Things that were not immediately obvious to me

Thinking about the Geert Wilders matter, it occurred to me that, once you abandon the principle of untrammeled free speech, there’s no particular reason you couldn’t make laws “self-defending”. For instance, you could pass a statute like this:

• Every adult American citizen must adopt one tarantula
• It shall be illegal to advocate the alteration of this statute

A silly example, sure, but I can’t see anything logically wrong with it. This occurred to me because Wilders is apparently charged with “incitement to hatred and discrimination” — a pretty broad claim. Could an argument be made that advocating the repeal of laws against “incitement to hatred and discrimination” is, itself, “incitement to hatred and discrimination”?

I don’t see why not. Once you criminalize the advocacy of X, it seems but a short step to criminalizing the advocacy of any action obviously tailored to promote X, such as the repeal of laws against X, or against the advocacy of X.

The Law: “You can’t incite hatred!”

Some Dude: “I hate C# programmers! Everyone knows they use spaces instead of tabs!”

The Law: “Hey, you’re going to jail.”

Other Dude: “We’ve got to change the law! It’s interfering with our ability to bash C# programmers!”

The Law: “Hey, you just incited hatred. You’re going to jail.”

Yet Other Dude: “We’ve got to change the law! It’s interfering with our ability to speak in vague ways that I can’t go into!”

The Law: “Look, the law only interferes with your ability to incite hatred. The only reason you’d need to change it is if you wanted to encourage hatred. In fact, repealing the law would encourage hatred, so arguing for its repeal is tantamount to incitement. You’re going to jail.”

This is, of course, a far-fetched and ridiculous scenario and line of argument. But since I believe that people mostly construct intellectual arguments to justify pre-determined emotional conclusions, the ridiculousness of the argument does not reassure me that it will never be employed.

The right to free speech must be jealously guarded.

Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician perhaps best known for some controversial stances vis-a-vis Islam. He’s currently on trial for “incitement to hatred and discrimination”.

Frankly, I don’t think that should be a crime. Hatred and discrimination may be unlovely, but they are part of the human condition; as a society we “hate” genocidal lunatics, and we discriminate against criminals by, e.g., putting them in jail and denying them the vote. Arguments over who to hate and how to discriminate are essential to a democracy. Or, to put it another way, many vital arguments can be cast as “incitements to hatred and discrimination” by those who would otherwise lose them.

I recognize the right of the people of the Netherlands to live under whatever laws they please. I will say only that I would not want to live under a regime that criminalizes the advocacy of the defense of Western culture, even when such advocacy runs to calls for policies that may be ill-advised.

A few days ago I went out to take some pictures of “spider alley” — a 5 foot gap between a narrow hedge and fence that attracts some impressive specimens — but some goofball had apparently blundered through and knocked down all the webs. (He must have been … surprised … when he realized what he’d done.) All I could get were some shots of the hedge-dwellers, who were numerous, but a little boring. (Most looked to be representatives of the same species, as opposed to the alley-dwellers, who display more variety.)

Autofocus

Spiders can be a little hard to photograph. They’re small(ish), their webs tend to move a lot in even a light breeze, and they tend to “float” in space in a way that confuses the heck out of an autofocus camera. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up with something like the photo on the left.

Now, if you have a SLR or something else that lets you focus manually, that’s great. With a point-and-shoot, you have to get a little tricky. The solution is to force the AF to focus on something at about the right distance (usually by pressing/holding the shutter halfway down) and then move the camera into position relative to the subject. This requires you to manually judge focus based on the camera’s LCD image, but it can produce impressive results.

Amputee

I feel a little bad for this guy. I photographed him because he was a nice big fellow, and because I could get his dorsal side (most of the other spiders were on the “inside” of their webs). When I got home and looked at him full-size, I noticed that he seems to be missing a leg. (The right front, if I’m not mistaken.) He’s still out there hunting, so good luck to him.

(As a side note, when I was walking away from the hedge — which is covered with spider webs — I noticed that a small moth/butterfly had landed on it. “Hope your life insurance is paid up, buddy”, I thought. Nature: Red in tooth and claw.)

It recently came to my attention that there are intelligent 20-somethings, sporting educations from respected universities, who don’t know who Pol Pot was. This reflects little discredit on them — after all, it’s not your fault if you’ve never been told — but it really ought to be remedied.

Pol Pot was the dictator of Cambodia from 1976 to 1979, in which time he managed to slaughter around 2 million (or 20%) of his own people. His methods were as unpleasant as you might imagine.

Pol Pot was a Marxist and ally of the People’s Republic of China. A man of the left. While it is indisputable that the vast majority of leftists would disapprove of Pol Pot, it should never be forgotten that leftist ideals and policies can culminate in atrocities such as those visited upon the Cambodians.

From The Big Lebowski:

Walter Sobchak: Nihilists! F*** me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.

So there’s this dude. (Not The Dude, of course!) He spends 5 years writing a 1,905 page … well, 1,905 pages which he sums up this way:

Every word, every thought, and every emotion come back to one core problem: life is meaningless … The experiment in nihilism is to seek out and expose every illusion and every myth, wherever it may lead, no matter what, even if it kills us.

Than he blows his brains out. In public. I guess he wanted to make a statement. So do I, and you can read it below.

Continue reading →