The Seditionist

Oh my, an expletive in the title. And I’m a whiny bleeding-heart socialist small-l liberal. Why am I dissin’ freedom?

It’s because I have to balance out Freedom’s rep. There are enough hoarse voices screaming how great freedom is, how we need lots more freedom, blah blah blah. I think that’s a load of crock.

The truth is that freedom is a double-edged sword.

Of course we all like being free ourselves. I enjoy many of my freedoms. My freedom to live my life, my freedom to eat, my freedom to be educated, my freedom of speech, my freedom of (non)religion; these freedoms are all great.

Then there are the freedoms I don’t really care about. My freedom to potentially own a billion dollars. My freedom to potentially earn the equivalent to the GDP of a small country. My freedom to potentially own the world’s most expensive house. These freedoms I don’t care about because they’re constrained. Wealth is the measure of freedom here, and having the potential “freedom” to own lots of stuff is not the same as having the freedom to own lots of stuff, because that potential is only fulfilled if I’m: incredibly lucky, incredibly clever and/or incredibly wealth and famous to start off with. If I’m ugly, with an IQ of 75, have an unemployed drunk for a father and an HIV-positive prostitute mother, then I have zilch chance of that potential being fulfilled (well, with a lottery ticked it goes up to one in a gazillion).

And then there are the freedoms I really wouldn’t want anyone else to have. The freedom to enslave me. The freedom for someone else to own everything I need. The freedom for a hospital to throw me sick and dying on the pavement because I can’t pay. The freedom for rich people to not pay taxes. The freedom for other people to deprive me of my freedom of movement or to kill me.

When we’re putting together a society, we can go two ways (no more, no less):

First, Total Anarchy. The freedom to do whatever you want. The problem is that that’s a potential freedom, and bigger people can take it away from you to increase their freedom. They’re “freedom-rich” and you’re “freedom-poor”. Too bad.

The second is a social contract as proposed by Hobbes. We all give up those freedoms that impinge on someone else’s freedom to a more substantial degree than they add to our own. No, you’re not free to shoot me with that gun because that will take away my freedom to be alive. No, you’re not free to enslave me because that’ll take away my freedom of action and of expression. No, you’re not allowed to buy that extra mansion to stay in over summer with the money I need to buy food.

Today, we’re moving further and further away from a stable social contract to more and more anarchistic freedoms which empower the few but disadvantage the many. And freedoms don’t “trickle down”.

So what’s the answer? A paradigm shift. We have to stop talking about freedom societies, because achieving perfect freedom for everyone is by definition impossible (because we’d need the freedom to impinge someone else’s freedom) and there’s really no good reason for advocating excessive freedoms. What we need is a fairness society; a society in which freedoms are guaranteed in order to provide all of us with quality lives, and freedoms are restricted to prevent a minority from absconding with our rights and our toil. Fairness is at least theoretically realizable. Practically it will be a struggle, but at least it will be a struggle worth fighting for. Progress will mean progress for those least well off.

Freedom must mean many freedoms for all, not all freedoms for some and none for you because you’re the sucker.

I’m an Atheist. As far as I’m concerned, religion is bad. Religion, if it ever had a unique purpose, is robbed of it now. It is possible to replace religion completely. And since that will also deal with the violence and irrational craziness religion inevitably brings, letting religion die is the moral course of action.

However, there’s a belief among some Atheists that it’s religion which is responsible for all the world’s ills. Especially since 9/11, some Atheists have concluded that it is fundamentalism which has created the situation we see in the world today. The greatest evils as embodied by 9/11 are religion’s fault. I agree that 9/11 is religion’s problem. I agree religion makes a bad situation worse. But I disagree that what’s at the core of the world’s problems is religion. Sometimes religion creates problems, more often it acts as a catalyst to allow people to express violence in response to pre-existing problems. I think it’s folly to claim that the crazy disparities in wealth and welfare are not huge problems. I think it’s intellectually bankrupt to select 9/11 as a terrible holocaust while ignoring the violence that has killed millions since WW2, violence only rarely directly attributable to religion. Religion has made things worse, but it’s not religion’s fault that wealth is concentrated with a tiny elite while most humans are poor.

Religion feeds on injustice, because it pretends it has solutions in the afterlife and on judgement day. Religion will never go away until we resolve these injustices and create a good standard of living for everyone. And to use atheism to absolve ourselves from man-made injustice is no different than using religion to absolve ourselves from man-made injustice.

The difference between Science and Religion X is that Science will work for you, will help you, whether you believe in it or not. A car, microwave, computer or space shuttle does not scream “Unbeliever” and deactivate its electronic components in response to our skepticism.

Religion, on the other hand, requires a thing called “faith”. In most cases, you have to have “faith” for God to help you, to go to heaven. “Faith” means holding the “Religion X” hypothesis is true despite having no corrobberating evidence that holds up to scientific scrutiny.

Science works for all to see, and if one believes that it is God or a magic spell that keeps the television running, then one is quite free to substitute said power source for the power point. At this point the television set will turn off. Too bad. It all works in mysterious ways!

If Science required adherence to the scientific principle in order to work for us, then the struggle of Science versus Metaphysics would already be over. Unfortunately, Science is not as egotistical and vengeful as most Gods seem to be.

Perhaps when everyone knows that gods come down to Earth, we hallucinate gods; when all of us are familiar with demons, it’s incubi and succubi; when fairies are widely accepted, we see fairies; in an age of spiritualism, we encounter spirits; and when the old myths fade and we begin thinking that extraterrestrial beings are plausible, then that’s where our hypnogogic imagery tends.

(Sagan, The Demon-haunted world, p. 80)

We humans have done a lot of stupid shit which has haunted and tormented us. Here are ten prime candidates for royal fuckups we’ve spawned during the last century. They’re in no particular order.

1. Scientology
   Founded by a two-bit SciFi author with delusions of godhood (second coming of Buddha indeed!), Scientology is probably the most successful crazy cult ever. While they don’t ask their members to commit ritual suicide (that would hurt Scientology’s bottom line) their brainwashing techniques, abuse of the legal system and grave injury to many of their members and ex-members with their mumbo-jumbo qualifies the whole org as nasty small-e evil.
2. Microsoft
   What self-respecting geek doesn’t hate the poster-child for how greed and the constraint of knowledge can cripple productivity and affordability for decades?
3. The A-Bomb
   We invent something with only one use: to turn the clock back to the stone age. Bravo!
4. The Evangelical movement
   Science; who needs it when we can hate homosexuals?
5. “Smart” weapons
   People talk about the ethical implications of embryonic stem cell gathering; nobody talks about the ethical implications of smart weapons, of what it will mean if the next generation is smart enough to start killing without human control. Wars without consequence? For one side, at least. The side with enough money to build killer robots.
6. Celebrity culture
   I suppose the demise of nobility left an important gap in the social fabric. Enter a bunch of drug-addled grandiose and beautiful people with no other redeeming qualities.
7. Bush
   If anyone can bring on biblical apocalypse, he can.
8. Modern advertising
   Advertising may be thousands of years old (the ancient Greeks did it), but today’s subversive and manipulative ad war on common sense, waged on billboards, television channels, in movie theaters and even on our very bodies with the aid of brand logos is unequaled in history.
9. Two world wars
   What should be said about the greed and insanity that led to the killing of millions? At the very least that civilization is always at the precipice, and once set in motion unimaginable horrors may ravage those that cannot put a stop to the behemoth weight of bombs and bullets. A great reason to get along. Because victory is never certain, never swift,  never truly good, never forever.
10. Social Darwinism
    It seems that perverted forms of Darwinism (unintended by the great man himself) were not killed with Hitler’s Nazi Germany, but are alive and well in many forms in many minds today. Casual acceptance of a dog-eat-dog world, of innocent casualties, callused self-interest as purpose and reason for deeds of great vileness; and so we let the suffering continue, because God will help those who help themselves… it’ll be a great age when we can put behind us the economic, social and racial theories that are based in the belief that the weak must perish or be enslaved.

A lot is being made of Islamic fundamentalism. And of course, there’s a lot of truth to the allegations that in many poorly developed parts of the world ideas persist that are incompatible with human rights, science and in some cases common sense. Of course it’s easy to blame Islam instead of poverty and lack of education, since fighting poverty costs money. Ranting about a Clash of Cultures is free, and gets you elected if you’re a right-wing shill.

Much more worrying to me is the resurgence of Fundamentalism among Christian denominations in well-educated places. The Evangelical phenomenon is probably the best example of a head-long dive into mindless Fundamentalism, but Ratzinger has been doing his part for the Catholic church. One would think helping AIDS spread through condemnation of birth control and persecution of homosexuals would be enough for a man at the helm of a fading and increasingly irrelevant Christian sect. Not so. The pope has announced the Catholic church will be training more exorcists to fight the spread of Satanism.

And you thought the Catholic church had enough problems without making up new ones? Well, I suppose the advantage is that the imaginary Satanist problem will be a lot easier to deal with than emptying churches in the Catholic European heartland.

It’s official, Huckabee is victorious in the Iowa caucus. Huckabee, a man who doesn’t “believe in” evolution… I know Iowa is conservative, but it’s shameful that people in the country that’s self-declared leader of the world take seriously a man who doesn’t believe in science.

Bush has been a curse for the U.S and the rest of the world for the past seven years. Whatever happens in Election ‘08, I really hope there won’t be another dim-witted god-invoking self-righteous xenophobic prick in charge for the next four years. If that happens, many people will give up on the U.S.

I bitch a lot about how terrible everything is today, but the truth is I think things aren’t great compared to how great they could potentially be. So, in honor of the New Year here’s a list of ten reasons I’m glad I’m not a first-century jerk.

1. Mushrooms: I love eating mushrooms. Today, I can do that while knowing I won’t die in agonizing pain hours later. If there’s any death more terrible than that some poisonous mushrooms can inflict on you, let me know. Several of my ancestors died in mushroom-related incidents, so buying non-deadly mushrooms by the kilo is definitely on the list for me.
2. Flowing water: Having a good shower is so much better than bathing in the tepid pond behind the outhouse.
3. The Internet: How did I ever survive without Wikipedia?
4. Safety from Hordes: With all the horror about terrorist attacks, let’s not forget that a couple of thousand years ago there were hordes of Mongols, Vikings, Muslims, Christians and every other depraved racial and religious group out to skin us and eat our babies. Not having rampaging hordes is a good thing!
5. Modern Medicine: For those of us that live in a country with decent medical care, not dying from a slight chill that turns into double pneumonia is a good thing.
6. Planes: I know they’re bad for the environment. But when ya gotta go, sometimes ya just gotta go. And those month-long sea journeys would have been the end of me.
7. Science: The kind that’s not read from a holy book. I love science. Isn’t it great to look at something and understand a little of what makes it tick?
8. Lack of famines: Famines suck. I don’t like being hungry. I suspect I would like dying from hunger even less.
9. No Black Death: Ties in with modern medicine, but it deserves its own bullet point. After all, being trapped in a city of the dying burying the dead is far beyond modern comprehension to us who shiver at the thought of shop closings on public holidays.
10. Less chance of nuclear holocaust: What some people don’t want to admit. Our chances of being wiped out overnight by our own weapons has decreased to zero. That’s real good.

But of course this list only applies to the fortunate 5% of the world that live in the very rich and fortunate parts of the world. New Year’s resolution for the Industrialized World: make sure nobody anywhere dies of a slight chill double pneumonia or a scratch tetanus infection.

Happy New Year!

Fox had a little reportage dealing with terrorism, and the host came to the conclusion that he couldn’t understand how people can believe climate change to be worse than terrorism.

Ok, so let’s start on the terror front. So far, their greatest success was using our own stupidity against us. 9/11 was well planned on their part, but it couldn’t have succeeded without useless airport security (all part of the wonders of economics, security spending doesn’t generate great returns…). We knew airport security was important before 9/11, we just didn’t do it. The other “success stories” came from primitive bombs. The events were terrible in their own right, but not significant in magnitude unless your view them under the selective “terror microscope” where hundreds of thousands of dead in Africa are ignored in favor of some thousands in the West.

So, how far can terrorists take it? Well, let’s say they rustle up a real nuclear weapon (not a much-hyped but useless dirty bomb which won’t produce casualties over and above those from the initial conventional explosion). I don’t think there’s any chance that will happen. But let’s say they get one. Obviously it won’t be a ICBM. It’ll be a small man-portable device. They position it in a major city. They blow it. Everything goes great for Osama. The small nuclear blast (by any modern standards) kills hundreds of thousands. There’s a huge cleanup bill. That’s nasty. It’s the ultimate worst-case scenario for what terrorists might achieve (aside from colluding with evil space aliens that provide them with Death Spores) and yet it doesn’t add up to wiping out a city, much less civilization as we know it. So terrorists fail the apocalypse test.

Ok, next scenario. We need to worry about “rogue states”. Iran could have a couple of primitive longer-range nukes soon. First off, there is NO evidence that any regime with the potential to get nukes would use them unilaterally just to wipe out some unbelievers. While xenophobic politicians would have us believe Iran is controlled and populated entirely by suicide bombers who would love to blow up their babies if only it could give an infidel a paper cut, the real world couldn’t be more different. People in Iran are largely reasonable. They don’t like the U.S, and have a general mistrust of the Western world. Fair enough. There’s the little business of the Shah to remember. The West was indeed out to make Iran their bitch. Having been in that situation, Iranians are pretty clear on one thing: it won’t happen again. But nobody, least all the Mullahs, have shown a tendency to launch suicidally insane attacks. There’s no historic precedent. No nothing. Just people flapping their mouths. I’m more afraid the U.S will launch nukes, with the crazy talk of some presidential candidates, and all that crap about pre-emptive nuke strike policies. Yet even if Iran decided to launch their arsenal it would at best kill a few million people. At best. And again; that won’t happen. So again, no apocalypse.

Last you have China. While China has the nukes, there’s no nation on earth more pragmatic than China. China’s very unlikely to start WW3. No apocalypse here.

And with all of these threats, you can’t get intelligence services to agree on even the basics. No evidence of Al-Quaeda acquiring nuclear material… and now, even Bush’s own intelligence services are telling him Iran isn’t developing nukes… to say “opinions are divided” would be putting it mildly.

On the other hand, you have the linked events of global warming and energy scarceness (which occurs because we use up materials, and that use creates global warming). Scientific opinion is virtually unanimous. Don’t listen to me, look at the bulk of research. It’s man-made and so it’ll keep happening until we stop burning stuff. Plant life is pretty fragile. Harsh temperature swings will wreak havoc with food output. In Australia, we’ve noticed. Elsewhere, expect to notice soon enough. Fertile land will decrease. Desertification will increase. Lack of energy will make transport of foodstuffs, farming of foodstuffs, and making of fertilizers (all dependent heavily on oil) difficult and expensive. And it’ll get more and more difficult and expensive. Add to that the population explosion and the fact that we’re operating at close to peak capacity food production as it stands and one thing becomes clear: there won’t be enough food for everyone.

Famines have always been better at killing people than any other catastrophe including war (but excluding disease, in some circumstances). And when there’s not enough food to go around even here in the West, people are going to get upset. People are going to do what they can to get food. Society deteriorates. Thin veneer of civilization goes out the window when it comes to getting food for our kids. Anarchy, warfare over remaining resources, mass starvation… how many dead? Millions? Billions? It’s impossible to tell, but the potential is there for near-total collapse of modern society. Yes, that’s the worst case. But it’s not unrealistic, especially if we keep going at this rate. It’s not unprecedented either; civilizations have wiped themselves out in the past by using up their natural resources. When push comes to shove, they couldn’t develop technology to adapt quickly enough. And there their stories ended.

Apocalypse? Probably not, at least in the total sense. Though those of us unlucky to be alive to experience it may not see a big difference.

So yeah, I think climate change is worse than terrorism. I think it’s potentially worse than pretty much everything that could happen to us that we have the power to change. The sad thing is, if worst comes to worst not even saying “I told you so” will bring much relief.

It’s finally happened. With the death of Benazir Bhutto, the only slightly viable candidate for the upcoming Pakistan elections is dead. And with her, Pakistani democracy.

Of late, the world seemed to have decided that a bit more democracy in Pakistan would be nice. If only to make selective pro-democratic pressure seem less hypocritical. After all, Musharraf had received fabulous military and financial support from the U.S and other western countries.

Now when the international community was having second thoughts, we find it’s too little too late. The elections will be worthless. The powder keg of Pakistan is ever more tightly packed. Perhaps one day soon, we’ll come to regret yet another marriage of convenience to dictatorship.