Month: April 2006

A reader writes:

"The person making a big stink over Pianka, Mims, is a creationist with an anti-science agenda. If you read the article, you’ll note that Pianka was basically presenting his research on dangerous diseases in a silly way, and not actually seriously advocating anything at all. But such goofy over-thetop hyperbole is no longer contextual: in a world of internet context-stripping it was ripe fodder for the latest faux outrage scandal. Please, step out of the chain, and take things with a few more grains of salt. Stop and think for a second: you REALLY think that Pianka or any of his students seriously wants the end of the world? Just like end-of-times people? Come on. Trying to find phony equivalences just to look more even-handed is silly."

More context here.

Drudge’s expose of a wacko environmentalist looking forward to the end of humanity through massive plagues was telling to me. In the long run, right-wing fundamentalism and left-wing fundamentalism end up in the same place. A core aspect of most such ideologies is their expectation of a moment in the future where all that they currently despise will be done away with and all will be well. So you have the eschatology of the early Christians, which eventually morphed into the nineteenth century doctrine of pre-millennialism, which is the forefather of the astonishingly successful dispensationalist fiction series, "Left Behind." You have Ahmadinejad forseeing the return of the Twelfth Imam and doing what he can to accelerate it. You have John McCain’s new best friends, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, seeing the End-Times approach, when every homosexual, feminist and Jew will be roasted alive by Jesus. You have Marxists expecting the Communist revolution when all alienation will be dispelled. And you have the fundie enviro-left eagerly anticipating species annihilation. To my mind, it’s a very good indicator of whether someone is worth listening to from a political stand-point. Those who expect the end of the world relatively soon should be kept as far away from public office as possible. They can keep their apocalypses to themselves.

My take on the GOP’s immigration bust-up.

There’s online footage. And there are Russian connections.

I’m glad that Condi Rice and Jack Straw went to Baghdad yesterday. Add that visit to the president’s remarks last week bluntly ruling out Jafaari as prime minister, and you can see how desperate London and Washington now are. They know that this is Iraq’s last chance to avoid meltdown, and yet the Iraqi elites seem unable to make the small compromises necessary to save themselves and what’s left of their country. Mohammed sounds ominous in his latest post:

"The situation at this point can be summed by the following:
There is a majority of politicians from various trends who want to avoid a confrontation and willing to reach a deal to form a government; those are not working hard enough though.
On the other side there are militias supported by some parties within their corresponding blocs who think they can enter an armed conflict against the rest and come out victorious.
Politicians recognize the great price that everyone will have to pay if such a terrible possibility becomes reality, there will be no winners in this conflict and every involved party will have to shoulder a share of the losses, the shares may vary though."

The civil war, in other words, has already started. There will be no political deal until that war achieves some results for one side or another. The politics and the violence will continue in tandem. And one mode of self-expression will eventually prevail.

(Photo: Franco Pagetti/Time.)

A conservative blogger denies charges that the rightwing blogosphere jumped to unsavory conclusions about Jill Carroll – before all the evidence was in. Make your own mind up.

One of the merging memes on the social right is that you judge a society by its fertility rate. It’s argued that Western Europe is a failure because its population is aging and will soon begin falling; ditto Russia and Japan. The implication is that modern secularism, with its encouragement of individual freedom, ignores the injunction to go forth and multiply, and is thereby doomed to the dustbin of history. But check out this interesting graphic of reproduction rates. Look where the highest birth-rates are: Niger, Yemen, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, Afghanistan, to name a few. A quck hands up: who wants to move there?

At one end, high birth rates are an indication of social collapse and desperation: people are having kids in order to maximize their survival chances. Maybe there is some spiritual benefit to living in such dire need, but I fail to see a simple connection between high birth rates and social health. In fact, declining birth-rates are almost always a sign of economic and social success, not failure, as we’re seeing in China and India. As long as the infrastructure exists for maintaining economic growth, the number of people in a given society is not that important an issue. Fewer may well be better. I’d rather live in Germany than Kazakhstan, wouldn’t you? Yes, there comes a point at which demographic imbalance with too many old people can strain a system. But this is a transitional problem, not a permanent predicament. Wealthier societies with fewer people and continued growth are – or should be – a goal for most of us, not a threat. They help spread wealth more widely, will eventually ease environmental strain, and make for more comfortable living in a less crowded Western Europe or Japan. Numbers don’t equal wealth or military power, given technology and the new brain-driven engines of economic growth. Instead of bemoaning population decline, why not celebrate it?

The GOP would do well to heed Bill Kristol’s advice on this one.

The British government continues its internal soap opera. The Labour party may well pay for it during the upcoming local elections.

"I saw the – what this town is known for, spin, cherry-picking facts, using metaphors to evoke certain emotional responses or shading the context. We know the mushroom clouds and the other things that were all described that the media has covered well. I saw on the ground a sort of walking away from 10 years‚Äô worth of planning. You know, ever since the end of the first Gulf War, there‚Äôs been planning by serious officers and planners and others, and policies put in place – 10 years’ worth of planning were thrown away. Troop levels dismissed out of hand. Gen. Shinseki basically insulted for speaking the truth and giving an honest opinion.

The lack of cohesive approach to how we deal with the aftermath, the political, economic, social reconstruction of a nation, which is no small task. A belief in these exiles that anyone in the region, anyone that had any knowledge, would tell you were not credible on the ground. And on and on and on, decisions to disband the army that were not in the initial plans. There‚Äôs a series of disastrous mistakes. We just heard the Secretary of State say these were tactical mistakes. These were not tactical mistakes. These were strategic mistakes, mistakes of policies made back here. Don’t blame the troops. They‚Äôve been magnificent. If anything saves us, it will be them." – Gen. Anthony Zinni, former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East. Three words: Fire Rumsfeld Now.