Category Archives: Social Commentary
One-Way Trips To Mars?
It’s actually the only way that makes sense right now:
The hard part, he says, isn’t subsisting in a hostile environment millions of miles from home but changing the Space Shuttle-era culture of timidity.
It would be easier to just ignore NASA than to change it. I’m working on an issue paper on risk aversion and reward, and how we have to stop fretting so much over killing people if we want to open up space.
A Mother
Google+
Is it breaking the Internet?
The Problem With The Welfare State
When people come to be more reliant on the state than they are on each other, community bonds fray and social solidarity falls into disrepair. When the struggling mum looks to the state for help, rather than turning to family, friends, neighbours, the end result is that she becomes more isolated from her community. When a 17-year-old school student short of cash turns to the state for a weekly handout, he never really develops skills of self-sufficiency or dependency on friends and neighbours. When young men looking for work know that the state will sustain them for long periods of time, especially if they make a performance of being “ill” or “depressed” at the dole centre, then their instinct to work becomes frayed. The old healthy working-class habits of pulling together, “getting on one’s bike”, offering one another work and advice have slowly but surely – and tragically – been replaced by the “helping hand” of the ever-watchful state. People start to rely less on their own wits and mates, and more on the faceless keepers of charitable cash.
It is soul sapping.
Technology, Depression, Asbergers
…and suicide. This isn’t just a problem for the IT industry — we see it in space as well. Of course, as some have theorized, it’s possible that more people are being born this way, since the Silicon Valley culture over the past decades has allowed more of them to socialize together and mate with each other, opportunities that were more rare in a less mobile era that didn’t concentrate geeks to the same degree. We need to help the Asbergers-afflicted more as a society (no, I don’t mean government programs). As the article points out, many believe (including me) that they have advanced us greatly in not just computer technology, but tech in general, but they often pay a price in being social pariahs.
Watching TV With Your Kids Over The Holidays?
Try Firefly. I noticed that there was a Firefly festival last weekend on one of the cable channels.
Mullah Ron Paul
Thoughts on the congressman’s defense of Iran, from Spengler.
And thoughts on Ron Paul’s real racism from Roger Simon:
Paul’s racial bias is more complex and intense than what has already been alleged of his attitudes towards blacks and Jews. He thinks even less of Muslims. He treats the Islamic world as if they do not have views of their own, their own ideology. In essence, he does not take them seriously as people and claims their actions are largely a result of American (and presumably Western) imperialistic behavior.
In other words, Muslims are children who could not possibly have the beliefs they do of their own accord and choose to act on those beliefs. They only do what they do because of us.
Besides being ethnocentric in the extreme, this negates many centuries of history — the majority of which took place before the U.S. even existed — and an entire, highly evolved system of religious, philosophical, and social thought. Whether Paul does this out of ignorance or arrogance I am not sure, but his disregard of Islam as something to be taken seriously in and of itself is particularly stunning when that ideology is close to the most antithetical imaginable to Paul’s self-proclaimed libertarianism.
Yes, by denigrating the Muslims’ moral agency, he dehumanizes them.
[Update a few minutes later]
I should note that denying moral agency to Muslims is something that the left has been doing ever since 911.
Why Would You Go?
How do you convince the twentieth generation of space colonists to leave earth?
[Update a few minutes later]
Slightly related: Charles Krauthammer wonders if we’re alone in the universe. I disagree with him, though, that politics is the driver of human history. Technology plays at least as large a role.