I note with some glee that Marco has abandoned to me the position ‘we should do nothing about anthropogenic global warning’. His discussion over in anotherblog appears to be quibbling about the best way to do something about anthropogenic global warning. [I accidentally deleted this when trying to fix a typographical error, along with Marco's comment that he still does really think we should do nothing about global warming, he just believes there can be collateral benefits to carbon trading. So consider me gleeful instead that I have not lost my only fellow traveller!]
I admit that I have wavered somewhat over the past year, but now feel that I can assert this position with confidence. Anthropogenic global warming is a fact, but we should do nothing about it.
Item 1: Climate doesn’t kill people, Weather kills people. If the climate is likely to change to give a 25% increase in the amount of economic and human damage from weather, should we make heroic efforts to avoid this change, enormous in absolute terms? Or should we direct our efforts to protecting people and property from weather in general? Any change in climate leading to more severe storms/droughts in a particular area will be a trend laid over a pattern of variations in weather already containing many episodes of these events. If an area experiences too many droughts to be used for agriculture without subsidies from outside, it should be abandoned. If the economic productivity of a storm-affected area in good years is not enough to offest the cost of reconstructing it after bad years, it should be abandoned. Admittedly there is the possibility that Atlantic hurricanes could become regular events in the north-east and south-west Atlantic, for example, but I assert that the primary economic damage of a strong global warming event will be restricted to areas that are marginal for human use and should never have been used in the way we are using them. Nobody in their right mind ought to live in a dead-flat swamp where six-metre storm surges can occur, like the Ganges Delta or the Gulf Coast of the United States. These areas are likely to suffer recurring natural disasters and struggle to remain viable with or without global warming. Rather than do anything to slow global warming, we should abandon these areas.
Cost neutral suggestions: I recommend vegetarianism, as a way to remove the economic incentive to occupy marginal grazing lands susceptible to drought, and thalassophobia- the vast evil blue thing wants to kill us- to remove people from these dangerous places.
Item 2: Everything adapts. So a hundred years may well see a significant change in climate. In a hundred years, a farming district may cycle through three or four cash crops. In a hundred years, people can abandon one region en masse and settle another one. In a hundred years, animals and plants can also move from one place to another. Shifts in habitat are already occurring and being noted as responses to global warming. Usually these are reported with concerned tut-tutting: they need not be. Life is flexible.
Global warming cannot be uniformly bad for all environments and all species. It will be bad for some species and good for others. A naive Clammish view would say that it would favour warmer environments- which tend to support a larger number of species than cold ones. Invariably, we are likely to hear sad tales about species that are losers and find species that are winners demonised as pests. This will be irrational. Species come and species go, just like individuals. The primary difference is that unlike species, individuals can suffer or be happy: individuals are of more importance. However, I do like having lots of species around. However, preventing global warming is a very round-about and inefficient way of protecting endangered species. The evacuation of areas that are marginal for human habitation (Item 1) will present a fine opportunity to establish large reserves.
Cost neutral suggestions: I recommend open borders, to allow people to adapt optimally to new condtions, and an end to subsidies to poor uses of agricultural land, ditto.
Item 3: Lomborg is probably wrong about the main impact of global warming being on the Third World. It now appears likely that the world will not heat up uniformly, but heating will be much more marked near the poles than near the equator. A modest increase in tropical temperatures over a hundred years is unlikely to produce any impact on the Third World that could be disentangled from the pre-existing background of weather, disease, and poor governance. These are the problems that we should be tackling. Warming of the temperate/subarctic northern hemisphere, on the other hand, will have significant beneficial economic effects: reduced winter mortality, reduced energy use for heating, extended growing seasons, more available arable land, new sea routes, etc.
Item 4: We should worry about the catastrophes. Lomborg mentions in his reply to Scientific American that he did not attempt to cost certain catastrophic events, since the models suggested they had a very small likelihood of occurring. These catastrophic events play a large role in global warming consciousness-raising, however.
(a) We have no idea what degree of global warming might be necessary to kick off these events.
(b) We have no way of ensuring that, even if we emit no carbon dioxide, these events will not occur sometime in the future due to natural warming.
Therefore, instead of going to heroic efforts to aim at some target (a) which may be made redundant by (b), we should think seriously about how we can adapt to, mitigate, or reverse these possible catastrophic events.
Self-serving suggestion: We should give lots of money to scientists and engineers.
Item 5: On reflection, Item 5 is sillier than the rest, and has been omitted.
Addenda: This dodgy analysis has left out a few things we are likely to lose to global warming, but I think it will be much cheaper to save them in an ad hoc fashion. These are edifices of significant cultural value in places marginal to human habitation, and species inhabiting environments likely to vanish entirely. Polar bears presumably survived the last warm interglacial period in some refugia. We ought to locate one and ensure that a population of them remains there.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Bananas!
$2.50 a kilo! At the little shop in the village! Someone brought them up from the coast.
Here is Scientific American's really lame attack on Lomborg, entirely embedded in the best poliblog fashion within Lomborg's reply.
Here is Scientific American's really lame attack on Lomborg, entirely embedded in the best poliblog fashion within Lomborg's reply.
The Comedy of the Commons
The other day on the radio I heard someone from one of the local councils complaining that people weren’t using enough water. Under pressure from the state government they had switched from a flat fee structure to a pay for use system . Now pensioners were refusing to water their lawns, he said, and the town was starting to look drab and brown. ‘It’s silly,’ he said ‘The river flows right through town. We’ve got plenty of water. It’s one of the things that attract people to our area. And its not like the extra water costs us anything: all of our expenses are involved with the infrastructure for delivery, which costs us the same no matter how much people use.’
There certainly is a fine river flowing through that particular local council area, but I understand it is a saline trickle by the time it reaches the ocean… I should like to see this local council required to bid for water licenses in competition with all of the cotton growers, rice growers, fruit and vegetable growers, and other towns and cities further downstream. Allocate enough for everyone to have one free toilet flush per day from the river, O Greenly-inclined State Government, and auction off the rest!
There certainly is a fine river flowing through that particular local council area, but I understand it is a saline trickle by the time it reaches the ocean… I should like to see this local council required to bid for water licenses in competition with all of the cotton growers, rice growers, fruit and vegetable growers, and other towns and cities further downstream. Allocate enough for everyone to have one free toilet flush per day from the river, O Greenly-inclined State Government, and auction off the rest!
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Bjorn Again
I haven’t yet read more than a tiny fraction of the Anti-Lomborg webpages I’ve come across, and can’t contemplate the process of wading in against them. I find it astonishing that he can have aroused such vitriol. It is also hard to believe that many of the critics have even read the book, the straw man they attack has so little resemblance to the book I have been reading. The Skeptical Inquirer’s review is a particularly feeble hatchet job that cherry-picks a few examples of logical fallacies- which could be found in practically every popular science book ever written- and never mentions the central thesis of the book. Other critics accuse Bjorn of naively assuming that the market and business as usual will take care of everything, while he actually argues strongly for government action in the form of debt for rainforest swaps, research into renewable energy, multinational mangement of oceanic resources, etc.
I think Bjorn is trying to say something very simple that ought to be utterly uncontroversial:
Since we do not have infinite resources, we need to set priorities. If we do not do this explicitly, we will end up with a set of priorities based on media sound-bites that will be grossly inefficient. We need to set our prioirities rationally, in the light of a proper study of the possible costs of our problems and the possible costs of fixing our problems.
It is legitimate to argue about the best way of doing these cost benefit-analyses, and it is both legitimate and easy to poke holes in Bjorn’s specific analyses. He is just one person, analysing data that is in the public domain, and I am sure he would agree that every calculation he makes is provisional and subject to large errors. The point of the book seems to me that simply that such analyses should be made and should form the basis for environmental policy.
I think critics are also wrong to snarl at Bjorn’s relentless optimisim. I remember years ago, pre-Lomborg, reading a book by David Suzuki called ‘The Japan We Never Knew’. In it he recounts with apparent approval a scene in a Japanese classroom where an environmentally aware teacher is asking students if they think various facets of the environment will be better or worse when they grow up, and they all agree that things will be worse. I wanted to shake David Suzuki. Hang on, those are all things that I know have gotten better in the past few decades! If this teacher is any good, she should be convincing students that they can make a difference. She should be telling them about the successes of the environmental movement and the way people have managed to change things for the better, not inoculating her students with despair for the future. If you are Dictator of Eastasia and your environmental advisors keep telling you your environmental problems will cost more resources to solve than you have, wouldn’t you just say ‘the hell with it’, spend your resources however you feel like it, and hope your environmental advisors have got it wrong? I know I would. Before we can solve our problems, we need to believe our problems are soluble.
I think Bjorn is trying to say something very simple that ought to be utterly uncontroversial:
Since we do not have infinite resources, we need to set priorities. If we do not do this explicitly, we will end up with a set of priorities based on media sound-bites that will be grossly inefficient. We need to set our prioirities rationally, in the light of a proper study of the possible costs of our problems and the possible costs of fixing our problems.
It is legitimate to argue about the best way of doing these cost benefit-analyses, and it is both legitimate and easy to poke holes in Bjorn’s specific analyses. He is just one person, analysing data that is in the public domain, and I am sure he would agree that every calculation he makes is provisional and subject to large errors. The point of the book seems to me that simply that such analyses should be made and should form the basis for environmental policy.
I think critics are also wrong to snarl at Bjorn’s relentless optimisim. I remember years ago, pre-Lomborg, reading a book by David Suzuki called ‘The Japan We Never Knew’. In it he recounts with apparent approval a scene in a Japanese classroom where an environmentally aware teacher is asking students if they think various facets of the environment will be better or worse when they grow up, and they all agree that things will be worse. I wanted to shake David Suzuki. Hang on, those are all things that I know have gotten better in the past few decades! If this teacher is any good, she should be convincing students that they can make a difference. She should be telling them about the successes of the environmental movement and the way people have managed to change things for the better, not inoculating her students with despair for the future. If you are Dictator of Eastasia and your environmental advisors keep telling you your environmental problems will cost more resources to solve than you have, wouldn’t you just say ‘the hell with it’, spend your resources however you feel like it, and hope your environmental advisors have got it wrong? I know I would. Before we can solve our problems, we need to believe our problems are soluble.
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Paul Ehrlich
Reading the Skeptical Environmentalist has1 reminded me of the most serious concern I had with the books of Jared Diamond, namely that the author seemed to be good friends with Paul Ehrlich.2 The nicest3 you can say about Paul Ehrlich is that he is a racist sociopath. I will let you discover his ghastly Neoimperialist fantasies for yourself: suffice it to say that he embraces my dystopic vision ‘Al Gore takes over the world and sterilises everyone’ with gusto. This is the famous passage from his famous book4 quoted by young Bjorn:5
I am not a big fan of Delhi either. It is a very overwhelming and frequently unpleasant place to be foreign in. But, those people in Delhi are doing much the same things, at much the same density, as people in an American shopping mall.6 There are only a few differences: As part of the general bustle the people in Delhi are recycling and repairing a vast number of things that the Americans are throwing away. The people in Delhi are using, per capita, ever so much less of any resource you care to name than the Americans are. The city of Delhi occupies a much smaller land area and has a much smaller enivronmental footprint than an American city of the same size. And… there was one other thing, but I can’t remember what it is.7
1. In addition to rekindling my ancient love affair with footnotes.
2. This is okay, in that it is morally okay to be good friends with all sorts of people with lunatic ideas. It would be okay to be good friends with David Irving, say. But, when you bring this up in conversation, you ought to hastily add that you repudiate his ideas, if you don’t want to be tarred by the same brush. Jared Diamond never makes it clear that Paul Ehrlich’s published ideas are the ideas of a racist sociopath, and that’s what made me concerned.
3. Funk & Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary, New York, 1977. nice, adj. 4. Precise, accurate.
4. My Struggle, oops I mean The Population Bomb, 1968.
5. Page 48 of the Skeptical Environmentalist.
6. I only say American because Paul Ehrlich is one of the Chosen People: shopping malls in Devil Bunny City are obviously just as bad.
7. Remembered now! I think the disgraced gubernatorial candidate in ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’ put it best: ‘Them boys are not white.’
Psychologically, the population explosion first sunk in on a stinking hot night in Delhi. The streets were alive with people. People eating, people washing themselves, people sleeping, people working, arguing and screaming. People reaching their hands in through taxi windows to beg. People shitting, people pissing. People hanging off buses. People driving animals through the streets. People, people, people.
I am not a big fan of Delhi either. It is a very overwhelming and frequently unpleasant place to be foreign in. But, those people in Delhi are doing much the same things, at much the same density, as people in an American shopping mall.6 There are only a few differences: As part of the general bustle the people in Delhi are recycling and repairing a vast number of things that the Americans are throwing away. The people in Delhi are using, per capita, ever so much less of any resource you care to name than the Americans are. The city of Delhi occupies a much smaller land area and has a much smaller enivronmental footprint than an American city of the same size. And… there was one other thing, but I can’t remember what it is.7
1. In addition to rekindling my ancient love affair with footnotes.
2. This is okay, in that it is morally okay to be good friends with all sorts of people with lunatic ideas. It would be okay to be good friends with David Irving, say. But, when you bring this up in conversation, you ought to hastily add that you repudiate his ideas, if you don’t want to be tarred by the same brush. Jared Diamond never makes it clear that Paul Ehrlich’s published ideas are the ideas of a racist sociopath, and that’s what made me concerned.
3. Funk & Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary, New York, 1977. nice, adj. 4. Precise, accurate.
4. My Struggle, oops I mean The Population Bomb, 1968.
5. Page 48 of the Skeptical Environmentalist.
6. I only say American because Paul Ehrlich is one of the Chosen People: shopping malls in Devil Bunny City are obviously just as bad.
7. Remembered now! I think the disgraced gubernatorial candidate in ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’ put it best: ‘Them boys are not white.’
Saturday, May 06, 2006
The Lesson of September 12th
I realise why I have been so quiet lately. I am clearly going through a meek and non-confrontational phase. The prospect of unpacking my thoughts on climate change makes me feel all twitchy.
So I should start in a roundabout way by saying that I have finished Jared Diamond’s ‘Collapse’. Like ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’, you all ought to read it, so I won’t say too much about it here until the rest of you catch up. It is a lot like Dr. Seuss’s ‘The Lorax’ but with real examples. The Lorax always made me really sad, but I have grown used to reading really sad things so that the sadness has siuffused my being, so I can’t say I became any more depressed through reading it. The irreversibility of deforestation in some environments struck me- on Iceland, Easter Island, and Northern Arizona. Some environments are robust enough that the forests come back in a few generations and seethe over the ruins of lost civilisations, and some just aren’t. I went out immediately and went for a walk around my own piece of land, once open forest, cleared ninety years ago and not grazed or (except for a few feeble attempts at firebreaks) mown for the past 18 months since we’ve had it. There are several large established native trees, but there were absolutely no new ones coming up anywhere. Maybe all of our native trees are the sort that need fire to germinate? We have cool, wet summers and long winters, so I would expect the unmodified landscape to have been more of a mosaic of pro-fire and anti-fire trees, like in northwestern Tasmania. If they are all ‘pro-fire’ trees, I assume it is a product of aboriginal land management practices and the ‘anti-fire’ trees are lurking in the gorges thirty km to the east. I might be wrong since my botanical ignorance is near total. It could just be that it will take a long time for the soil to recover from all those decades of being walked on by sheepses. Along one side there is a line of old pine trees planted as a windbreak, and under these a few new little pine trees were coming up, but nowhere near as many were springing up under the same kind of trees on along the road. Where we have transplanted these to outline the windbreak of the future along another side fence, they are doing very nicely. It sunk in that the lovely view outside is one of those irreversibly-changed environments: if humans left tomorrow, whatever final forest cover does manage to colonise it would be dominated by introduced trees and would have a depleted flora and fauna compared to neighbouring areas of uncleared bush for thousands of year.
Jared Diamond never says much about the subtitle of his book: ‘How societies choose to fail or survive’. Or, I guess he does, but he never addresses the more interesting quiestion, ‘Why societies choose to fail or survive.’ He says that the response of societies to changes is sometimes good and sometimes bad, and in the case of the Pacific islands fits this to a deterministic model: things tended to reach a stable and not completely disasterous equilibrium on tiny islands where everyone’s actions obviously affected everyone else, and on large flattish ones where a single government could be established. But on ones geographically condemned to be divided between numerous groups, Tribe A had no incentive to conserve resources if it meant that they would be snaffled by the evil Tribe B: it was better to get in and snaffle them first. You will read this yourselves, of course.
I think the why to failure is simply putting personal, short-term interests ahead of long-term interests. Often, what is globally good will be locally bad, and vice versa.
Two examples from a society that is supposedly concerned about achieving a sustainable use of energy:
The Victorian (non) wind farm. Canned because of the orange-bellied parrot. Is it a good thing for the parrot? Probably. Is it remotely credible that a network of wind and solar energy remotely capable of meeting our energy needs could be established without impacting negatively on a lot of endangered species? I don’t think so.
The evils of smoke. The council in the big city (population 16,000) is banning wood heaters because it is in a valley and fills with smoke every winter. This will be nice for the local asthmatics, but it also means that houses currently heated with non-fossil carbon will be shifted to fossil carbon.
Here’s another example, which I don’t get at all, about another scare resource. Devil Bunny City was under the despotic rule of a supposedly ‘green’ premier. It lets all its stormwater and almost all of its wastewater run off into the ocean. Instead of attempting to convince us of the merits of recycling, he decided to build a desalination plant which makes no environmental or economic sense. On second thought, I have no idea what this is an example of, since it seems both locally and globally insane.
The evils of smoke brings me to the important lesson of September 12th. What happens if you ground all the planes for a few days and reduce the amount of particulates in the upper atmosphere? The temperature shoots up a couple of degrees. What would happen if we instantly stopped using fossil fuels (say, if it is discovered an over-zealous Pentagon once added a few zeroes to a proposal and there are enough submarine-sized nuclear reactors in a cavern in Texas for every small town in the world to have one)? If we cut our emissions to zero, the temperature will spike up everywhere by some unspecified amount. And it is the speed of climate change that is a bad thing: life can cope with very big changes if they aren’t too quick. Carbon sequestration technologies are absolutely essential if we want to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, because natural processes are too slow. When these are cost-effective to implement they will be impemented. I don’t know what the ideological conservationist position is on carbon sequestration and I suspect it will make me twitchy to find out. My worry is that the orthodox wisdom conflates a whole bunch of questions into one:
Is global warming occurring?
Is it caused primarily by humans?
Should we try to stop it, or just mitigate its effects?
If we should try to stop it, what are the best ways?
How do we get societies to adopt these best ways?
It seems to me that the ideological conservationist leaps directly from the beginning of this to the end without thinking too much about the middle. I am not so sure as I was a year ago that we should do nothing to try and stop global warming: I think we should probably spend a reasonable amount of money on investigating biological and technological methods of carbon sequestration. I think Kyoto-type agrreements are a very bad idea. The transition to a post-fossil fuel economy will happen anyway, driven by economics. We won’t even have to stop driving our cars, because once our power generation is nuclear we will have immense reservs of natural gas to reform into clean-burning motor fuel at no more than two or three times its current cost in real terms. (By ‘we’ I mean Russia and the Greater Iranian Islamic Republic).
I haven’t read the Sceptical Environmentalist, but I think the Copenhagen Consensus project is a good idea. We need to prioritise things. It is silly to go around saying everything is equally important and we need to everything now, because we either end up paralysed and do nothing, or make a choice on where to devote our energies on sentimental reasons and become tireless advocates for baby Harp Seals.
So I should start in a roundabout way by saying that I have finished Jared Diamond’s ‘Collapse’. Like ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’, you all ought to read it, so I won’t say too much about it here until the rest of you catch up. It is a lot like Dr. Seuss’s ‘The Lorax’ but with real examples. The Lorax always made me really sad, but I have grown used to reading really sad things so that the sadness has siuffused my being, so I can’t say I became any more depressed through reading it. The irreversibility of deforestation in some environments struck me- on Iceland, Easter Island, and Northern Arizona. Some environments are robust enough that the forests come back in a few generations and seethe over the ruins of lost civilisations, and some just aren’t. I went out immediately and went for a walk around my own piece of land, once open forest, cleared ninety years ago and not grazed or (except for a few feeble attempts at firebreaks) mown for the past 18 months since we’ve had it. There are several large established native trees, but there were absolutely no new ones coming up anywhere. Maybe all of our native trees are the sort that need fire to germinate? We have cool, wet summers and long winters, so I would expect the unmodified landscape to have been more of a mosaic of pro-fire and anti-fire trees, like in northwestern Tasmania. If they are all ‘pro-fire’ trees, I assume it is a product of aboriginal land management practices and the ‘anti-fire’ trees are lurking in the gorges thirty km to the east. I might be wrong since my botanical ignorance is near total. It could just be that it will take a long time for the soil to recover from all those decades of being walked on by sheepses. Along one side there is a line of old pine trees planted as a windbreak, and under these a few new little pine trees were coming up, but nowhere near as many were springing up under the same kind of trees on along the road. Where we have transplanted these to outline the windbreak of the future along another side fence, they are doing very nicely. It sunk in that the lovely view outside is one of those irreversibly-changed environments: if humans left tomorrow, whatever final forest cover does manage to colonise it would be dominated by introduced trees and would have a depleted flora and fauna compared to neighbouring areas of uncleared bush for thousands of year.
Jared Diamond never says much about the subtitle of his book: ‘How societies choose to fail or survive’. Or, I guess he does, but he never addresses the more interesting quiestion, ‘Why societies choose to fail or survive.’ He says that the response of societies to changes is sometimes good and sometimes bad, and in the case of the Pacific islands fits this to a deterministic model: things tended to reach a stable and not completely disasterous equilibrium on tiny islands where everyone’s actions obviously affected everyone else, and on large flattish ones where a single government could be established. But on ones geographically condemned to be divided between numerous groups, Tribe A had no incentive to conserve resources if it meant that they would be snaffled by the evil Tribe B: it was better to get in and snaffle them first. You will read this yourselves, of course.
I think the why to failure is simply putting personal, short-term interests ahead of long-term interests. Often, what is globally good will be locally bad, and vice versa.
Two examples from a society that is supposedly concerned about achieving a sustainable use of energy:
The Victorian (non) wind farm. Canned because of the orange-bellied parrot. Is it a good thing for the parrot? Probably. Is it remotely credible that a network of wind and solar energy remotely capable of meeting our energy needs could be established without impacting negatively on a lot of endangered species? I don’t think so.
The evils of smoke. The council in the big city (population 16,000) is banning wood heaters because it is in a valley and fills with smoke every winter. This will be nice for the local asthmatics, but it also means that houses currently heated with non-fossil carbon will be shifted to fossil carbon.
Here’s another example, which I don’t get at all, about another scare resource. Devil Bunny City was under the despotic rule of a supposedly ‘green’ premier. It lets all its stormwater and almost all of its wastewater run off into the ocean. Instead of attempting to convince us of the merits of recycling, he decided to build a desalination plant which makes no environmental or economic sense. On second thought, I have no idea what this is an example of, since it seems both locally and globally insane.
The evils of smoke brings me to the important lesson of September 12th. What happens if you ground all the planes for a few days and reduce the amount of particulates in the upper atmosphere? The temperature shoots up a couple of degrees. What would happen if we instantly stopped using fossil fuels (say, if it is discovered an over-zealous Pentagon once added a few zeroes to a proposal and there are enough submarine-sized nuclear reactors in a cavern in Texas for every small town in the world to have one)? If we cut our emissions to zero, the temperature will spike up everywhere by some unspecified amount. And it is the speed of climate change that is a bad thing: life can cope with very big changes if they aren’t too quick. Carbon sequestration technologies are absolutely essential if we want to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, because natural processes are too slow. When these are cost-effective to implement they will be impemented. I don’t know what the ideological conservationist position is on carbon sequestration and I suspect it will make me twitchy to find out. My worry is that the orthodox wisdom conflates a whole bunch of questions into one:
Is global warming occurring?
Is it caused primarily by humans?
Should we try to stop it, or just mitigate its effects?
If we should try to stop it, what are the best ways?
How do we get societies to adopt these best ways?
It seems to me that the ideological conservationist leaps directly from the beginning of this to the end without thinking too much about the middle. I am not so sure as I was a year ago that we should do nothing to try and stop global warming: I think we should probably spend a reasonable amount of money on investigating biological and technological methods of carbon sequestration. I think Kyoto-type agrreements are a very bad idea. The transition to a post-fossil fuel economy will happen anyway, driven by economics. We won’t even have to stop driving our cars, because once our power generation is nuclear we will have immense reservs of natural gas to reform into clean-burning motor fuel at no more than two or three times its current cost in real terms. (By ‘we’ I mean Russia and the Greater Iranian Islamic Republic).
I haven’t read the Sceptical Environmentalist, but I think the Copenhagen Consensus project is a good idea. We need to prioritise things. It is silly to go around saying everything is equally important and we need to everything now, because we either end up paralysed and do nothing, or make a choice on where to devote our energies on sentimental reasons and become tireless advocates for baby Harp Seals.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Closely based on a real conversation
Dr Clam is talking about the Australian higher education system with a visiting academic:
...most Universities in Australia don’t like to hire their own PhD graduates. The usual thing is to go overseas for a post-doc for a couple of years, then bounce around from short-term contract to short-term contract for up to a decade before getting a permanent job somewhere,if you are lucky.
Visiting Academic: (Aghast) That is terrible. In my country, the University where you do your PhD is legally obliged to offer you a job.
Dr Clam: Wow!
Visiting Academic: I suppose it is worth it, though? Academics are highly paid and respected members of society?
Dr Clam: Not really... we could all make a lot more money if we went into industry.
Visiting Academic: (Shakes head unbelievingly. Notices clock.) How late do you work here?
Dr Clam: The students generally finish by five... (Notice dubious look, continues hastily) But most of us would stay at work until at least six, you know academics! When does the working day finish in your country?
Visiting Academic: We stop work at two. (Shakes head sadly, looks at Dr Clam with pity.) Life is very easy in Iraq.
...most Universities in Australia don’t like to hire their own PhD graduates. The usual thing is to go overseas for a post-doc for a couple of years, then bounce around from short-term contract to short-term contract for up to a decade before getting a permanent job somewhere,if you are lucky.
Visiting Academic: (Aghast) That is terrible. In my country, the University where you do your PhD is legally obliged to offer you a job.
Dr Clam: Wow!
Visiting Academic: I suppose it is worth it, though? Academics are highly paid and respected members of society?
Dr Clam: Not really... we could all make a lot more money if we went into industry.
Visiting Academic: (Shakes head unbelievingly. Notices clock.) How late do you work here?
Dr Clam: The students generally finish by five... (Notice dubious look, continues hastily) But most of us would stay at work until at least six, you know academics! When does the working day finish in your country?
Visiting Academic: We stop work at two. (Shakes head sadly, looks at Dr Clam with pity.) Life is very easy in Iraq.
Friday, April 07, 2006
Phat Lewtz!
The great thing about this whole nuclear energy thing, from my selfish point of view, is the prospect of lots of job creation in science and engineering. Only if we are smart, though, I guess, and move on from our 'digging stuff up and selling it' paradigm. I was talking to a colleague the other day who is optimistic that science is on the way up here, thanks to demography: we need about the same number of professionals per capita, whatever happens, and in 2010-2020 all the boomer professionals are going to retire, so we are going to need more. It will not be easy to just import them from India and China, because (a) all the rest of the West will be in the same position, and (b) India and China are likely to be able to retain more and more of their own professionals as the years go by. So there will be no option but to train more here, hurrah! Academics will be paid obscene amounts of money just to sit around and look intelligent, I am sure.
Yes, Jenny, we should take all the waste in the world! We should charge a premium if it wasn't generated by our uranium, to extract maximum economic benefit. There are probably good spots for a repository in the Northern Territory and Western Australia as well, but I was thinking a non-tropical location would be better for the nuclear waste deepwater port. And yes, I was thinking of Pig Iron Bob as well...
As for Australia's capacity to moral leadership, I am of the (sadly cynical) opinion that while our government is primarily composed of lying weasels, moral pygmies, and waxwork dummies accidentally left on the front benches, it is *more* principled than any other government in the world, especially if you include all the valiant civil servants like Dave that are actually doing the work. (1) No other country, except the US and some former American colonies in the Pacific, voted with Israel against the UN security wall resolution. This can only be a matter of principle because all the other relatively decent US allies, like Slovakia and the UK, only abstained. (2) No other country is having a gigantic domestic political fracas about abuses of the Oil for Food programme. Sure, AWB is a big company, but so were the French and German and Russian ones involved. (And I am sure there were Americans involved too, that we don't hear about...)(3) Our much maligned immigration department has precipitated us into what may be a full-blown crisis with our biggest neighbour, possibly destroying seven years of careful post-Timor Leste diplomacy, on pure principle.
So we are the best there is.
Although we suck.
Yes, Jenny, we should take all the waste in the world! We should charge a premium if it wasn't generated by our uranium, to extract maximum economic benefit. There are probably good spots for a repository in the Northern Territory and Western Australia as well, but I was thinking a non-tropical location would be better for the nuclear waste deepwater port. And yes, I was thinking of Pig Iron Bob as well...
As for Australia's capacity to moral leadership, I am of the (sadly cynical) opinion that while our government is primarily composed of lying weasels, moral pygmies, and waxwork dummies accidentally left on the front benches, it is *more* principled than any other government in the world, especially if you include all the valiant civil servants like Dave that are actually doing the work. (1) No other country, except the US and some former American colonies in the Pacific, voted with Israel against the UN security wall resolution. This can only be a matter of principle because all the other relatively decent US allies, like Slovakia and the UK, only abstained. (2) No other country is having a gigantic domestic political fracas about abuses of the Oil for Food programme. Sure, AWB is a big company, but so were the French and German and Russian ones involved. (And I am sure there were Americans involved too, that we don't hear about...)(3) Our much maligned immigration department has precipitated us into what may be a full-blown crisis with our biggest neighbour, possibly destroying seven years of careful post-Timor Leste diplomacy, on pure principle.
So we are the best there is.
Although we suck.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Faustian Bargain
'To live is to collaborate.'- Hassan i Sabbah, aka William S Burroughs
The best reason I can think of for authoritarian government is the selfish one that I would not then have to share any of the blame for the decisions of my elected rulers. I am afraid I can't really offer any constructive suggestions at all, though I feel I have a democratic duty to lobby strongly for something or other. All I can say is that I feel awkward and uncomfortable at the idea of our country becoming very, very, very, very, very, very, very rich by selling uranium to the desperately wicked renegade mainland provinces. As seems likely to happen.
I have only two suggestions, which are (almost) purely economic in nature:
Value Adding. It is silly to just export uranium oxide. We ought to process the stuff further along and sell reactor grade uranium. There can't be such a big deal transporting the enriched stuff around, as there is just one plant serving the whole of the United States. Methinks this would help with proliferation concerns, as it would be much easier to track smaller volumes of material going directly to power plants.
Cradle-to-Grave Service. We have a responsibility to take care of the waste products of any uranium we sell, and the users of nuclear energy will pay us handsomely to do so. We have a rare combination of geological and political stability that makes us ideally suited for nuclar waste disposal. The main problem here is the nimby attitude of state governments. I suggest that the Federal Government compulsorily acquire a large chunk of South Australia, like it consficated a chunk of New South Wales to put Canberra on, and establish the Australian Nuclear Territory. This could be served by a purpose built deepwater port distant from existing population centres and secured by genetically engineered super-soldier penguins.
The best reason I can think of for authoritarian government is the selfish one that I would not then have to share any of the blame for the decisions of my elected rulers. I am afraid I can't really offer any constructive suggestions at all, though I feel I have a democratic duty to lobby strongly for something or other. All I can say is that I feel awkward and uncomfortable at the idea of our country becoming very, very, very, very, very, very, very rich by selling uranium to the desperately wicked renegade mainland provinces. As seems likely to happen.
I have only two suggestions, which are (almost) purely economic in nature:
Value Adding. It is silly to just export uranium oxide. We ought to process the stuff further along and sell reactor grade uranium. There can't be such a big deal transporting the enriched stuff around, as there is just one plant serving the whole of the United States. Methinks this would help with proliferation concerns, as it would be much easier to track smaller volumes of material going directly to power plants.
Cradle-to-Grave Service. We have a responsibility to take care of the waste products of any uranium we sell, and the users of nuclear energy will pay us handsomely to do so. We have a rare combination of geological and political stability that makes us ideally suited for nuclar waste disposal. The main problem here is the nimby attitude of state governments. I suggest that the Federal Government compulsorily acquire a large chunk of South Australia, like it consficated a chunk of New South Wales to put Canberra on, and establish the Australian Nuclear Territory. This could be served by a purpose built deepwater port distant from existing population centres and secured by genetically engineered super-soldier penguins.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Unification Day, w/ Brownshirts
The main problem with Serenity can be stated very simply, though its solution is far from obvious, and most of my suggestions towards improving the film will doubtless amount to no more than minor tinkering. Before I move on the main problem, however, I must declare my prejudices. There are a few things that are not at all Serenity’s fault that caused me dissatisfaction. These are equally features of Firefly, but were harder to overlook in the larger, more concentrated dose of a film.
(1) The first prejudice is entirely my bad, not Serenity’s. I do not like ‘Action’. When there is so much plot to get through, why waste time running around like headless chickens? I find action scenes tedious at the best of times, and while watching Serenity I found myself several times reaching for the free local paper and reading the Under-16 netball results and letter from Mrs. G_____ complaining that the council had not yet surfaced C____ road while waiting for an action scene to finish. I don’t think this stems from anything as noble as an aversion to violence. I think it is a preference for chance over determinism, stemming in large part from a quarter-century of role playing. An action scene can be interesting in an RPG, since there is a real connection between the mayhem and the final result: but in scripted violence, it is all predestined. I just want to get to the end and see what the result is. If it was possible to play the DVD again and get a different outcome, that would be alright. This is not really any criticism of Serenity, just a good reason to recuse myself from commenting on Action films. So everything else I have to say will address the ‘Non-Action’ elements of Serenity.
(2) The second prejudice is shared with the entire ‘Hard Science Fiction’ community. Serenity is not science fiction in any real sense of the word. Space has certain characteristics that make it an inherently interesting place to tell a story: the terror of the vast emptinesses, the phenomenal plenitude of stars and planets in their possible quadrillions, the deep Otherness of an Other that is utterly indifferent to us. In science fiction this amazing backdrop is preserved. Maybe we can whisk from star to star in the blinking of an eye, but some sense must remain of the terrible distance, the incredible audacity of doing such a thing. Cordwainer Smith has a dozen different ways of doing this in different stories. In Space Opera, the characteristic qualities of space that make it space are removed. We move from world to world as trivially as we move from town to town in our global village. Once space is made just like anywhere else, we need to introduce new terrors to create drama, terrors that are usually transparently and tediously terrestrial. This is what I call ‘The Shatterzone Effect’ after a mid-1990s RPG that did it particularly badly. [It also mentioned logarithms in the first paragraph of the rule book, a sure sign that a game is not destined for a second edition]. The Reavers are basically a crummy device of this kind. Take the Firefly’s approach to Miranda. Randomly running into a Reaver in space is about as likely as jumping into the ocean and landing on a giant aquatic serpent creature previously unknown to science. If you see one, it is because it is chasing you. Okay, so the Reavers are present in a belt of ships around Miranda, because they started there. We are told there were about 300,000 Reavers, once upon a time- if we make the conservative assumption that pretty much all of them are ranged around Miranda, that will give more than a thousand square kilometres of room for each Reaver in a sphere surrounding a typical Earth-size planet. We could say that, perhaps, you can only jump from world to world at specific nodes, and the Reaver ships are clustered around the Miranda node. But then, why doesn’t the alliance have all these nodes staked out, so that people like Mal can’t function? Maybe not all planets have these nodes, just some, and Miranda happens to be one? I could go on. But making up excuses for what is really only a crummy device to make cheap drama- like having the Enterprise crew fall out of their chairs- makes my brain hurt.
The tacky space-opera aspects of the Firefly ‘verse are of course present in the TV series, but were less noticeable.
There is a third thing that is again not really Serenity’s fault but is not simply a prejudice of mine, which leads naturally to the main problem. In a film, there is not room for the kind of luxurious, leisurely character development that was one of the great joys of Firefly (and also Buffy). In a movie I don’t think there is room enough to develop more than about three well-rounded characters (e.g., Han, Chewie, and R2 in Star Wars). If you try to do many more, none of them will work, and they will all end up as flimsy cutouts. Mal is a much more unlikeable bastard in the movie than in the series. Jayne is much less an unlikeable bastard. Kaylee is much less cute and endearing. Enara might as well not be there at all. There are too many characters cluttering the landscape, and they are flattened and lifeless. And this brings me to the glaring flaw in the film: It is not really a film. Serenity is a highly compressed second season of Firefly. It does not hold together well as a film and (on my limited observation) commands very little interest to people who watch it without having seen the series. That is why it is cluttered with undeveloped characters. I expected to see a resolution of the River storyline in the film, but I also expected that plot to be presented as a whole, a thing in itself. This was probably naïve of me, because the main audience was obviously going to be fans of the TV series. Essentially, the whole point of the film is to answer the questions left hanging about River at the end of the TV series.
Now I shall make my prescriptions for improvement, in the classic tradition of Film Forensics. As you probably know if you have bothered to read this far, the Alliance is after River not because she is a genius, or a super soldier, or even that she has weird psychic powers per se: they are after her because of what she has learned with her weird psychic powers. The film needs to set up the mystery properly, for the uninitiated, and then get to the point where it is solved without too many unnecessary discursions, because time is needed to resolve what the characters are going to do with this information.
(1) Stuff needs to be cut out. I would have excised Enara and the Shepherd, for a start. Mr Universe, certainly. Even worse than making travel between worlds trivial is to make communication between worlds as trivial as communication in the global village, and introduce preposterous anachronisms like Mr Universe. Firefly could not exist in a global village. Mr Universe could not exist anywhere else.
There are a number of little things that damage the consistency of the ‘verse. I am sure Jayne swore once in English, rather than Chinese- that should go. The sense of the culture of the Firefly ‘verse as a Chinese-American fusion is too muted in Serenity.
Kaylee should not say that she had heard of Miranda. Space Opera is large, it contains multitudes, and even if there is no terror in the dark spaces between the planets they should still be there in their thousands and tens of thousands.
(2) The missing pieces of the River-Simon storyline need to be fitted in. This would involve abandoning the attempt to provide one canonical text for the whole story. We do not need a shot-by-shot abridgement of the first episode, but a different version with fewer characters and sub-plots that can fit into the time available. If the fans demand a single canonical version, tough. Christianity has survived for millennia with four different overlapping and sometimes contradictory accounts of the life of its central figure. The point is to make a film that can stand up as a film.
(3) There should be a more plausible excuse for the name Miranda to come out. The whole scene where River goes berko and beats up the barful of people, and its explanation, makes very little sense. Begone! That is of course partly my prejudice against action speaking. We have a long way to go and a lot of plot to fit in. Something else can be put in to bring out the name Miranda, as soon as possible after the beginning of the story has been told. This is left as an exercise for the reader.
(4) They should be chased by a Reaver- just one- on their way to Miranda. This could be made as exciting as any number of exciting things by good writing. There is no need to show more than one.
(5) In Serenity as it stands, Wash is killed in a stupid and senseless way. That is okay, after a fashion: life is like that. A hero is someone who gets other people killed. But I have a different plan.
Why are all these Reavers in spaceships? Why are they happy to cooperate together in flying spaceships, and only give way to rape and pillage and cannibalism when they find non-Reavers? The answer might be that for some pseudo-scientific doubletalk reasons people who have spent a lot of time in space are more likely to become Reavers than to lay down and die, when exposed to the Pax agent. And for similar reasons, whatever happens to them, it doesn’t alter their sense of shipboard camaraderie, it just renders everyone else prey.
Okay, so maybe it’s a pretty hot summer’s day on Miranda. We might see Wash splashing some water on his face from a convenient fountain. Sometime later, we learn from the holographic captain that the planet has been exposed to the Pax agent. How do we know its not still there? In Serenity as it stands, the crew doesn’t seem to worry about this possibility. They should. Maybe the Pax agent is still there- in the water, say. Wash starts to get mood swings. He becomes a bit inarticulate. Maybe he gets some Ukrainian-style chloracne, But he still seems to be to same old Wash. Then they land on Convent School WorldTM and he goes on a sadistic rampage. Mal has to kill him- not indirectly, as in the old Serenity, but directly- just like he killed the guy when the Reavers disrupted the bank robbery at the beginning.
(6) The fanatical bounty hunter guy just gives up at the end? ‘No use crying over spilt milk, what’s done is ended, have a nice life?’ I don’t think so. Not going to happen. While Mal’s goal after the discovery of Miranda is to tell everyone about it and change the ‘verse for the better, this is a hero’s goal. Its primary result is to get a lot of other people killed. Politically, realisation of this goal is a victory for Neoconservatism. Hollywood should not stand for such a thing. Mal should be forced by events to abandon this goal for the more limited goal of getting out with his life to someplace far, far away where he won’t be chased any more. Maybe pursuing this goal should get other people killed. Maybe his single-mindedness in pursuing this goal could lead the crew to suspect that he, too, is turning into a Reaver. Maybe the crew’s passivity and lack of enthusiasm in pursuing this goal could lead Mal into thinking they are becoming apathetic Pax-affected drones. The whole idea of peace as a drug could be used as the basis for a subtle and topical allegory of the processes of mutual demonisation we see in the real world.
Of course, even escaping with their lives seems like a big ask for the Firefly. I envision the Firefly escaping from some big exploding thing that is nigh-impossible to escape from (they are the PC’s, after all), so all the chasy people think River is dead. Maybe she can reinforce this with her weird psychic powers. Anyway, off they go to BackofbeyondworldTM to wait for the sequel. Roll credits. Not a big win, but a hell of a lot more satisfying than the ending of the X-Files movie. Pretty much on a par with Star Wars, methinks.
(1) The first prejudice is entirely my bad, not Serenity’s. I do not like ‘Action’. When there is so much plot to get through, why waste time running around like headless chickens? I find action scenes tedious at the best of times, and while watching Serenity I found myself several times reaching for the free local paper and reading the Under-16 netball results and letter from Mrs. G_____ complaining that the council had not yet surfaced C____ road while waiting for an action scene to finish. I don’t think this stems from anything as noble as an aversion to violence. I think it is a preference for chance over determinism, stemming in large part from a quarter-century of role playing. An action scene can be interesting in an RPG, since there is a real connection between the mayhem and the final result: but in scripted violence, it is all predestined. I just want to get to the end and see what the result is. If it was possible to play the DVD again and get a different outcome, that would be alright. This is not really any criticism of Serenity, just a good reason to recuse myself from commenting on Action films. So everything else I have to say will address the ‘Non-Action’ elements of Serenity.
(2) The second prejudice is shared with the entire ‘Hard Science Fiction’ community. Serenity is not science fiction in any real sense of the word. Space has certain characteristics that make it an inherently interesting place to tell a story: the terror of the vast emptinesses, the phenomenal plenitude of stars and planets in their possible quadrillions, the deep Otherness of an Other that is utterly indifferent to us. In science fiction this amazing backdrop is preserved. Maybe we can whisk from star to star in the blinking of an eye, but some sense must remain of the terrible distance, the incredible audacity of doing such a thing. Cordwainer Smith has a dozen different ways of doing this in different stories. In Space Opera, the characteristic qualities of space that make it space are removed. We move from world to world as trivially as we move from town to town in our global village. Once space is made just like anywhere else, we need to introduce new terrors to create drama, terrors that are usually transparently and tediously terrestrial. This is what I call ‘The Shatterzone Effect’ after a mid-1990s RPG that did it particularly badly. [It also mentioned logarithms in the first paragraph of the rule book, a sure sign that a game is not destined for a second edition]. The Reavers are basically a crummy device of this kind. Take the Firefly’s approach to Miranda. Randomly running into a Reaver in space is about as likely as jumping into the ocean and landing on a giant aquatic serpent creature previously unknown to science. If you see one, it is because it is chasing you. Okay, so the Reavers are present in a belt of ships around Miranda, because they started there. We are told there were about 300,000 Reavers, once upon a time- if we make the conservative assumption that pretty much all of them are ranged around Miranda, that will give more than a thousand square kilometres of room for each Reaver in a sphere surrounding a typical Earth-size planet. We could say that, perhaps, you can only jump from world to world at specific nodes, and the Reaver ships are clustered around the Miranda node. But then, why doesn’t the alliance have all these nodes staked out, so that people like Mal can’t function? Maybe not all planets have these nodes, just some, and Miranda happens to be one? I could go on. But making up excuses for what is really only a crummy device to make cheap drama- like having the Enterprise crew fall out of their chairs- makes my brain hurt.
The tacky space-opera aspects of the Firefly ‘verse are of course present in the TV series, but were less noticeable.
There is a third thing that is again not really Serenity’s fault but is not simply a prejudice of mine, which leads naturally to the main problem. In a film, there is not room for the kind of luxurious, leisurely character development that was one of the great joys of Firefly (and also Buffy). In a movie I don’t think there is room enough to develop more than about three well-rounded characters (e.g., Han, Chewie, and R2 in Star Wars). If you try to do many more, none of them will work, and they will all end up as flimsy cutouts. Mal is a much more unlikeable bastard in the movie than in the series. Jayne is much less an unlikeable bastard. Kaylee is much less cute and endearing. Enara might as well not be there at all. There are too many characters cluttering the landscape, and they are flattened and lifeless. And this brings me to the glaring flaw in the film: It is not really a film. Serenity is a highly compressed second season of Firefly. It does not hold together well as a film and (on my limited observation) commands very little interest to people who watch it without having seen the series. That is why it is cluttered with undeveloped characters. I expected to see a resolution of the River storyline in the film, but I also expected that plot to be presented as a whole, a thing in itself. This was probably naïve of me, because the main audience was obviously going to be fans of the TV series. Essentially, the whole point of the film is to answer the questions left hanging about River at the end of the TV series.
Now I shall make my prescriptions for improvement, in the classic tradition of Film Forensics. As you probably know if you have bothered to read this far, the Alliance is after River not because she is a genius, or a super soldier, or even that she has weird psychic powers per se: they are after her because of what she has learned with her weird psychic powers. The film needs to set up the mystery properly, for the uninitiated, and then get to the point where it is solved without too many unnecessary discursions, because time is needed to resolve what the characters are going to do with this information.
(1) Stuff needs to be cut out. I would have excised Enara and the Shepherd, for a start. Mr Universe, certainly. Even worse than making travel between worlds trivial is to make communication between worlds as trivial as communication in the global village, and introduce preposterous anachronisms like Mr Universe. Firefly could not exist in a global village. Mr Universe could not exist anywhere else.
There are a number of little things that damage the consistency of the ‘verse. I am sure Jayne swore once in English, rather than Chinese- that should go. The sense of the culture of the Firefly ‘verse as a Chinese-American fusion is too muted in Serenity.
Kaylee should not say that she had heard of Miranda. Space Opera is large, it contains multitudes, and even if there is no terror in the dark spaces between the planets they should still be there in their thousands and tens of thousands.
(2) The missing pieces of the River-Simon storyline need to be fitted in. This would involve abandoning the attempt to provide one canonical text for the whole story. We do not need a shot-by-shot abridgement of the first episode, but a different version with fewer characters and sub-plots that can fit into the time available. If the fans demand a single canonical version, tough. Christianity has survived for millennia with four different overlapping and sometimes contradictory accounts of the life of its central figure. The point is to make a film that can stand up as a film.
(3) There should be a more plausible excuse for the name Miranda to come out. The whole scene where River goes berko and beats up the barful of people, and its explanation, makes very little sense. Begone! That is of course partly my prejudice against action speaking. We have a long way to go and a lot of plot to fit in. Something else can be put in to bring out the name Miranda, as soon as possible after the beginning of the story has been told. This is left as an exercise for the reader.
(4) They should be chased by a Reaver- just one- on their way to Miranda. This could be made as exciting as any number of exciting things by good writing. There is no need to show more than one.
(5) In Serenity as it stands, Wash is killed in a stupid and senseless way. That is okay, after a fashion: life is like that. A hero is someone who gets other people killed. But I have a different plan.
Why are all these Reavers in spaceships? Why are they happy to cooperate together in flying spaceships, and only give way to rape and pillage and cannibalism when they find non-Reavers? The answer might be that for some pseudo-scientific doubletalk reasons people who have spent a lot of time in space are more likely to become Reavers than to lay down and die, when exposed to the Pax agent. And for similar reasons, whatever happens to them, it doesn’t alter their sense of shipboard camaraderie, it just renders everyone else prey.
Okay, so maybe it’s a pretty hot summer’s day on Miranda. We might see Wash splashing some water on his face from a convenient fountain. Sometime later, we learn from the holographic captain that the planet has been exposed to the Pax agent. How do we know its not still there? In Serenity as it stands, the crew doesn’t seem to worry about this possibility. They should. Maybe the Pax agent is still there- in the water, say. Wash starts to get mood swings. He becomes a bit inarticulate. Maybe he gets some Ukrainian-style chloracne, But he still seems to be to same old Wash. Then they land on Convent School WorldTM and he goes on a sadistic rampage. Mal has to kill him- not indirectly, as in the old Serenity, but directly- just like he killed the guy when the Reavers disrupted the bank robbery at the beginning.
(6) The fanatical bounty hunter guy just gives up at the end? ‘No use crying over spilt milk, what’s done is ended, have a nice life?’ I don’t think so. Not going to happen. While Mal’s goal after the discovery of Miranda is to tell everyone about it and change the ‘verse for the better, this is a hero’s goal. Its primary result is to get a lot of other people killed. Politically, realisation of this goal is a victory for Neoconservatism. Hollywood should not stand for such a thing. Mal should be forced by events to abandon this goal for the more limited goal of getting out with his life to someplace far, far away where he won’t be chased any more. Maybe pursuing this goal should get other people killed. Maybe his single-mindedness in pursuing this goal could lead the crew to suspect that he, too, is turning into a Reaver. Maybe the crew’s passivity and lack of enthusiasm in pursuing this goal could lead Mal into thinking they are becoming apathetic Pax-affected drones. The whole idea of peace as a drug could be used as the basis for a subtle and topical allegory of the processes of mutual demonisation we see in the real world.
Of course, even escaping with their lives seems like a big ask for the Firefly. I envision the Firefly escaping from some big exploding thing that is nigh-impossible to escape from (they are the PC’s, after all), so all the chasy people think River is dead. Maybe she can reinforce this with her weird psychic powers. Anyway, off they go to BackofbeyondworldTM to wait for the sequel. Roll credits. Not a big win, but a hell of a lot more satisfying than the ending of the X-Files movie. Pretty much on a par with Star Wars, methinks.
Friday, March 31, 2006
Think Globally, Act Unilaterally
While trawling through old emails the other day I came across this from an email to Androoo in mid 2003:
I thought of another interesting facet of the problem of infinities in the moral calculus: the main argument for unilateral disarmament pre-1990 is now an equally good argument for unilateral world conquest.
Numerous commentators on the cold war have written that the game theory that usually applies to relations between countries should be thrown out when the risk of human extinction has to be factored in; while human extinction may have a low probability, but is of infinite badness, so all other goods should logically be sacrificed to avoid it. Thus, violations of international law, violations of human rights, and considerations of national interest should all be ignored in favour of unilateral disarmament...
Now, if there is no current threat of human extinction, but one might arise in the future, all other goods should logically be sacrificed to avoid it. Thus, violations of international law, violations of human rights, and considerations of national interest should all be ignored in favour of unilateral world conquest...
Of course these are both simplistic arguments, but I reckon they map onto each other perfectly! The only difference is the artifactual distinction between "doing bad things so that good things will happen" and "letting bad things happen so that good things will happen" which disappears if you can eradicate solipsism completely and really believe sum homo...
I wonder how much the Venn diagram of the adherents of these two opinions overlaps? (probably <0.0001 %)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)