Plodding Insight

This is a funny article that everybody should read.  Here’s an excerpt of the best parts.  I know you can hardly call this kind of linkage “blogging” but I’m too busy to add my own thoughts, so too bad.

Link

Everyone knows they’re gonna be gone in a generation. “The glaciers on the Himalayas are retreating,” said Lord Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank and author of the single most influential document on global warming. “We’re facing the risk of extreme runoff, with water running straight into the Bay of Bengal and taking a lot of topsoil with it. A few hundred square miles of the Himalayas are the source for all the major rivers of Asia—the Ganges, the Yellow River, the Yangtze—where three billion people live. That’s almost half the world’s population.” And NASA agrees, and so does the UN Environment Programme, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the World Wildlife Fund, and the respected magazine the New Scientist…

But where did all these experts get the data from? Well, NASA’s assertion that Himalayan glaciers “may disappear altogether” by 2030 rests on one footnote, citing the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report from 2007.

In fact, the Fourth Assessment Report suggests 2035 as the likely arrival of Armageddon, but what’s half a decade between scaremongers? They rate the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing as “very high”—i.e., more than 90 per cent. And the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for that report, so it must be kosher, right? Well, yes, its Himalayan claims rest on a 2005 World Wildlife Fund report called “An Overview of Glaciers.”

… 

The WWF report relies on an article published in the New Scientist in 1999 by Fred Pearce.

That’s it? One article from 12 years ago in a pop-science mag? Oh, but don’t worry, back in 1999 Fred did a quickie telephone interview with a chap called Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. And this Syed Hasnain cove presumably knows a thing or two about glaciers.

Well, yes. But he now says he was just idly “speculating”; he didn’t do any research or anything like that.

But so what? His musings were wafted upwards through the New Scientist to the World Wildlife Fund to the IPCC to a global fait accompli: the glaciers are disappearing. Everyone knows that. You’re not a denier, are you?

And the best part:

By 2008, Syed Hasnain’s decade-old casual chit-chat over the phone to a London journalist had become “settled science,” so Dr. Pachauri’s company TERI (The Energy & Resources Institute) approached the Carnegie Corporation for a grant to research “challenges to South Asia posed by melting Himalayan glaciers,” and was rewarded with half a million bucks. Which they promptly used to hire Syed Hasnain. In other words, professor Hasnain has landed a cushy gig researching solutions to an entirely non-existent global crisis he accidentally invented over a 15-minute phone call 10 years earlier. As they say in the glacier business, ice work if you can get it.

Have you heard of this?

Since I’m a blogger sometimes I just have to find something new on the internet, learn a few things about it, and then write a few sentences mocking the hell out of it.

There’s something called “game”.  It’s not “the game”, or “a game”, just game, as if it was a substance like sand.  If guys that use “game” were to try to sum it all up in two wordy bullet points, here’s what I imagine them saying.  (Edited for honesty.)

1)  We’re resentful as hell about the way women think and act.  Women say they want one thing, when they really want something else.  If you try to please them and be a nice guy they just lose their respect for you.  Deep down, women really like tough, abusive, arrogant assholes, not guys like us.  And we hate them for it.

2)  We’re a group of smart guys who use a lot of counter-intuitive insights from evolutionary psychology and deliberate, cynical, almost scientific observation in an effort to … BECOME. THOSE. ASSHOLES!

No, Really.

Click here to read it.

When a high brow outfit like NPR produces something as shrill and mean as this, you know they are getting frantic.

The majority of Americans are against the health care reform bills.  But remember, that majority is a dangerous fringe group!

I’m thinking of reading a girly novel like Pride and Prejudice or Emma or Little Women.  Does anybody have a suggestion of which one?  I’m leaning towards Pride and Prejudice.  Is that the best one to read?  Your input is appreciated.

*was in 1996, anyway

This post is sort of “meta” and possibly pointless. I’m going to take a position on an “inside baseball” dispute between some different bloggers, and in doing so I’m uncomfortably aware that I’m indulging my own unhealthy need to insert myself into any argument I hear going on, which is in a large part why I read so many blogs and follow the news so closely. (Hey at least I’m not commenting on Charles Johnson or Andrew Sullivan. I’ve got my pride.) Nevertheless it can be instructive to examine these kinds of issues, if for no other reason than to clarify our ideas about ethics and race.

Robert Stacy McCain (”The other McCain”) is a pugnacious and entertaining blogger who probably relishes a good throw-down more than anybody on the web. Or at least he’s the most open about it. Under a stylized picture of himself, his website says, “Being Notorious Is Not the Same as Being Famous, But It’s Better Than Being Anonymous.” (The capitalization is in the original.) He also has a post (I would call it a mission statement) called “How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog is Less Than a Year”, wherein rule 4 of 5 is “Make Some Enemies”. So we’re not talking about somebody who is going to great pains to avoid giving offense.

So naturally when I first heard the meme going around that he was a white supremacist, I didn’t pay it any mind. Liberals are always big on accusations and short on evidence. They’re so unprincipled that when Sarah Palin’s book came out, they tried to smear her on television because, get this, she hired a ghost writer Lynn Vincent who (among many other things) had previously written a book with somebody who is “widely believed to be … a white supremacist”. That person was, of course, Robert Stacy McCain.

McCain’s response at the time to that smear included this revelation:

When these accusations were first made, during my employment at The Washington Times, management decided not to respond, as to do so would tend to suggest that the accusers had some credibility. Therefore, I was required to maintain silence, rather than to make any rebuttal. By the time I resigned from the newspaper, in January 2008, to undertake a research trip to Africa, the appropriate time for explaining several falsehoods and misunderstandings had certainly expired.

That, combined with the fact that nobody was producing any, you know, evidence — was enough to convince me that the charges were spurious.

That brings us almost up to date. Last Sunday another conservative blogger Patrick Frey (”Patterico”) posted a comparison of two quotes and asked his readers whether each quote was racist. The first was from a black woman being interviewed about the recent Tiger Woods gossip. She indicated that black women generally dislike seeing a black man with a white woman, and went so far as to say that if Barack Obama had been married to a white woman, she would have “thought twice” about voting for him. (Wow!) The second quote wasn’t immediately attributed, but it turns out it belongs to McCain:

As Steffgen predicted, the media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion. The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sisterinlaw, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us.

On the first reading, this sounded pretty racist to me. Maybe this McCain fellow really is racist, I thought. It’s a shame because he wrote some pretty good commentary on other issues. Heck, he wrote reasonable stuff that I cited on my blog on the topic of race! He must just censor out the racism when he writes (with the occasional exception.) Patterico provided the whole long argument that the paragraph was excerpted from. I didn’t read it too closely, but I skimmed it and it didn’t seem to help. How could the context redeem a quote like the one above, anyway?

Or so my thinking went at the time.

One blogger responded like this:

For the record, I do not buy Pat’s argument that anyone who has hangups about interracial dating and marriage is racist. For one thing, if one is going to concede that, then one has to concede that there are a lot of black racists out there. A lot.

But I think that’s baloney. Cassandra is exactly right in her response:

Why is the conclusion that black racism exists unacceptable?

It’s funny. I took this to be precisely the point of Patterico’s post: what difference does it make who says a thing? If you agree the statements say the same thing and you decide the first statement was racist, consistency demands that you call the second statement racist too. In other words, the same standard ought to be applied to both statements.

When Patterico revealed that the author of the quote was McCain, he said,

I asked readers to tell me whether you think this quote is racist. Many of you said that it is. I agree. As one commenter said: to be as charitable as possible, it is racially prejudiced.

I found it a little strange that he thinks it is racist, but then he would go on to say,

Again, I’m not willing to write off the man entirely for one quote.

And later, to sum up a long post of protestation,

I have read on the Internet today that I called Robert Stacy McCain a racist. I did not. I said that he said something that is in my opinion racist. That is not the same thing.

…

Yes, I stand by my belief that McCain’s quote was racially prejudiced

What is that all about? Is this because McCain is “on the same team” politically? Give me a break. A hypothetical racist who works in journalism is not going to go around trumpeting his biased views every chance that he gets. If he’s not a complete imbecile, he would carefully censor himself in order not to reveal his true feelings. One statement unambiguously expressing revulsion at interracial marriage is enough for me, frankly. Why would a non-racist person say something like that, even once?

In any case, while Patterico is laughably trying to say McCain is and isn’t a racist, Jeff Goldstein, whose powers of reasoning I have much respect for, didn’t have the same interpretation. (It’s worth noting there is some bad blood between Jeff and Pat due to previous arguments in which I’m pretty sure Pat overreacted and caused a lot of needless antagonism.)

Here’s my take, for what it’s worth. What McCain is — judging from what I’ve read, both past and present — is someone who has been candid in his writings about questions of racial politics, and as such, I believe he can be more accurately described as someone seeking a “real conversation on race” than nearly all those who gave lip service to such a noble idea, then worked tirelessly to make sure that said conversation never actually took place, with the punishment, for those who mistook the offer as legitimate, being predictable charges of racism, should any of those commenting question left-liberal orthodoxy.

He’s also not convinced of Patterico’s distinction between accusing McCain of racism and accusing McCain’s words of racism:

But ask yourself: how can a statement (which, detached from agency is just a collection of marks) be, in and of itself, “racist”? Racist how? Racist to whom?

To wit: if you believe a statement, as a linguistic entity (which always presumes intent somewhere along the interpretive chain), is somehow, say, inadvertently racist — that is, if you don’t think RS McCain really meant it as a racist statement — then on what basis are you calling it a racist statement in the first place, especially if you admit to believing it was not intended as such? Alternately, if you believe the statement is racist, but that its utterer is not racist, where, precisely, does the “racism” come from in that particular formulation?

And the answer to that is that it comes from the person interpreting, the person or persons who, for whatever their reasons, decide that the statement is racist, but yet won’t to commit to the full-on charge of racism against the the statement’s utterer. It’s a cowardly argument; it hasn’t balls; it lacks confidence in its convictions.

Just so. But is Patterico’s veiled accusation of racism actually correct? As I indicated in the title of this post, I have come to think not. Cassandra of the Villainous Company blog was the only person I came across who really dug into the quote to examine its meaning, and I found her examination very helpful in clarifying my own thinking (although I found some of her conclusions a little odd.) The original quote is, again:

As Steffgen predicted, the media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion. The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sisterinlaw, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us.

First, McCain never says that he is one of those people that feels revulsion when confronted with images of interracial couples: 

Did Stacy say that he is repulsed by mixed race couples? No. Did he say that there should be no mixed race couples? Again, no. So there is no racist intent and indeed Patterico didn’t say there was. What Stacy appears to have said is that some people - people who are perfectly rational - feel revulsion when they see a mixed race couple. That’s arguably a true statement which makes two points:

1. The revulsion is “natural” or instinctual, and

2. Merely feeling such a feeling does not, in and of itself, render these people irrational.

On the first point, McCain is right. Human beings are naturally tribal. We are pattern recognition machines. We extrapolate generalities from brief experiences, and thank God for that or we’d still be in hunter-gatherer mode, or more likely extinct. And we have strong innate inclinations to conform to social norms. Things outside of the normal, especially when concerning family and reproduction, are taboo or deviant. There doesn’t even need to be a thought process; It is a gut instinct.

Note that all of these propositions are morally neutral. I’m not talking about whether interracial dating is morally ok, (or homosexuality, or incest, or marriages with large age differences, or polygamy, etc…). What is being pointed out is that psychologically speaking these things make us squeamish precisely to the degree that they are unusual (or hidden) in our society.

Now, we can quibble about how strongly to define “rational”, but I am going to argue that the second proposition Cassandra points out is also valid. These feelings are experienced in a more or less universal fashion. Even people who mentally believe that such things are ok tend to be a little “icked out” by anything that is both unusual and sex-related. At the very least they feel that way until such feelings are beaten down by enough will power and repeated exposure.

While on first reading, McCain’s use of the phrase “altogether natural revulsion” seems to give his blessing to such feelings, this is not a necessary interpretation, nor is it ultimately a fair one in the absence of other damning statements. The key is the greater context - does what we know about Stacy lead us to believe that he is saying these feelings are right and good, or is he simply pointing out that they occur naturally without necessarily being preceded by prior racist sentiments? I think almost certainly the later.

And that brings us to the second half of the quote, which asserts that “The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sisterinlaw, and THIS IS NOT RACISM”. Here I think it is a little more difficult to agree. I am on board with the suggestion that such feelings occur naturally in people who are not, in fact, racists. But what is really meant here by “be adverse to accepting”? It is not perfectly clear if he means to imply something above and beyond a sub-rational instinct. It could be that he is merely trying to signify that those experiencing the “altogether natural revulsion” previously discussed are not to be condemned. But if so, I think he has expressed himself poorly. Hence the first half of my title: McCain is wrong about racism. A fair-minded person who experiences a little primal feeling of “taboo” or even “revulsion” does not deserve to have it said about him that he is adverse to accepting a black sister-in-law. You could make a strained case that what McCain said could be literally true, but the most likely interpretation is that he is saying something more.

Not all, in fact not many of the gut inclinations and revulsions that human beings experience are in perfect conformity with the moral law. They are perfectly natural (in the modern sense of “natural”, not the traditional theological sense) but they must be ruled by the will. Hatred is perfectly natural. Envy is perfectly natural. Laziness is perfectly natural. None of these are acceptable instincts for our mind to give reign to. Somebody who is truly adverse to accepting an interracial relationship may not yet be fully racist (especially if they have no aversion to other interactions with black people, as stipulated by the example of dealing with the bank clerk) but they have nevertheless opened the door to racist sentiments in their heart.

There is no indication I’m aware of that McCain feels that way. He has made other more recent commentary about race that is perfectly upright and commendable. Patterico rightly observes that “I have seen many people speak well of him and that certainly speaks well of him.” His comment from 1996 does not seem to correctly explicate what is and is not racism, but so what? Most people I know have been wrong, on occasion.

And just to be complete, I think Cassandra is way off when she starts talking about “thought crime” and pornography. The whole idea of an accusation of racism is not criminality but that a certain person harbors attitudes that are fundamentally indecent. You can’t define racism down to just provable incidents of illegal biased actions. What is in the heart matters. See Matthew5:27f.

more

Link.  Excerpts:

Holding all of America’s garbage for the next one hundred years would require a space only 255 feet high or deep and 10 miles on a side. Landfills welcome the business. Forty percent of what we recycle ends up there anyway. We are not running out of landfill space.

…

The best way to measure the scarcity of natural resources, such as trees, sand, or oil, is to use the market prices of those resources. If the price of a resource is going up over time (and it’s not just inflation pushing those prices higher)  the resource is getting scarcer. If the price is going down, it is becoming more plentiful. Indeed, since 1845, the average price of raw materials has fallen roughly 80 percent after adjusting for inflation.

…

Recycling is a manufacturing process, and therefore it too has environmental impact. The US Office of Technology Assessment says that it is “usually not clear whether secondary manufacturing such as recycling produces less pollution per ton of material processed than primary manufacturing processes.”

…

Manufacturing paper, glass, and plastic from recycled materials uses appreciably more energy and water, and produces as much or more air pollution, as manufacturing from raw materials does. Resources are not saved and the environment is not protected.

My earlier musings on this topic are here.

The always interesting Michael Williams has a post up about the true marginal tax rate, with a graph that is devastating.

Go, read.  This is what is wrong with our government.  Until we fix that graph, we’re not going to be able to move forward.  Unfortunately I think we’re more likely to flatten it out even more.

Christopher West has written something to address the recent controversy over his teachings. It is well worth reading if you have followed those discussions.

Link

Megan McArdle:

I think we’ve finally hit the wall on deficit spending.  There is no more room for tax cuts, or new spending, or anything else government wants to do.  Unless the budget picture improves dramatically, there is but one inevitable course, which is whacking great tax hikes to pay, not for any new program, but for the spending we’re already doing.

Well dang.

Notre Shame, staying classy as ever.

Healthcare Reform over at Atoms and Ideas

Interesting discussion in the comments, goes on at some length, ends badly.  Sometimes there isn’t enough common ground to build a civil discussion on, unfortunately.  I am getting better at cooling down my anger before I write, but it’s a work in progress.

If you are too busy, or too disinterested, to pay attention to politics this decade, let me point you to just one video that sums up where we are today as a nation, which hinges upon the political world is currently turning.  This is America.  These are the issues that shape the next 50 years.  Less than 10 minutes.

Bill Whittle talks about ACORN, Andrew Breitbart, and the News Media.

Added bonus:  If you studied Latin at Moorestown High School, you’ll experience David Rhody Nostalgia.

Today was one of those “I told you so” days. If you didn’t believe the Nobel Prize committee was a bunch of unprincipled leftists after Al Gore and Paul Krugman … well now you know.

ARE.  YOU.  KIDDING.  ME?

I don’t have much to add to this but I want to give it maximum exposure, so I’m posting an excerpt here.

Link: Case of Jailed Deadbeat non-dad Shows Need for Overhaul of Child Support Laws

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently ran articles on a case that should outrage any fair-minded person. Georgia man Frank Hatley was in a Cook County jail for over a year for failure to pay child support. However, DNA tests proved that the child in question was not biologically his.

…

A court ordered that Hatley be relieved of any obligations for future support of the boy. However, this order did not relieve him of the back payments owed when it had been assumed he was the father so Hatley continued making those payments from the money he earned at his job of unloading charcoal grills from shipping containers.

In 2007, Hatley was laid off from his job.

…

[He] fell behind in his payments, was found in contempt of court and jailed.

…

The Hatley case illustrates a crying need for an overhaul of the child support system. Firstly, there is the fact that poverty is not a defense against the failure to pay child support. Even if the child had been his, the facts are that Hatley was unable to adequately support himself and did not have the money to support the child. However, the law took a jobless, penniless man living out of his car to jail for not making child support payments. This is a modern day version of the old Victorian horror of debtor’s prison.

People should not go to jail in 21st Century America just for being poor – but Frank Hatley did and so have many others.

I want to add that this is only especially enraging because the child was not his.  Even if the kid was his, it is monstrous to jail people for their debts, not the least because it hurts their ability to work, even after they are released.

But the laws don’t change because everybody knows the woman is always the victim.

It’s a little bit amazing to me that they guy tried so diligently to pay the support after it was proved that he wasn’t the father.  If I was in that situation I wouldn’t pay a cent out of principle, jail or no jail.  I think his approach is kind of a sad manifestation of chivalry gone terribly wrong.  Guys, proper behavior needs to be reciprocated.  It’s fine to give up your seat to a lady, but this throwing yourself in front of a bus for a woman who is crazed and irresponsible — it has got to stop.