Rants – Page 45 – a sibilant intake of breath

The Tetherballs of Bougainville

Virtually every page of Mark Leyner‘s book made me want to reach out and strangle the insufferably pretentious protagonist: a compulsion that sat awkwardly beside the way in which the author of the book has intentionally conflated himself with the central character (nested several times), even imbuing him with his own name. The Tetherballs of Bougainville is an absurdist collection of miscellanea. It cannot really be called satire because it doesn’t have enough direction to constitute a criticism. If anything, it both glorifies and mildly rebukes the emotional shallowness and obsessive character of society, as perceived by Leyner himself. The book can be funny, when one is in the right frame of mind, but it most frequently struck me in the way Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas did the few times when it came across as crass and monstrous, rather than comic and off-the-wall.

The self-referential plot betrays the abject narcissism of the protagonist. In the opening section, a straightforward narrative of his father’s unsuccessful execution is presented. The second section consists of a screenplay written for a contest mentioned in the first. Again, author/protagonist Leyner is at the centre of the narrative. The same is true for the extended review of a fictional movie read by the Leyner character in the screenplay. The non-existent film is described at great detail, and also features Leyner as the protagonist. Screenplay Leyner, reviewing the non-existing Leyner-starring film judges it as “a movie that consistently subordinates meaning to titillation. And it is a movie that perpetually teeters between puerile perversity and puerile sentimentality.” It seems that author Leyner was hoping to achieve something similar with the book as a whole.

In the end, this book feels like the product of a high school student trying way too hard to be clever: writing impossibly detailed (though not error-free) dialogue as a kind of intellectual fantasy fulfillment. Nobody has the real-life inability to expound upon minutiae so extravagantly and tirelessly. In that sense, the book reminded me of The Gilmore Girls: it had the same tendency to replicate the idealized conversations of ex-Ivy League screenwriters. Leyner’s work is dramatically more explicit and tries to be more disturbing – the most successful attempt being an anatomically ludicrous by nonetheless revulsion-producing scene involving a woman without a cranium – but it has that same feeling of over-eager whiz-kiddery behind it.

Earth Hour, and why it is a bad idea

The news today is full of talk about Earth Hour. Frankly, I think the idea is stupid. Telling people to turn out the lights for one hour one day has a trivial impact. Furthermore, it has nothing to do with approaches that actually would. Shutting down the lights in a brief symbolic gesture does nothing to change the energy basis of our society. Replacing one ordinary light bulb with a compact fluorescent one would have a bigger impact in the long term, and would at least suggest an understanding that brief voluntary abstinence from energy use is no solution whatsoever. Earth Hour is akin to choosing to fast for one hour and hoping that it will send a strong message to the factory farming industry.

Earth Hour reinforces many of the fallacies people believe about climate change, such as:

It will mostly be solved through consumer choices
Voluntary efforts are enough
It’s the visible changes that really matter

As discussed at length here in the past, it is very likely that none of these things are true. Climate change will only be dealt with when the energy basis of society has changed enough that the most greedy and selfish people are nonetheless leading low-carbon lives. That requires massive infrastructure change over the course of decades – the progressive replacement of high carbon options with low carbon and finally zero carbon ones. Earth Hour is, at best, a distraction from this process.

[Update: 25 March 2009] Judging by the Google searches, another ‘Earth Hour’ is coming up. I still think the exercise is a pointless one. Moving to a sustainable society isn’t about reducing energy use for one hour, it’s about reforming the energy basis of society. Tokenistic environmental gestures do no good, and help to convince people that the real changes we need are trivially easy.

[Update: 24 March 2011] Looking back over it, what I have written about Earth Hour before is a bit harsh. Yes, I think the basic idea of turning out the lights for an hour is a weak one. At the same time, environmental groups presumable use Earth Hour as an opportunity to communicate with the public. It might have less value as a symbolic action, and more as a simple advertising opportunity, in terms of direct communication with the public and media exposure.

Car standards in China and North America

The Toronto Star has reported that: “No gasoline-powered car assembled in North America would meet China’s current fuel-efficiency standard.” Even the proposed tougher Californian standards – the ones about which there is a big fight with the Environmental Protection Agency – will not do so. In the United States, there is a proposal to require 35 mile per gallon (14.9 km/L) performance by 2020. Today, all Chinese cars are 36 mpg (15.3 km/L) or better. Canadian cars average 27 mpg (11.5 km/L), and don’t have to meet any minimum standard of that type.

That’s certainly something to consider the next time you hear that tougher standards will maul the auto industry. Judging by the relative performance of Japanese and American car companies, it might be fairer to say that continuing to pump out dinosaur vehicles is more likely to leads to its demise on this continent.

Dark comedies

I first experienced Jhonen Vasquez‘s work in the form of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: a darkly comic feature of my high-school days. Johnny is insane and believes he needs to keep a wall in his house painted with fresh blood so that demons do not push through from the other side. On the basis of that, you might wonder why Nickelodeon decided to produce a children’s television show created by the same man. Invader Zim is not nearly as dark as Johnny – though it definitely has its moments – and I think it is funnier overall. In one episode, the megalomaniacal alien Zim is concerned that a human nurse will uncover his secret identity as an alien because he lacks human organs. His solution is to start stealing them from his classmates in a macabre and hilarious episode called “Dark Harvest.”

The series is worth watching just so that you can exchange the most hillarious lines with other devotees.

For those already enamoured with Zim it is worth noting that you can buy every episode on DVD for $29.59. At that price, it may soften the rueful chastisement embodied in the angry fist you wave at those $70 seasons of The Sopranos. They even had the gall to split series six in two parts, so they could rob people twice…

Evolution and Ben Stein

It is always surprising when a seemingly intelligent person adopts a hopelessly indefensible position. This seems to be the case with Ben Stein’s new anti-evolution movie. It is still possible to argue that some kind of deity must have created the universe. What is not possible is to argue convincingly against the central elements of the theory of evolution: namely how mutation and selection drive change and how all life on earth is descended from a common ancestor. There is simply too much evidence for both claims, and it is too good:

The fossil record shows overwhelming evidence for a branched tree of life, connecting existing organisms to ancient ones that preceded them.
Comparative embryology provides good anatomical evidence of both evolution and common descent.
Concrete examples of evolution on human timescales can be easily found. These include plant domestication, moths that darkened in response to coal soot, and antibiotic resistant bacteria.
The geographic distribution of species provides evidence for speciation and adaptation to new biological niches.
Both nucleic and mitochondrial DNA provide excellent evidence for both common descent and evolution through selection.
Common aspects of biochemistry are demonstrative of both claims: especially those features which are arbitrary yet consistent among living things

I haven’t seen the film, and it probably argues something more sophisticated than “the world is 6,000 years old and every creature that has ever lived is alive now, in the exact form in which it was created.” Even so, it is depressing to see someone commonly associated with intelligence fuelling a false debate centred around ignorance.

There are certainly many incredible mysteries that remain in biology – including many of the details on how evolution functions and has proceeded. Similarly, a questioning attitude is essential to scientific advancement. Those things freely admitted, purporting to challenge things with so many strong and independent collections of evidence supporting them is much more likely to retard the advancement of human knowledge than it is to advance it. This is especially true when a contrived debate runs the risk of forcing sub-standard education on children.

You are very safe

Glancing through news stands and television reports, a person is likely to see all manner of terrible hazards highlighted: from kidnapping to toxic chemicals leached from Nalgene bottles. It is worth remembering – in the face of this onslaught – that we are about the safest people who have ever lived. Hunger and infectious disease kill hardly any Canadians. Violence kills some, but fewer than in just about any society ever. And yet, too many people live in fear.

Maintaining perspective is vital. Let your children play in the park, even though one or two children in the whole country get kidnapped from there annually. Let them build treehouses, even though some tiny subset of Canada’s population contracts tetanus.

Refusing strengthens the significant possibility that they will live sedate and uninteresting lives.

CIA given license to torture

President Bush vetoed legislation that would have forbidden the CIA from using certain torture techniques, such as simulated drowning. It seems a clear sign of what we have lost due to excessive concern about terrorism – the understanding that governments are the most dangerous entities in the world. While they generally lack the desire to cause mayhem that defines terrorist groups, the powers governments have are so vast that they can do great harm through simple ineptitude, or a failure to police the actions of their agents. Facilitating torture is an international crime, and for good reason. It is a shame that geopolitics ensures that none of America’s new generation of torturers will even find themselves on trial in The Hague.

Stopping this legislation ensures that a few more people will be tortured needlessly, in violation of international law and the kind of ethics that we are supposedly trying to defend from terrorism. Furthermore, I think it’s likely that decisions like this will be looked back on in thirty years time much as we now look back on using the CIA to arm Osama bin Laden and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, or help keep Pinochet in power. In the long term and in purely geopolitical terms, it will prove to be an own-goal for the United States – further tarnishing its increasingly shaky reputation on human rights and emboldening governments like China and Sudan to treat the idea even more disdainfully.

This Michael Ignatieff article, which I have doubtless linked previously, does a very good job of treating the subject of torture ethics intelligently. Henry Shue has a less convincing argument.

Big picture uncertainty

Climate change policy focuses on constant attempts to make guesses about the future: about economic development in rich states and poor, about patterns of technological evolution, about climatic responses to radiative forcing caused by changes in the gas mixture of the atmosphere. One cannot always evade the feeling that too many uncertainties are being layered. Consider, for instance, the possibility that hydrocarbon fuels will peak in world output within the next few decades. If that happened, most of our ‘business as usual’ economic projections would be badly wrong.

An even more ominous consideration relates to global conflict. When the world is generally doing well, it is devilishly hard to convince states to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions for the universal good. Imagine how hard it would be in a geopolitical environment based around rising tensions and the growing expectation of great power war. We make projections for 2100 without acknowledging that making it from now to then without such a war would be a historical aberration.

In the end, I suppose, cynicism does us little good. The vast majority of ordinary people – and of powerful people – will not believe in the disastrous potential consequences of climate change until they start to manifest themselves visibly. As such, agonizing about them just makes you more marginal to the debate that exists among those not kept awake by fear about the possibility for self-amplifying positive feedbacks in the climate system. We must do the best we can, avoid confusing engagement with the mainstream debate with genuine complacency, and hope that humanity possesses more wisdom than it has ever demonstrated before.

Obama on gay rights

Whereas John McCain thinks that it is a principle of “Human Dignity” that the “family represents the foundation of Western Civilization and civil society and… believes the institution of marriage is a union between one man and one woman,” Barack Obama has issued an open letter calling for equal rights for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals.

Unfortunately, Obama doesn’t come out and call for the legalization of gay marriage: doubtless due to a political calculation about what homophobia might cost him in a general election. While that is probably smart politics, it is a disappointing thing to see from a candidate that tries to paint himself as so progressive. In fifty or one hundred years, I am convinced that people in liberal societies will see restricting gay marriage as equally unjust as restricting interracial marriage or marriage between different social classes. It’s a shame that even progressives in the United States cannot recognize this now.

In truth, even McCain probably doesn’t have a problem with two people of the same sex getting married for the same reasons – and under the same laws – as any mixed sex couple might. The politics of the American conservative movement simply make it suicidal to acknowledge that.

Previous posts on gay marriage:

The hopelessness of the voluntary

Energy Saving Day in the United Kingdom has produced no measurable results. While this is a blow to the “everyone recycle your used Coke cans and we will be fine” form of environmentalism, it is less surprising to people who have a sense of the scale of the climate issue and an awareness of the (in)effectiveness of past voluntary efforts.

Even if the day had been successful, it would have been more about displacement than reduction. Consider the much touted ‘Buy Nothing Day‘ espoused by certain rejectors of the dominant consumerist culture. Even among those who observe the occasion scrupulously, it is plausible that overall consumption doesn’t fall at all: it just gets displaced to the days before and after. Overall, the idea that serious societal issues can be tackled through 24 hours of voluntary abstinence by a handful of devotees is profoundly flawed.

What is the alternative? Price carbon and de-carbonize infrastructure.