Hypocrisy 2 - naval disasters and feminism

The entertaining thing about the tragedy of the misguided Mediterranean cruise liner, is watching or listening to commentators turn themselves in knots trying to justify their perspectives on right and wrong.

So the crew abandoned before helping the passengers. Almost certainly wrong.

Did they do so because: a) they are bastards; b) they are slimy wogs who can't face things with a proper stiff upper lip; c) they are products of a modern world where no one is expected to know what a stiff upper lip is (yes the Titanic comparison was playing big on the whole issue of women and children first and men, particularly the captain, going down with the ship); or d) underpaid and under-appreciated workers who know full well their value and pecking order in relation to both the no doubt corrupt company and the average insufferable passenger, and therefore were fully justified in not considering their duties went to the point of sacrificing themselves for people who only treated them with contempt? Or was it just so fast that everyone panicked?

I would suspect all of those had a certain effect, but I wouldn't be willing to argue which individuals (passengers as well as crew) were effected by which.

But the fascinating thing is that the more it was discussed, the more the outraged commentators found themselves cast as ridiculous old fogies. And wasn't it a shock to the self righteous commenteriat that anyone could see the self contradictions in their perspectives?

My favourite bit was the 'women and children first' part. As countless bloggers pointed out, why in a world of supposed equality should women go first? Children, yes. Perhaps mothers escorting the children as some sort of preference (though in this day of stay at home fathers that is possibly a bit sexist),. But certainly not young healthy women before elderly and infirm of either sex?

One of the young men who phoned in rightly commented that if he was ever sitting on public transport, and a middle aged woman and an elderly man approached, he would offer the elderly man a seat first. Then a pregnant woman, then an older person of any description... amazing to hear such a young sounding living fossil.

The radio commentators were simply stuck on 'women first'. They acknowledged that although they had campaigned for equality for years, their own ingrained upbringing would insist they offer a woman a place first. It was quite sweet listening to them try and explain their reversion to ingrained prejudice, and the confusion they felt as they admitted it was politically incorrect, but nonetheless felt as though it should still be the right thing to do.

Hypocrisy is as often for good motives as for bad. In fact the worst and most dangerous hypocrisy is the self righteously 'but I am doing it for other people's best interests' kind. But the issue is self contradiction. (And I will give these two the credit of acknowledging they were being self contradictory...).

As I listened to two male baby boomer's – who have spent a large part of their careers castigating other baby boomers for hypocrisy – struggle to explain themselves even to each other, I reflected again on the inadequacy of logical thinking that most modern people apply to matters of morality. They talk of doing the right thing, and all they really mean is applying the prejudice that was ingrained with as a child, or that is currently fashionable (or in this case trying to balance the two).

They missed completely the sensible comment from the younger man, and from several women who rang up. They believe in equality, and will fight for it, but they accept disadvantage, and are willing to work to overcome that. They just don't know how to say that that is what they mean.

In practical terms what they seemed to mean was that in a modern age of equality, the hierarchy should be disadvantage. Buggar the idea of all women before all men. That is just prejudice. How about the physically disadvantaged like children and elderly - of either sex - before fit adults - of either sex. Then, if you want to be finicky, how about the mid 20's male with severe asthma ahead of the mid 50's female who swims 100 laps a day?

Interestingly this approach is far closer to the Titanic example than most commentators seemed to realise. The rich, powerful, important, and often elderly and infirm, men, who stayed aboard the Titanic, had an ingrained sense of not only disadvantage, but also of noblisse oblige. Noblity, real nobility (which already meant very little by that time) existed for centuries on the idea that priviledge involved sacrifice... in battle, or on a sinking ship.

[Nobility, on the English model, is quite separate to Arisotocracy, which, on the French model which the Americans seem to have adopted, has devolved into priviledge without responsibility. The insistence of the old French aristocracy on maintaining their rights regardless of not having many responsibilities anymore, is what led to the French Revolution. The Americans adopted this perspective to help explain their betrayal of oaths of loyalty during their revolutionary war, but then seemed to ingrain into their culture the concept that all priviledge was without responsibility. Which actually fights with their equally recognisable tendency towards charity by the wealthy in America... Or at least by the old fashioned wealthy. fortunately Bill Gates and others are old fashioned. But Americans as a rule seem have a hard time understanding nobility except in Holywood features about dog's.]

A medieval knight's deal with his peasants was that he would be priviledged, as long as he was willing to die to protect them. A king or nobles justification for priviledge was that they served. (Modern politicians make the same promises, but don't seem to suffer or take many risks for their vast returns. Given the choice between Prince Andrew coming from a family that expected him to use his helicopter to distract guided missiles from his aircraft carrier during the Falklands War, and expected Prince Harry to serve in the front line in Afghanistan: and President Clinton coming from a family who rigged things to keep him safe in the National Guard during the Vietnam war, you have to think seriously about which tradition might be valuable...)

Civilisation is built on morality. Many people can behave in a morale way without being able to explain it, and many people who drone on endlessly about rights couldn't recognise moral behavior if they were hit in the face with it. The two media commentators in this post fit the former, and the so called Feminists (who aren't really) in the previous post fit the latter.

Unfortunately modern children are being harangued with the misunderstood and misapplied crap of the latter all through school.

Fortunately, most generations want to rebel against the previous.

Any rebellion against the impossible hodge podge of misconception and self deception that makes up what is 'politically correct' at the moment can only be for the good.

Hypocrisy… the ultimate test of political value

(Another rant I am afraid... enjoy)

I have got more than a little sick of self righteously high minded pratts preaching about the nobility of their ideas, and then failing to admit that they only hold those ideas when convenient to their politics. This sort of hyprocrisy is, to me, the worst possible failing of any politician, or idealist or idealogue of any sort.

Not acknowledging it is a clear statement that the person is an unprincipled shit, out only for what they can get.

Not recognising that there is any hypocrisy, is the sign of being too stupid to be trusted to run a church cake stall, let alone have a say in any policy on anything that might ruin people’s lives. (Sorry, forgot. Church cake stalls are illegal in the Victorian nanny state… OH&S issues and public liability now making baking a cake for privatye sale a criminal enterprise unless your kitchen passes health department guidelines, and your cake is plastic sealed and labelled with a complete list of ingredients, their origins, and the name, address and shoe size of the person who baked it…. Alright the shoe size is an exaggeration, but you get the point.)

Unhappily, the vast majority of modern politicians, journalists, lobbyists, and lawyers, are screaming hypocrites. Professionally. In fact they could not do their jobs unless they can either ignore the truth, or not recognise it in the first place.

There was a fabulous example quoted on the radio today. A few years ago a police car entered the men’s ceremonial area of a remote Australian Aboriginal tribe, with… a woman in it! Now the media had a field day with the ‘disrespect’ element of this, because of course cultural relativism argues that such a thing was disrespectful. But to do so the media happily quoted an Aboriginal elder who stated that, had the female been Aboriginal, she would have automatically been killed.

The fact that they quoted this was not a problem. It is a true reflection of Aboriginal culture. It was a true statement by the elder concerned. It was accepted by all who new the facts as a statement of reality. And, most importantly I suppose, it fitted the argument of how ‘disrespectful’ the female police officer was being to Aboriginal culture.

The problem is of course, that the statement that Aborigines reserve the right to murder women who are Australian citizens, was not remarked upon by anyone in the media. Not one single member of the press who commented on it that day thought it was a problem. (Others did later of course.) Not even the many hard line Feminists who had raged against the white ‘oppression’ of Aboroiginal culture seemed to think that it was a problem. Apparently, Aborigines are allowed to oppress women as much as they like in the eyes of an Australian Feminist, because Aborigines – also being victims of white male oppression – clearly have the right to hang on to a culture that oppresses women. In fact any attempt to stop them doing so must be racist.

Now I realise that the self avowed ‘left’ in politics has to find, or invent, causes to rage about to get people who are young enough or stupid enough motivated. (I frankly agree with the old joke that if you are not Socialist when you are 20 you have no heart – we know people’s rationalty is not fully developed until 24 or 25 – and that people who are still socialist at 40 have no brain.) But that does not excuse hypocrisy.

If you genuinely believe (as I do) that women are equal, and deserve equal rights, then you believe it for all women, in any culture. Not just for the ones who will vote for that, and not excluding the ones for whom you can get more mileage from denying those rights in the name of another supposedly honourable cause.

The reason that a police car was on the ‘men’s reservation’ in the first place, was because Australian police have the unfortunate task of trying to protect Aboriginal women from Aboriginal men despite the efforts of our Socialists and Feminists and lawyers and judges to keep them properly subjugated in the name of cultural relativity.

A court case at a similar time was about a 13 year old aboriginal girl who had been raped by a 50 year old aboriginal man. The judge was presented with serious arguments that the case be thrown out because the girl had been promised to the man as a bride by her family. (In fact her grandmother assisted with the rape!) Sad to say the cultural relativists have such a sway over the Australian legal system that the judge initially delivered a sentence of only a few weeks, explaining that the case fit more within ‘traditional cultural law’ than in modern Australian law.

Or, in other words, Australian female citizens should have no protectioin from murder or rape if that happens to fit the cultural practices of the primitive uneducated hunter gatherer tribe from which they come. (And why are they uneducated? Because the cultural relatavists have forced the missions and schools to stay away from the ‘purity’ of aboriginal tribal life… for their own good of course.)

Presumably this same approach will soon be available throughout Australia to Muslims in favour of female circumcision or honor killing, to New Guineans who would like to hang on to tribal cannabalism, and to Indians in favour of Suti. As long as they only practice it on members of their own tribes of course. It has to be culturally relative!

Hypocrisy in applying standards only where and when convenient – preferably to your own political advantage – is unforgivable. More, it is uncivilised. In fact it is one of the clearest signs of people working to undermine anything that could be called civilisation… again, usually for their own political advantage.

The only real test of a person’s political trustworthiness is whether they can recognise, and reject, hypocrisy. Those that recognise it, but take advantage of it, are scum. Those who fail to recognise it, are simply beneath contempt.

What a pity so many of them hold high office.

The Worship of Science

A pseudo scientist called Richard Dawkins recently launched yet another crusade to blame all the evils of the world on the superstitious and the ignorant. Fair enough. The problem was that by his definition the superstitious and the ignorant are those who believe in stuff which he doesn’t believe in – in this case God; while the real problem is that one of the most dangerous single classes of superstitious and ignorant people throwing their overly pompous wieght around in modern world appear to be pseudo scientists – like Richard Dawkins. (The man was apparently once a respected real scientist, but has wandered both beyond his area of expertise, and beyond the correct application of scientific principles.)

There appears to be an increasing desperation to the athiests efforts to write off religion in the modern world. More and more efforts are being made by people like Richard Dawkins, who used to smugly assume that religion was a dying vestige of the past: to whip up some popular enthusiasm about what they describe as pointless, or even evil, superstition. Which is amusing, when you consider that atheism, and partcularly ‘scientific’ atheism, has all the attributes of the most fanatical of religious movements.

“Science’, and ‘scientific method’, are funny things in the modern world. They have been elevated in much of the popular imagination, and certainly amongst much of the unthinking press, to the status of unchallangeable truths. They have in fact supplanted religion in the minds of many, as the one true faith which must be defended against all comers. Which is ironic really, because much of what we hold as scientific truth is apparrently wrong, and rarely stacks up to scientific method.

Historically, it was scientitsts ‘defending’ the truth against heresy, who called for the burning at the stake of such dangerous radicals as Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei. The unthinking assumption applied by many modern people is that they fell foul of the church. But that is only a confusion with the concept of what was effectively a church based education system at the time. It was not the theologians who were calling for blood, but the self proclaimed ‘scientists’ who defended to the death the truths from antiquity as defined by the ‘Divine Galen’ amongst others. In fact if there has been a constant in the last thousand years of science, it has been the repeated enthusiasm by the majority of 'scientists' and scientific bodies to fight strenously against anything which challenges an accepted orthodoxy. They challenge assumptions, ridicule new theories, and usually attack proponents of new ideas. It often takes centuries for new concepts to establish dominance (by which time they are already out of date, but are being defended as the ‘new’ orthodoxy).

One of the problems is with how we interpret the concept of science. The traditional, and correct, name for Physics is ‘Natural Philosophy’, which is still carved on the sides of the older university physics buildings. A phrase coined at the time when scholars clearly recognised that all human understanding of the physical world is theoretical. Now that distinction has largely been lost, particularly in the minds of the so called scientists themselves.

There is a fervent belief in the modern world that scientific method establishes absolute truths. It is this pseudo religious rapture which propels men like Richard Dawkins into proclaiming that we can ‘prove’ his version of the world, because we cannot ‘prove’ God.

Which ignores the fact that we most certainly cannot prove Dawkins version either.

Let us run through a few holes in our science, and our scientific method. Bumble Bees can’t fly - according to my favourite myth of recent science. Moisture cannot be drawn more than ten feet up a tree trunk – according to fairly recent science. And gravity does not work – according to our science (see anomalies and discrepancies).

It is this last which fascinates most. The theory of gravity – and it is a theory not a ‘law’, in the oldest meaning of something unproven – was a nice working hypothesis to explain a few features of the observable world around us. Mind you, so was the theory that the world was in the centre of the universe, and it is marvellous to examine the complex and peculiar models made by the medieval scientitst to try and expalin the movements of the planets as they rotated around the earth. Enormous effort was made to defend the orthodox belief, even after Galileo’s telescopes had made such efforts pointless and ridiculous. The same thing appears to be happening with gravity today.

There have long been anomolies with gravity, such as the concept that something dropped hundreds of metres down a mineshaft appeared to fall faster than something dropped hundreds of metres up in the sky. None of which prevented gravity from becoming the foundation stone of modern physics. But the study of galaxies has disproved all this. There is simply not enough matter in the universe to make it work the way the Big Bang theorists think it should. In fact the total mater in the universe comes to only a fraction of what is needed to make it fit the models. As is usual, the scientists have concluded that it is not the models, but the galaxy, which is incorrect. Therefore the galaxy must have other bits in it to make their models correct!

The first component they theorised was Dark Matter. If there were several times the dark matter in the galaxy as there is the matter we recognise, then the model might work. Except it still doesn’t. The maximum conceivable dark matter for their models still didn’t work, so they had to invent Dark Energy to fill up even more spaces (starting to sound like one of those medieval spheres?). The problem being that the theoretical Dark Matter and Dark Energy apparently cannot be proved except by the theories themselves, and certainly cannot measured. (Oh they are trying. Billions is being spent. No conclusive results expected any time soon. And although those billions seem to be starting to deliver results which might demonstrate some ‘proof’, I suspect that any investment of billions might lead to finding something to justify such an investment... And if we ever do find something like dark matter, what’s the bet we also discover something else which makes new ‘adaptions’ to the models necessary?)

This then is the state of modern physics. Our scientific understanding of how everything works is based on a theoretical existence of something which we can neither find nor measure. And this from people who claim that a God can’t be real because we cannot prove or measure Her! Perhaps someone should suggest to our so called scientists that they find a definition of scientific method in a basic primary school textbook.

Another scientific assumption, is the theory of evolution. I say this not because I don’t accept that species evolve, they patently evolve (one could argue that humanity is evolving into illogical idiots as we speak). What is unproven is that man evolved fom an ape: though every few months we hear of yet another inconclusive excuse for a ‘missing link’ in the fractured inconsistencies of the archeological record. (The British Sci-Fi write Terry Pratchett posits that fossils are the result of a god with a sense of mischief, and writes a whole book around the premiss of the discovery of the skeleton of a dinosaur holding a placard demanding “end nuclear testing”.) The flaw with an argument like this is that it chases it’s own tail. In what way does evolution prove that God does not exist? In what way does our continued enrapture over an unproven dogma - evolution of the species – make our logic superior to religious ‘superstition’.

Take the issue of race. Much modern science declares, loudly and often, that there are no genetic markers for race. A statement which is obviously farcical. It must be something more than a coincidence that two back parents tend to have a black child; and two Asian parents an Asian one; and that when black and white twins are born in a family, there is usually a grandparent of the other race involved. Our alternatives here are somewhat limited. Either there are genetic markers, which we have not found yet (the more likely answer); or there are no genetic markers, and the whole massive coincidence is made statistically possible by some outside influence which we also cannot identify (score another point for those who believe in some sort of god).

The simple answer is not to loudly proclaim the scientific fact that there is no genetic basis for race – as they were doing on publicly funded television recently: but instead to admit the three hardest words that so called scientists can say… “we don’t know”.

‘Science’ is, and will always remain, a collection of theories to explain some observable facts about the world. Science has never been, and will never be, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Countless generations of bad scientists have defended, literally to the death, orthodoxies, against the assaults of new knowledge. The fact that some theories about observable facts allow us to achieve certain desirable results, does not mean that we know the truth about how things really work. It simply means that we have learned a little more about our ignorance.

Take the ‘scientific’ theory of the beginning of creation. The one which people like Dawkins think they can use to disprove the existence of God. The theory is that the whole of existence burst into being from a single point; expanded; formed matter; life came forth from the seas and evolved; all the way to ipods and shopping malls. The fascinating thing is that the book of Genesis also claims that the whole of existence came into being from a word – let there be light; that matter formed; that life came forth from the seas and developed; etc. Of course some extremists claim that God literally did the lot in seven days, which is a lot to load on a misunderstanding of a term for an undefined period of time, but then there are two dangerous types of fanatics in the world – those who believe the world was created as is in seven days and nothing has changed, and those who believe that the entire of reality is nothing but an accident with no rhyme or reason behind it. Both types should be carefully avoided.

The real problem with the scientific theory of the Big Bang, is not that it explains absolutely nothing about why or how such a thing could happen, but that it is in direct opposition to scientific method. If Big Bang’s are a natural phenomena, then we should be seeing Little Bangs all the time. The fact that we can’t find any means that either our theory of the Big Bang is incorrect, or, that a Big Bang could only have happened through direction by a conscious agency. Still struggling to see how any of this disproves the existence of God! In fact the more you look at it, the more the latest scientific theories seem to point to the impossibility that the universe is all an irrational fluke by an inconsistent reality. Or that God has a sense of humour.

Which is not to say that most of the Intelligent Design proponents aren’t as single minded and offensively inaccurate in their self proclaimed crusades as Dawkins and his co-religionists. Any of the extremists of either side should be judged as what they are… fanatics. The type of people who brook no argument, and accept no inconvenient perspective in their pursuit of what they believe. People who know they have the one real truth, handed down direct from their own version of on high. People who, like many generations before them, will protect their version of the truth to the death. In fact, it is people like Dawkins who give religion a bad name.