True Equality

Earthquake!

I was woken up this morning by some fairly substantial shaking. I have been in only one earthquake before, a minor shake in the UK where a man’s leg was injured by a falling chimney. This was slightly different. The shaking increased in intensity and lasted for what felt like a long time (thirty seconds I think – time is hard to gauge when you’ve just been woken up in a situation like that). I could hear the sounds of bottles and objects falling over, my thoughts were “woah – this is awesome!” followed by “I hope this doesn’t get more serious” to, afterwards, “Bugger, the aftermath of this is probably going to mess up my life for a time”.

There were a lot of aftershocks and I sat back in bed and soaked them in. The earth grumbled away with rumbles and shakes, almost like it was threatening to start back up again. I can still feel them now but they are quite rare.

I am living near Lyttelton, which is on the Banks Peninsula to the East of Christchurch, separated by mountains. I don’t know how much those mountains might have absorbed or shielded the quake but I imagine I got off pretty easy. No doubt I shall hear numerous stories in work on Monday.

On the plus side, right after the quake, the power was out. I was able to step outside my door and see the milky way on a clear night – completely unperturbed by light pollution; it was beautiful.

A 7.0-magnitude earthquake has struck off New Zealand's South Island, the US Geological Survey has said.

The epicentre was 55km (35 miles) north-west of Christchurch, at a depth of 12 km (7.5 miles), it added.

Police said there had been widespread damage to buildings and roads as well as power cuts. Two men were seriously injured by falling masonry and glass.

A state of emergency was later declared in Christchurch, New Zealand's second largest city with a 386,000 population.
Continue reading the main story
end of the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, and above an area of the Earth's crust where the Pacific Plate converges with the Indo-Australian Plate.

The country experiences more than 14,000 earthquakes a year, of which only around 20 have a magnitude in excess of 5.0.

The last fatal earthquake was in 1968, when a 7.1-magnitude tremor killed three people on the South Island's western coast.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11183685

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What? “Mosque at ground zero”.. Never heard

Ho hum. I’ve been hearing about this so goddamn long that maybe some here may be wondering what my opinion is on this..

*Drumroll please*

I don’t know.

That’s it. I don’t know. On an issue like this I can see both sides clearly and I also sympathise with both sides. On one side (generally leftward) they make an argument of freedom of religion, the rule of law and equality. On the other side (generally rightward) they make an argument of sensitivity in light of a very special case as well as the motivations of unity under such an act as the proposed mosque/Islamic centre.

Here’s the thing. I can see the good points in each so I don’t know. If a gun were to be held to my head at this very moment, I would probably go with the left position.

What interests me about this foofaraw is not the issue itself so much as it’s the reaction of the political left to those they disagree with. In essence, it is the same old story. It’s bigotry, pure and simple. The resounding chorus from the left is that xenophobia and bigotry is the only possible reasons for this. It’s hard to retell the multiple accounts I have heard but it reminds me of the tea party reactions, all the sources I read or listened to said the same thing. Racism.

Krauthammer on this:

Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the "bitter" people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging "to guns or religion or" -- this part is less remembered -- "antipathy toward people who aren't like them."

That's a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities -- often lopsided majorities -- oppose President Obama's social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president's proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/26/AR2010082605233.html

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Here are some unbelievable new stories

I know I haven’t posted in a while (immigrating to another country is hard). So here are some funny and unbelievable news stories to keep you all amused.

Polish man finds bullet in head five years after party

A Polish man living in Germany spent five years with a bullet in the back of his head having forgotten he was shot because he was drunk when it happened.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11078116

German student attacks Hell's Angels with puppy

(Reuters) - A German student created a major traffic jam in Bavaria after making a rude gesture at a group of Hell's Angels motorcycle gang members, hurling a puppy at them and then escaping on a stolen bulldozer.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65E39Q20100615

Thank you and good night!

Sports fan politics - “Refudiate”

What is sports fan politics? It’s where you pretend to care about something that you wouldn’t care about if someone from a political party you support had said/done it. I got the term from Ed Brayton on this podcast which deals with the book “mistakes were made” (which is excellent and should be read by all).

Here is a good example of sports fan politics:

Gathered from our referrers page, here are some reactions to Sarah Palin’s now-famous “refudiate” post on Twitter.

Many people (but by no means all) seem to be focusing on Palin’s neologism, and missing the real point — the bigotry and hatred her statements on the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” endorse.

…

Ben Smith: Sunday reading: Refudiate

The New Yorker: Meme Watch: ShakesPalin

The Atlantic Wire: Palin Demands Muslims ‘Refudiate’ NYC Mosque, Sparking Criticism, Mockery

Language Log: Refudiate?

Bob Cesca: Refudiate

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/36778_Refudiation_Round-Up

“Refudiate” seems to be a combination of “refute” and “repudiate”. It seems to be the kind of brain fart that I would make on a daily, nay, hourly basis.

I’ve made silly typos and I’ve garbled words. In my “problems with feminism” video I pronounce Simone de Beauvoir’s last name as “boo-vee-ey”. Oops.

It doesn’t matter. It’s inconsequential crap. If someone writes something that is basically incomprehensible then I can understand making a fuss about it. It’s like the people who say “you expect to take me seriously” when I make a typo in a blog post pr essay transcript. The idea that you discount the argument of a person based upon a mistaken work or typo is self evidently stupid as they will not do so when they see it in the writings of a person they like. It’s something that happens only when you don’t like the person or the ideas (and therefore the person) and the brain seeks to reduce dissonance by settling on whatever reason it can to dismiss those ideas or that person. This is a psychological theory of the mind known as “cognitive dissonance” and it' is a very important theory.

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15 sexy scientists? Prepare to wring hands

One of the most things about male feminists is what and-wringing, cringing pussies they can be sometimes.

Here is a list, with photos, of 15 sexy scientists. It has a little excuse for some obvious bias in the choices:

…

The worst possible way to handle this is to search the internet for photos of women scientists and make superficial decisions about who the male eye would find sexy. There's a process of judgment that went on behind the scenes, where many women scientists had to have been rejected because they were insufficiently 'hot', and then many of the women dragged into the spotlight had their "scientist" qualifications completely ignored for their literally biological qualifications. It's a reiteration of the same inappropriate judgmental attitude that pretty much every woman scientist suffers through.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/i_have_been_objectified.php

Good grief. He’s complaining that not enough shrift is given to scientific qualifications for a list  called “15 sexy scientists”. Read that title slowly again Myers.

Then there’s the usual yammering about “turning these women into objects” on the comment thread of the post he is referring to (and a lot of good rebuttals too). I can’t help but think that a lot of what these people don’t like about lists like this, is what amounts to a basic railing about the basic fact that looks are more important to women then they are to men. That’s like, get over it and stop being so offended by reality.

NASA to outreach to the Muslim world: Atheist/Skeptic blogs silent

This isn’t exactly new, a lot of you might already know about this story: Obama's New Approach to Joint Space Exploration (original story). Below is a quote from an MSNBC article.

Bolden raised eyebrows in the space community and outrage among conservative pundits by telling Al-Jazeera television recently President Barack Obama had instructed him to work for better outreach with the Muslim world.

He said Obama told him one of his top priorities was to "find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38212800/ns/technology_and_science-space/

Charles Krauthammer is scathing on this:

I didn’t touch the original story. However, what is noteworthy is that the skeptic/atheist blogs I most regularly visit haven’t mentioned this to my knowing. Take the two main ones on my start-up menu, pharyngula and badastronomy:

muslim nasa site:http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/

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Does truth matter?

In the ongoing tradition of replies that deserve their own blog post. This one is a follow-up to the “Ada Lovelace was not the first computer programmer” thread.

Emotion, to me, is my starting point; it is also an important element of the way I communicate.

..

I also think that truth is just about anything anybody else wants it to be. ‘Truth’ is a word that is available to me in sea of many other words.

This reminds me of when, discussing God with religious people, if a person says that god is a faith issue for them then there is no point arguing anymore because you have boiled it down the fundamental difference between that person’s view of the world and yours. This is similar to you and I.

Truth is subjective.. Your emotions are your guide.. That is a view I can neither understand nor condone.

Truth is not whatever we want it to be. I believe there is a standard of truth that transcends our emotions and perceptions. That is why I go through efforts to clarify what I am talking about, in this instance that the claims that Ada Lovelace was “the first programmer” are false. You don’t get to answer “yes” or “no” depending on whatever you feel you want to, there is only one answer. Whatever you want to define as a program, if you make the statement that Ada was the first to write it, then the fact that Babbage wrote it for her nullifies the idea that she was the first making the answer a “no”. Plain and simple. The question of whether Babbage was the first is separate, and “giving her the benefit of the doubt” is wishful delusion.

Living on emotions is a bad idea. Should the anti-Semite live on his or her hate? Does the racial lies they tell about Jews, which are truly believed by themselves, be the “starting point” for them? Do my protestations over the claim that that Jews slaughter non-Jews in order to use their blood for knead matzes for Passover [1] get legitimately pushed aside against claims that “emotions are my starting point” or does the truth matter?

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Jonah Goldberg: See You Next Tyranny Day!

Excellent article from Jonah Goldberg at National Review.

According to New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman in his mega-best-selling book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, China banned plastic bags a few years ago. “Bam! Just like that — 1.3 billion people, theoretically, will stop using thin plastic bags,” he gushed. “Millions of barrels of petroleum will be saved, and mountains of garbage avoided.”

China’s got us beat, suggests Friedman, because its leaders aren’t hung up on democracy, checks and balances, or any of the other dusty old impediments found in the American system. Friedman has proclaimed his envy for China’s authoritarian system countless times. It’s why he titled one of the chapters in his book “China for a Day.” The idea — he calls it his “fantasy” — is that if we could just be China for a day, the experts could impose by diktat what they cannot win through democratic debate.

…

Such arguments are as old as they are dangerous. And they are arrogant beyond description. People like Friedman automatically assume that their preferred policies are so obviously right, so objectively enlightened, that there’s no need to debate them or vote on them.

…

Such arrogance is dangerous. The literature on the unintended consequences of policies crafted by experts is at least as old as the field of economics. Frédéric Bastiat, the great 19th-century economist, noted all that separated the good economist from the bad is the ability to appreciate the possibility of the unforeseen. Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek demonstrated that healthy economies couldn’t be controlled by experts, because the experts will always have a “knowledge problem.” They can never know all of the variables and never fully predict how their theories will play out in reality.

This is Iran: Iranian Woman Sentenced To Stoning After Being Lashed

This is Iran:

Amnesty said she received flogging of 99 lashes as per her sentence but was subsequently accused of "adultery while being married" in September 2006 during the trial of a man accused of murdering her husband.

Mostafai said his client knew the man who "killed her husband and because she was at home when the murder took place, she was accused as accomplice."

"But after her kids pardoned her in the case of murder, she now stands accused of adultery with that man."

Mostafai added that such cases involving women in Iran arise due to difficulties in getting divorces with husbands despite "having troubled marriages."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hsH_Nwq_L045KhDsWEhGeDExJ6_A

This is the UN:

Iran Wins Membership to the U.N Commission on the Status of Women

Women arrested and imprisoned for having suntans? Check. Women stoned to death for adultery? Check. Random persecution, detainment, violent arrest, and imprisonment of women's rights activists and mourning mothers? Check. Women blamed for causing earthquakes? Check. Use of makeup illegal because it makes women dishonorable? Check!

Sounds like the Islamic Republic of Iran is all set for membership to the U.N Commission on the Status of Women! Welcome, Iran, and thank you for helping to set the bar for the status of women around the world. It's exhilarating that the U.N and its member states have so clearly sent the message that women belong under the control of authoritarian governments, under the cover of dress codes and the watch of morality police, and in prison or the grave if they don't obey their male controllers.

http://womensrights.change.org/blog/view/iran_wins_membership_to_the_un_commission_on_the_status_of_women

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Carl Sagan: A Universe Not Made For Us

An amazing piece of writing.