Why write?

[Writing] begins with an appetite to discover my self-respect. To redeem the day. So the day does not go down in debt. It begins with that kind of appetite. 

- Leonard Cohen

Snyder's Nazi References are Not a Violation of Godwin's Law

There is a provocative article by historian Timothy Snyder connecting our climate quandaries with Hitlerian delusions.

I would like to speak in defense of the article - I do not know if I will feel inclined to defend Snyder's work in general as this is the first I've heard of it.

It's quite an intense and unusual piece. For instance:

The Holocaust may seem a distant horror whose lessons have already been learned. But sadly, the anxieties of our own era could once again give rise to scapegoats and imagined enemies, while contemporary environmental stresses could encourage new variations on Hitler’s ideas, especially in countries anxious about feeding their growing populations or maintaining a rising standard of living.

Of course it immediately drew fire as a violation of Godwin's Law. Breakthrough Institute's Mike Shellenberger was quick on the draw.

Apparently oblivious of Godwin's Law, Yale professor @TimothyDSnyder says climate deniers" are like Hitler.

I find this a superficial criticism. Starting a conversation specifically about Nazis is inherently not a violation of Godwin.

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1" 

"there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress." 

"Godwin's law applies especially to inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons of other situations (or one's opponent) with Nazis – often referred to as "playing the Hitler card". The law and its corollaries would not apply to discussions covering known mainstays of Nazi Germany ... if that was the explicit topic of conversation, because a Nazi comparison in those circumstances may be appropriate"

===

Godwin's law is set to expire soon. The youngest person to have a clear memory of Nazi power will be nearly 80 years old now.

I knew many holocaust survivors including my own parents; most of them have passed on or are at best not following political discourse closely. I was an early enforcer of Godwin back when no one outside usenet had heard of it, but I'm less of one now. Atrocities eventually fade into history. We need to learn from them, not bury them in respect for the feelings of people no longer paying attention.

Snyder's invocation of "denying" in his closing paragraph does seem deliberately provocative. BTI's Shellenberger finds it irresistible to tweet:

Apparently oblivious of Godwin's Law, Yale professor @TimothyDSnyder says climate deniers" are like Hitler.

But this hardly seems oblivious. To the contrary, Snyder is willing to connect some dots that urgently need connecting.

In the end, this is about human history. A serious historian asserting that consequences have begun is timely and important. This speaks of climate in a language that is accessible to many powerful people who have dismissed the problem to date.

===

The fact that we experienced climate warriors may find this article strange and unsettling may be a feature, not a bug.

Once, a few years ago, trapped in an airport without any of my own reading material, I found myself reading a book by Fareed Zakariah about the geopolitics of the 21st century. The book never even mentioned climate change. I felt I was reading about a different planet, but it probably attained more readers than any contemporaneous book which faced our circumstances realistically.

In speaking in terms of power and history rather than in scientific or geophysical language, I wonder if Snyder will not be able to reach audiences focused on power and politics who have somehow not come to terms with our collective quandary.

===

By the way, Jim Hansen casually violated Godwin a few years back. His comparisons then seem to me far less considered than Snyder's. Still, maybe it's the passage of time and the passing of my parents and their siblings and their cohort from this world, but it bothers me less now than it did then.

It is time to start considering the enormity of our folly as a fair topic for conversation.

Climate Modeling is A Success, But Maybe We Can Do Much Better Still

I have an essay to this effect at And Then There's Physics.

Managing Without Growth

This is a one-hour lecture. But I think it's worth the time.

Some tweets on the futility of growth

My tweets of this morning, slightly edited for legibility:

Literal growth in children is good while growth in adults is unhealthy.

Why is the case not similar in economies?

In speaking of growth people usually mean GDP.

Even if wealth mapped to well-being, which I doubt, GDP growth doesn't imply wealth increase.

If I sell you a chair for $30 on MWF and you buy it back for $30 on TuThSa, we have increased GDP by $180 that week and achieved nothing. No one is the wealthier.

If someone stops cooking at home and starts cooking similar meals at a restaurant which their family buys with the restaurant salary, GDP increases. But no one is the wealthier.

GDP measures effort, not result.

Increasing GDP would mean more employment, not necessarily better well-being, except now we have robots to do the work.

The sound historical reasons to connect meaningful work and income have broken down, and much "work" becomes meaningless and demeaning.

People need meaningful ways to spend their time and reliable ways to allocate resources. Tradition and history have coupled these needs. Nowadays, though, things which need doing and which people otherwise would do are left undone, because people must be employed in activities where there is a surplus, so they can allocate resources.

There are plenty of resources to go around. We are not struggling to create wealth, we are struggling to allocate it. It's maladaptive. People aren't starving because there isn't enough food available. There's plenty. People starve because they can't allocate any for themselves.

Also, The Impossible Hamster

How we talk about extreme events nowadays

Batting Average Change: an analogy to climate change/severe events discourse. Suppose a hitter has improved batting average this year
Now you see the batter get a base hit. Somebody asks you whether the base hit was because of the improved batting average.

The alarmist says "Of course the base hit was caused by the batting average! Batting averages cause hits!"
The Polyanna says "Obviously not! In fact, the base hit has nothing to do with the batting average!"

The journalist sees that truth must be somewhere in between. https://drboli.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/the-duck/ … SOME hits are caused by batting average, some not The wise scientist publishes a paper attributing 20% of the base hit to the improved batting average, the rest to natural variation. 

This happens every time there is a base hit. For some reason, this discourse illuminates nobody.

Writing Exercise

Took a 90 minute workshop on food writing.

 The thing I learned is that, while I was trained to stop using adjectives in college, for a non-academic audience, adjectives are good. So this is my attempt to re-adjectivate my writing.

 The exercise was to write whatever you were inspired to write by a paper plate containing a fig and a walnut.

People liked mine. I cleaned it up a bit but not too much. Here the lovely, adjectival, effusive, evocative, sentimental and personal thing is in all its overweening glory.

 ===

WHAT IS NOT ON THE PLATE 

A walnut half and a fig. Our distant ancestors would have taken such delight.
It's an atavistic plate, an ancient masterpiece.
One can imagine such a delight in the dynasties of Egypt. 

But not for the pharaoh, no, the plate demands more. 

Some goat cheese, a splash of balsamic vinegar, a dab of honey.
Broil it for a few moments.
And surely a glass of red wine. 

The fruity, sticky grit of the fig
The wild sweetness of the honey
The intricate pungency of the aged vinegar
The earthy smoothness of the goat cheese
The toothy sweet crunch of the toasted walnut
And the slow savoring of the cool, glowing, bittersweet wine. 

Bring on the pipers, the drums, the dancers, the jugglers, the fool!
Nothing has changed. 

Cooking is an old old story, but it is made new on every telling.

===

 The crowd really thought I had nailed it.

But I had to stop myself from apologizing just the same. You know what another food analogy is? Schmalz.

The top emitters and our quandary

ABC of Australia has provided a cute embeddable widget (*) to help visualize the emissions problem:

We see that these 15 "contribute" (if that's the right word. "dyscontribute"?) well over half of ongoing emissions.

Also, some interesting observations by Ken Caldeira cited by Joe Romm, which I will steal because they are worth considering:

There is some noise around the idea that it useful to think about some amount of “allowable CO2 emissions budget” that would keep the world under 2 C of global warming.

This concept is dangerous for two reasons:

1. There are no such things as an “allowable CO2 emissions.” There are only “damaging CO2 emissions” or “dangerous CO2 emissions.” Every CO2 emission causes additional damage and creates additional risk. Causing additional damage and creating additional risk with our CO2 emissions should not be allowed.

2. If you look at how our politicians operate, if you tell them you have a budget of XYZ, they will spend XYZ. Politicians will reason: “If we’re not over budget, what’s to stop us to spending? Let the guys down the road deal with it when the budget has been exceeded.” The CO2 emissions budget framing is a recipe for delaying concrete action now.

We should be framing the issue around what we need to do today: stop building things with tailpipes and smokestacks and start retiring the things we have already built that do have tailpipes and smokestacks. Stop using the sky as a waste dump for our CO2 emission.

These are things that we can hold politicians accountable to today. Trying to hold politicians to a budget that will be reached 30 years in the future is a recipe for disaster.

If our current crop of politicians is any indication, it is unreasonable to expect politicians to feel constrained by something that might happens 30 years from now, long after they have left office.

The key point is that every CO2 emission is bad; the budget for “allowable CO2 emissions” should be zero.

When I emit CO2, I am transgressing against nature and future generations. It is not something allowed; it is a violation.

As long as we are still building CO2-emitting devices, the politicians are failing, and we must hold them accountable for their failure today, not 30 years into the future.

So, in short, we have two problems. First, all of this emission is fundamentally illegitimate. Second, there is no global sovereignty to allocate the pain of slowing down, so in negotiations each nation jockeys for position to minimize its own commitment.So even in the unlikely event of successful negotiations, they will be inadequate.

The fact that no power speaks for the earth as a whole is systematically killing the earth.

===

(*) Actually, the widget is sort of gratuitous, and they'll probably take it down someday anyway, so here are the three views for later reference if the link breaks:

How Times Change

Seen on Facebook. Artist unidentified (attribution appreciated).

Image by Pierre Brignaud, a fellow Montrealer. The drawing won third prize in a contest, which had an award of absolutely nothing whatsoever:

3ème prix bidon: Un concours international de dessin d'humour organisé par un organisme renommé du Québec dont je tairai le nom m'a décerné le 3ème prix pour le thème : Humour noir.

Le premier prix : 2500$, 2ème et 3ème... Rien...

La première fois que je gagne un prix absolument sans valeur et qui me fait vraiment honte!

The Original Spartacus A P Pepsi Cola Oriental Restaurant

Well, I'm trying to pull together some longer writing and trying to keep my mind intact in the light of the fact that battle these days seems to be between the forces of malicious self-aggrandizement versus the forces of ignorant self-righteousness. Between that and having a cold and dealing with another aging relative, today I just couldn't cope.

I just wandered off to a Chinese buffet for some self indulgent soup and fried things and noodles. Irene being too sane to accompany me on this modest bit of self-destruction, I grabbed a book at random.

I don't recall why I purchased Daniel Pinkwater's memoir Chicago Days, Hoboken Nights in the first place.

I had been mildly amused by his monologues on NPR back in the days when I had to drive a lot and when All Things Considered was still a tolerable listen, before it too fallen prey to the forces of journalistic cowardice and compulsive difference-splitting that have pretty much destroyed the American collective capacity to think about any damned thing.

Maybe it was on special. I'm a sucker for a book bargain.

I recall reading it, and being mildly amused.

But Irene has this thing, you know, being a retired OCD and hoarding treatment specialist, this thing where you shouldn't have a collection of things that is too much bigger than the capacity of the house which contains it. And we're down to 1100 square feet, no attic or basement to speak of, and just two smallish closets. (Which by human historical standards is luxurious and all, to be sure. And it is a very nice little apartment with a spectacular location; please understand I'm not complaining.)

But the thing is, there's a perpetual battle where I want more bookshelves and Irene wants to me to own no more books than I will be able to read in my remaining years, as my mind continues to dwindle to a shadow of its former self.

So there have been several rounds of collecting up hundreds of books and selling them for two cents on the dollar to a reseller. Every time, I considered giving away this mildly amusing little book, read a few random paragraphs, chuckled, and spared it from recycling.

Today I started reading it again. I can't really explain how or why I suddenly adore this book so much. Maybe there's some nostalgic sentimentality for the twentieth century that couldn't really come into bloom until the time itself really began to fade.

I'm not sure how much value this book will be to people who are younger, unless they are writing period fiction set in the sixties. But somehow, despite its themes of incompetence and poor taste and failure and greed, to me it amounts to a celebration of the human spirit.

It's all non-fiction, but written by a guy with an eye for the stranger corners of the world, and who seems to belong there. This is a slice of the comedy hidden in the tragedy of gritty urban life in the middle of the 20th century. I've been there, but somehow nothing I write is like this, chosen literally at random:

Overall, my reaction to fashion food is this: ha! You may blacken all the redfish you like - I know there is nothing apt to be discovered or invented to surpass what I have experienced long years past.

I speak of the Original Spartacus A P Pepsi Cola Oriental Restaurant - the ultimate. It was known to regulars as the Original Spartacus - the sign outside displayed the full-length enigmatic handle. ... It was a Greek restaurant. In the same sense that Praxiteles was a stonemason. Dim and dingy, lit by a few fluorescent fixtures, no one of the with more than one bulb working, it was frequented by artists, communists, and Puerto Rican cab drivers, some of whom were artists and communists.

The walls bore one of the last examples of the work of the Mad Muralist - a specialist in Levantine and Middle Eastern restaurants, whose hallmarks were stencils and silver radiator paint. In the case of the Original Spartacus, the motif was many silver Acropoles applied at various angles to the blue walls.

There was no menu as such. Jimmy, the proprietor, sized you up and served you what he thought you needed. Some of Jimmie's creations were boiled porgies, dandelion salad, incredible tender lamb with orzo, coffee to raise the dead, and a sort of custard I've never encountered again.

The price for all this was determined by Jimmy's assessment of how much you appreciated his work. If you left anything on your plate, the price went up.

For page after page, Pinkwater has me somehow wishing I were there again and yet immensely glad that I'm not anymore. At the same time. Pretty much how I feel about my own time and place, except in reverse. I guess life's like that. But not everyone has the knack of reminding you.

I failed to fully appreciate Pinkwater's special knack for telling a colorful story over the years, and yet I saw it well enough to keep this odd little book while I let go of so many others.

I'm glad I kept it long enough to appreciate it for the gem that it is. And I'm glad I can recommend it to you in this day of instant gratification. You can get it on your Kindle for less than a buck.

I'm gladdest of all to note that despite being even fatter and more self-indulgent than myself, Daniel Pinkwater is alive and well enough to still be producing whatever the hell it is that he produces. I hope he'll notice this little review, and that he will accept my thanks for brightening a blazingly bright and ominously hot but otherwise spiritually gloomy Texas day.

Whaddya know, Pinkwater, you've been a Zen master all this time and didn't even know it.