Stiggy on...

Melting Ice and Spreading Sands

The ice caps are melting, see, hear or read anything about global warming and you are probably going to hear about it. Maybe there will be a picture of a polar bear stuck on a little lump of ice surrounded by vast expanses of water, maybe it’ll show glaciers retreating up valleys. Now here’s the thing. I am not a climate change denier; it is in fact an issue I care greatly about. However when it comes to the loss of the ice caps in and of themselves, frankly I don’t give a damn.

Possibly I should explain this before all credibility is lost. The subsequent rise in sea levels resulting in widespread flooding, food shortages as fertile coastal land is lost and mass migration of millions of displaced people is an incredibly important issue. As is the release of methane trapped under permafrost which has the capacity to massively exacerbate and accelerate global warming. As is the loss of some of the world’s largest freshwater reserves. As is the loss of Gulf Stream and its subsequent effect on the UK climate (ok I admit that one is more of a local than global issue for me but still, it is an issue). Those are all serious issues that will occur as a direct result of the ice caps receding.

The thing is that, to me, the ice caps are largely dead. Yes they are a landscape “unspoilt by man” but that is largely because they are so useless and difficult for life to exist in. I would far prefer a world where all that land was alive, either with the influence of man or not. It could make an abundance of farm land or provide habitats for countless more species of animals than it does now, or provide space to help alleviate humanity’s overcrowding problems. Any of those options is to me preferable to a large expanse of rock and ice where no plants grow and animals are sparse.

Another frequent problem of the ice caps melting is people hear “warmer winters” and think, ooh lovely. Hell, I’d actually agree with them, but then I have the circulation of a lump of basalt and so when the weather gets cold I basically lose the ability to use my hands for anything even remotely dextrous or to touch another human being without them recoiling from my icy touch.

Now, it would seem harsh to deflate this poster child of the environmental movement without offering up a counter, so here it is. What does concern me is not the reduction of the inhospitable ice caps but the spread of the inhospitable deserts. The Sahara is already expanding south at a rate of 30 miles per year and that is only going to increase as the planet heats up. Currently over 2 billion people live in the world’s dry lands, the areas at risk of desertification, and already 10-20% of those have undergone some form of degradation. Yes just like at the ice caps some organisms can survive in the desert as well, but that doesn’t stop it from being an environment counterproductive to the continuing survival of life.

With food shortages already happening can we really risk a further 40% of the earth’s land area turning in to desert? This works on the personal level as well, those lovely warmer winters don’t sound so nice when the price for them is a summer of people dying in the tens of thousands across Europe from heat waves and water becoming a scarce commodity throughout the summer.

 So next time you go to highlight the problems of climate change don’t necessarily lean on the old crutch of polar ice melting, because the creation of new hospitable land and warmer winters for all doesn’t necessarily carry the same impact as the slowly spreading heat death of the planet. 

Something Very Important

Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they’re doing. Do things without always knowing how they’ll turn out. You’re curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you’re waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.

Randal Monroe - xkcd

Limited Attention Spans

Question: How many tabs do you have open at the moment? How many have you looked at in the last 5 minutes? How many have you come through to end up here? How many have you flicked to already since you started reading this? My guess is probably quite a lot, well, apart from maybe for the last one. If you can’t even get past a few lines without being distracted than the problem is worse than I thought.

There is an acronym on the internet you are probably fairly familiar with, tl;dr, literally too long; didn’t read. I think that pretty much sums up the problematic attitude people have at the moment. When it comes to anything that actually requires more than a few minutes attention to absorb people just dismiss it, there is a strong consensus that if something is not presented in a manner such that any actual depth or analysis is lost then it is too long to bother concerning oneself with. But what do you know? It turns out some issues are complex and require some actually contemplation to get any meaning out of. And these are often the issues that are actually important. A couple of sound bites and a cool little graphic may give you the impression that you are expanding your knowledge but often people seem to know no more than, for example: “Oh there is this guy called Gaddafi and he is like, bad, and his people are revolting. They’re in this country called Liberia, or Libya, or Latvia, oh you know, one of those sort of counties.”

We are constantly bombarded by information, and from that we feel like we are absorbing it but that just isn’t the case, we as a culture seem to be losing the ability for sustained thought and analysis and that saddens me. Take the four and a half thousand word essay I saw on tumblr the other day, it was one of the most interesting things I have read and in the time it took me to read and think about it I got far more than I would have through any amount of casual browsing through various tabs, and yet I expect the vast majority of people will look at it and immediately give up and go find something requiring far less thought to look at. Now I’ll be honest, four and a half thousand words was a longer essay than I would expect to see on tumblr, you can say a lot in that many words and what is said is going to take a lot of thought afterwards, but that was an exception. I am forever seeing tl;dr written in response to blog posts easily less than a thousand words. Take this one, around seven hundred and fifty words, it will take only a few minutes to read through . And yet I would put good many on many people who see this (okay, assuming people did actually read these posts) taking a look at the whole five paragraphs and immediately going to look for something that they can look at for a number of seconds before getting bored and looking for something else to momentarily rest there focus on. Very few people seem to be willing to take the time to read longer essays even if they would actually get a lot out of them.

“Longer essays? Pah! I could read the headlines on a news site, watch a short clip on youtube, check facebook, check twitter, maybe update my status and make a tweet myself. Why on earth would I want to read five hundred words on the Libyan revolution when I could do all that? In fact, one of the tweets I saw was talking about revolutions in Libya so see I already know about that!  Something about there being no flies in the country. What? You mean it actually takes more than that to actually learn about a topic? What do you expect me to do, actually take five minutes to read the article, and then what, you expect me to actually pause and think about what I have just read? But someone could have updated their facebook status by then!”

Yeah, to hell with that. If you have actually bothered to read this far then please, next time you see an interesting headline please take the time to actually read the article, not the first paragraph but all of it, and then actually think about what you have just read. I promise you you’ll get far more from it than you ever would from spending that time refreshing facebook.

Government Salaries

The following is based on notes I made from a conversation with a close friend during a long coach journey. The premise is fairly simple; the wages of the members of the government should be set to the national average.

Now, that is not a very common view point and a number of arguments will likely be raised against it. The main one is that it would cause a loss of talent, where the skilled and intelligent would go elsewhere, would work in other fields where they would get substantially better pay. And I agree with that, and more so, I welcome it.

Let me explain. As I see it there are three main factors that could encourage someone to go in to politics, money, power and improving the country. Now I’m not saying politicians at the moment are doing it for the money and nothing else, I expect the vast majority have some interest in improving the country, however for many, if not all, money will play some part of the motivation. So we have people who partly want what is best for our country, but also want to gain for themselves; and with the current system that gain comes at a cost to the rest of the people.

I am also now going to include power in the money bracket as having money is a fair portion of the power, people are far less likely to consider a position powerful if it is not also associated with material wealth. This leaves us with money and improving the country as the two factors. Now if we were to remove the money motivation, as the original premise would achieve, what would we end up with? People who were only interested in politics for the sake of improving the lives of other people, and those people exist, these are not martyrs to the rest, they are still living on a wage that is by definition above that of half of the population, but they are there working because they want to improve the world around them, not for their own personal gain but because they fundamentally believe in what they are doing. I will leave it to you to decide if you want to be governed by those who are motivated by a desire to improve the lot of everyone or those motivated by a desire for improving their own lot. To me that is a fairly easy choice.

Another side effect of this, by a job as a politician no longer making someone rich, the strong link that exists between the rich elite and the politicians would be broken. It would open up the field to the best of the best of the entire population who want to help their fellow people by reducing the number who go into it because it is a “suitable occupation for a man of wealth”.

A final point, by wages being set at the natural average, the well being of the politicians then becomes intrinsically dependant on the success of the country. If that is not a strong motivator to do their best to improve their country then I do not know what is. And that does not contradict the point of removing money as a motivator, it merely means that they are directly rewarded for improving the country, and punished for letting it fail. It means that they as affected by their actions as it is possible to be. To me, that is pretty much the epitome of a fair system for paying those who have taken on the responsibility for this country’s well being.

Meaningless Ambivalence

Meaningless ambivalence to everything, no difference between moral imperatives taken from talking heads and sense. We build little communities held fast be insecurities and never stop to realise the thoughts we hold behind our eyes are shared by all humanity, the glory and depravity are all within our potential but systems held reverential ensure we all stay within bounds reinforced by making the rounds through every new generation across every single nation, lessons learnt reiterated, thoughtful diatribe placated. Now every idle utterance is analysed for happenstance it contains a hidden meaning that maybe could be demeaning to an unknown minority formed like a young sorority  by lumping groups and labelling and as such not enabling for them to branch out intertwine, knock past procedure out of line, unite through common difference rather than split in ignorance into these countless warring factions each thought of through fractions actions while really the majority are not dissimilar from me or you for we are all alike each operating our own psyche or will we still continue this as bombs still fall and missiles miss their targets hit hospitals, schools, and cries of rage condemn the fools whose policies and politic define our countries rhetoric create a demagoguery where some are slaves to make us free to live in our built up illusion, this pathetic selfish delusion. Drain the weak to feed the strong, put people back where they belong defined by past colonials now hear the testimonials of the reality we’ve made and for it with others blood paid.

Fluctuating Opinions

This is a concept I think I should get out the way fairly early on, so here goes. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are reflective of my views and opinions at the time of writing. Just because I have written them here does not make them set in stone and does not mean my opinions cannot differ in the future. All it means is that at the point in time where I hit the “Create Post” button, I am behind these opinions. I still retain the right at any point in the future to alter my opinions. And this should be more than a right, this should be a duty, this should be what is expected of me, and of anyone else.

That shouldn’t have needed to even have been said, I shouldn’t have to clarify that my opinions will change over time, it should be taken as given that when new facts or opinions are brought up they may alter my own opinions on an issue, and yet I feel I have to actually have to go so far as to make a post explaining this. We live in a culture where to change your opinion, to alter your viewpoint based on new events and evidence, is a sign of weakness, an admition of defeat and with it the victory and correctness of anyone you had previously disagreed with on the issue.  It is even built in to our very language; you either win or lose an argument, a debate, you are either for an issue or against an issue. And that is just wrong, and has caused all sorts of problems even recently.

—-Abortion trigger warning for Case 1 only—-

Case 1: Something that has been making the rounds recently, the news that a 13 year old girl self aborted using a pencil. Now this is a pretty horrific story and a good example of the importance of legally accessible abortions for all. (Two things of note: I will not be dealing with the actual abortion argument right now. Secondly, I do support the assertion that abortions should be legally accessible to all, and at the ultimate decision of the person having the abortion; however I do also think the parents should be informed that the child is having the abortion. This is all linked in to the nature of being a legal guardian/dependant and again, I will be dealing with and backing this up in a later post, I just wanted to make that clear now.) But anyway, what I actually wanted to get at with this is the assertion by “pro-life” (I hate those terms and will be dealing with them in the future as well) campaigners that this was a victory for pro-life because if abortions were legal the girl would not have been hospitalised forcing an explanation and the rapist would not have been identified and the girl would still be involved with him.

For starters, the above mentioned insistence that the parents are informed and that the abortion went through official channels would have allowed that anyway without the need to make abortions illegal so declaring it a victory was itself illogical. Anyway what I actually wanting to get at with this is that the pro-life campaigners felt the need to spin this out as a victory or risk losing their standing on the issue. And it is wrong that they have to do that. What should have happened is that pro-life campaigners looked at this issue, stopped to think “wow, our proposal isn’t perfect after all, we should reassess where we are coming from and take this in to account when forming our opinions in the future.” Now please note that in no way means they have to stop being pro-life just that they have to take reality in to account. But they can’t do that, because it would mean altering their opinions, and that would be seized by pro-choice supporters and used against them (see, both sides are at fault here). It is so ingrained in our culture that changing an opinion, even by a small amount, is a matter of losing, and that it invalidates your previous arguments, to the extent  that people are forced to stick to their overall argument even when it takes them to the ludicrous extent of describing a hospitalising home abortion as a victory. People should be freely able to change their opinions as new evidence and opposing opinions are bought to their attention, in fact, not ‘able to’, but applauded for doing so. Dogmatically sticking to either one side or the other helps no one and brings us no closer to a resolution.

Case 2: Climate Change: If any uncertainty or altering of position is shown by scientists looking at climate change then it is immediately seized by climate change deniers as a validation of their opinion. Unfortunately for the scientists who are just trying to get at the truth of the matter regardless of the political ramifications, this means that they feel pressured not to admit to conflicting peer reviews, to hide evidence that goes against current models even if it in no way invalidates climate change, they find themselves unable to question and review their own hypotheses, to draw conclusions from experimental data, in short, they are unable to follow any semblance of the scientific method for fear that any discrepancies with the current model will be used against them to convince the public that climate change deniers are right, even if the scientist know themselves that these discrepancies in no way show that to be the case. (The scientific method being immensely awesome and a brilliant system for assessing pretty much anything which I will again be covering in more detail in the future.) So again, the cultural view that a change of opinion is a failure of the opinion holder is causing real problems because we refuse to accept that changing opinions is a natural and useful thing that should be expected of any reasonable and sensible thinker.

Case 3: Creationism vs. Evolution, a topic I could talk a lot more about and at some point intend to do so. All I want to say here is similar to that in Case 2, any instance of uncertainty of a change of opinion on the part of evolutionary scientists when new evidence is discovered is instantly seized by creationists as proof that they are right. Once again, the change of opinion never actually validates the creationist’s point and is just the scientific method in action, but it is still used to wrongly convince people of their unsupported arguments. And why are they successful in doing this? Because as I keep saying we are still living in a world where a change of opinion is equated with the opinion holder being wrong and the other party being correct.

And this is why I will be happy to change my opinions as necessary upon the analysis of any new views, evidence or arguments presented to me. And why I will in no way feel obliged to limit myself to agreeing with or standing by previous views I have expressed on here or anywhere else.