Writing on the Guardian’s eco-blog – titled, somewhat presumptuously, Ethical Living – Adharanand Finn touches on another great moral conundrum of our time. 

If you take a bicycle, one of the greenest forms of transport available, and put an electric motor on it, is it still green?

The answer, apparently, is yes.

In the battle to get commuters out of their cars, electric bikes are regularly cited as an eco-option, particularly for those who live too far away from work to cycle, or those with injuries or fitness problems, or those who are just too lazy to cycle. They also get rid of the excuse that you don’t cycle because you don’t want to arrive at work dripping with sweat. One enthusiast even suggested to me that the energy saved by not showering cancels out the energy used to power the bike, making it just as green as regular cycling.

A comforting thought for our cyclist’s friends and colleagues. Sadly, Mr Finn’s 13-mile test ride didn’t go terribly well.

After a while, however, as the motor began to lose its charge, the bike began to struggle. Hills needed pedalling up, and were almost as much effort as on a normal bike – the now feeble pull of the motor being virtually cancelled out by the added weight of the bike. I wouldn’t want to get caught out and about with a flat battery. By the end I was sweating.

Which brings us to the thorny matter of deodorant and the agonies of making the most Gaia-friendly choice. Thankfully, there are numerous eco-conscious personal hygiene products to fret over, including hemp seed oil and, perhaps surprisingly, bicarbonate of soda, which is applied either by hand or with a brush and can be bought by the kilo. However, the most remarkable product is almost certainly Dr Mist, which “flushes out toxins” while healing minor flesh wounds and is described by its makers as “a concept to respect human self-esteem.”

Mr Finn has previously wrestled with the cultivation of a green CV and such pressing moral questions as Are Ceramic Cups Really More Ethical Than Disposables?

As regular readers will know, the Guardian has long been a home to unpleasant political appetites and revolting apologia for murderous idealists of an approved political stripe. The most recent example, though by no means the most dramatic, comes from Peter Tatchell, who recalls, a little too fondly, his youthful romance with Maoism:

In response to the Australian media’s deranged and often racist anti-Chinese propaganda, a few of us organised a ‘Be Kind to Mao Month’, where we promoted the ‘good’ aspects of the red guards’ rebellion against what we saw as the privileged, arrogant and authoritarian communist elite in Beijing.

Over at the Joy of Curmudgeonry, Deogolwulf shares a few thoughts:

Now, I have little interest in what Mr Tatchell’s youthful sympathies were, or in what they are now, still less in what claims he might make for the purity of his intentions. Another political fantasist to add to the pile makes little difference. What interests me is how the ideal of communism has enjoyed so charmed a life in the West, eking out a fanciful existence in the heads of such men, wherein it has remained unsullied by the reality of its application or even of its theoretical expression…

But how is it that anyone can be so brazen as to claim compassion as the very basis of his politics, and yet not bother to find out whether those politics might actually be good for others? To advocate a scheme for the whole of society, and to have made little effort to find out what effects it might have, other than that it makes one feel warm inside, is not to show compassion for others, but rather to show passion for oneself. Here, ignorance may be a defence, though not of any claim to compassion.

Indeed. And there’s something almost surreal about one-time enthusiasts of a blueprint for violation and horror speaking of their former affiliations as if they were simply fashion gaffes or a taste for embarrassing pop music.

The whole thing.

In the L.A. Times, P.J. O’Rourke offers some unlikely commencement advice. Two items in particular caught my eye.

On idealism:

Don’t be an idealist. Don’t chain yourself to a redwood tree. Instead, be a corporate lawyer and make $500,000 a year. No matter how much you cheat the IRS, you’ll still end up paying $100,000 in property, sales and excise taxes. That’s $100,000 to schools, sewers, roads, firefighters and police. You’ll be doing good for society. Does chaining yourself to a redwood tree do society $100,000 worth of good? Idealists are also bullies. The idealist says, “I care more about the redwood trees than you do. I care so much I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. It broke up my marriage. And because I care more than you do, I’m a better person. And because I’m the better person, I have the right to boss you around.”

And, on fairness:

Forget about fairness. We all get confused about the contradictory messages that life and politics send. Life sends the message, “I’d better not be poor. I’d better get rich. I’d better make more money than other people.” Meanwhile, politics sends us the message, “Some people make more money than others. Some are rich while others are poor. We’d better close that ‘income disparity gap’. It’s not fair!” Well, I am here to advocate for unfairness. I’ve got a 10-year-old at home. She’s always saying, “That’s not fair.” When she says this, I say, “Honey, you’re cute. That’s not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That’s not fair. You were born in America. That’s not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don’t start getting fair for you.”

Via.

Busy today, but these may be of interest.

Heather MacDonald on race and crime. 

In fact, the race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data. As long ago as 1978, a study of robbery and aggravated assault in eight cities found parity between the race of assailants in victim identifications and in arrests – a finding replicated many times since, across a range of crimes. No one has ever come up with a plausible argument as to why crime victims would be biased in their reports.

Andrew McCarthy on euphemism, evasion and the jihad in plain sight.

Nor is it clear why calling a terrorist a jihadist would cause angst for moderates – unless they are pretending that jihad is something other than what it is… Progressive, moderate Muslims would doubtless like the concept of jihad to vanish. They are in a battle for authenticity with fundamentalists, and jihad would be far easier to omit than it is to explain away. Indeed, if anyone should resort to a purge of jihad, better it be Muslim reformers repealing the concept than U.S. Pollyannas striking the word. To persist in conceding jihad’s centrality as an Islamic obligation while distorting its essence can only fatally damage the reformers’ credibility and, hence, the entire reform effort.

Ophelia Benson on closed religious groups and pious handicapping.

Not being able to leave is the key, I think. It’s the key because it is a violation of rights in itself, and because it motivates other violations of rights. Amish children who stay in school are much more likely to leave than those who quit school after the eighth grade. What does this mean? That children who know more about the world, and who have some qualifications beyond primitive farming, often choose not to stay, while children who don’t, don’t. In other words children who are handicapped – deliberately handicapped – for life in the larger world are more likely to stay, and the Amish want those children to be handicapped.

Feel free to add your own in the comments.

Speaking of Sam Harris, in this clip he touches on a blind spot shared by many commentators, especially on the left.

Here’s the money quote:

I think liberals, almost by definition, don’t know what it’s like to really believe in God. They don’t know what it’s like to be sure that the book they keep by their bedside is the literal word of the creator of the universe and that death is merely a passage to an eternity of happiness. And so they find it very difficult to believe that anyone actually believes this stuff and is motivated by the content of their religious beliefs. And so liberals, when they see the jihadist look into the video camera and say things like “we love death more than the infidels love life” – and then he blows himself up – it’s the liberal in our society, the religious moderate or the secularist, who is left thinking that’s just propaganda. 

Indeed. This disbelief in belief, as it were, helps explain the extraordinary denial of jihadists’ and former jihadists’ self-declared motives, and the hugely selective, often absurd, declarations of “root causes.” As Tawfik Hamid, a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, pointed out:

Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it… It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence… The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Sharia. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts.

It is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals have become obstacles to reforming Islam… They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism… If the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror… All of this makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more difficult. When Westerners make politically correct excuses for Islamism, it actually endangers the lives of reformers and in many cases has the effect of suppressing their voices.

As explained at length here, the size of an extremist “fringe” and how it relates to mainstream conceptions of the faith, and its theology and history, is a matter of some importance and has to be considered as it actually is, not as one might wish. And, as Tawfik Hamid, Tanveer Ahmed, Hassan Butt, Tahir Aslam Gora and others have argued, omitting the role of Islamic theology, whether for reasons of preference or embarrassment, leads one to inaccurate or perverse evaluations of what we are faced with and how it might be stopped.