Monthly Archives: June 2013

The truth about liberalism

Posted on by
2

Is that it works. Period.

The historical record of the last 30 years proves it. When liberals are in charge, things get better. When conservatives rule, things get worse.

And we are not just talking better for the poor or the immigrants or the gays. We are talking better for the very things which conservatives consider to be their own.

Under liberals, deficits shrink. The economy grows. Business (big and small) thrives. Wall Street prosper. The Dow Jones breaks all previous records. Ask any conservative what they care about most in terms of money, and you will find that liberals are better at actually delivering it.

Because liberalism works. Conservatism doesn’t. It’s just that simple.

Conservatives cling to the notion that they are somehow the guardians of real civilization against the forces of anarchy, but the truth is that modern society is based on liberal values and hence does best under a leadership in line with said values.

The entirety of modern history has been written by liberals and radicals. Everything we think of as progress, whether that progress is economic, social, or technological, has come from some liberal fighting off the forces of reactionary conservatism that mindless protect the status quo not because they actually think it is the best we can do, but because they simply fear change. They fear the unknown.

And that is the opposite of liberalism.

Modernity has liberalism in its DNA at a fundamental level. Liberal values like education, science, and innovation are backbones of the economy. The causes of tolerance, understanding, and acceptance have done nothing but advance since the modern era began.

The conservatives never, ever, ever win. Think about that. They always lose. In the end, they stop absolutely nothing. Change happens, the ground shifts beneath their feet, and they are dragged by their heels into the future by the unstoppable march of human progress.

This does not happen automatically, of course. It happens because most people do not think of themselves as mean or irrational people and hence the kinder and more rational options inevitably win out. And that, in turn, only happens because the liberals who are the forerunners of all progress work tirelessly to refine and spread their message.

The conservatives can scream and shout and stomp their feet and hold their breath until they turn blue all they want just like the spoiled and petty children they really are, but the adults of liberalism will always win out over time.

And the progress made by those liberals will be taken as a given by the next generation of conservatives, who will fight some new and equally senseless battle to keep the next wave of positive change from happening without even acknowledging how much they owe to the liberals of the past.

We are seeing one of those waves of change happening right now. Gay marriage is coming to state after state and country after country. Tolerance of the GLBT community is at an all time high and just keeps rising. The oppression of any harmless minority is against the fundamental principles of justice and tolerance that are the very foundations of modern society, not just in word but in practice.

Everyone in modern society benefits from the sweat and toil of liberals of the past. The forty hour work week, tolerance of religious and racial differences, the technology that liberal scientific innovation has brought to the world and saved billions of lives and untold human suffering… we are all swimming in waters purified by liberalism, and that process will continue far into the future.

The folly of conservatism, then, is the inability to see how things actually work because their tiny minds, shriveled souls, and cold hard hearts cannot handle the idea that being nice actually makes things better for everyone. Even them.

Their regressive minds have devolved into those of selfish children who scream NO at the slightest provocation and who can’t imagine there being any good reason why anyone else should ever tell them they can’t do what they want to do and can’t have everything they want to have.

And when they rail against change, it is with the same unreasonable and unreasonable stubborn determination of a child throwing a temper tantrum because the family is going to move to a bigger, better house, or because they were made to go to the dentist when they didn’t want to do it.

It doesn’t matter what is right or wrong. They are frankly incapable of making that determination. The variables are too complex for their weakened state of reason. All that matters is what is familiar and comforting instead of new and frightening.

It is a purely emotional reaction, which is why it cannot be reasoned with. Things which are not the product of reason cannot be changed by reason.

A conservative is a fundamentally unreasonable person.

Luckily for human freedom and progress, they are also a minority, and a shrinking one at that. As the world urbanizes, the rural base which provides the bulk of conservatism’s able-bodied working supporters is dwindling, leaving only the old people who have lost not just their mental but their moral faculties.

Hopefully, this means that human progress will proceed just a little more smoothly in the future, without the millstone of cranky conservatives needlessly delaying popular change.

And who knows. Maybe we do need conservatives around in order to keep things from changing too fast and too soon. As I age I find that increasingly hard to see, but I can’t eliminate the possibility.

But this modern world of ours is a liberal world. It was founded by liberals, it was built by liberals, and it works best under liberal leadership.

The Europeans understand this. They have grasped that caring, considerate, tolerant societies thrive on all levels, not just the ethical.

But we here in North America seem to have missed that particular update.

Reagrdless, liberalism will always triumph because it is the right thing to do and the most effective way to satisfy even our most selfish and greedy desires.

Because it just. Plain. WORKS.

Thoughts from the world’s slowest whirlpool

Posted on by
Reply

I feel a real sense of deep churn today, like everything in me is spinning in a great, slow whirlpool. The speed in terms of RPM is slow, but the angular velocity is enormous because of the sheer mass involved.

And who knows what flotsam and jetsam will be sucked up from the depths and tossed past the horizon by the sheer centripetal force of it all?

Accompanying this state of churn is a deep brooding, nameless and wordless but profound. And that’s a good thing, this brooding. I am pro-brooding, as I have said before. Brooding lets you slowly burn off repressed emotions like anger and fear without a big emotional apotheosis like the one I had recently.

Better to brood than explode, am I right?

Now, about last Thursday’s therapy session. Stuff came up. Deep stuff. Powerful stuff. Stuff I would rather not have dealt with, which, of course, means it’s the exact kind of stuff I need to deal with and that I want to deal with, but that I would have a hard time dealing with without a therapist there to metaphorically hold my hand and take me through it.

So it was a really excellent session all around.

First we talked about anger, and how I find it really hard to deal with or even look at all the deep frozen rage I have buried deep within the permafrost of my soul.

And it always devolves to the same old thing : I am so uncomfortable, nay, terrified to deal with all that anger because it feels like if I tap into it even a little, it will, at best, merely blow my psyche into tiny pieces, or at worst, turn me into an angry, bitter, sarcastic, callous, brutal, dismissive, judgmental asshole who everybody quite rightfully hates.

I know that sounds ridiculous to people who know me, because that would basically be a total personality inversion on my part, but there is a very dark and angry side of me that I keep locked up tighter than a twelve year old back injury, and I am afraid to let it out.

Even though I know that it, too, is a part of me, and the secret to my recovery is in finding and dealing with all the pieces of my scattered and shattered soul and putting them back together, and that being unable to accept a part of yourself is the opposite of that…. still, I can’t do it.

Well, knowing what you should do does not instantly confer the ability to do it, and when you have the illness called depression like I do, what you can and cannot do is a far, far more complex question than merely what it is physically possible to do right now.

So we started off, my therapist and I, talking about anger, but then somehow we transitioned to talking about arrogance and intelligence instead. I am not sure how the subject changed, and I am pretty sure I did not deliberately switch off anger to avoid talking about it, but you never know.

My mind is so subtle and devious that even I don’t always know what it’s up to.

Anyhow. What we ended up talking about is my knowledge from an early age that I was extremely bright, and how I never really truly integrated that knowledge into my ego.

After all, having an IQ of 161 is something to be proud of, or at least, so it would seem to people who do not have it. Means I am special(special!). So special(special!). A lot of people would think being so damned smart was a wonderful thing.

And yet, I don’t think I ever thought of it that way. Before I went to school, it didn’t really make much difference in my life apart from occasional adult praise (and fear), and after I went to school it insure I always got good grades but it came so easily to me that I never really valued it.

It is really hard to value that which comes easily, even if others would think it highly valuable and might work very hard to get it. And that’s as true of intelligence as it is of, say, natural beauty or athletic ability or artistic ability.

If it’s easy, it must not be worth much. It’s the labour theory of value all over again.

And for a lot of my childhood, it seemed like more of a curse than a blessing because I took the benefits for granted to such a degree that they became invisible to me and all I could see were the downsides, like it isolating me from my peers (I had nothing in common with them but age) and insuring that I was frequently extremely bored and completely unchallenged in school.

But there is another, deeper, and more important layer to this question, and it relates to elitism. The obvious route for someone who is bullied and harassed by and thus isolated from his peers by his intelligence is to become an intellectual, elitist snob who declares everyone who is not as bright as he to be idiots, unworthy of consideration, let alone association.

It’s a path lots of others in my position took, and who knows. Maybe if the teachers and administers had been more supportive of me and protected me, that is how I would have turned out.

But I didn’t go that way, and I wonder why. It would have provided some much needed ego defense and gone a long way towards helping me cope with life. So why not?

And the best that I can come up with is, because that would take me even further away from people. I want to be close to people, to feel their warmth, to interact with them. Elitism would not solve the problem of isolation for me, it would only make it worse. I just cannot imagine putting up that kind of barrier between me and others.

The thought of it makes me feel stifled.

Add to that the fact that elitist are assholes and I do not want to be that kind of person, you can see why I took the much tougher path of egalitarianism instead.

And I suppose that was the beginning of my passionate devotion to deep humanism as well.

This is all noble and wonderful, of course, but it does mean that I went too far in the other direction. There must be some sort of middle ground between elitism and discounting your gifts entirely.

And perhaps I have been, to a certain extent, a victim of my own ruthless pragmatism. If results are all that matters, then my intelligence sucks, because all it has resulted in is mildly clever conversation.

And really, this is just the tip of the negative self-worth iceberg. I have all kinds of assets and gifts that I have always discounted and which I am actually afraid to really acknowledge on an emotional, personal level.

So what the heck am I afraid of? Becoming an egotistical dick?

Or is it just… fear of the unknown?

Friday Science Nanoparticle, Friday May 31, 2013

Posted on by
1

Hard to believe that another wacky yet wonderful week has gone by already! But here we are at yet another jolly holly Science Day, and here I am with another brace of science stories to march across your mind and put on a bloody good show.

As usual, the hardest part of writing this column was choosing which half-dozen stories to cover out of the score or so potential beauties all vying for your attention.

But after many rounds of competition and a particularly brutal swimsuit round, I can now present you with the six stories that made it to the semi-finals!

First off, a story which I have been dying to talk about since I discovered about, but which I am choosing to do first because it is only somewhat related to science.

It’s about the discovery of literally thousands of cave paintings in Mexico.

4,926 of them, to be precise, in 11 different locations. One cave alone had more than 1500. It is a find simply staggering in scale. It’s like finding a hundred Lascaux’s. The sheer amount of information in this find will be keeping archaeologists, archivists, analysts, and other academics busy for decades.

To me, cave paintings mark the true beginning of culture in the modern sense of the word. I often think about that moment when some caveman (or woman) first looked at some scribble they made and saw… something. Something from their life. A person, an animal, fire, whatever.

That had to be an extraordinary moment for that individual.

Next up, a piece of the Drake’s Equation puzzle : a bacterium that thrives at -15 degrees Celsius.

It’s called Planococcus halocryophilus strain Or1, and it lives in tiny pockets of extremely salty freezing water found inside permafrost.

So the requirement for liquid water remains, of course, but the actual temperature of said water can be as low as fifteen below and life does just fine there. The bacterium was even observed still respiring at -25 degrees Celsius, and might even be able to survive even colder conditions.

This offers concrete proof that the parameters of Drake’s Equation have never been broader, and certainly suggests that life of a sort might exist on that tantalizing neighbor of ours, Mars.

We know there is some water on Mars, and there could certainly be pockets of it that stays liquid due to being very salty and near a volcanic heat source.

And then…. life on Mars!

Our next story is from the frontiers of both genetic science and psychology : scientists have been able to eliminate one form of schizophrenia in mice.

It is the form associated with high levels of activity from a gene called NRG-1. When the mice had high levels of activity from this gene, they exhibited schizophrenia-like symptoms, such as hyperactivity, inability to remember what just happened, and inability to ignore stimuli.

To me, that sounds a lot more like genuine ADHD than schizophrenia, but I suppose it is hard to tell when a mouse is hearing voices or hallucinating.

Only ten percent of schizophrenics have this form of the disease, but still, if a drug could be developed to reduce activity in NRG1 to normal levels, it could provide relief to at least some of the victims of this most mysterious and perplexing organic mental illness.

Reality issues are the hardest to treat.

And now for the wackiest sounding science story of the week : adding spinach to solar panels nearly triples their efficiency.

Yup. You read that right. Spinach. Like what Popeye eats.

Specifically, the photosynthetic protein from spinach, which they sprayed onto silicon and discovered made for a current 2.5 times stronger than your more typical solar cell.

That is an impressive enough result by itself. With solar, it has always been about the efficiency : how much current per square inch of solar cell. That is the vital statistic determining how well solar can compete with other, dirtier and less sustainable ways of generating electricity.

It seems odd to me that this spinach thing works, though, because I always assume photosynthesis produced glucose, not electricity.

But perhaps the role of the chlorophyll is to focus energy that is then used to synthesize the glucose.

Who knows? Maybe another plant does it even better!

And if you think that’s impressive, scope this, junior scientists : a team in Scotland has gotten the go-ahead to start testing artificial blood from stem cells!

First, a vocab check : in this case, “artificial” means “not generated by the human body”. These would be human blood cells identical to the ones currently moving stuff about inside all of us. They would just have begun their lives as harvested stem cells instead of inside your bone marrow.

And obviously, being able to mass-produce human blood would be a simply massive medical achievement, especially if it is cheap. No more blood drives, no more running out of blood in the OR, and just think of the progress that could be made against blood-borne illnesses and other blood diseases.

Not to mention the impact on the vampire community. For them, it would be nothing less than revolutionary.

No more cow’s blood for Nick!

And finally, what story gets Pride of Place this week? Well, sad to say, I was a little self-indulgent this week. This is not the most important or world-shaking story, just the one I found most interesting.

Turns out there is a strange movement afoot amongst the young male nerds of today, and it all revolves around a substance called Soylent.

It’s not people.

Instead, it’s an open-source attempt to create a drink that supplies all that your body needs as the ultimate in meal replacement.

Its inventor, Rob Rheinhart (great name), describes it thus :

I researched every substance the body needs to survive, plus a few extras shown to be beneficial, and purchased all of them in nearly raw chemical form from a variety of sources… The first morning my kitchen looked more like a chemistry lab than a cookery, but I eventually ended up with an thick, odorless, beige liquid. I call it ‘Soylent’.

At this point, I have to separate my artistic/aesthetic side from my scientist side.

My artistic/aesthetic side find the entire idea utterly repulsive. Only programmers and engineers would want to eliminate eating and consider that a triumph of “efficiency”.

I mean, you know this guy has the wrong end of the stick when he declare’s Soylent’s taste to be “irrelevant”, when it’s the first thing anything wants to know about the damned stuff.

Still, scientifically, I find the attempt quite interesting. I have wondered for a long time why there could not be a single nutritionally perfect diet supplement that would provide everything your body needs so that you would not have to worry about nutrition at all.

And as far as I can tell, Soylent is pretty close. It needs roughage, and something to make it taste good, or it will not get the job done.

Nobody wants to drink something that tastes awful and gives them diarrhea. (Well, except engineers.)

But there’s no reason why sufficient roughage couldn’t be added to keep one regular, and we have some pretty strong and yet healthy artificial flavours and sweeteners to make it taste good.

I still don’t think an all-liquid diet is a good idea. But there is no reason why you could not use Soylent as your dietary supplement, like a multivitamin, then eat whatever you like, secure in the knowledge that you have your nutritional needs covered.

And anecdotally, at least, it seems to make people feel amazingly good, which is exactly what I would expect would happen if your body is finally getting everything it needs.

Most people in modern life are suffering from a host of nutritional deficiencies without even knowing it. A lot of modern malaise might well stem from, ironically enough, malnutrition.

And anything that can end that has my vote of approval.

Seeya next week folks!