’t matter, mercury in the environment means nothing, oil supplies will last forever, and science will magically solve all our problems despite research funding cuts and watering down of politically inconvenient scientific facts.

Which of these sounds more like a religion?

orisinal.com

If you want to be happy for an hour, take a nap;
if you want to be happy for a day, go fishing;
if you want to be happy for a year, inherit a fortune;
if you want to be happy for lifetime, help others.

Chinese Proverb

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had little misunderstandings explode into full-blown flame-wars in my e-mail inbox. One second I’m having a polite debate with a friend over the comparative merits of government-sponsored versus third-party payment methods for health coverage or whether Captain Picard was cooler than Captain Kirk on Star Trek (Totally Picard. Totally.), and the next second we’re at each other’s virtual throats.

Later, after an adequate cooling off period, one of us will ask, “Why were you so angry?” and the other will invariably reply, “I thought you were the one who was angry!”

E-mail is cold, impersonal. It doesn’t convey tone of voice or facial expressions. Compound these shortfalls with the fact that the average American adult can only read at an 8th grade level, and it’s easy to see how simple misunderstandings in our digital correspondence can accidentally leave us with hurt feelings.

The solution to this technological sterility and staggeringly sub-standard literacy was to start supplementing our messages with ideograms that communicated visually what text wasn’t linguistically; in other words, we started interjecting smiley-faces everywhere.

: )

According to Yahoo, this year marks the 25th anniversary of the emoticon, but the first emoticon was -) and it meant “tongue in cheek” in 1979, all the way back in those ancient times when the Internet was just a bunch of computers calling each other directly on the phone. So maybe Yahoo isn’t counting that one. It was the “smiley,” the most recognizable of emoticons, which first debuted in 1983.

A picture paints a thousand words, as the saying goes, and emoticons do this in a nearly universal language. People flavor their e-mails with emoticons all over the world. Westerners make their emoticons sideways, eyes followed by a mouth:

: P or : D or :-S

While East Asianers make their emoticons upright, eye, mouth, eye:

(*_*) or <(^_^)>

Cars could use emoticons. When behind the wheel, people tend to become very uncivilized. They exhibit rudeness on the road they would never dare exhibit to pedestrians on the sidewalk. Psychologists hypothesize this has to do with anonymity and impersonal nature of vehicular interactions. We don’t associate a human being with the back-end of the SUV that just cut us off.

Imagine how quickly our anger and resentment at other drivers could be assuaged if they could just flash us a cute embarrassed emoticon on their rear windshield:

(*^_^*)

Awwww… Can’t you just feel all the tension melting away seeing that cute wittle character? It almost makes all that hot coffee spilled into your lap worth it. You can’t make an angry emoticon. It would look too cute.

I’m angry. Grrrr. }:-(

Truly, the world would be a much happier place if everyone simply used more emoticons, online and in real life. The physical act of smiling improves our own moods and the moods of those around us. Like the Chinese proverb says, “The world is like a mirror, smile and it smiles back at you.”

All Hail Hypnotoad!

I finally got to pick up a copy of the First Carbon Neutral DVD from FOX, Futurama: Bender’s Big Score, this weekend, and I’m very much enjoying my geek-humor fix.

Some big brains go into making Futurama. Executive Producer David X. Cohen has a master’s degree in computer science from UC Berkeley. Writer and executive producer Ken Keeler has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard University. When asked if all those years of education ever paid off, Keeler replied in an interview:

Well, sure. For example, Bender’s serial number is 1729, a historically significant integer to mathematicians everywhere; that “joke” alone is worth six years of grad school, I’d say.

My favorite extra on the DVD is a lecture by Dr. Sarah J. Greenwald explaining many of the mathematical jokes appearing on the show. She also has a website of Futurama’s Math and Science references.

My all time favorite reference from the show’s history comes when the winner of a horse race is announced, and Professor Farnsworth angrily tears up his losing ticket and exclaims, “No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!” This references the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, a fact of quantum physics that drove Einstein crazy, and oh boy you should hear the crickets chirping when I quote this joke while watching sports with my friends.

There’s also a half-hour long pilot episode of “Everybody Loves Hypnotoad,” which is a half-hour of Hypnotoad doing it’s thing with a commercial break and laugh track. I sat through all of it, regularly breaking out into laughter because I… just… love… Hypnotoad. Excuse me, I have to go watch that episode again.

Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan

A family friend was giving a talk at the American Anthropological Association’s Annual Meeting in DC this last week, which exposed me to a wide variety of interesting and intellectually diverse subjects from many different speakers.

One brief lecture that hit close to a subject I hold dear came from Richard Robbin SUNY at Pittsburgh, who described himself as “to the left of Richard Dawkins,” which got a laugh out of myself an a few others. Mr. Robbin’s focus was the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 over the teaching of evolution. Robbin argued that, in alienating Evangelicals over Evolution, liberals lost one of their strongest allies.

He specifically examined William Jennings Bryan, the prosecuting attorney in the trial, and someone who history has characterized as foolish and stubborn for fighting against teaching evolution so ferverently. The film Inherit the Wind makes him out to be overly zealous in his faith, oppressively conservative, but Bryant was in fact quite liberal in many respects. He supported women’s suffrage, a progressive tax system, and social support services.

It was his egalitarian concerns that prompted him to so vehemently oppose the teaching of evolution, which, in the textbook Civic Biology, was being used to advocate eugenics, selective breeding programs, and the sterilization of undesirables.

In an exerpt on “The Races of Man,” the book describes Caucasians as “the highest type of all.” But this is nothing compared to what comes later, when the textbook advises eugenics as the best way to improve the human race as we can clearly see in these passages from pages 263 - 265 of the text:

Improvement of Man. — If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection. This improvement of the future race has a number of factors in which we as individuals may play a part. These are personal hygiene, selection of healthy mates, and the betterment of the environment. (p. 261)

Eugenics. — When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, syphilis, that dread disease which cripples and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent children, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics. …

Parasitism and its Cost to Society. — Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.

The Remedy. — If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this country.

This is the textbook that John Scopes was teaching his students from, and the ideas Bryan was fighting against. The teaching of evolution science is crucial to our modern understanding of biology, and alternative, purely theological alternatives have no place in a biology classroom, but these textbook passages are abhorent.

Our tendency is to dismiss Bryan as an ignorant baffoon, but the scientists concluding that evolution justified eugenics were equally ignorant and baffoonish and amoral. It’s important that we acknowledge that.

The complete text of George William Hunter’s Civic Biology: Presented in Problems is available at Google Books.