Catch-22

As the ecological disaster of the century thus far trickles its way out of the news and into the water table, people are beginning to pay less and less attention to the truly silly things that BP officials have been saying. To whit:

[BP] officials have said the moratorium on offshore oil drilling... harmed its cash flow.

"If we are unable to keep [offshore] fields going, that is going to have a substantial impact on our cash flow," David Nagel, executive vice-president for BP America, told the New York Times.

The moratorium "makes it harder for us to fund things, fund these programmes [the cleanup and compensation programs, among others]."

Yeah.

By that logic, of course, we shouldn't regulate after disasters, because otherwise we won't be able to pay for them. Not even disasters. If a company dumps millions of tons of lead and mercury into a municipal water supply to avoid the crippling costs of dealing with industrial byproducts, we shouldn't penalize them, nor should we stop them from doing it after people become sick or die. We should give them tax breaks and possibly government funding so they can afford to pay the victims of their ongoing criminal malfeasance compensation. If something is done wrong, it's important to keep doing it wrong so you can afford to pay off the people who get hurt.

This, of course, extends to bank robbers, who shouldn't be thrown in prison, but rather given assistance to rob further banks so they can afford to pay the fines associated with bank robbing. Or how about drug dealers, who shouldn't be shut down, but rather kept in business so they can pay for their legal costs by selling more drugs. We may be going a bit far afield here.

In summary, apparently BP needs money. They need it because they screwed up. Thus, to get the money to pay for their screw-up, they must make more money by doing the very thing that caused them to screw up in the first place. Capitalism red in tooth and claw my ass.

You Apparently Can Have It Both Ways

Suppose, dear reader, that you were a member of the group of people who are both Glenn Beck supporters and Ground-Zero Mosque detractors. The Venn Diagram there isn't completely overlapping, but I'd say that there are a fair number of both. In fact, maybe you are one of them. But suppose you were. Or, if you'd rather, suppose you're the opposite: you criticize Glenn Beck for holding rallies on certain dates, and you believe that Muslims should be able to build mosques wherever they want. Further suppose, humorously, that you were a logical human being, not given to contradiction.

You'd be caught on the horns of a dilemma. Either you have to support people's rights to do whatever they damn well please, regardless of the offense it might cause, or you have to support the rights of the possibly-offended to shut down other people. Or you'd be a hypocrite.

If you hold a rally which makes frequent reference to Martin Luther King Jr. in the same location as his most famous speech on the anniversary of said speech, you're probably going to offend some people. I don't care if you are the spiritual heir to his legacy, I don't care if you are the most respectful rally of people ever, I don't even care if you're Martin Luther King Jr. back from the grave. You're probably going to offend someone. If your sole criterion for whether or not something is acceptable is whether or not you might offend someone, then guess what, you're not going to get to do too many things because we live in a hyper-sensitive world and someone will probably be offended. And you certainly can't be seen to be co-opting Rev. King's legacy, even if that's not your intention. What people think about what you do is much more important than what you're doing, at least according to you, and if people think you're doing something, well then you're doing it.

Contrariwise, if you believe in the rights of people to do things because they're protected by law and the Constitution and whether or not it might offend some people, it's still right and free and so forth, then you can't complain when a guy you're not terribly fond of does things which you aren't terribly fond of, as long as they don't violate any laws. That's liberty: you may not agree with what someone is saying/doing, but you must fight tooth and nail for their rights to do it.

This is addressing perception, not facts. If you use perception as a justification, you're probably not going to like the results. Either you perceive all things the same way, or (inevitably) you're hypocritical. Which is why perception makes a lousy argument.

Now, the facts of the matter are that there is no mosque, it's not being built at Ground Zero, and it's not my place to make the decision whether or not to allow it to be built because I'm not living there nor do I have any connection to it beyond living in the same country as the events in question. I'm not abdicating opinion or responsibility; if it were up to me, I'd leave religion completely out of the site, but I hardly think that several blocks away, a community center which happens to be of a particular faith is in poor taste, given what I've heard of the other things in the area. On the other side, the rally, from the reports I've heard, sounded like it was fairly standard fare, without rioting or hate speech or what have you that was being predicted by some. However, if Glenn Beck and company didn't realize that they were holding their rally on the same day in the same place when they scheduled it (giving them the benefit of the doubt), then they at least realized it before they wrote the speeches because it sounds like they were making reference to MLK in a way which wouldn't make any sense unless they knew what they were doing, given the fact that Rev. King is hardly the poster child for their movement most of the time. I'm not offended, because again, I have no real right to be offended, but the balance of evidence points to them attempting in some way to co-opt. Hardly the first time, and surely not the last.

There have already been too many arguments made about both of these issues, I just wanted to point out their basic incompatibility. But no one is logical and everyone is hypocritical, so there's not much point in attempting to talk anyone out of their points of view.

No, Fuck You Peter Molyneux

"Films, TV, even hallowed books, are just rubbish because they don't involve me," [Peter Molyneux] said. "It's a sea of blandness."

Yeah, everything should revolve around you. And not in some difficult way, like having to see a story through the eyes of another character, or appreciate something that you're not actually a part of. No, everything should involve you in a way that's more immersive. And by that, I mean you should stare at it through a screen and a haze of technology and do basically what the game designer thinks you should do.

By the same token, newspapers and magazines should only feature stories about your life, which are the only things that are important because there's no way someone else's experiences could possibly have an application to you. The music industry needs to change its tune too. Not to mention cocktail parties: how many times have you gone somewhere and people were talking about something other than you?

It's all about you, Peter Molyneux. You and your tiny, tiny ego. Did I say ego? I meant something else, let me assure you.

Talk about rubbish.

Unhappy? Really?

On perusal of the BBC homepage, this headline blurb caught my eye.

Home truths

Life in shacks makes black South Africans unhappy

No! Why would it? I can't understand.

I'd venture a guess that life in shacks probably would make most people unhappy, color and nationality notwithstanding. Maybe not people who are currently living in caves, or simply exposed to the elements on street corners, but taken as a whole, I'd say that the bulk of humanity wouldn't be happy in shacks. I'm sure there's more to the story, but the headline blurb isn't great.

North Korea

The whole article is great, but all you need to know about North Korea is contained in the following sentence:

That evening we were taken to the theatre to watch a ballet devoted to the triumphant building of a hydroelectric dam.

Yeah... they might be crazier than the Burmese.

And lest you think that this is overt racism, it is not. I feel incredibly sorry for the poor people who have to live in both North Korea and Burma, because those countries are FUBAR. It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the kind of crazy that shouldn't be let out.

And the previous comes from a person who actually likes Soviet art and literature.

A Metaphor That Needs Work

I am bothered by comparisons of apples and oranges, particularly if the point of the comparison is to prove that apples should be peeled because oranges should be. It doesn't even matter if I disagree with the central premise of the comparison; I still want a better analogy.

South Africa is mooting the idea of banning all Internet porn. We could argue all day about freedom of speech or the idiocy of believing that it could be done, but what I actually take issue with is this quote by Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Malusi Gigaba (from this BBC article), to whit:

"Cars are already provided with brakes and seatbelts [sic]... There is no reason why the Internet should be provided without the necessary restrictive mechanisms built into it."

No. No no no. It won't do, Mr. Gigaba. Cars are provided with brakes and seat belts for good reason, and perhaps the Internet of South Africa should be provided with a mythical porn-blocking filter for good reason too, but those reasons aren't the same.

According to Mr. Gigaba, brakes and seat belts are "restrictive mechanisms," possibly because they restrict the car's movement or the movement of the driver. But a far better way to classify them would be as safety mechanisms, in that without them, the car is extremely unsafe, as is the driver. Comparing that safety to a virus scanner or a firewall is kosher, because those things are safety devices for computers and the Internet. If South Africa were planning to put up a national firewall to keep out attackers (rather, of course, than keeping out porn, which isn't so much a safety issue as one of those "restrictive mechanisms") then it would be a fine metaphor to use.

However, what Mr. Gigaba is actually talking about is the technology to keep a car from exceeding the speed limit. That's restrictive technology, and one could argue whether or not it was safer. Similarly, keeping computers from visiting pornographic sites is restrictive technology and one could argue whether or not it was safer. Sadly, Mr. Gigaba can't use that analogy because the technology to keep cars from driving faster than the posted speed limit, if it exists, is not widely available. We could be developing it, and I think it would save lives, but we're busy keeping people from looking at dirty pictures.

In summary, seat belts don't keep you from doing anything you would otherwise do, and their sole purpose (unless you're a crank who believes that they're terrible) is to keep the driver safe. Porn-filtering technology keeps you from doing something you would otherwise do, and there may be a side effect of making you safer. One is restrictive, one is not. And brakes are just part of the car. Without brakes, a car is no longer a car, it's a poorly-guided suicide missile. No comparison there.

If You Do It

Here's the deal: if you have a religious prohibition against doing something, that means you and your coreligionists shouldn't do it. That does not mean that everyone else who isn't a member of your religion is bound by those same rules.

So you have a rule that you can't eat hot dog buns. You feel very strongly that the eating of hot dog buns is wrong. Everyone laughs at you, but you refuse to eat those hot dog buns, no matter how tasty they look, no matter how annoying it is to eat hot dogs sans bun.

Then you see another person eating a hot dog bun, you go berserk, and you kill him or her with a runcible spoon, the weapon your religion has historically used to kill infidels. Everyone says, "Oh, well, I guess we really shouldn't eat hot dog buns so we don't offend that religion," but what they're really thinking is, "Gee, I don't want to get killed with a runcible spoon too."

Herein, the idiocy. If you have a problem with something, don't do it. If you believe that everyone should have a problem with something, you should try to convert them to your religion, wherein they will be prohibited from doing that thing. But if you think that just because you feel religiously bound to dance naked in the streets every July 12th, I'm going to do the same thing so as not to piss you off, then you are thinking wrong. Hell, if dancing naked in the streets is against the law, I'm not even going to support you in your claim to be religiously oppressed.

It's not offensive to do something that someone else is religiously prohibited from doing. It's simply a reflection of the fact that you're not a member of that religion. If they don't like it, they can look away, or keep not doing it, or try to convert everyone in the world to their religion. But until they do, it's not a matter of political correctness, it's a matter of fact. Not everyone believes that. Whatever that happens to be.