Around the tubes #2

I’ve been on the Net, but I’ve been too busy to blog at length on anything I’ve really wanted to. Still too busy IRL!

Iran

Again, more from Christopher Hitchens…

‘Persian Paranoia‘ – In which Hitchens dissects the conspiracy minded pap peddled by the Mullahs, and the sceptical way the public popularly receives it. I especially liked where he wrote…

“The tendency of outside media to check the temperature of the clerics, rather than consult the writers and poets of the country, shows our own cultural backwardness in regrettably sharp relief. Anyone who had been reading Pezeshkzad and Nafisi, or talking to their students and readers in Tabriz and Esfahan and Mashad, would have been able to avoid the awful embarrassment by which everything that has occurred on the streets of Iran during recent days has come as one surprise after another to most of our uncultured “experts.”"

(Christopher Hitchens, 2009)

Who’d be an expert with that kind of rebuke waiting for you? All in all though, if there is anything that is damning of much/most of the West’s take on the Middle East, provincialism ranks pretty high.

Farhad Manjoo weighs in (pessimistically) on the role of social media in the Iranian situation. ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized‘.

It is true that there has been hyperbole coming out of Iran, and out of the mouths and TweetDecks of those with a Utopian vision for social media. But… Revolutionary processes have occurred in the past, all without the support of social media. If Hitchens is right about the mood of the public prior to the “elections” in Iran, is the crackdown on electronic media in Iran as significant as Manjoo would seem to imply?

Media

I know that SkepticLawyer thinks it’s a nasty place, but Scott of GrodsCorp has put up a nice post in response to the whining entitlement of the MSM. Specifically, the indignant address given by John Hartigan of News Ltd, lamenting the new media and bloggers in particular. ‘Not an either/or proposition.’

Politics/History

We may not have him to kick around anymore, but we do have his carcass. And tapes. Christopher Hitchens gives a run down of some examples of pure evil that the disgraced disgrace, Richard Nixon, left behind for us to hear. ‘Caught on Tape‘. It makes all the apologetics for the man, and his own victim card playing, all the more pathetic.

Science

Since 2007, the IPCC Report detailing projections for climate change has been facing a contrary barrage of evidence suggesting that the contributions to sea level rise from melting glacial ice (in addition to contribution from thermal expansion) was underestimated. Accumulating evidence seems to mostly point in the same direction (despite denialist canards to the contrary or even sillier denialist analogies about melting ice in glasses of water), although to what degree projections need to be changed, nobody seems to know exactly. Which would seem right considering that we are talking about projections, not predictions.

In a perhaps unfortunately named article (speculative title for a speculative article?), ‘Sea level rise: It’s worse than we thought‘, New Scientist takes a look at the increased ice flow from glaciers, and asks how soon and how much?

To be frank, I’m always a bit sceptical when journalists cite studies with narrow contexts to contradict, rather than to counter-speculate or qualify massive projects like that of the IPCC. Be they denialist or not. A greater volume and co-ordination of research on ice flow changes is needed.

Interesting, but also in the “bigger sample size thanks” basket is a New Scientist piece on the work of Han et. al. ‘Brain’s response muted when we see other races in pain.’ Who’s “we”? Well, 17 Chinese and 16 Caucasians. I’m not sure I feel adequately represented in such a sample size. A population study is in order!

The gist is, that in the sample group when witnessing footage of painful vs neutral stimuli, a stronger sympathetic pain response (similar to the kind guys get when seeing another kicked in the groin I suspect) was detected in people seeing others of their own race (grrr – “race” – essentialism) than those of another.

How widespread is this in Homo sapiens? It all seems very speculative, but really the stuff of thought experiments at this stage. At any rate, misanthropes with contorted views of the way physical determinism (as in physics and cause and effect) works in biological organisms, needn’t pop the champagne and celebrate our damnation yet. Nurture hasn’t been ruled out of the equation – let’s not bring up the genetic determinism straw-man, thanks.

Religion

John Micklethwait of The Economist has a new book coming out. God is Back. From what I can tell, its more of a neutral anthropology than a polemic such as McGrath’s triumphalist The Twilight of Atheism. Got the heads up from Father Bob the other day…

Found a couple of YouTube videos discussing the book. Good to see the host qualify his remark about Nietzsche… Irritating, when people get the point of the quote wrong.

God is Back interview – Part 1 – (6:26)

God is Back interview – Part 2 – (6:47)

I think that Micklethwait needs a wrap over the knuckles for treating pluralism and secularism as two poles of a dichotomy. Grrr… Religious pluralism is a product of secular Enlightenment values! Just take the intellectual thought behind the US Constitution, or S116 of Australia’s.

And on the topic of faith and tolerance, Vjack of Atheist Revolution discusses points of tolerance raised by the interfaith movement and their relevance to atheist-theist discussion, despite that even with inclusive intentions, “interfaith” is by definition exclusive of those without faith. ‘Can atheists participate in interfaith dialogue?‘

Music

I’m going to have to find a copy of A Small Deadly Space after cracking my CD of it. Will I have to go through eBay and thus PayPay? I don’t want to go through iTunes or any downloadable version. Want. CD.

Here’s one of the tracks (yeah I know, fan slideshows can be a bit much at times.)

Fight – In A World of My Own Making (7:11)

Halford’s Crucible would be good as well. The re-mastered version. Must check at The Muses.

~ Bruce