Why China is the new austro-hungarian empire of climate change

Here’s the link to the guardian’s coverage of China’s stymieing of the Copenhagen summit.  We had all been focused on the oil petrosaurs in the Republican camp.  When George W was replaced by Obama, it was like the clouds parted, and suddenly… there was another big wall of clouds.  China and the American republicans, between them, then, are the single biggest threat to the planet – ensuring that there is a real danger that the average temperature of the earth will go above 2 degrees C (that is, over 4 degrees F) over the 1990s average (let alone the preindustrial average, which was .7 degrees C colder than the 1990s average).  But for a little while here, we have a window, when the republicans’ power is temporarily reduced, and there is a chance that we can get something serious done.  That is, were China not the enormous problem that it will undoubtedly continue to be.  Why is China such a problem?  Well… in some ways the answer is obvious:  it’s a totalitarian state.  But how, exactly does this work?  The analogy with Austria-Hungary, which together with the Czarist Russian empire was the main instigator of World War I, is striking…

Everyone knows something about World War II, or at least, we think we do, largely because it was the first major war in which the movie camera was developed to the extent that footage from it is widely available.  And, of course, the Nazis were so wondefully, resolutely evil, so as to make great bad guys; and, let us not forget, also so European, that portraying them as badguys does not set off any of our modern political correctness-o-meters (and while I agree with the ideas in principle, as a means to correct centuries-old bias vs. non-Europeans–it’s important to remember that the Germans are getting the rap for being the world’s worst badguys, when, in fact, many Asian and African regimes, and some South American ones, have been just as evil in terms of people killed per capita, or in the brutality of the murdering.  Why don’t we see extensive footage every week on how evil the Cambodians were under Pol Pot, or how brutal the Japanese were to the Chinese?

Why do professors and scientists tend to be liberal?

During the surge of rightism which occurred in the wake of the Iraq invasion, when the opinions of the right-wing talking heads became, for a little while, mainstream opinion, you may remember that they began campaigns against ‘left wing professors’ who allegedly were pumping the country’s innocent college students full of all-but-marxist dogma, when all they really wanted was to go to class and get an education.

The right correctly realizes that the professoriate, and the sceintific establishment in general, tends to be more liberal than average.  For that matter, high school teachers are also left of center as as group, but tigher laws and curriculum restraints effectively censor them from putting political content into their classrooms, to a large degree.  Not so the professoriate–yet.  Though I admit that as a beginning professor sans tenure, I felt quite muzzled at the time – and had to make sure that I couched every possible criticism of Bush with some observations which would ensure a more ‘balanced’ classroom attitude.  I for one seldom out and out criticized the right wing policies of the Bush admin in class, even though the rest of the world thought they were radically off the charts, and even though I personally thought that, from an historical standpoint, what was going on was historically bad, in many ways (though I was careful not to lose sight of the right’s arguments for toppling Saddam – clearly, that per se was a good idea, in theory–whether it was worth several million dead, wounded, and displaced is another question).

At any rate, why are profesors and scientists so liberal? 

The Guardian’s editorial on climate change.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/06/copenhagen-editorial

Well, here it is.   56 Newspapers from around the world committed to run this on their front page today, at the start of Copenhagen.

God help us:  as they state, the A bomb was born out of major conflict:  but carbon limiting technology will have to be born out of cooperation.  The american republicans might be the most singlehandedly to blame in the whole world for the future state that we find ourselves in:  if they weren’t still dragging their feet, even to the point of outright denying the huge weight of the science (no matter how you slice it:  if you put CO2 in the air, it will get hotter:  viz., the planet Venus), all becasue key members are in the pocket of fossil fuel companies; and there is an almost radical ability now in the party to deny reality, both on religious grounds, and if it happens to be against the interest of “american capitalism” (read:  their favourite, usually old-fashioned, sorts of companies, like fossil fuel and tobacc0).

Why study the liberal arts?

This is the first of what will eventually be a number of posts on this topic:  this is one of my central concerns.

Some liberal arts professors, in the deconstructionist school, notably Stanley Fish, have recently argued that the only purpose of gradschool in the arts is to produce arts professors.  He sees literary criticism as a craft, and his english department is supposed to teach that craft.

He also argues that the notion that the liberal arts can ‘improve people’ is pure hogwash.

Deconstructionism, however, isn’t exactly known for its idealism:  Fish is an anti-idealist.  And, arguably, he and his ilk are the principal problem with the arts in the US.  In their literary criticism, they argue that there is no purpose to anything.  Thus, they are purely of the 1950s nihilist school of artistic thought, which was following dadaism, which was following Nietzsche, in arguing that since Christianity was false, therefore God was dead.  With god dead, they reasoned, there was no real or ‘true’ idealism:  thus, no truth, beauty, etc.  Since there was no such thing as beauty, art did not have to be beautiful.  And, more to the point, there was no way to judge that art was beautiful.

Why study history?

Like most people, I grew up thinking that history is extraneous to ‘real life.’  It’s just entertainment, right?  It’s something that certain smartish and/or nerdy people know stuff about, because they actually watch the ‘hitler’ (history) channel.  And, I was taught by my parents, and learned from people in high school, that ‘real’ education meant studying something vocational:  i.e., something that would allow you to get a job afterwards, and the higher-paying that job track was, the better.  But I was never a very practical person, so I majored in english, and remember promising to myself, that by the end of my 4 year degree, that i would be able to tell myself what was the point of studying the liberal arts.  By my second year, I had a pretty good answer.  So I’ll share it here, hoping that some of you, at least, won’ t have to go through so much soul searching and self-doubt; or at least, that what follows will help you marshal your inner forces against the naysayings of your ‘practically’ minded parents, friends, etc.

Where has biology left off, and where do we begin?

We as a species are only half-baked.  We’re mostly animal, and only partly rational, only partly godlike.  And yet, once we become aware of the possibility of achieving godliness–i.e., to become like ancients imagined their gods were like, which in fact we have moved a long way towards over the past 500 years, then we realize, instinctually, that our noblest goal now becomes to continue on this journey – to eventually make ourselves like gods.  This, in essence, is the job of the medical profession (creating ideal bodies–i.e., making us immortal), and of the liberal arts professoriate (creating an ideal society, and an ideal political system, making us omniscient regarding the nature of society) and the psychological profession (creating ideal, strong, rational, healthy minds), of the science profession (making us omniscient regarding the nature of the universe) and of the engineering profession (making us omnipotent).  As a society, in other words, we already have our best minds dedicated to this task, which I call, in a phrase borrowed from Michelangelo and other renaissance thinkers,  ’making men like gods.’  In this post I would just like to detail, to make manifest, and to articulate, exactly what our task is, that we are already performing, and also to ask why we are doing this, even though it is something that we all participate in every day, and the nature of the human mind is that we are still 90% animal, i.e.,  most of us do things without self-awareness, most of the time (this being a function of the fact that, though some of us have become self-aware, most of the species still lags behind, most of the time). 

The platonist’s top 25 alternative albums.

 

The best album cover ever?

Last night on VH1 Europe they did a countdown of the top 25 albums of all time.  Prince made no. 3, and, inevitably, I guess, Thriller made no. 1.  But REM’s automatic for the people made no. 2.  What I found very weird about this, is that people since about the mid 90s have been intentionally forgetting that, between the period 1977-1995, ‘mainstream’ rock, or ‘establishment’ rock, was cosidered by the listening public to be entirely different from ‘alternative’ rock.  At least, that was the case in the US.  In britain, they always seemed to blur the line more, and ‘alternative’ acts often scored top 10 hits, which in the US happened much more infrequently.  But there was still a clear idea that alternative was alternative, and mainstream was mainstream.  And today, people realize this when shopping for music on Amazon:  i.e., “the killers” and DCFC are known to be ‘alternative,’ with ‘emo’ in the latter’s case being a subgenre of alternative:  and everyone has always known that Prince belongs in an entirely different category (of its own–file under ‘weird.’) 

Does our society allow the more intelligent to ‘enslave’ the less intelligent?

In western societies, higher IQ people make considerably more than people with lower IQs- apparently it’s something like 400$ more per year per IQ point.  And, a recent study showed that people with 120 IQs have an average net worth of about $128,000, while people with 100 IQs had an average worth of about $58,000–i.e., those 20 IQ points translates into a net worth of more than double.  And we might go further, and note that people with 80 IQs are worth considerably less than $58,000–there seems no reason to doubt this.  And we certainly know that most of the self-made mega rich are quite intelligent:  Gates and Jobs, and Trump and their ilk, are clearly 160+ ers.

Let’s enlighten the economy.

Here’s one that will have ‘em running for the exits.  But I post it because the topic could not be more important and timely.  In this post, I argue that the enlightenment has gone a long way towards increasing our personal dignity, but that in the sphere of economics, most especially in our workplaces and our homes, we could dramatically improve the living conditions of the average person if we would systematically apply enlightenment notions.  Below is a list of what this would mean in practical terms. 

In the eighteenth century, the enlightenment proclaimed that every human being should have dignity–particularly in the way that they are treated by the court system.  Prior to the enlightenment, throughout Europe, the justice system treated people as property of the Crown; and thus, when they were accused, their bodies and often their lives were forfeit.  As punishment, their bodies were made grisly spectacles, which co-opted the rest of society into the cycle of violence and domination, which is characteristic of a non-democratic system.

Why do we keep getting married?

The book of love is long and boring
And written very long ago
It’s full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes
And things we’re all too young to know
But I, I love it when you give me things
And you, you ought to give me wedding rings
I, I love it when you give me things
And you, you ought to give me wedding rings.

–The Magnetic Fields

So, why do we keep getting married, in the face of statistics which say that perhaps half, or even more, of all marriages end in divorce?  Wouldn’t it be better to replace marriage with a series of 5-year contracts–to limit the seemingly archaic notion of ‘until death do us part’?  Marriage as we in the west know it, i.e., monogamous marriage, is certainly not the human norm–this is one thing that biologists and anthropologists are happy to proclaim to us, usually with not a little glee.  Biological marriage modelers, particularly the ones who study primates, can assure us that humans, like chimps, are meant to hump like rabbits with just about anything that moves, at all hours of the day, and at all seasons of the year.  They cite the human female’s continuous fertility cycle as evidence of this, as well as the mating patterns that they find in primate troops, in which dominant males get to mate with the most females, while undominant males often meet a lonely and/or violent end.  The current theory seems to suggest that we are best suited to serial monogamy.  But is that true of all humans, or is this pattern culturally determined?  To find out, we need to look into the origins of the European marriage pattern.