Numpties – Page 7 – Wis[s]e Words

No Fly-Zone wanking

Published on March 12, 2011

In the middle of a comment thread on liberal Conspiracy on the desirability of a no-fly zone over Libya, Sunny Hundal says:

I’m happy for people to make valid points, but if the only response is IRAQ IRAQ IRAQ!!! – then frankly one should join Stop the War coalition and hang out with Lyndsey German. That is about the extent of your political nous.

Sunny Hundal is one of the founders of Liberal Conspiracy as the name implies a soft left blog that over the past five years or so has become one of the more important UK political lefty blogs. Sunny has his heart in the right place, but also an eye firmly on a possible political career so sometimes tend to let conventional Westminster wisdom overrule his own intelligence which makes him sound much dumber than he really could be. As a prominent leftist, even a soft leftist, Sunny has also been a frequent target of rightwingers and Decentists, and as with many people who are subjected to such hate campaigns he has internalised some of their assumptions. Put the two tendencies together and you have an explenation for the above quote.

For those of us who can remember as far back to the runup to the Wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s quite clear that “Lyndsey German” (sic) and the Stop the War Coalition were right to oppose them, that all our fears about what these wars would be have been fully justified and that in fact far from the outcast fringe group Sunny paints them as, millions of ordinary people were smart enough to share their views and march with them in opposition.

So if Sunny and co want to argue that a no-fly zone in Libya is urgently needed and that this time, western military intervention will work, that calling for it is done for more substantial reasons than just wanting to show how morally upright and brave you are, that it’s needed in this particular occasion and not say in Ivory Coast for more substantial reasons than that Libya is on the telly, they need to do more than get hysterical. Some choice quotes:

Sunny: If the Libyans rebels want some support against Gaddafi, then I’m afraid the arguments against helping them fall apart.

We definitely need some way to stop Gaddafi massacring his people and its a shame some on the left want to just sit back while it all happens in front of our eyes.

[…]

Galen10: Doing nothing is only an option if you have no conscience.

[…]

Sunny again: Gaddafi’s son Saif Al-Islam says the time has come for full-scale military action against #Libya rebels – Reuters

Clearly, the correct response is to sit by and vent outrage on blogs and twitter while people are killed in their hundreds.

Yeah, nice one guys.

[…]

The delightfully named Rubert Read: I hope y’all will remember this debate, if and when Benghazi is crushed and the Arab Spring is demoralised and essentially finished.

This sort of posturing and emotional appeal reminds me more of the prowar “debate” in the runup to Iraq than anything opponents to the no-fly zone proposal argued in that thread. It’s an attempt at emotional blackmail by people who will never ever have to suffer the consequences of their advocacy. Or more succinctly:

Ok. I hereby announce the formation of the Free Libyan Legion. Since we all care so much, we’re going to follow in the footsteps of Byron in Greece and Orwell in Spain and get ourselves over to Benghazi and actually fight for Libyan Freedom. In person.

Reassuring to know Martin Amis remains a knob

Published on February 14, 20111 Comment

Wild horses couldn’t drag me in front of the television to watch Sebastian Ffaulks on fiction and fortunately it’s also forbidden under the Genevea Conventions to force people to watch his self-satisfied smug face, which is why I missed Martin Amis being a knob again. When asked if he would ever write a children’s book he said “‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book”:

Remarks about children’s books made by Martin Amis on the BBC’s new book programme Faulks on Fiction, broadcast this week, have caused anger and offence among children’s writers.

“People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book,” Amis said, in a sideways excursion from a chat about John Self, the antihero of his 1984 novel Money. “I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.”

“I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write,” he added.

These remarks led to the usual (justified) outrage by those he targeted, but they’re really nothing more than unthinking snobbism from a has-been, a somewhat desperate attempt to remain “controversial”. Of course Amis would be disdainful of children’s books: he wouldn’t be Amis if he didn’t look down on anything that wasn’t written by him or his mates like Ian McEwan. It’s pointless to get angry at him or try to reason him out of his prejudices; he only says these things for the publicity and the image.

“Christian” bully turns out to be a wife beater. Surprise!

Published on January 29, 2011

Christian Voice (sic) spokeperson Stephen Green is accused by the Daily Mail of being a wife beater:

Caroline Green was often punished by her husband Stephen for failing to be a dutiful, compliant wife, but his final act of violence against her — the one that prompted her long-overdue decision to divorce him — was all the more chilling because it was coldly premeditated.

Stephen Green wrote a list of his wife’s failings then described the weapon he would make to beat her with.

‘He told me he’d make a piece of wood into a sort of witch’s broom and hit me with it, which he did,’ she recalls, her voice tentative and quiet. ‘He hit me until I bled. I was terrified. I can still remember the pain.

‘Stephen listed my misdemeanours: I was disrespectful and disobedient; I wasn’t loving or submissive enough and I was undermining him. He also said I wasn’t giving him his conjugal rights.

‘He even framed our marriage vows — he always put particular emphasis on my promise to obey him — and hung them over our bed. He believed there was no such thing as marital rape and for years I’d been reluctant to have sex with him, but he said it was my duty and was angry if I refused him.

‘But the beating was the last straw. It convinced me I had to divorce him.’

Good on the Daily Mail, but hang on, which newspaper was it who kept promoting this dangerous lunatic? Take it away John Walker:

But most interesting is the Mail’s relationship with the man. Their latest story describes Green as a “monster”, a “fundamentalist.” The article goes on to note,

“Stephen was immersed in Christian Voice, which allowed him the autonomy and freedom to express his increasingly bizarre views unchallenged. As its founder and director, he was answerable to no one.”

And just who was it who was letting Green’s views go unchallenged?

Well, take for example this article about student stunt marriages that appeared in a newspaper just fifteen days ago:

“The students’ wedding was condemned by Stephen Green, national director of Christian Voice, an organisation that represents Christians.”

The story then goes on to quote Green at length, without editorial comment. And which paper is it who let this extremist monster go unchallenged? That would be the Daily Mail.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg regarding the Daily Mail‘s relationship with Stephen Green, as Walker shows with quote after quote from just the last two years. As long as Green fit with the Mail‘s prejudices and could be counted upon to spout the reactionary, bigoted hateful nonsense the paper liked to quote he was a welcome guest; now that he turned out to be more nuts than they wanted the Mail puts the knife in.

The temptation here is to call Green a hypocrite, posing as somebody with high morals yet according to the Mail beating and raping his wife. This would be wrong however. It doesn’t matter whether these accusations are true or not as even without them Stephen Green has shown himself to be a nasty bigoted man who despises anybody who doesn’t think like him, who if he had the power would want to force everybody to live like he wanted them to live, no matter their own preferences. He believes homosexuality is sinful, divorce is sinful, anything not out of a 1950ties children’s picture book is sinful. In short, he’s a bully with no morals, just hate.

Thilo Sarrazin: Islamophobia is okay, but mention Jews just once…

Published on August 31, 2010

A rightwing blowhard spouting racist nonsense, even when he is a high ranking official at the German Central Bank, does not become an international scandal, but Thilo Sarrazin made one big mistake. He targeted the wrong ethnical group:

Over the weekend, Sarrazin went even further. In an interview with Welt am Sonntag, Sarrazin waded into the fraught field of genetics, saying “all Jews share a certain gene, all Basques have certain genes that make them different from other people.”

The comment came as he was discussing the identities of different European cultures, but the reference to a Jewish gene has unleashed yet another storm of critique. Such references have been largely taboo in Germany since World War II.

When asked by the interviewer if perhaps he meant to talk of “races” rather than “cultures,” Sarrazin responded “I am not a racist.”

Had he only kept his racism to the usual Islamophobia, it wouldn’t have mattered, but talking about a “Jewish gene” when you’re a German banker? That’s asking for trouble. As The online archive at Der Spiegel shows Sarrazin has been Islamophobic for a long time without it harming his career much. He might have faced censure by his own party (the social democratic SPD!) and criticism from the usual quarters, but his job was safe and he has been described as a “provocateur” and “blunt talking” rather than “racist bastard” in respectable newspapers. One little mention of the “Jewish gene” has changed all that….

Geert Wilders is smarter; not only a “critic of Islam” but also a “friend of Israel” (and you do wonder how much of his Islamophobia is caused by this friendship and imbibing the Israeli views of it, or vice versa). He has kept his racism confided to acceptable targets and as a result is taken seriously as a coalition partner in the next Dutch government. That’s the bad news. The good news is that one of its intended coalition partners, the Christian Democrat CDA has gotten cold feet at the last moment, as many of its members do not feel comfortable with Wilders. As well they should: rightwing or leftwing, no non-racist politician should want anything to do with somebody who wants to use a specific ethnic group of citizens (and in the vocabulary of Wilders’ followers, if not always with Wilders himself, the word “Islam” is interchangable with “Moroccan”) as the scapegoat for all of our country’s problems.

Science fiction has a lot to answer for

Published on August 28, 20101 Comment

Brad Reed reports on libertarian transhumanism in which internet blowhard and proud government sponsored individualist Glenn Reynolds features prominently:

Writing over at the Cato Institute, meanwhile, mortal non-cyborg law professor Glenn Reynolds acknowledges that the creation of godlike robo-humans might have negative consequences for both the environment and the poor souls who choose to remain in their current flesh-bag forms.

“The empowerment of ordinary people is a good thing, but it also carries with it the dangers inherent in empowering bad people,” he writes. “In a world in which individuals have the powers formerly enjoyed by nation-states, an already-shrinking planet can get pretty small.”

So how does Reynolds propose to remedy this? Does he think maybe we should make it illegal to inject the screaming hobo at the local 7-11 with matter-creating nanobots? Why, no! He thinks we should resign ourselves to the fact that the Earth is doomed and instead work on blasting off into space before we all die, since “humanity won’t survive the next thousand years unless we colonize space.”

Reynolds elaborates on this theme in an essay for Popular Mechanics, going into greater detail about the dangers the Singularity could pose for humanity. Among them: nanobots that emit mind-control drugs, computer worms that infect and kill our new robobrains, and even the possibility of putting “world-killer weapons into the hands of anyone having a bad-hair day.” Reynolds admits these things might be potentially bad, but he thinks we ought to go through with them anyway since the free market will naturally create a demand for remedies to nanobot-enhanced cocaine addicts that can fire cruise missiles from their fingers.

As Reed says, transhumanism, with its emphasis on how individuals could become superhuman is the perfect fit for the type of childish rightwing libertarianism practised by the likes of Kurtzweil and Reynold, a way to evade all your obligations to society forever. It’s sadly not a new or even uncommon strain in sf fandom — from the start there have always been people who genuinely thought fans were slans, better than normal people and who swanted to remove themselves from the common herd. Even in the infancy of science fiction in the forties there were nutters like Claude Degler who wanted to create a master race of fans by getting them to breed in his special lovecamp in the Ozarks.

But the real coupling of science fiction with of rightwing libertarian science fiction only took place from the seventies and can probably be blamed on one guy: Jerry Pournelle. If you’ve read his and Larry Niven’s Footfall, where you have a team of thinly disguised science fiction writers (Pournelle and friends basically) advicing the US president during an alien invasion, that’s more or less how he would like things to be in real life. A product of Boeing as much as of Analog, Pournelle was the seventies version of Glenn Reynolds, arguing for space colonisation as essential to America’s defence and the future of the human race. He was thick with the Team B loonies, the same sort of people who three decades later would rage about the Islamist threat but where then predicting a Soviet victory in the coming Third World War, less than a decade before the USSR collapsed…

Pournelle then established this political tradition of which Reynolds is the latest example, a tradition that mixes personal greed with a technocratic vision of the future and a deep dislike of having to deal with other people… L5 colonies for the best and brightest were the answer in the seventies, brain downloads today.