A momentary lapse of reason

I had the unfortunate occasion to read this half-assed critique of PZ Myers and, rather than have my rant confined only to the domain of Google Reader, I thought I’d post it here as well.

The Dalai Lama’s cumbaya rhetoric is all well and good, but I always find it rather hollow given that, if he and his order still in power, they’d likely still be living like royalty at the expense of the Tibetan people’s utter destitution. 

Not that life under the PRC is a picnic (I’m sure it isn’t), but Tibetan theocratic feudalism was brutally oppressing Tibet’s people as recently as 50 years ago. No amount of praise from Richard Gere can rewrite that bloody history, and I wish people would stop looking to this man in a funny dress as some sort of beacon of holiness, allowing leftover orientalist impulses to elevate him above his discredited western counterparts.

The rest of the article seems but a milieu of intellectual masturbation and strawmen. Needless to say, I doubt that even PZ would paint all clerics as necessarily bad or ill-intentioned people, but charlatans they most certainly are, if only unwittingly. As for scripture: I’m sure that the holy books of many religions contain miniscule morsels of worthwhile universal truth, just as I am sure such nuggets exist in the Twilight series of novels. That doesn’t mean that I think that either are worth the trees it takes to print them.

“Democrats can’t run away from the fact that the stimulus has failed to provide the immediate jolt to the economy and prevent unemployment from climbing above 8 percent as the administration promised.”
  — Rep. John Boehner, House Minority Leader

Howard Dean, guest hosting Countdown 07/29/2009, responds:

“This is the moral equivalent of an abusive guy who puts his wife in the hospital, and then gets mad at the doctors who can’t send her home as soon as they’d hoped.”

If science were merely a “narration”, a “myth”, a “social construction”, medicine wouldn’t have doubled our lifespans in just 100 years. And science’s many postmodern critics would be mercifully dead. Luce Irigaray wouldn’t be pushing 77 and still spewing her ridiculous crap.

George Galloway vs. George W. Bush

It’s notable that given the suspicions surrounding George W. Bush having knowingly authorized torture of detainees, he too should have been turned away at the Canadian border, as persons reasonably suspected of war crimes are not admissible to Canada under Canadian law. He wasn’t; he spoke on Tuesday, March 17, in Calgary.

Once he was on Canadian soil our government was obligated by the Convention on Torture, to which we are a signatory, to investigate and, if necessary, prosecute Mr. Bush for war crimes. We did not.

And yet some relatively unknown British Member of Parliament with some controversial views is worth censoring like this?

Clearly we have a federal government that only obeys Canadian and international law when it suits their political agenda.

An analogy for the CRTC ruling on Bell’s throttling practices

I own the only orchard in the kingdom. The reasons for this notwithstanding, the king tells me that I have to lease out portions of my orchard to other growers. The citizens can then choose to buy fruit directly from me, or from one of the other growers who grow on my property. 

One season I spray my fruit with a new pesticide. This new pesticide makes my fruit taste absolutely terrible. Not wanting to be at a disadvantage in the marketplace, I intrude onto the leased lots and spray all my tenants’ fruit with the same pesticide. The tenants are fairly angry but I tell them that it’s my land, I am within my rights to choose how to manage it most effectively.

Pretty much anyone who follows this line of thinking will agree that in this situation, I’m an asshole, what I’ve done is unfair. The whole purpose of making me lease out plots on my orchard was to encourage market competition, and if I’m allowed to exert control over my competitors, the exercise is pointless. 

Replace me with Bell Canada, replace orchards with network infrastructure, and replace pesticide with P2P throttling, and you have the situation that the CRTC has just given the official seal of approval.

This is the first time that one of those fucking Starbucks wisdom-on-a-coffee-cup things has resonated with me.

I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside. Because how do you meet a new person? I was very stumped by this for many years. And then I realized, you just say, “hi.” they may ignore you. Or you may marry them. And that possibility is worth that one word. 
   — Augusten Burroughs

As someone consistently complaining about feeling so alone, maybe I should take this to heart.