Overpopulation

Recently the famous primatologist Jane Goodall attracted criticism for saying that environmental issues "wouldn't be a problem" if our numbers were at the levels they were 500 years ago. I assume what she meant is that they would be much more manageable, not absent, as even mere hundreds of millions of people would produce waste, use non-renewing resources, etc., but the point is that whenever somebody brings up population pressures, the immediate reaction in much of the social media that I frequent is an evidence-free rejection of the idea combined with personal attacks on the person who made the statement. The same happened in this case.

I am really quite puzzled by this. While a discussion could be had about whether the planet is overpopulated or not, depending on what resource constraints we assume, Goodall's statement is irrefutable. Of course 500 million people would have less of an environmental footprint than seven billion. One could just as well try to reject the idea that four people will have it easier to fit into a car than twelve.

Consequently I was quite interested to see an article in The Conversation titled "why we should be wary of blaming 'overpopulation' for the climate crisis". It was written by an academic and of some length, so the argument can be expected to have been developed more clearly than in a rage-tweet. After citing Goodall the author, Heather Alberro, begins her argumentation as follows:

This might seem fairly innocuous, but its an argument that has grim implications and is based on a misreading of the underlying causes of the current crises. As these escalate, people must be prepared to challenge and reject the overpopulation argument.

So we are promised here two different arguments:

First, nobody should say that the planet is overpopulated because it has "grim implications". This is not about whether a statement is wrong, it is about whether somebody else could misunderstand or deliberately exploit the statement to justify something terrible.

I am always uncomfortable with this stance, because the logical end-point is that nobody should be allowed to state a demonstrable fact if there is an interest group that will use this fact to promote a harmful agenda - and there will always be such a group if a topic is controversial at all. Or in other words, the logical end-point of this stance is to restrict your ability to use evidence in decision making towards your own, hopefully benevolent agenda, which means that your decisions will be ill-informed and less likely to solve the problem you are dealing with.

Therefore any argument along those lines must, in my eyes, meet a fairly high standard. It cannot simply be, "you aren't allowed to state this fact because somebody somewhere could do something bad". It would have to provide a clear, convincing causal chain from stating the fact to the probable occurrence of a harm that would be significantly less likely to happen if the fact were kept confidential. A causal chain like:

Somebody says the world is overpopulated -> ???? -> genocide

What needs to be in the middle of this chain to make genocide plausible?

Second, Alberro also argues that the world is not in fact overpopulated, that this would be a "misreading" of the situation. This claim is what I find particularly interesting, because as mentioned in the beginning the relevant conversation on social media can be comfortably summarised as "everybody who says there is overpopulation wants to commit genocide against the developing world", in other words the previous argument plus character assassination. I have yet to see anybody addressing the question whether the world is, actually, overpopulated; it simply gets ignored.

I will therefore start with the examination of this factual argument, which also makes up the majority of the article.

In reality, the global human population is not increasing exponentially, but is in fact slowing and predicted to stabilise at around 11 billion by 2100.

I do not quite understand what it means that "population is slowing". I assume what is meant is that population growth is slowing. That is great... but. First, it is like wanting praise for promising to only stuff eleven people into your five seater car, instead of infinity people. Yes, okay, but you already have seven people in there right now, and even that is not safe. So will you please stop putting the eighth in there, like, right now please, instead of ignoring the problem? Second, slowing growth is clearly irrelevant to Goodall's statement, which implied that we are already too many.

More importantly, focusing on human numbers obscures the true driver of many of our ecological woes. That is, the waste and inequality generated by modern capitalism and its focus on endless growth and profit accumulation.

This is the key argument of this article, which is subsequently detailed in various ways: inequality is the problem, not number of people. Now in what way would ending inequality solve ecological woes? First we need to consider how it would be ended, as there are at least two ways to do so.

First, raise the living standards of the poor. This would be the humane approach, but I do not see how it helps with carbon levels in the atmosphere, waste, soil erosion, groundwater overuse, whatever. It would only make things worse. Second, reduce the living standards of everybody to that of the poorest people on the planet. That would help reduce emissions etc., but spelling it out like this should reveal the obvious problem: nobody is going to accept this immiseration, neither the wealthiest nor the poorest, who desperately want a better life too.

Now one could reply to this that we could all live sustainably in equality if we just made our economy carbon-neutral. That is correct, but the whole controversy is about whether we turn the population-growth dial or the economic equality dial. (Why we should only do one of those is left unexplained.) Goodall said that we would have less of a problem if there were less people using fossil fuels, and Alberro (somehow) tries to argue that this specific statement is false, that we should not turn that dial but only the other. The third dial, carbon-neutrality, is orthogonal to this discussion.

The industrial revolution that first married economic growth with burning fossil fuels occurred in 18th-century Britain. The explosion of economic activity that marked the post-war period known as the "Great Acceleration" caused emissions to soar, and it largely took place in the Global North. That's why richer countries such as the US and UK, which industrialised earlier, bear a bigger burden of responsibility for historical emissions.

That is true and an important point but also completely irrelevant for the question of whether the planet is overpopulated. "Yes, I am trying to stuff eleven people into my five-seater, but that is totally safe because last week that other guy was speeding."

In 2018 the planet's top emitters - North America and China - accounted for nearly half of global CO2 emissions. In fact, the comparatively high rates of consumption in these regions generate so much more CO2 than their counterparts in low-income countries that an additional three to four billion people in the latter would hardly make a dent on global emissions.

Well, clearly adding more people will not make a dent in emissions, it would increase them, but I get what is meant here: adding more poor people to the planet will have less of an impact than the rich increasing their consumption even further. I find it ironic, however, that China is mentioned as one of the two worst offenders, because if we should be worried about how racists spin concerns about overpopulation then we should also be worried about somebody concluding "see, it is China's fault, so we Europeans don't need to do anything".

Consumption levels in China have risen, of course, but they are still much lower per person than in the USA. A key reason why China rivals North America in emissions is that it accounts for about one fifth of the world population all by itself. And we are back at Goodall's point, which applies across all consumption levels.

There's also the disproportionate impact of corporations to consider. It is suggested that just 20 fossil fuel companies have contributed to one-third of all modern CO2 emissions, despite industry executives knowing about the science of climate change as early as 1977.

This is another argument that frequently comes up on social media, very often citing the number twenty, so that meme must all go back to one statistic somewhere. Now I will agree immediately that more powerful people bear more moral responsibility, because a CEO has more influence than a single supermarket customer or a single assembly line worker.

But still, what rarely seems to be considered is that these corporations produce the emissions to offer products and services that we seven billion humans buy and consume. It is not the case that these industry executives run polluting factories and refineries at a loss and for the giggles because they like pollution, like some cartoon villain. It is not the case that they are doing their thing over there, and we normal people are doing our entirely unrelated thing here. They run their factories because we buy stuff, and they run them unsustainably because many of us insist on buying stuff as cheaply as possible. Conversely, that also means that if there were only one billion of us these corporations would produce only one seventh of the emissions that they are producing now.

Inequalities in power, wealth and access to resources - not mere numbers - are key drivers of environmental degradation. The consumption of the world's wealthiest 10% produces up to 50% of the planet's consumption-based CO2 emissions, while the poorest half of humanity contributes only 10%.

I have already mentioned how likely the poorer half are to accept that they should never see the wealth of the wealthier half themselves (i.e. not very likely), but let's assume that we reduce everybody's standards of living to those of the poorer half: even those who are currently billionaires will live in crowded little, non-AC'd apartments with only a bicycle and the bus as transport options. I am a frugal person myself, so I could happily live with that. But what exactly does that for us, carbon-wise? According to the numbers cited above, it would logically reduce "consumption-based" emissions to a fifth of what they currently are.

Now it is a bit unclear, at least to me, what exactly is meant with "consumption-based". Googling for some guidance I find that, according to the EPA, US greenhouse gas emissions in 2017 were distributed as follows: transportation 29%, electricity 28%, industry 22%, commercial & residential 12%, agriculture 9%. What is consumption? I assume all of agriculture and at least part of industry, so at a minimum perhaps 20%. The rest is less easy - is electricity consumption in Alberro's sense? Maybe yes, maybe no, but transport probably not.

So we are talking about reducing to a fifth what may now be somewhere between 20% and 50% of the total emissions. That means tackling inequality by impoverishing everybody would reduce our overall emissions by 16-40%, or to 60-84% of what they currently are. That is hardly going to stave ecological and societal collapse off by many years, much less solve the problem. Reducing inequality by the more desirable approach of lifting everybody out of poverty or an approach in the middle between those extremes would, of course, have the opposite effect.

With a mere 26 billionaires now in possession of more wealth than half the world, this trend is likely to continue.

I do not like inequality either because of how unfair it is and how it distorts democracy, and I certainly do not believe anybody morally deserves to have a billion dollars, but purely in terms of greenhouse gases I doubt that somebody with a hundred thousand times my money contributes a hundred thousand times the emissions that I do. There are only so many private jets or yachts any single billionaire can use at a time and only so much a single person can "consume". Much of their wealth is invested or used for gambling at the stock exchange as opposed to buying a hundred thousand people's worth of food, for example.

Developing regions in Africa, Asia and Latin America often bear the brunt of climate and ecological catastrophes, despite having contributed the least to them.

Again true but again does not contradict Goodall's statement that environmental problems would be less pressing if there were less humans.

The problem is extreme inequality, the excessive consumption of the world's ultra-rich, and a system that prioritises profits over social and ecological well-being. This is where where we should be devoting our attention.

See above. Again, I would prefer a much more equal distribution of wealth. But that does not mean that overpopulation is not an issue. It is simply an undeniable fact that all else being equal, reducing our numbers by half reduces our ecological impact by half. Just as it is a fact that all else being equal, reducing our consumption would also reduce our ecological impact. There is no either-or, and we can devote attention to several problems at the same time.

Coming now to the political or strategic argument:

The idea that there were simply too many people being born - most of them in the developing world where population growth rates had started to take off - filtered into the arguments of radical environmental groups such as Earth First! Certain factions within the group became notorious for remarks about extreme hunger in regions with burgeoning populations such as Africa - which, though regrettable, could confer environmental benefits through a reduction in human numbers.

Here the implied causal chain is: Somebody says the world is overpopulated -> fringe group without any political influence whatsoever thinks that famine is beneficial -> genocide. Not sure I am convinced. Then towards the end of the text:

Issues of ecological and social justice cannot be separated from one another. Blaming human population growth - often in poorer regions - risks fuelling a racist backlash...

Somebody says the world is overpopulated -> racist backlash -> genocide. There might be a few steps missing here. Also, see above regarding the backlash that could result from blaming China for half the problem even from an inequality angle.

...and displaces blame from the powerful industries that continue to pollute the atmosphere.

Somebody says the world is overpopulated -> fossil fuel industries can claim it isn't their fault. I do not see this logic at all, sorry. They still sell the fossil fuels, and the only difference is that they sell them to even more people.

Is it really that difficult to keep three factors in one's head at the same time? Imagine a three-dimensional graph, a cube. In one corner are very few humans, all getting along with very little, and what little they need is produced using renewable energies. In the opposite corner are billions of humans, each of them consuming massive amounts of throw-away goods, and these goods are produced burning the dirtiest coal you can imagine. To change the emissions we produce we can move along all three axes of this graph, along all three edges of the cube.

Not only is entirely unclear to me how the idea that we would have less emissions if we moved down on the population-axis is refuted by arguing that we should move down on the consumption per person axis; it is not even clear whether Alberro even argues for that, because again, inequality could also be resolved by moving up that axis, making our ecological impact worse.

So in summary, I do not see how this article refutes Goodall, and nor could it have, because the relationship between population size and ecological footprint is obvious. It does not appear to make an argument that the planet is not overpopulated either - as always the question is merely deflected. And finally, it does not even provide a plausible causal chain leading from the discussion of this question to "grim implications", leaving the intermediate steps up to the imagination of the reader, who, however, could just as well say, "what is so terrible about empowering people to be able to do family planning?"

Review of the Aachen Memorandum

I picked this book up at a book fair after having read that it was a satire on bureaucracy and 'political correctness'. Although I am not the kind of person who believes that not being able to use sexist and racist insults is the end of the world and thus unlikely to agree with the author politically I nonetheless thought I might still find this kind of book interesting. I can, for example, read the original Conan novels through to the end without believing myself, as their author did, that all civilisation is corrupt and deserves to be destroyed.

Unfortunately, Robert E. Howard was a master of wit and subtlety compared to Andrew Roberts, and I only made it halfway through the Aachen Memorandum before giving up. Roberts took everything he dislikes - immigration, high taxes on the rich, animal protection, weed, speed limits, feminism, anti-racism, grade inflation, concern for healthy nutrition, and so much more, stuffed it all into one pot and then scrawled 'Europe' onto it.

The results are, unfortunately, not even intellectually coherent. The book has all European nations dissolved into a Euro-superstate, but somehow France is still able to buy the Channel Islands off England. The dominant culture is depicted as a caricature of feminist prudery, while the protagonist is constantly lecherous and voyeuristic, but he also complains that advertisements are all using sex to sell products. Europe is a total dictatorship with complete surveillance of communications, no free press, and continental armies stationed in England to forcefully squash nationalist protests, but (what follows is the only minor spoiler here) somehow the entire edifice collapses the moment somebody finds evidence that a referendum a generation ago was manipulated. The ruling ideology is clearly supposed to be left-wing and cosmopolitan, but at the same time Adolf Hitler is venerated in the schools.

How does that any of that even start to make sense? It seems as if the author believed that everybody who is not part of his own political sect is interchangeable and in cahoots with each other.

Underneath the visceral hatred of everybody outside of Britain oozing from the pages it is just about possible to see the outline of a potentially amusing thriller, but the problem is that I cannot maintain willing suspension of disbelief. Yes, the reader will soon understand that the author despises the European Union in general and Germany and Polish taxi drivers in particular, so well done communicating that, but novels also need an at least somewhat plausible and logically coherent setting, otherwise they don't work. And that is before even mentioning how blatant a wish-fulfillment self-insert the protagonist is.

I assume there was, and still is, a very particular audience for this book in one particular country, but at least in my eyes everybody else would be better served by doing something more entertaining than reading it, such as watching paint dry or counting how many grains there are in one kg of sugar.

Sam Harris and Ezra Klein on intelligence and race

Recently atheist activist Sam Harris and journalist Ezra Klein had a discussion about intelligence and race. The background is that Harris had Charles Murray, the author of The Bell Curve, as a guest on his podcast, Klein's Vox site published an article critical of that interview, and Harris felt that that article was unfair.

Having read through the transcript of Harris' and Klein's conversation, I must say that it went reasonably well, considering the topic. Harris' discussion with Noam Chomsky, for example, was much worse, as his first argument went completely over Harris' head, and they just went in circles from that moment on.

The frustrating thing is that at the bottom of what Harris is trying to argue there are quite a few ideas that are valid. Yes, scientific results should be accepted for what they are instead of being pushed aside for fear of being politically incorrect. But his otherwise reasonable points are completely overshadowed by his tendency to make it all about how mean his critics are to him for calling him biased and his inability to see that making it all about how his critics are mean to him while bracketing out how this discussion fits into its historical and political context in the United States is his own unacknowledged bias at work.

What is in my eyes particularly ironic, however, is that while Harris makes it all about how unfair his critics are, he argues at the same time that the science should be the focus. So I tried to have an eye on how the scientific evidence was discussed, and as far as I can tell it seemed to go as follows:

Klein sometimes brings up evidence that shows that intelligence (as measured by IQ or similar tests, which is another whole can of worms) is strongly influenced by the environmental conditions under which somebody grows up, e.g. when children from disadvantaged backgrounds are adopted by affluent families, and cites, by name, relevant scientists who argue that at the very least there is at this moment no evidence yet for any significant genetically determined IQ difference between groups. (And I have no idea where such evidence could even potentially come from, unless there is behind this the usual misunderstanding of what heritability means.) Harris never addresses those arguments, as far as I can tell. His counter-arguments appear to be:

(1) "genes are involved for basically every[thing]". But that is so trivially true as to be meaningless. Genes are involved for the development of fingers, still there are no differences in the number of fingers between different populations. And even if we are talking about traits that vary, it gets us nowhere, because it doesn't necessarily follow that the genes determine more than, say, 5% of the variation. And even if intelligence is strongly heritable it says nothing about significant differences between groups either, as he readily admits that variation within is much stronger than between.

(2) Then there is Harris' sports example, where he says that West Africans dominate certain running sports. He argues "if you have populations that have their means slightly different genetically, 80 percent of a standard deviation difference, you’re going to see massive difference in the tail ends of the distribution, where you could have 100-fold difference in the numbers of individuals who excel at the 99.99 percent level". Now I get that this might be a valid argument to explain the underrepresentation of a group with a hypothetically slightly lower mean at excelling at the >99.9% level under the Utopian assumption of complete equality of opportunity, but then we would be talking about Field Medal winners or Nobel laureates. As an explanation for lower societal achievement on average, i.e. why members of a group are vastly overrepresented in prisons and have vastly lower household wealth than the majority, it is a non-starter and thus irrelevant to the discussion from the get-go.

(3) Harris cites unnamed scientists who, he says, do not want to have their names published because of fear of being called racist, but who are said to agree with him. Not knowing who they are one is, of course, unable to confirm what they said or meant as well as to assess their qualifications, their potential agendas and biases, and if they are even from a relevant field of research. (Note that according to Wikipedia Charles Murray, with whom that whole discussion started, is a "political scientist, author, and columnist" working for a conservative think tank. That is, he is not an expert in the areas of population genetics, human cognitive development, comparative assessments, or any other field of relevance.)

I find that a bit disappointing. For all Harris' claims that the science is clearly on Charles Murray's side, it rather looks to me as if his argumentation runs simply as follows: There are differences in IQ between groups, and these differences must obviously have a genetic component, because everything has a genetic component. And that's it, at least as far as one can tell from the conversation with Klein.

Andrew Sullivan on baking cakes

As always the following is my personal opinion and not necessarily that of my employer, friends, family or potted plants.

To follow news from the USA I regularly read the New York Magazine Daily Intelligencer. Once a week or so they have a column by Andrew Sullivan, who is the very peculiar combination of (a) Catholic, (b) homosexual, and (c) conservative. His average column follows a fairly predictable formula: first complaining about Donald Trump or the state of the Republican party, then a section break, then bashing left-wing activists over something or other. So as to maintain one's conservative reputation despite criticising conservatives, I presume?

Anyway, the most recent column takes a different approach. Titled "Let him have his cake", it takes the side of a religious baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple and now finds himself in front of the US supreme court. Then there is a section break, and then he complains about Donald Trump. It is the other way around, you see?

Anyway, his gay wedding cake argument proceeds as follows:

1. If there are alternative solutions, like finding another baker, why force the point? Why take up arms to coerce someone when you can easily let him be -- and still celebrate your wedding?

That is probably what I would do in such a situation, as I am relatively conflict-shy. But this is a legal issue, one of principles, and as always in such situations it has to be asked what would happen if everybody made use of the 'right' to refuse service.

It is my understanding that the USA had a time when a black person could find themselves in a town where every single bar served only whites. Surely given the rampant religiosity in some parts of that country it is at least not immediately absurd to think that a gay couple might find themselves traveling through a town where every single hotel would turn them away by citing religious objections to gay marriage?

2. The baker's religious convictions are not trivial or obviously in bad faith [...] those religious convictions cannot be dismissed as arbitrary (even if you find them absurd). Opposition to same-sex marriage has been an uncontested pillar of every major world religion for aeons.

This is a really interesting argument. My first response is that yes, religious convictions are all entirely arbitrary by definition. That's just the thing about religion, it is based on faith instead of logic or empirical evidence. The founders of one religion just made up some random beliefs, and the founders of another religion just made up some different random beliefs, and that is why there is not just one religion on the planet, as would be expected if there existed an actual god who communicated with people. Conversely, ideas that are not arbitrary are shared across different belief systems and accordingly not religious per se.

(Just as an aside, I don't really see where in the Bible or the Koran it actually says "Thou shalt not marry somebody of the same sex." Does it actually say so somewhere? I know that the Bible considers gay sex to be an abomination, at least between men, but funnily enough that particular "conviction" is not really insisted on very much at this time, or at least not to the degree that any significant number of religious politicians tries to outlaw gay sex. Because such convictions are indeed arbitrary.)

So yes, the conviction that gays should not marry is arbitrary. And that raises the problem that if there is a right to discriminate based on religious conviction, people can simply make up additional convictions to refuse service to other groups and in other cases. It is hard to argue that some taxi driver's newfound religious conviction that they do not want to drive around an interracial couple is 'arbitrary' if something as obviously arbitrary as not being able to use a light switch on the Sabbath is considered not arbitrary.

Interestingly, Sullivan seems to understand the problem - I worry that a decision that endorses religious freedom could effectively nullify a large swathe of antidiscrimination legislation - but ultimately this worry does not carry the day with him. Is he perhaps a bit naive about the intentions of the other side?

As a mirror image of the above we then get the following:

3. Equally, I worry that a ruling that backs the right of the state to coerce someone into doing something that violates their religious conscience will also have terrible consequences. A law that controls an individual's conscience violates a core liberal idea.

I do not understand what terrible consequences he expects. The consequences would be that people are treated equally, hardly something I would call terrible. And I think he confuses "controlling an individual's conscience" and "making them behave professionally". Those are not the same thing. An individual is allowed to believe that gays shouldn't be allowed to marry, but they should not be allowed to discriminate against gays. It is really as simple as that, even knowing that Sullivan will call me a "fanatic" for seeing it like this.

4. Much of the argument for marriage equality was that it would not force anyone outside that marriage to approve or disapprove of it. One reason we won that debate is because many straight people simply said to themselves, "How does someone else's marriage affect me?" and decided on those grounds to support or acquiesce to such a deep social change. It seems grotesquely disingenuous now for the marriage-equality movement to bait and switch on that core "live and let live" argument.

Well, I can only say that I find this argument rather disingenuous. The discussion went to the effect of, "if Bob and Jim are allowed to marry, your own heterosexual marriage does not lose any of its status, so what is it to you?" If the discussion was to the effect of "hey, we just want you to let Bob and Jim marry, but you can still treat them like second class humans and discriminate against them", then I have missed that.

5. A commenter on Rod Dreher's blog proffers a series of important questions in this respect: "If the cake shop loses, does that mean that if I'm, say, a freelance designer or an artist or a writer or a photographer, I can no longer pick and choose my clients? If the Westboro Baptist Church comes to me, I can't reject them on the grounds that they're deeply un-Christian scumbags? If I'm Jewish, do I have to design a Hitler's Birthday cake with swastikas on it? Would a Muslim cake-shop owner be forced to design a cake that shows an Islamic terrorist with crosshairs over his face, a common target design in most gun shops in America? Can a gay, atheist web designer choose not to do work for the Catholic Church, or would we have the government compel him to take on a client he loathes?"

This is perhaps the superficially most convincing argument presented by Sullivan. (Partly it may be that I find this style of argument particularly useful.) However, I feel that it mixes up a few different scenarios.

Yes, it seems to me that somebody who opens a shop or provides a service should not be able to refuse service to a church merely for being a church. That would be exactly the same kind of discrimination as refusing service to homosexuals, and it would be unacceptable to me. On the other hand, I think that a Hitler's birthday cake or a face in cross-hairs is a different kind of message to write in glazing than "Bob & Jim".

Yes, I get the idea that the latter supports gay marriage and is thus as objectionable to a certain kind of deeply religious person as mass murder is to other kinds of persons, but I believe that one would have to be quite nihilistic to not see the difference between those two points of view. One message seems objectionable because of an arbitrary, made-up religious dogma, the others are objectionable because they are demonstrably hateful and evil. Still, I understand how this is a difficult difference to see for some who hold a certain view of the first amendment of the US constitutions, for the kind of person who, for example, sees European countries outlawing Holocaust denial as engaging in a terrible restriction of free speech and taking the first step towards totalitarianism.

Finally,

6. It always worries me when gays advocate taking freedom away from other people. It worries me as a matter of principle. But it also unsettles me because some gay activists do not seem to realize that the position they're taking is particularly dangerous for a tiny and historically despised minority.

Again, these are two very different types of freedom we are talking about. Historically, the freedom taken away from gays was the freedom to exist. The freedom Sullivan considers to be taken away from the baker is the freedom to discriminate against others. I find it puzzling how the latter can possibly be held to be a freedom worth defending, let alone be equated with the former.

What race is a dickhead, indeed

Reading the recent news items about an Australian senator with Muslim background being abused in a pub by a bunch of racists, two thoughts occur to me. The first regards the oh so clever comeback by one of those racists after being called a racist: "what race is Muslim?"

The thing is, of course, that there are legitimate and illegitimate cases of people being called racist. If, for example, a hypothetical atheist were to say, "mainstream Islam as currently practised is problematic to me because so many of its adherents consider homophobia and sexism central to their beliefs and identity" then calling that statement racist is just wrong. Maybe that atheist is also mistaken, and maybe they are also incidentally racist, but the argument as stated would be explicitly about a belief or behaviour, regardless of what particular person holds the belief or shows the behaviour. It is not a racist statement.

This present case, however, isn't that. Somebody who says, "why don't you go back to Iran" and calls their opposite "monkey" is clearly not making an argument about theology; they are just being racist. Those statements are what is called a dead giveaway.

The second thought is the same that I always have when reading about white racism in countries like the USA or Australia: I gawk, open-mouthed in amazement, at somebody whose ancestors lived in Europe a mere two hundred years ago telling somebody else to "go back" to the country of their parents. Ye gods, one of those guys apparently called himself an "original Australian". The mind boggles. One wonders which Aboriginal tribe he identifies with, and what the other members of the tribe think about that...

Some quick, handy references

I just read that an Australian Senator called Fierravanti-Wells said the following:

I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman ... coming together in one unique union. That is what it has been for every culture, in every ethnicity, in every faith in every corner of the world for thousands and thousands of years.

Suggested reading:

• Wikipedia entry on polygamy
• Wikipedia entry on polyandry
• Wikipedia entry on the history of same-sex unions

The primary literature is cited in those entries. Also:

• Skeptic's Annotated Bible entry on what the Bible says about polygamy

It would appear that the premise of this particular argument is demonstrably false. It would further appear that it is also not a logically valid argument, regardless of the truth or falseness of its premise:

• Logical Fallacies > Fallacies of Relevance > Irrelevant Appeals > Appeal to Antiquity / Tradition

This is not how this works, religious freedom edition

Sometimes it is interesting what raises one's hackles. Today one could get upset about domestic terrorism in the USA or the level of discourse regarding dual citizenships in Australian politics, but what really annoyed me was an opinion piece on the ABC website with the title "same-sex marriage is more complex than the Yes campaign admits".

Basically, the author, one Peter Kurti identified as "a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and the author of The Tyranny of Tolerance: Threats to Religious Liberty in Australia", argues that any changes to laws that will allow same-sex marriage will have to ensure that those who don't like that change can still discriminate against homosexuals:

Freedom of religion extends far beyond the walls of a church or a synagogue.

Schools, charities, and other faith-based not-for-profits, as well as ordinary business people such as bakers, florists, and photographers who wish to uphold the traditional meaning of marriage need to be protected from discrimination and attack if the law on marriage does change. [...]
   
If the law is eventually changed to allow same-sex couples to marry, it should not create an additional entitlement enabling some citizens to force other citizens to act against their religious beliefs or conscience by making them help celebrate same-sex marriages.

The usual disclaimer applies here as to how what I write is my private, non-professional opinion and not necessarily that of any other person or institution that I may be associated with, but I believe I am not stating anything particularly controversial or revolutionary when I now write:
This is not how freedom of religion works.

Let's consider how this would have to work in other cases, if it wasn't complete nonsense.

• If the law is eventually changed to allow mixed-race couples to marry, it should not create an additional entitlement enabling some citizens to force other citizens to act against their religious beliefs or conscience by making them help celebrate mixed-race marriages.
  
• If the law is eventually changed to allow women to seek employment, it should not create an additional entitlement enabling some citizens to force other citizens to act against their religious beliefs or conscience by making them hire women.
  
• If the law is eventually changed to allow people to wear yellow shirts, it should not create an additional entitlement enabling some citizens to force other citizens to act against their religious beliefs or conscience by making them provide services to customers wearing yellow shirts.

The logic, and I am using this word loosely because any more appropriate alternative would be impolite, is exactly the same in all four cases. There is not one iota difference between them.

Freedom of religion, unless it is intended to destroy all personal freedom and tolerance, cannot mean that people get to discriminate against whatever they personally don't like. It means that they are allowed to follow their religious rules, for example by not marrying somebody of the same sex themselves, but it cannot mean that they are allowed to discriminate against others who do not follow those rules.

What really frustrates me is that this is not some random dude who has never looked into how rights and freedoms work and made some thoughtless off the cuff remark during lunch break. This is somebody who has carefully written an opinion piece and got it published by Australia's public broadcasting company on the strength of their authority as a scholar. I assume it would be silly to ask if the piece underwent peer review.

Discussions of diversity and equality are generally very depressing

Somebody at Google circulated an opinion piece on Google's diversity efforts, which was ultimately published by Gizmodo. A public discussion ensued. And as always with what is called "cultural" issues I find the way it goes very depressing. Perhaps surprisingly that is not because of some particularly backwards or intolerant position taken by this or that participant (although that too, see #6 below), but rather because much of what goes on in these kinds of discussions seems so futile.

One of the most fundamental problems is that there is not actually one controversy, there are numerous controversies going on at the same time, and people mix them all up. Just checking out two articles or posts and following their links to perhaps another three, it seems to me as if at least all of this is being discussed at the same time, in no particular order:

1. Whether there are psychological differences between men and women.

2. If such differences exist, to what degree they are genetic/developmental or socially conditioned.

3. Whether there are cognitive differences between men and women to the degree that the average man is objectively better at abstract problem solving and thus more suited for being a software engineer than the average woman.

4. Whether there are cognitive differences between men and women to the degree that the average man is objectively better at abstract problem solving than the average woman, but because software engineering is really a collaborative and thus people-oriented activity, at which women are said to excel, the average woman makes a better software engineer than the average man.

5. Whether different levels of representation of men and women in different fields of work are now largely due to job preferences as opposed to discrimination, meaning that trying to achieve parity in all fields is futile.

6. Whether women are, and I quote, "inferior" in sports. Yeah, I have no idea what that has to do with anything either, but I believe the choice of terminology speaks volumes.

7. Whether Google (and by extension many other companies) now has been captured by "the left" and has adopted "political correctness" to the degree that nobody dares to speak their mind for fear of being shamed, ostracised, and fired.

8. Whether Google was justified in firing the author of the memo for being disruptive and/or violating its code of conduct.

9. Whether circulating this memo to colleagues falls under the Free Speech guarantee of the US constitution.

And I am sure I have missed some. For what it is worth, the way I understand the original memo it was clumsily trying to argue mostly #5 and #7 and potentially #3, or at least it is widely read as arguing the latter.

In light of this it is unsurprising that so little is achieved and that so many people are at each others' throats. Of course there are many other topics where people will have heated discussions, but it is because their opinions differ very strongly (e.g. economic policy, environment, energy), not merely because they are completely talking past each other.

But with these equality / diversity issues I regularly see people go ballistic at each other who seem to pretty much agree on policy goals (e.g. better representation of currently underrepresented groups), general political outlook and acceptance of empirical reality (e.g. differences in mean innate cognitive abilities between groups of humans are negligible compared to variance within those groups) and should consequently be able to hash their differences out in a more rational manner.

One person says "maybe it is mostly job preferences now" but the other hears it as "I want to excuse under-payment and harassment of women"; or one person says "what he wrote could be read as if women don't make good engineers, and that creates a hostile work environment" and the other hears it as "nobody is allowed to have a different opinion than me; burn, heretic!" Makes me despair of political discourse.

The Prince

I have arrived in Shenzhen, China, for the International Botanic Congress. I meant to upload a few pictures of the Luohu district today but it seems as if my cell phone does not want to talk to my laptop, so perhaps I can do that when I am back.

On the flights I was unable to get much work done beyond making corrections to a manuscript, so I read a book and watched movies of varying quality: Star Wars Rogue One, Suicide Squad, and Throne of Elves. It is all a matter of expectations; they weren't high, so I enjoyed all three, although the last of them partly for being so different from how a European would have done it, and while happily ignoring the humongous plot holes of the second. The funny thing about Rogue One is that it is actually in part a reasonably good attempt at rationalising why the heck the Empire would have built the Death Star with such an idiotic weakness, although it still remains implausible that nobody else noticed it during construction and just added another wall on the way.

Ah well. Anyway, the book I read nearly through on the flights - because it is not actually all that long - is Machiavelli's Il Principe. The book needs no introduction as it is a classic, but I had never read it until I happened to pick it up in a German retranslation at the last book fair I visited.

The scholar who wrote the foreword stresses that Machiavelli's reputation is undeservedly bad, that his work is really a groundbreaking piece of political philosophy. With Il Prinicipe and its sister work on republics he is considered to have pioneered political writing that sees humans as capable of influencing history within certain realistic limitations instead of being the passive objects of divine providence, and that argues for a pragmatic approach to politics instead of an unachievable spiritual ideal or political utopia.

And yes, I can see where that is coming from, although given my political socialisation I always remain sceptical of seeing history as a chain of outstanding people having influential ideas. (I think it is much more likely that if Machiavelli had not written this book others would still have organically moved towards more pragmatic political philosophy, as that was simply the Zeitgeist.)

But I can also see clearly where his bad reputation comes from. Not only is he fairly open about criticising past politicians and military leaders, including popes, for their personal and public failures, which would obviously invite opprobrium. He also matter-of-factly advises the audience to betray their allies for political gain and to murder the entire family of a previous ruler so that their bloodline is extinguished and no remaining heir can challenge the new order.

Again, both Machiavelli and the author of the foreword argue that this is just realistic. If you want to secure power and strengthen your state then this is what you must do. Machiavelli also doesn't see any issues with such behaviour because he has a very dim view of humanity in general. For example, to him it is no problem to break treaties because your treaty partners are, well, humans and as such should be expected to break the treaty themselves at the first good opportunity. That's just how dastardly humans are, fide Machiavelli at least.

Now realism is one thing. I can understand Machiavelli's advice in many cases, for example when he considers whether it is more important and easier to have the general population on one's side or the nobility (in today's context, the one percenters), and how to achieve either. And I also understand that one has to be realistic about the established rules one is subject to; if everybody habitually lies then a single honest person will indeed perish where another liar may have prospered. But I think he and that modern scholar miss to what a large degree opportunistic breaking of rules changes the rules for the worse, and what the consequences are.

Be it keeping true to treaties or showing mercy to one's enemies, the point of following rules or gentlemen's agreements is that only then can you expect that others will follow them to your benefit. When, for example, it became customary in the early to high middle ages of Germany that nobles competing for the crown would not eradicate the opposing family but instead force the male members to retire into monasteries, and only kill them if they blew that chance by coming back and raising another army, the idea was presumably that once the shoe is on the other foot one would also be given the chance to leave politics instead of coming home to find one's wife and underage children face down in puddles of blood, as Machiavelli would have it.

In other words, I am coming away from Il Principe with the impression that he was too clever by half. He took pragmatism just far enough to come out on the other side and fall back into short-sightedness.

Free-association word salad is not the same as analysis

I find it remarkable what kinds of pieces are sometimes published by otherwise serious news organisations. Today during breakfast I made the mistake of trying to read something hilariously filed under "analysis" at the ABC website, Are we sleepwalking to World War III?

It starts with the claim that WW3 is coming and that Australia will be invaded:

All certainty will be lost, our economy will be devastated, our land seized, our system of government upended.

It is backed up by what a single former military commander said to the author over lunch:

This isn't mere idle speculation or the rantings of a doomsday cult, this is the warning from a man who has made it his life's work to prepare for just this scenario.

I may be missing something here, but unless there is a bit more at least circumstantial evidence I would still file this warning as mere speculation; that is kind of what the word means.

Then the author randomly quotes out of context Mark Twain ("History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme"), Alexis de Tocqueville as writing that the French Revolution was inevitable, a claim that can very conveniently be made about any historical event after the fact because it is always untestable, and then quickly moves to a historian's work on the beginning of World War I (while spelling the name of that source in two different ways).

In this latter case at least an actual argument can be discerned: Britain and Germany were trade partners and still went to war, so we should not assume that two countries today would stay at peace just because they are trade partners.

The author accelerates his already breathtaking pace to name-check a Harvard scholar and, before that person gets to say anything useful, the Ancient historian Thucydides. He seems to imply that the USA might be forced into starting WW3 to stop the rise of China, as Sparta was forced to start the Peloponnese War when Athens became too powerful. (I read Thucydides years ago, and I seem to remember it was a bit more complicated than that.)

The text descends into gibberish for a bit:

Any clash between the US and China is potentially catastrophic, but as much as we may try to wish it away, right now military strategists in Beijing and Washington are preparing for just an eventuality.

Perhaps: "just such an eventuality"?

Global think tank the Rand Corporation prepared a report in 2015 for the American military, its title could not have been more direct -- War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable.

Yeah, that's the job of strategists and (serious) think tanks.

It concluded that China would suffer greater casualties than the US if war was to break out now. However, it cautioned, that as China's military muscle increased so would the prospect of a prolonged destructive war.

How... what... huh? If I picked a fight with my neighbor now, I could be hurt, BUT (!) if I picked the fight an hour later, the fight could take longer. That doesn't even begin to make sense as a sentence. Even if we try to speculate about what the author may have meant here, for example that China would lose a war now but may have a better chance of winning a few decades in the future, one would have to point out that suffering greater casualties may not be incompatible with winning now either, cf. USSR in WW2. Also, why interrupt the sentence with a comma after the main verb? Did nobody proof-read this?

Having established to his satisfaction that war could happen, the author now moves to the question what precise incident could precipitate WW3 in Asia. Again a historian is cited, and again only so superficially that it is impossible for the reader to judge if what they say can be backed up. The islands of the South China Sea and other islands disputed between China and Japan are mentioned as the most likely causes of war. Okay, so I am not a military strategist, and I appreciate how useful symbolic conflicts can be to fire up nationalism when a government is in domestic trouble, but are these really the kinds of issues where a government would say, hey, let's needlessly blow up our entire economy and get hundreds of thousands killed over a practically worthless heap of rock? (Or sand, as the case may be.)

But of course we have to move on immediately. Cyber warfare! Thucydides! (Again.) Name-checking a Chinese scholar who does think that China and the USA are too economically interdependent to go to war, so at least we have an isolated counterpoint. Then the former military commander from the beginning opines that it would be helpful if politicians would also consider the risks of going to war; I am sure nobody in the history of humanity has ever had that idea before.

The piece ends with the author claiming to be more optimistic than his interview partner, only to end on a very depressing note. He takes this as an opportunity to quote Shakespeare, I presume in case the mention of Twain, de Tocqueville and Thucydides wasn't enough to signal deep erudition.

Now don't get me wrong, I am also rather pessimistic about the future. Overpopulation, resource limits and climate change may well combine to throw the world into a new dark age, with starvation, mass migrations, widespread collapse of most institutional order, and warlords duking it out with the few Byzantine Empire-like islands of stability that are left.

But that is how I would expect a serious analysis of future trends to look like: citing empirical evidence of risk factors like crop failures, water availability or shifting alliances and how they can produce unsolvable dilemmas for all involved. Merely name-checking historians in a meandering, stream-of-consciousness text without any real information or data isn't it.

Two weird realisations about the gay marriage discussion

Certainly other people will have had the very same realisations long before me, but it has only recently occurred to me how absurd some of the rules around what I will for the moment call 'gay marriage' are.

First, in Australia two women, for example, cannot get married at the moment. However, a man and a woman can get married, and then the man could come out as transgender and transition to become a woman. This results in two women being married.

So how do these two make sense at the same time?

When we discussed that issue, it was pointed out to me that in a specific European country, gay couples may currently not adopt children, presumably under the idea that children need a mother and a father to grow up normally. However, in that country a single person can apparently adopt children.

Again, how do these two make sense at the same time?

As always this is my personal opinion only, and I am not speaking in any official capacity, but in my personal opinion this drives home how utterly ridiculous it is to disallow gay marriage. I have yet to see an argument against gay marriage that passes the laugh test, let alone critical examination.

Useless but unavoidable political rant

As usual, the following is entirely my own opinion and not that of anybody else or any institution I am affiliated with, and I am obviously not writing in any official capacity.

Right now the media, social and traditional, are full of the personal tragedies caused by the new US president's executive order barring immigrants and refuges from selected Middle Eastern countries from entering the USA. According to reports in major newspapers, the order is interpreted to mean that even people who have permanent residency status in the country are currently not being allowed to return from holidays, refuges who have already been accepted are told they can't come after all, and scientists are turned back as they are about to start or continue research projects at US American universities. Furthermore, the order says to prioritise Christian refuges over Muslim ones.

I am certainly not a scholar of the US legal system, but it seems rather obvious to me that the order would have to be somewhere between unconstitutional and illegal. One reads that there is even a law that outright prohibits discriminating against immigrants based on their nation of origin.

Be that as it may, I feel for the people who are personally affected by this act. But more generally I hope that people around the world are looking at what is unfolding politically at this time, both in the USA and elsewhere, and taking away a few lessons.

The political system of the USA

So, about that recent election. I am not an American, so I don't actually have a horse in that race except to the degree that everybody will be impacted by what one of the most influential nations on the planet decides to do.

I don't really want to discuss party politics on this blog either, so what I will focus on is simply what I consider to be certain systematic issues with how elections work in the USA. The point is, as far as I can tell the system is built so that it systematically favours conservatives, whether intentionally or not.

A major concept here is Gerrymandering.

In case that isn't clear what Gerrymandering is, imagine a political system in which the seats in parliament are given to people representing individual electoral districts as opposed to nation-wide party lists. So if you win the plurality of the votes in a district, or perhaps the majority after resolving preferences or a run-off election, you get its seat in parliament. Imagine further you have two electoral districts in your town with a hundred voters each and where voters favour the two major parties as follows*: the Yellows always get 45 votes, the Reds 55. Both seats go to the Reds.

Now assume that the Yellows have control of the state government and can redraw the district boundaries. They cleverly manage to redistrict the voters as follows: one district now has Yellows 55 votes versus Reds 45, and the other makes up the difference with Yellows 35 versus Reds 65. Eh voilà, the Yellows have won one seat in parliament without convincing a single voter to switch allegiance. The trick is to concentrate your opponent's voters in a few districts that are super-overwhelmingly safe for them while giving yourself lots of narrower margins.

Now coming to the USA, which of course have district-based representation as opposed to proportional representation.

First, the Electoral College. This is the most obvious and widely discussed, as there have now been two elections within twenty years in which conservative candidates won despite losing the popular vote. If election of presidents had been direct, their opponents would have carried the day. That being said, however, the Electoral College is probably the least Gerrymandered of all bodies, not least because it cannot possibly have been done deliberately. State boundaries are just what they are, they do not get redistricted easily. Still, I assume that urbanisation has an effect here. Many Americans are concentrated in a very small number of states, in huge metropolitan areas, which are strongly leaning progressive. Most states are rural, rural voters lean conservative, and consequently the Electoral College leans conservative.

(By the way, I find it extremely bizarre how these discussions go on American websites. On many sites I have read in the last two weeks there will be commenters who complain about the Electoral College not reflecting the popular vote. And then there will always be somebody replying to the effect of "it is doing exactly what it was meant to do, that is stopping a minority [of states] from dominating the majority [of states]". This is weird, isn't it? There are two main political camps; either the first "dominates" the second, or the second "dominates" the first. You cannot say that when the first doesn't happen but the second does there is suddenly no "dominating" going on. So why should the majority of states count more than the majority of voters? At a minimum I would need more explanation here than is usually forthcoming...)

Second, the US Senate, the upper house of the US Parliament, which has a lot of power. It consists of two senators from each state. Immediately the situation should become clear: the Senate is Gerrymandered by default. Most states are rural, rural voters lean conservative, consequently the Senate leans conservative.

Third, the states. The same principle applies. The majority of states is rural, rural voters lean conservative, and consequently conservative politicians control a majority of the states.

But that was just the districting; there are other factors.

Fourth, for some strange reason US citizens are not automatically registered for voting, they have to make a deliberate effort to become registered voters. People who have time on their hands will have an easier time doing that. People who have time on their hands are, in particular, pensioners and the independently wealthy, while the working poor will have it harder. Old and wealthy people lean conservative, consequently registered voters will lean conservative.

Fifth, out of ancient tradition the USA have elections on Tuesdays, a working day. This makes it much easier for pensioners and the independently wealthy to participate in elections, whereas the working poor will find it harder to take one of their very few days of leave to stand in a queue for voting. Old and wealthy people lean conservative, consequently voters will lean conservative.

Sixth, it is my understanding that US citizens have a lot more elections than the citizens of most other countries. They elect people for offices that are filled without formal election campaigns elsewhere, such as judges, sheriffs, school boards, etc. This means that participating in democracy is much more time-consuming for US citizens, and will easily lead to voting fatigue. The people who have lots of time to deal with all that are, in particular, pensioners and the independently wealthy. Old and wealthy people lean conservative, consequently voters will lean conservative.

Now I have read those who argue that this is simply the system that exists, so progressives will have to learn how to win elections in that system instead of e.g. whining about the unfair Electoral College. Fair enough. What is more, it works well for the conservatives, and again, I am not even an American. It just kind of seems to me, personally, that the point of a democracy is that the outcome of an election should kind of reflect the popular will. The Americans will have to know themselves what they want, and there does not appear to be any interest in change. Myself, I prefer proportional representation, party-independent committees drawing district boundaries, automatic voter registration, voting on a Sunday, and fewer elections with much shorter campaigns so that there is less voting fatigue. It seems to work well in many countries. Just my two cents.

Footnote

*) Of course, one of my major concerns with district-based parliaments is that they distort the popular will even without any Gerrymandering whatsoever. If a smaller party gets 20% in each district of the country they will still get 0% of the seats in parliament, a situation that completely disenfranchises one in five voters.

Independence

Soon the state (really territory) election is going to take place, and consequently there are now all manner of posters around us. Given that Australia has a very nearly two party system it is no surprise that most of them are for Labor or the Liberals. On my way to work there are, however, also a few with a rather odd colour scheme asking the reader to vote Independent.

This reminds me of when I was younger, back in Germany. There were (and are) parties like the Social Democrats (~Labor), the Christian Democratic Union (conservative), the Liberals, the Greens, the Left. And then at the local level we always had groups that would call themselves something on the lines of Unabhängige Wählergemeinschaft, or in other words Independents.

What I have never understood and still find hard to grasp is what independent is supposed to mean in this context.

As far as I can tell there are only three possible meanings.

First, independent from all the other parties that have names without "independent" in them. But that would be rather silly. I am sure I am not communicating any revolutionary insight when I say that e.g. the Liberals are independent from Labor, and vice versa, and the same for most parties. We divide both sides of the equation by the same number and nothing changes. This meaning of independent is consequently empty.

Second, it could mean independent from that terrible evil, special interest groups. The idea being that all the other parties with real names are tied to selfish or ideological splitters, and only the Independents are nobly above it all, unideologically putting the interests of the common man on the street first. But again I see a little snag. The people who consider themselves the common man on the street are one of those special interest groups.

And in my eyes the idea that a party in a democracy is not supposed to work for a special interest is completely incoherent. Representing interest groups is the whole point of political parties, and finding a compromise between multiple special interests is the whole point of democratic politics. The alternative is tyranny.

In summary, the first option for the meaning of independent appears to be empty and the second appears to be nonsensical.

After some thought I only recently came up with a third idea. It would actually make sense to call one's party independent if the other parties were all puppets of some truly illegitimate outside influence, like a foreign power meddling in a weaker nation's internal politics. I think, however, that that is clearly not what the Independent parties mentioned above have in mind.

Ultimately I suspect that the name is chosen because people think it sounds nice. But it just doesn't tell me anything, especially when the information content of the poster on my way to work is limited to "vote independent", without any details on what they want to achieve.

Fun with trendline charts

Via Pharyngula I was recently lead to an American blog that had produced the following chart of average annual global temperatures, apparently in an attempt to demonstrate that we need not worry about the greenhouse effect:



This is just so totally awesome, I thought I would do a few myself. First, did you know we don't need to worry about overpopulation either?



Indeed there is absolutely no population growth at all! Next, watch my daughter grow up:



Finally, I tried my hand on one of those Kurzweilian charts of exponential technological progress:



Seems like we won't see a technological singularity any time soon. Checkmate, futurists!

Euphemistic threats

I am kind of wondering whether I merely increasingly notice something over the past few years or whether it is actually on the rise.

David Futrelle of We Hunted The Mammoth (nee Manboobz) dissects the 'logic' of an obnoxious commenter on his blog. Basically the guy argued that if attractive girls do not sleep with unattractive, frustrated young men then the latter will naturally go on a killing spree, so girls should sleep with men even if they don't find them attractive.

For some reason that made me think of the cases where religious fundamentalists and their supporters argue that one should not say or write or draw certain things such as, say, cartoons of Mohammed, because it is just unavoidable and natural that such blasphemy will lead to violent riots.

Speaking of religions, the logic behind Muslim or Orthodox Jewish demands for the veiling of women, or even just Western conservatives' demands that girls and women dress more modestly, and the general removal of women from public spaces often appears to be that if women show themselves then men will unavoidably and quite naturally lust after them, leading to harassment and worse.

The underlying idea is always the same. People don't come right out and say, hey, the crazies are threatening violence if you don't do what they want; that's blackmail! Instead, it is, hey, you should do what they want or you will cause bad things to happen. Things that just logically happen, as opposed to things that the prospective killers, rioters and rapists could decide not to do if they were nicer.

So, did I simply not notice that ten, fifteen years ago or is it on the rise?

In the case of collections, the humanities seem to have the edge

From colleagues in plant taxonomy I have repeatedly heard anecdotes and rumors indicating that some managers and politicians appear to have a remarkably myopic attitude towards natural history collections such as herbaria or insect collections and towards the research being done within them. Indeed at the conference in Sydney three weeks ago somebody who would know it mentioned that at least one unnamed Australian State Herbarium (!) was in real danger of being shut down.

Apparently there are actually people in governments or science administrations who think that once most of the specimen data from a herbarium are placed into a searchable database the herbarium can be closed down, and that once a flora of a given region has been published all taxonomists studying the local plants have become redundant. Those ideas leave me very puzzled.

Don't get me wrong. I am not at all puzzled by the prospect that people would cut or close down valuable institutions in general. That happens all the time and is, no matter how shortsighted, entirely unsurprising.

No, what puzzles me is why some people come up with these ideas for closing down taxonomic research and natural history collections when they would never in their wildest dreams suggest the same for other, comparable research and institutions outside of biology. Or would you consider it plausible to see the following suggestion from a politician?

Did you hear? All the works of art in our National Gallery have been entered into a searchable image database. That means we can save a lot of money by closing it down. Maybe some other museum elsewhere will take those superfluous paintings and statues?

Or perhaps this out of the mouth of a science manager?

Hey, I only just realized that a book exists that discusses the history of the Roman empire. Great! Now we can fire all historians and archaeologists dealing with that period of history because obviously they will never be needed again.

Of course not. When applied to any other type of museum or research, these suggestions would immediately be recognized as bizarre. Yet from what I hear, they are made in all seriousness for natural history collections, our priceless repositories of preserved specimens from which information can be extracted on biodiversity, evolutionary relationships, morphology, anatomy, DNA, and historical changes in phenology, species distributions, land use, vegetation cover, and weather patterns. Why would somebody consider this type of museum redundant who would laugh at the same suggestion were it made about, say, the National Coin and Stamp Collection? That is what I don't understand.

It is a common assumption that the natural sciences get all the money and that the humanities are not taken seriously. But in the case of collections and collections based research, the humanities actually appear to have more support. Weird.

The odd interpretation of election results in the media

I really have little interest to discuss party politics here but one thing that I found odd in the last few days is how election results are interpreted in the media, entirely regardless of the merits of each individual party. First we had the Australian election which was interpreted as a resounding victory for the Coalition (liberals and allies). But the funny thing is, they only got 1.9% more of the vote than the last time. So if I were to discuss this, I'd say that what mostly happened was that Labour and the Greens lost votes, and they mostly lost them to small parties instead of to the Coalition. It does not change the outcome but it gives us a better understanding of what is really going on.

But okay, due to the peculiarities of the voting system the country inherited from Britain the Coalition obviously won a vast majority of the seats, and many more than in the previous election, so it is easy to understand why the Australian media would look at those changes in the composition of the parliament and speak of them in they way they do. The same explanation is not available when discussing the very different German system.

Miscellanea

Did I mention the German federal election earlier? It will take place the coming Sunday. So why did we get one of our two ballot papers only yesterday? That seems a bit pointless because it will never make it back to Germany in time. Could they not have sent the documents out two weeks earlier? Maybe postal voting is meant only for Germans who are too lazy to walk to the polling station on Sunday, but not for those who are silly enough to be in another country?

---

I always find it fascinating how long some people of faith can go on thinking about and discussing religion without getting anywhere near the question of whether any given religious idea is actually correct or wrong. Just last week, a blogger who considers himself a "druid" wrote 3,095 words on what we might call comparative religion and what he calls changing religious sensibilities, comparing nature-worship against the hope for salvation or eternal life, mentioning historical changes in perspectives and rituals, and expressing his hope that another such change was taking place now (towards his preferred sensibilities, of course).

And at no point did he ever raise the issue of whether this or that religious belief is actually, you know, true or false. He would probably consider that to be a question of no importance; perhaps he would consider it oppressive and arrogant "ethnocentrism" to even ask it. And that is, at its core, the difference. For some people it is all about picking a pleasant narrative (a term that is seriously starting to set my teeth on edge). But for some of us it is, strange as it might seem, about what is true and what is false. It is not about wanting to believe in some kind of salvation through technological progress, as he seems to think - in fact I am quite pessimistic about the future. No, what is important to me is aligning my beliefs with demonstrable fact.

If the things he prefers to believe are wrong, we should want no part of them no matter how pleasant and satisfying they are, no matter how much of a feeling of homecoming they might provide. That comes with being a mature and sane personality. On the other hand, it is clear that the transient nature of both individuals and societies as well as the desirability of living sustainably are demonstrable facts. But at that point, not although but precisely because its beliefs as represented by him (and stripped of any supernatural mambo-jumbo) align with reason and empirical evidence, a "druidic faith" becomes superfluous to requirements. Rationality and evidence-based thinking are all we need.

---

Australian weather is really much more chaotic than what I was used to from Europe. Here in Canberra we had several weeks with at most a soft half hour drizzle that evaporated instantly, and now it has been raining continually for two days. Yesterday was the wettest day of the year so far, and you should have seen how drenched I was when I had cycled home.

Reflections on current elections

Last Saturday was the national election in Australia. The country has a system in which all the members of the more powerful house - the parliament - come from electoral districts. It includes a mechanism of transferring the vote for a preferred but losing candidate onto a second, third, etc preference until only two are left, so that every winning candidate will have the support of at least 51% or so of the voters even if they weren't their first preference.

Still, it does lead to the kind of distortions one would expect from a district-based voting system that was inherited from Britain. Look at the estimates made by ABC which, as of my writing of this post, look like this:

The Coalition (Liberals and their immediate allies) gets 45.3% of the primary votes and are predicted to win 59.3% of the seats (89/150).

Labour gets 33.8% of the primary votes and are predicted to win 38.0% of the seats (57/150).

The Greens get 8.4% of the primary votes and have won 0.7% of the seats (1/150).

Palmer United Party gets 5.6% of the primary votes and may have won 0.7% of the seats (1/150) although that still appears to be narrow.

From a German perspective, that all seems terribly unfair. In an extreme case, if 51% of all voters preferred party A and 49% preferred party B, the supporters of the latter party could end up with no representation in parliament provided that the supporters of both parties are distributed perfectly equally across the map. The Bs would be completely unrepresented, just as the Green and Palmer supporters are nearly unrepresented at the moment. (Yes, there is the senate, but that is not the house with the real power and it has its own problems.)

More realistically, people are somewhat clumped: this area here slightly prefers A, that area over there leans towards B. Then we get the problem of Gerrymandering. Even if the As had 55% support across the nation, you could draw the electoral districts so that they would only get comparatively few seats. The trick is to lump as many of their supporters as possible together. You would have to draw some districts to include 80% of As and 20% of Bs and many others to include 47% of As and 53% of Bs. Voila, the Bs win more districts although the As have more votes. Apparently, Gerrymandering is not a bad problem in Australia but it is in some countries.

Germany also has an election in about two weeks. The German system cleverly combines districts with proportional representation, and the latter (the fact that parties get the same proportion of seats as they got votes as long as they clear the 5% hurdle) means that Gerrymandering would be useless. And, of course, with the same results as above under the German system the Greens and Palmers would get a decent number of seats in parliament (looking at party programs I assume the result would be the Coalition and the Palmers governing together).

But of course both have their advantages. Although I much prefer the German electoral system, there are at least two things that I would import from Australia if I could. The first is mandatory voting, the second are the preferences. There have been quite a few cases where a German party got 4.7% or so of the vote and thus no seats in parliament. The votes were thus as wasted as those to a losing candidate under a first past the post system. It would be nice if the voters of a German party missing the 5% hurdle, or perhaps even only the party itself, could decide what other party should get those votes then, as under the Australian system.