Category: Social Issues

“You must’ve been molested or something to hate God this much.”

Setting aside the creepy fantasizing about sexual violence against children, for that is what, “you must’ve been molested,” is; the,“hate God this much,” shows a real lack of imagination.

I don’t hate any gods. I don’t hate Jesus. I don’t hate his dad Yahweh. I don’t hate his dad Ēl, or Ēl’s wife and Yahweh’s mom Asherah, who creepily was also Yahweh’s consort in the guise of Athirat (if I got the names in the right chronological order.)

I don’t hate these gods in the same way I don’t hate other weather gods distantly related to Yahweh, like Thor, or less distantly related to Ēl like Zeus. I don’t “hate” any of them any more than I could hate Eru Ilúvatar who is also a god, and also… a fictional character.

Even the fictional characters that I really dislike for one reason or another, I don’t hate them.

When, as a teen, I tried to explain to my Sunday-school teacher mum that the reason I was not going back to church was that I had figured out, the completely obvious fact, that it was all a made up nonsense, she was angry and confused. So I tried to explain by telling her that I KNEW there was no god. And she wouldn’t, couldn’t, believe me.

I asked her why she didn’t believe me. And she just said that EVERYONE KNEW her god was real. Everyone… Knew…

The “you hate God” people are sure that you know that their god is real. They can’t even conceive of any alternative. That is what religious belief is. That is why they grasp for these insane straws.

Two Billion

Some optimist wrote, “I think the earth can support 10 billion humans just fine.” The other day some greater genius insisted that twice that was totally sustainable. The highest figure I have heard so far was, ludicrously, 50 billion.

Years ago, before it became a thing to deny overpopulation, like it has become a thing to deny climate change, like it has become a thing to deny that nuclear power is safe… there was a box set of, I think, Blue Planet. It contained two bonus episodes. And if I remember correctly, while one of those episodes touched on overpopulation, the second was about what population of humans was sustainable.

Incidentally, while making the series, they had asked every expert, biologist, ecologist, engineer, every one, the same question. What, in their expert opinion, what is a sustainable human population. As you might suspect, there was some variation. A couple were as high as 4 billion, but the consensus was 2–3.

And consider, if there were 2 billion of us, instead of eight, that would be a biomass, of us alone, 2½ times that of all marine and terrestrial mammals combined. While if our livestock scaled proportionately there would still be a biomass of cattle, sheep, pigs, and etc., 3.75 times that of all the wild mammals combined. Despite the “Oh waily waily!” Pretense that two billion is too few people, that would still be a huge population of any one species.

So, even though I think your hopes for sustaining 10 billion humans is delusional, and actual qualified experts agree, I fear that we are going to find out the hard way. Because this population and our population 10, 20, 30 years ago was already burning up the natural world, on which our lives depend. And it is yet to be seen if we could ever hope to remediate the damage overpopulation has already done.

Christianity the…

The “not-Christian” rhetoric has got to stop. We keep resorting to this sunny Sunday-school version of Christianity the good. But in order to believe that, you have to discount most of the last 1700 years of organized Christianity’s history.

But from the persecution of Arianism through the crusades and “the church” standing in the way of every progressive social development, through the fields of dead first-nations children at residential schools, to this awful christofascism… this is what religion, without secular constraint, always does. This is what it always did. This is what it will always do.

Most of the Christians, most people in the modern west will have ever met, up to a point, were in fact secular people in a secular society. They may have affected to be Christians is some airy fairy way, but their behaviour, for instance not persecuting people who were not their in-group, their behaviour was constrained by a secular society, by the separation of church and state. THIS religious terrorism is exactly what was inevitably going to happen when that separation broke down, when religious ideology was once again allowed to govern individual conduct.

You should have known full well this would happen. You were warned. But you wanted to pretend that the whole blood soaked history of Christianity was just a few bad actors. That REAL Christians didn’t do all the horrendous things they in fact either did or enabled, any time they were ever in political control.

wind&solar distraction

Where I live, there are many square miles of abandoned industrial properties and indeed many old industrial buildings each with acres of empty roof. Those properties are owned, privately by real people. Now imagine that it was true that you could “make a profit” by installing solar panels, that fundamentally they were a good idea, that they were a worthwhile investment to generate ‘some’ electricity. If that were so, then no one would have to encourage the property owners to install solar. The profit motive would do that.

But that will not happen. Not today, not five years ago when the same argument was being made. Not ten years ago when the same argument was being made. Not fifteen or twenty or twenty five. Because it is NOT economical.

However if you spend that same capital on refurbishing Pickering B. Then you get lots and lots of affordable low-carbon safe clean grid-scale electricity 24/7 for at least several decades.

Germany by the beginning of 2025, in the electricity sector alone, will have spent €520 BILLION on Energiewende. That is fluffy wind&solar projects the first generations of which are already reaching end-of-life. Had they instead put that capital to use building and refurbishing nuclear power plants, they would have depreciated coal in their electricity sector years ago. Instead, coal remains 16% of German energy. Indeed wind&solar in Germany realistically have only replaced low-carbon nuclear. 75% of Germany’s energy still comes from fossil fuels and the hypnotic allure of wind&solar are responsible for that failure.

Women’s washroom

At a mall in Toronto, when it was built, in the hallway with one set of washrooms the men’s washrooms were first and the women’s were further down, so that every woman who went to the women’s had to walk past the opening for the men’s. Then, some men being what they are, incidents occurred, and the washrooms were closed temporarily and switched so that the urinals went down to the end. Then women did not have to walk past the men’s to get to the women’s.

I don’t care about the gender of people I share a washroom with. But it is just dishonest to pretend that, in public, there is no cause for women, generally, to want a washroom that doesn’t have any men in it. Oversimplifying the issue, in the context of historic and ongoing male violence against women is not really that helpful a pretense.

However, I do like to check what I am saying. It has been years since I was in there, so I had a look. Today, according to the map those are all “Shared Access All Gender Washrooms.” There are men’s and women’s washrooms elsewhere in the mall still. And I suspect that for many women, certainly women who have been victims of male violence, the Shared Access All Gender Washrooms are now the men’s and they are gonna have to head over to the food court to use the women’s.

It would be better if people were not so awful.

Unleaded crime rates

I read an article a while back about the disconnect between actual rates of violent crime and people’s perception of it. The reality is that violent crime rates have been steadily decreasing, around the world, since the early 1990s.

Sometimes people have suggested that this is an effect of the decriminalization of abortion, as wanted children have better prospects in life. And while that may have a role in some places, it cannot be the main factor because other countries, for instance Ireland which only decriminalized abortion recently, have seen the same drop in violent crime rates.

Which takes us to a somewhat horrifying alternative explanation. Lead was eliminated from gasoline and therefore exhaust, in the early 1990s. And the correlation suggests that crime rates have fallen because the rates of brain damage from lead poisoning have fallen.

But hey, tolerate the dismantling of the EPA… I’m sure that will work out swell.

Palintiri

We do not have to imagine what harm trusting Palantir’s “Master Database” would make possible. Just look at the Horizon IT scandal. Horizon is/was an accounting software system used by the UK Post Office. The default position was that if Horizon said you had unbalanced accounts, then you were convicted, by Horizon.

Even when the Post Office discovered that Horizon was faulty and they were wrongfully convicting hundreds of sub-postmasters, ruining lives, causing deaths, the Post Office, which was invested in Horizon, they doubled down, continued to prosecute and destroy their innocent employees and engineered an horrendous cover up. And that was just the UK Post Office. They were wrong, but in the beginning at least, they were not trying to be malicious. The tRump administration is objectively malicious.

The last thing anyone with an ounce of sense wants is this kind of comprehensive database tool in the hands of the kakistocracy. It is insane. And it gets worse. Horizon was developed by Fujitsu. Fujitsu, a private company, left back-doors in Horizon, that they could access, presumably for maintenance, that allowed them to mess with and change/fabricate data. They even showed off this capability to people visiting their facilities. The idea that Palantir, named after a weapon of the Enemy, would not be able to fork around with your or anyone’s private data on such a system, is… naive.

Trick question: Which has killed more people, The Chernobyl disaster, or Energiewende?

The Chernobyl disaster, which was terrible for sure, will eventually, over like 70 years, have led to the early mortality of between 4 and 15 thousand people. The “accident” is the poster child for the anti-nuclear. “But what about Chernobyl‽” They scream.

The same people however seem largely unconcerned that German coal-fired generation, which could have been replaced by nuclear by now if they had not pissed away €520 BILLION on Energiewende, has been killing something like 75 thousand people a year, EVERY year, for decades. Instead of fixing that, these same anti-nuclear folks had the country closing nuclear plants and REVERTING to coal.

Closure of the last two German nuclear plants alone, in 2022, was expected to INCREASE the European death toll by about a thousand a year. Meaning that just that one stupid populist political decision, the premature closure, will have killed more people than the world’s worst nuclear disaster some time between next year and 2037.

Meanwhile, pollution from German industry, mostly the energy sector, that could have been largely eliminated by spending that €520 billion on nuclear power, continues to kill between 5–19 times as many people as the world’s worst nuclear accident, EVERY year.

Know one no’s.

People, I swear, know less than they did when I was 30. Too many people function like bedazzled children, gawping at an incomprehensible world, without any rudimentary knowledge with which they could usefully interpret anything, and no hooks with which they could make associations and integrate new learning. Like fElontRump staring at the eclipse. Like everyone repeating nonsense about nuclear power, or wind&solar, Like every anti-choice, every anti-vax, every small-government austerity tax-cut knuckle-dragger.

The clue that this was coming was in people’s “personal” religious beliefs. You meet someone who claims to be a christian, or “spiritual” or some crap. And what you realize is that they have just made up some dip-shitty Frankenstein’s monster of half-baked philosophies/mythologies from some fragmentary misunderstanding of their vague Sunday-school indoctrination. Where they have picked and chosen ideas, with no context, because they “feel right” to them.

And that can never be how knowing stuff works.

same ’ol, same ’ol

It is tempting to think of Germans in the 1930s as some sort of monsters. But they weren’t. They were no worse, on the whole than any other people. But they too were lured with the *promise* of prosperity, of traditional values, of nationalism, of rules, of a fix to their damaged world. And all that corrupt cynical right-wing politicians had to do to manipulate them, was feed those fears, and promise a solution.

And Germans who spoke up against this rising confusion were called “Communists” the “woke” of the time. Eventually they started rounding up those “Liberals.”

Without resistance, without repudiation, tolerating ignorant extremism only legitimized a rising tide of terror and madness that eventually set the world on fire. Which is all what “Conservatives” are doing right now.

Your “Fuck [whoever]” *Conservative* uncle (or dad, or mum, or neighbour), they are no different. But that shit is still very much an existential threat to peace, order and good government. It would be better if we put a stop to it sooner rather than just keep tolerating it getting worse.

And the biggest part of that, the first step, is acknowledging that it is very very ugly and bad.