Yeah, so? I’ve been doing this for years

Blanch, you delicate souls, blanch. Somebody else finally gets it.

I’d like to suggest a very simple strategy for American liberals: Get mean. Stop policing the language and start using it to hurt our enemies. American liberals are so busy purging their speech of any words that might offend anyone that they have no notion of using language to cause some salutary pain.

I wish I knew where Americans got this idea that being a liberal meant being Mr and Mrs Milquetoast.

300 million dead

Last night, I attended a talk by Sherman Alexie, who was hilarious and at times, biting. One of the curious things he noted, though, was that he had said something about the disastrous conduct of the wasteful war in Iraq, and despite this being an audience of collegiate liberals, no one applauded. He noted that this is his common experience — it used to be that voicing your objections to an unjust war got clapped, but nowadays, it’s old hat. Even people who once supported the war are backing away from it (although it’s rare for them to plainly say “I was wrong”), and the futility of the war has simply lapsed into the status of a given. It has become the background noise of our country. Protest has been ground out of us by the dreary dun of corruption and destruction and the unresponsiveness of our government — we are in a democracy with a large majority opposed to the war, to no effect and with no expectation that our representatives will actually act to end the killing.

So now we have reached the nice round milestone of 4,000 dead in Iraq. 4000 dead American soldiers, that is; it’s almost as if the two orders of magnitude greater number of slaughtered Iraqis, the millions of refugees, the destruction of an entire country, simply don’t matter and don’t count. Americans find it hard to gather outrage over thousands of our own dead, and tens of thousands wounded, and they sure as hell aren’t going to get stirred up over hundreds of thousands of dead foreigners.

I don’t get it.

As a nation, we stand atop a pedestal of bones and ruined lives. The disruption of families is ongoing, and our honor has been thrown away by the greed and ignorance of our leaders. And yet we carry on as if nothing is happening, nothing is wrong, no action need be taken. We will have an election, and one of the candidates stands for amplifying our involvement in this evil chaos … and he stands a chance of winning. The monsters who have perpetrated this crime will walk away to fat retirement checks and lives of wealth in the service of bloated corporate sponsors, and they will not pay — you will.

We all have blood on our hands, and no one cares.

Once, four dead in Ohio could stir us. Now, four thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, it doesn’t matter … we have all become dead inside.

Return of the Manimal

Britain is experiencing some dissent over research on human-animal hybrid embryos. One the one hand, you’ve got researchers and charities arguing that this is a technique to probe deeper into the genetic and molecular properties of developing organisms, and is key to developing treatments for genetic diseases and developmental abnormalities; on the other side, we have plaintive lowing from the do-nothings and ignoramuses about the “sacredness” of human life, and kneejerk rejection by the usual collection of suspects, the Catholic church.

In his Easter address today, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, will describe plans to allow hybrid human-animal embryos as “monstrous”.

I addressed this a couple of years ago when Bush wanted to ban this kind of research (by the way, we aren’t ahead of the Brits in this game; they’re at least discussing this, while our government has mostly acted to shut this work down, leaving little to argue over). This is not a science-fiction project to create half-human slave labor or anything silly like that — it is serious research in early development that puts human disease-related forms of genes into animal models so that we can try experimental treatments. “Monstrous” would be taking risks or doing experiments on Down syndrome children; humane would be inducing an analog of Down syndrome in mice so that we can figure out causes and treatments of health problems in an informed way. I would also put using ignorance and medieval dogma to prevent biomedical research in the “monstrous” category, but then, I put just about everything about the Catholic church in that bin.

Just so everyone knows precisely where I’m coming from, though, in addition to appreciating the practical value of hybrid research for alleviating human suffering, I also think all forms of reproductive biotechnology are just plain cool. Some people think the next revolution in humanity will be an outcome of advances in neuroscience and technology (the geek rapture), but I’m inclined to think that the most significant changes in how we think about who we are are going to arise from radical reproductive technologies.

An end to war?

That John Horgan fellow — he’s always going on and on about the end of something or other. This time, it’s about the end of war. There’s a little bit of “duh” about it — modern science can end war, all it has to do is end scarcity, or as it says, “Given adequate food, fuel, and gender equality, mass conflict just might disappear” — but also a good question. Are people intrinsically warlike by nature, or will they favor peace if given the opportunity?

I’m inclined to agree that people would rather avoid war, and that ending resource scarcity (which I’m not convinced that science can do) would reduce the incidence of war, but I think the article ignores one central source of conflict: ideology. Baboons and bonobos don’t seem to have it, but we do, and it can trigger wars for that other resource, human minds. We want people on our side. The Thirty Years War, the American Civil War, the Cold War … were those fought because one side wanted the other side’s food or land or minerals? Or over the spread of ideas that weren’t satisfied by science?

I have a suspicion that if we had a world of peace and plenty, where everyone was brought up to abhor war, and in which there was no biological imperative for conflict, we’d still have people coming up with ideas they’d be willing to die for … and we’d conjure up new tribes out of the contented hordes and set them to battling with one another.

The odious Sally Kern

Remember Sally Kern, the Oklahoma legislator caught on tape babbling about the gay conspiracy? It’s worse than it sounded: it seems Kern has a gay son who she has essentially deleted from her public life.

And these are the people who claim ownership of the word “family”…

Here’s something even worse than the self-destruction of her own family: Kerns is the sponsor of Oklahoma House Bill 2211, the “Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act”. You can tell from the title what it is: a bill that would privilege religious opinions over scientific information in public school classrooms. The story is all over the Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education page, as you might guess. The bad news is that the HB 2211 has passed in the House and is on its way to the Oklahoma senate, where we’d better hope it gets shot down. Here’s what it does:

The bill requires public schools to guarantee students the right to express their religious viewpoints in a public forum, in class, in homework and in other ways without being penalized. If a student’s religious beliefs were in conflict with scientific theory, and the student chose to express those beliefs rather than explain the theory in response to an exam question, the student’s incorrect response would be deemed satisfactory, according to this bill.

The school would be required to reward the student with a good grade, or be considered in violation of the law. Even simple, factual information such as the age of the earth (4.65 billion years) would be subject to the student’s belief, and if the student answered 6,000 years based on his or her religious belief, the school would have to credit it as correct. Science education becomes absurd under such a situation.

Oklahomans, call or write your state senators NOW.

Is this like a belated birthday present?

Yesterday, the Minnesota legislature introduced H.F. No. 3922, another of those “Academic Freedom” bills that are actually attempts to infringe on academic freedom. It’s full of high-minded language, but 1) they have not demonstrated that there is a problem, 2) they simply restate principles academics already hold, but 3) they turn those principles into opportunities for meddling legislators to police our campuses. It’s sponsored by Olson (R, 16B), Heidgerken (R, 13A), Drazkowksi (R, 28B), Erickson (R, 16A), and Emmer (R, 19B). I think you can see the common link in their party affiliation; these are conservatives who want a way to sneak their crude and stupid views into our universities. If they’re your representatives, blast them with email. If they’re not your representatives, write to the ones who are and tell them that this bill must die.

Those crazy Vermonters

A couple of small towns in Vermont passed an unenforceable law to declare Bush and Cheney criminals. I like it. Personally, I favor something more like Megan’s Law, in which Bush and Cheney would forever after be required to register with local law authorities where ever they go, with their names, photographs, addresses, and a list of their offenses made public. (I’m actually not a big fan of Megan’s Laws, but if we’re going to publicly track one kind of monster, I think far more wicked monsters should be subject to the same penalties.)