let me ask you this: are there any circumstances in which the oil spill would be, roughly, nobody's fault? or is that by definition impossible? what if, you know, they hit a sudden, you know, methane pocket or something that they could not have known was there? or something? or if there was just a bizarre concatenation of extremely unlikely events? what i would say is: you've got to look and see whether anyone was at fault, and if so why and to what extent. but the "it's a fucked-up world" move has to be one of the possibilities. i think rand paul is right, that is, that the whole idea is that we have to hang somebody. we still live for the anthropomorphic explanation: that it has to come back to somebody's greed and evil, who can then be punished; this is just to say that we can't face an amoral material universe. katrina was a beautiful example: it was going to have to turn out to be someone's fault: brownies's, the corps of engineers, the forces of global warming.
now one reason it has to turn out to be someone's fault is that someone has to pay; i mean literally someone's got to pony up the billions. but the impulse is more powerful than that. and working backwards from the disaster, it's going to be extremely easy to see some things that should have been done differently, even if at every moment of not doing things differently, the people involved made sound decisions relative to the information at their disposal, or made the decisions you would have made in their place, etc.
notice i am not saying that no one is at fault. i'm saying that as you do the investigations, that's more or less one of the possibilities. face up. and realize that burning people at the stake will not really expiate their sins or our sins or make the world make moral sense.
i've long argued that there is no - can be no - principled distinction between the natural and the artificial. our pride in human amazingness and distinctiveness - understood theologically or in terms of evolution - is matched by our self-loathing (beautifullly developed in the monotheistic traditions and environmentalism), and we regard our own interventions primarily as destructions. ''pollution' is a nice site of this struggle: pouring artificial poisons of our own invention into a pristine nature. so think about this: the gummy black toxic slop pouring into the gulf of mexico is an entirely natural substance: it hasn't been refined or processed at all; it is the trace of billions of organisms over millions of years; what's going to kill everything is an essence or a remainder of life. all we did was...release it. that is a much better model of us in relation to our world: not standing outside it destroying or conserving it from the heights of consciousness and technology, but issuing slight deflections or articulations of it, wholly from within. if we were to destroy nature (which, i tell you, is by definition impossible) it would be nature devouring itself.
Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal adds some nuance to Naomi Klein’s black-and-white picture of Milton Friedman’s contributions to the Chilean economy, noting how prosperity and effective enforcement of building codes have protected Chilean victims of the recent earthquake from the devastation that Haiti suffered:
“In left-wing mythology—notably Naomi Klein’s tedious 2007 screed “The Shock [...]
So I get home from work yesterday and get on Reddit…
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Yes, this really happened to me yesterday exactly as you see it.
Other fun facts
- I got the VPN yesterday in an attempt to allow myself to buy the goddamn game. Legally. That was a wasted 40 Euros of course but hopefully I’ll be able to use it to watch restricted content. Or you know, maybe not.
- I didn’t download the whole game at 300Kb/s fortunately. I watched a movie for the first 2 hours which allowed the 1.2 Mb/s to continue. However when the movie finished I tried to surf the net while the last 5% where downloading. Then my speed dropped to 300Kb/s and never got over it, thus making the last 8 minutes into 30.
- Yes, my PC did really die within 5 minutes of downloading the game. It was the PSU which gave up the ghost. Hopefully nothing else has been affected from it.
- Of course EA screwed me over by charging the same amount in Euros as they charge in Dollars. Exchange rates be damned.
- I’ve only managed to see the intro screen of Dragon Age and the first few stages of character creation.
And then people ask why Piracy is the better choice…
Insightful? Funny? Informative? Spot On? Helpful?
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