Be green and save the planet, or How to pick the wrong argument to defend your thesis 101

Recently and not so recently you may have noticed the number of appeals to save this poor endangered planet, and the number of impending tragedies and catastrophes that loom over us, waiting for the right moment to strike and doom all of us. Personally, I don't like to get so emotional about change in the environment, and have not had a look at the numbers involved, so I cannot judge whether some of those claims make sense or not.

Problem is, many, MANY of the arguments I've heard sound silly, plain wrong or simply the wrong argument to pick.

Let's start with an article I've read on some English newspaper a little more than a year ago (sorry I can't give a good reference for it). At some point during summer 2007, an Italian politician had given a speech in which, between other things, she referred to public administration buildings and dressing codes, her argument being: this summer is scorching hot, Italy has been having energy troubles for a long time, if everybody turns their air conditioning on the power grid will simply shut down, and the temperatures are high enough to be a serious health danger for very young and very old people. Let's drop the dressing code in public offices and buildings, leave the tie home and crank down the air conditioning (and save some public money in the process).

EDIT well actually her position was slightly different, but these assertions are my interpretation of what are the possible advantages, based mostly on what I've heard on tv last summer.

The journalist attacked this claim by asserting that global warming is an unproved problem, and, even if it turned out to be true, that would been good for England, since up here the climate is so much colder than Italy.

I wonder if it's fair to the journalist to attack his/her claims. I mean, whoever wrote it is obviously clueless about how global warming works in the models the scientists have prepared (whether you think that those models are valid or not). An increase of the average temperature on Earth is NOT going to warm up England, quite the opposite. The models predict increase of extreme phenomenons, hurricanes, heavy rain and droughts, due to the fact that hurricanes depend on energy the sun pours into our oceans: increase that energy, e.g., through the increase of temperature, and you get more and more powerful hurricanes. Plus, Great Britain is actually warmer than its geographical position grants for, and that's a well known effect of the Gulf Current. The model also includes a weakening of this current, due to changes in the temperature of water that would disrupt the flux (and there seems to be some evidence backing up this bit of the model, i.e., the Gulf Current seems to be weakening). Therefore, the most likely prevision for the climate in UK, if global warming is an actual threat, is that it will get COLDER, with increasing rain and the occasional hurricane sweeping up its coasts. Well, you could say, increasing rain, so what? We're used to it...

I beg to differ on this point. Apparently, enough rain can drown UK like any other country, if last year can be used as a comparison. Apparently, even high security installations, i.e., AWE-inspiring nuclear weaponry facilities are not immune to wet feet.

So, this should be enough to prove that UK should give global warming some thought (again, to either prove or disprove it - I'm not religious about it, I'm about to claim that it is the wrong argument to win this discussion). But, back to the article: why should we drop the ties and turn off the airco? To help the kids? To save grandma? That is all nice and good, and it appeals to me personally: I have a young niece and my grandma always struggles with the heat, plus I hate ties (they're useless by definition, I don't like the look of them and I've also heard disquieting rumors about how ties are not supposed to be washed). But each and every single point I just made can be discussed: someone loves ties, someone else has no children or grandmas, someone else may think the problem is in the power grid that needs fixing (and Italy might well decide to get nuclear plants or start studying renewable sources seriously, btw). So none of these arguments holds too much water, and why? Because they are based on goodwill (save this kid, or this small puppy, or whatever), or on personal tastes (burn those useless pieces of cloth around your neck, they're dangerous if you even have to put your head close to your car engine while it's spinning - rant end), and none of these is measurable or universal or objective. The winning argument here is in the last phrase I attributed to the politician: save some money. That's objective, measurable, and universal (show me someone who likes to WASTE money - not spend money for useful or useless things, waste as in: increase the cost, get exactly the same result - I'll show you a fool...). This is so true that even big companies have been known to bend to this law: an example from last year (again) is ENI.
Count the notes in your pocket, would you like to have more of those without changing your life style? Did I hear a "no" from back there? Honestly, mate, what's wrong with you?

Also from last winter (or maybe since last autumn, I'm not sure), there was this very funny advert: open field, sheep, and a guy going: "this is the animal that will save us from global warming. Put on a jumper and turn down the heating a couple of degrees."
I loved the joke, it was great. How many people do you think have cranked down the heaters because of it? Fifty? One thousand? Far from enough to make a difference. Same with this year ads on switching to 30 your washing machine, so that you can save the polar ice. Again, who do you know that gives a crap? If you live in Amsterdam you may refrain from buying a house and keep renting, just in case the sea overthrows the dams (my geography skills suck, so you may replace Amsterdam with any city that's really close to the coastline), but apart from that probably the only concerned people are those in Greenpeace, etc.

And there goes the BIG reason why saving the environment is the wrong argument to use. There is a lot of political color involved in claims like that, there are ideologies based on that, and there are a lot of people who would attack those ideas because of the other ideas that recently have learned to go arm in arm with them. To cite one, it seems that in Italy you cannot be concerned with your environment without being leftish (same goes for not wanting your country to go to war and invade other countries, or for preferring one charity to another - there's lots to be said about that as well, probably in another post). So what happens is that the battle to decide what's the next smart move becomes a political battle, and you get the following plan to disengage from dependence from oil coming from Arabic countries: let's drill in Alaska, leave SUV engines as big as possible, we'll keep petrol cost low by saturating the market.
No matter what you think of Alaska salmons becoming unedible, you can see that this plan is similar to the guy caught by rain next to a forest. He runs under a tree to avoid rain, and he wonders: what when rain filters through this tree? Oh, easy, I'll go under the next tree. Do I need to tell you he'll get home wet?

These days, with the word "recession" being screamed from each tv, the obvious argument to use is even more obvious: do all the little things that make you environment friendly, that make you a tree hugger, and so on and so forth. Why? Because you will save money! Buy a car with a smaller engine, you'll save money! Walk more instead of motoring around, you'll save money! Double glaze your windows!

All this stuff can be proved to help you make ends meet. It will also make you look like a bloody green, the children in the schoolyard will call you names, but you and me are self confident enough to survive some name calling, are we?

G.I. INSane

Last night I came home sometime past ten, and remembered only then that the mattress cover was still in the washing machine. Shit, I thought, it will take an hour or so for it to dry properly. Ok, let's see what's on tv in the meantime...

Nothing... nothing... Renaissance, already saw that one - btw, it's good... - G.I. Jane. Oh well, what the hell, I've seen it already but...
Well, it ticked me off. Badly. I've been on IMDB looking for more details, comments, stuff. On one side, more than one liked the citations from D.H. Lawrence:

Self Pity

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

which is both tender and tough, nice bit of poetry, nails it perfectly. But, on the other end, there was a very long list of enthusiastic comments on how close to reality most of the movie is, how good the director is at conveying the message, how exceptionally good is Demi Moore performance (exceptionally in the real sense, many claimed not to be fans of Demi in general). Me, I think adherence to reality is average for Ridley Scott movies that involve shooting, which means more or less not much. I'll have one cheap shot about that and then move on to more relevant stuff: Demi is visited by the doctor, who says: you are halfway through to being a wreck: tendinitis, huge loss of body fat, jungle rot on your foot, and she stopped menstruating as well, which is not unusual for women under heavy physical or psychological stress. Still, about five minutes after, Demi is doing situps while hanging upside down from some undefined structure, maybe a boiler, and the size of her breasts does not exactly match the idea of a stressed woman whose body fat was just drained out by sheer exhaustion. (yes, I know. I said it was a cheap shot)

Someone compared this movie with Alien. Please, please, please. Sigourney Weaver is way more convincing than Demi Moore as a fighter, she doesn't even need to shave her hair to look tough, and the alien idea is way more fascinating than tough women in kaki doing special ops missions. Which takes me to the core of what ticked me off badly in this movie.

The final real battle presents us with some fine american heroes who try and challenge dangerous foes, battling to secure safe return to their buddies, and bravely waiting for their commander to join them after being separated in action, because their motto is: you never leave your people behind. All nice and good.

Oh, I forgot. The mission of which the SEALs cadets are part is intended to rescue a satellite (not clear whether it's a spy satellite or not, some sort of military implement anyway) which has fallen down from the sky... in Libia. It's actually an armed intrusion in a sovereign country (whether you like Gheddafi or not), and the SEALs, including the noble commander, think nothing of shooting enemy soldiers who, as far as the movie shows, are regular grunts working the beat, little more than police patrols. They happen to carry RPGs, but none cares to shoot a rocket at the american soldiers. The proud commander gets two bullets, arm and leg, and is valiantly pulled out of the mine field the american soldiers prepared to welcome the pursuing soldiers by none else than Demi Moore. Twenty to thirty soldiers buy it in the meantime, notably not one of the americans gets as much as a scratch ("buy it" meaning to die - this being the military jargon to say that someone rests under two meters of dirt, or "bought a farm").

So the heroic deeds that the brave SEALs do are basically black ops, stuff that is probably (probably because I don't know the details of the laws covering these cases) considered illegal, the kind of stuff you send double o seven to do, and deny that it ever happened if someone finds out. That might be realistic, but consider the relationship with the rest of the movie, which is along the lines of: everyone has freedom of choosing how to live his or her life, no matter if a bra is needed or not, military hierarchies should be sensitive to the issue of sexual discrimination, blah blah... btw we don't give a fuck who else we have to kill for whatever menial purpose, such as recovering some high technology we happened to drop outside our borders, they are just cannon fodder we use for show, and a good replacement for the "real training" mission we were about to carry out in the Mediterranean sea.

Just now some funny coincidences struck me: Mediterranean, Libia, americans, stuff dropping from the sky. My limited knowledge of Italian recent history (yes, I admit that, I don't know shit of what has happened in my home country in the last sixty+ years) rings a couple of bells, Ustica and Sigonella (Achille Lauro, anyone?), but that needs a lot more researching into before I can say any more without sounding just stupid.

Leaving aside any consideration on the specific american vs rest of the world topic, the point is that, just like in Black Hawk Down, Ridley Scott does a nice clean job of presenting the american side as the righteous one, even when the situation is at least blurry when it comes to right and wrong, and american heroes seem more or less invincible. More to the point, one side gets a good characterization, a plot, actual people, the other gets only shooting targets or inept enemies. That sounds just like propaganda, dehumanizing the enemy while trying to make you cry about your officers citing poetry and your grunts becoming all for women rights and respect. Frankly, I cannot remember another couple of movies so embarassingly... mmm what's the best word for this? racist? since John Wayne was shooting Indians in the Wild West... should I say Native Americans? Well not if you watch the movies, I'm not referring to Geronimo, Sitting Bull or Red Cloud, I'm referring to the savages attacking the good ole pale faces, scalping and torturing whenever they could. Pity they learnt scalping from some guy from Great Britain, who used to do that back in the 13th century... have to dig up that name too...

End of story, I'll not waste my time watching any other Ridley Scott movie. I loved Blade Runner, Alien and Thelma and Louise, and The Gladiator is also a great movie, one in which he manages to do exactly the opposite, both sides are nicely described, the characters seem almost real, you can feel sympathy, of a sort, even for the evil Emperor... but the only other good movie I've seen is American Gangster. Seems like the best of Scott's production is in the remote past.

How to be posh AND NOT posh at the same time?

For those not acquainted with the English term "posh", WordNet says it means: "classy: elegant and fashionable", while britishempire.co.uk glossary gives "Posh: Naval This word, meaning 'superior', is said to come from the P. & O. Steam Navigation Company's abbreviation for the phrase 'Port Outward, Starboard Homeward', where the cabins were the cooler in the Red Sea and so the more attractive to passengers.", which seems like a good explanation of the origin of the word. Nowadays, regular people may use it either in a good or bad sense, exactly as you can use fashionable in both senses, something which is liked by many or something stupid which is liked by many.

So, how is it possible that someone/something is both posh and not posh at the same time? Seems like a logical impossibility, unless one does tricks like punning, and pretending the first posh has the good connotation while the second one has bad connotation. But there is another way: one can be very posh about the way they relate to the world and the people they meet (funny this switch from third singular to third plural: I learned last week that it's a way of avoiding the he/she thing when you don't know or don't want to differentiate the sex of who you are talking about - and also learned and learnt, the first one US English - for once they made the sensible choice of removing an irregularity from the language ;) all the better for us poor foreigners) and very NOT posh about the way they behave themselves, either in relation to other people or in simple everyday actions.

One simple example: would you wash your hands after going to the bathroom to take a leak? Given the availability of water, I'd think this is a necessary act, but let us forget for a second about what we would do. The act of NOT washing your hands should be classified as NOT posh in most situations, regardless of whether washing your hands is posh or just hygienically correct. So in order to be posh and not posh, just treat people you meet haughtily (unless they are evidently your peers or superiors) and do not wash your hands when you take a piss...
I.

P.S. If you don't get the meaning of this post, just email me and I'll explain it properly...

Contradictions?

Last week I was in Germany for a conference (ISWC 2008 in Karlsruhe, for those of you who are into Semantic Web conferences and weren't there), and in the picture you can find two items I found in my hotel room. Eden Hotel, a regular hotel, nothing too fancy and nothing too bad either.
what caught my attention, apart from the suggestive pictures of friendly young ladies, was the co-occurrence of the two items in the same place. Is this a contradiction? A show of hypocrisy? An offense to someone, both those who live by the book and those who live by the movie and could feel that the other item is meant as: this is what you are missing?

Personally, I don't feel strongly either way: the book is just a book, I've read it when I was younger and was told it's full of truth; I've changed my views about that a while ago. I've not seen these specific movies, but I've seen some related ones, and despite what some of my friends maintain, that porno movies have relevant trama and dialogue, I've failed to notice great differences, so I feel that I can safely skip these particular ones without much regret. They are both part of the items you usually find in a hotel room, slightly irritating sometimes but more often just disregarded until you check out. Like shampoo bottles, or the small soap pieces you usually get: the soap is crap, and there is never enough of it, or too much for what you need, and the rest goes wasted or recycled for the next visitor, and I'm not sure which alternative I find more disturbing... Point in favor of the Eden Hotel, it has none of the stuff: the soap and shampoo come in big sized containers, attached to the walls. Easy to use, you squeeze out what you need. Just the simplest solution.

So, might it be that gospel and porno together are the simplest solution? You have everything available, just pick what you like in the amount you prefer. By the way, you'll get charged more for porno than for the gospel. Well, that detail, it figures. You may be chased down the street by preachers, but hot chicks, it's often the case that you have to pay (/end of cynical joke).

Or maybe the whole thing is a lot less emotionally charged. Like in: we live here in this small city, we're doing all right, we sort of believe in god, we believe in love and we love sex, we got our little red light district (seriously little - it was like fifty meters from stem to stern) and we don't make too much a fuss about which part of our life you like more... mmm need to ask some German about what's their view on this. Off and out, I.