Further to our discussion on redistribution, the following reader’s comment, left at Protein Wisdom, caught my eye. It’s a sort of mouth-and-trousers thing.
As a business owner who employs 30 people, I have resigned myself to the fact that Barack Obama will probably be our next President, and that my taxes and carbon fees… will go up in a big way. To compensate for these increases, I figure that the customer will have to see an increase in my costs to them of about 20%. So connect economic ankle to shin, shin to knee, knee to thigh, and I will have to lay off roughly 8 of my employees in my forced tithe to “The One.” This really, really bothers me. I believe we are family here and I wasn’t sure how to choose who will get to stay and who will have to go.
So, I strolled through the parking lot this morning and found 8 Obama bumper stickers on my employees’ cars. These folks will be the first to be laid off.
In a local restaurant my server had on an Obama 08 tie; again I laughed as he had given away his political preference – just imagine the coincidence. When the bill came I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Obama redistribution of wealth concept. He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need – the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight. I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the server inside as I’ve decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful.
At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn even though the actual recipient deserved money more. I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application.
One might, I think, quibble about the distinction between “deserved” and “needed,” but still, it’s worth some reflection.
A few weeks ago, in one of the ephemera roundups, I posted a link to some tilt-shift photography. The technique is a kind of reverse Supermarionation, whereby life-size objects are made to look like scale model miniatures. Keith Loutit combines tilt-shift photography with stop-motion filming. The results are quite striking. Watch those teeny tiny people move.
A while ago, in the comments following this, I wrote:
It occurs to me that the implications of social construction can appeal to rather unsavoury motives. If a person’s tastes and disposition are primarily socially constructed, that person can also, presumably, be remade to suit society and its representatives. Such high-minded Agents of Society might even become “engineers of the human soul,” to borrow Stalin’s phrase. The idea of innate disposition and talent is in some circles quite contentious, not least with regard to intelligence and its unequal distribution. This seems to cause unease in ways that, say, the unequal distribution of musical or athletic talent does not. It also undermines many conceptions of egalitarianism, which is probably why it causes such a fuss.
And it does cause a fuss. It’s possible, for instance, to find people who are (or will be) employed precisely because of their well above average intelligence performing extraordinary contortions to deny the existence of the intelligence they possess. Some, like Joseph Kugelmass, an English graduate student at the University of California, say things like this:
The abstract personal definition of “intelligence,” reified in our minds thanks to IQ tests and their derivatives, is a source of social ills and should be abandoned. It impedes and confuses pedagogy, underwrites racism and sexism, inhibits culture, and trivializes political debate… To claim that intelligence exists as a phenomenon, but not as an inherent personal quality, is the same as arguing that race or gender exist as social phenomena but not as simple, natural facts. […] Intelligence, like all essentialism, is a technology of power. It reinforces privilege and hierarchizes speech. It cuts art and language off from its inspirations, aping capital by circulating language through a series of useless oppositions… and non-signifying refinements of craft.
Setting aside the tendentious postmodern framing, dutifully regurgitated, note how the objection to intelligence as a personal attribute is asserted rather than argued and is essentially political in origin.
With the above in mind, here’s a short TED lecture from 2003, in which Steven Pinker addresses the political appeal of the “blank slate” theory, its prevalence, and its shortcomings. Topics touched on include ideological taboos, experience versus theory, and the self-inflicted disrepute of literary criticism.
Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, is well worth reading.
Time for another episode of the excellent documentary series The Planets, this time on the Sun. Titled Star, the episode captures the magnitude of several “Eureka!” moments, as when Angelo Secchi, the Vatican’s chief astronomer, realised the blinding disc in the daytime sky is another one of those points that twinkle at night. As with previous episodes, there’s plenty of rare footage and some interesting characters, not least Kristian Birkeland, who created laboratory auroras while wearing a fez to protect his brain from radiation.
In the US, the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women. Our president must also serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, so a woman candidate for president must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making. As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing for 20 years that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than women’s studies with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances.
The gun-toting Palin is a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the civil war — long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men, which is why men could regard them as equals — unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the eastern seaboard… Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.
My other half once suggested a political thought experiment. When deciding who to vote for, you should try to imagine that the country has been invaded and the streets are teeming with Nazis, Communists, aliens or some other uncongenial presence. Can you picture your PM or president among the last line of resistance, gun in hand, fighting to the bitter end?
Well, I can’t picture Obama doing that. For one thing, his neck is just too thin. More importantly, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities, Obama urged Americans to “[understand] the sources of such madness” and the “fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers” – both of which, he maintained, had nothing at all to do with any particularreligion and how it is taught, but instead “grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”
I can, however, picture McCain and Palin leaning out of a White House window wielding automatic firearms. And, improbable as that scenario may be, I think the ability to picture it matters.
Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch. Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision.
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