Not What it Seems

Since the Enlightenment our western culture has revered the advances and solutions that science has delivered. It is one of those fields of human endeavour of which we are very proud.

After all, We fought our way up from thinking that all flesh contains the maggots that may crawl out of it from death and that the entire firmament spins about us, the magical centre of the universe to a much more detailed, specific, understood and known set of laws and reasons and consequences. We can make a machine and send it to another planet via a complex set of other machines and operate it from here for years of reseach and images. We can measure things so small that they become unpredictable in their behaviour and so discover another realm of knowledge enticing us forwards, we can split the centre of an atom and power a city with it. In short, we have become wizards. But just like Bod, we also call up things we cannot control.

We introduce Cane Toads to deal with a moth they don't eat, we have no way of dealing with the waste outcomes of splitting atoms, we can clone sheep, but we aren't really sure why we might do that. So we have Wizard Watchers, people versed in the lore of science, and ready to protect the interests of the greater good of humans. We call them ethicists. We trust that they are at the front lines, balancing our powers with our responsibilities, weighing the possible good with the largely unknown dangers, calling upon the broader communities for discussion, awareness, support and concensus.

Oh wait, I obviously strayed into science fiction there for a moment. When was the last time you heard an appeal from an ethicist for debate? Actually can you name an ethicist? Um .... Peter Singer? Is he? Does he count? I don't know.

What I do know, is that when I read a news article this morning about a court granting permission to a 17 year old to remove his breasts after having been on a gender-reassignment hormone treatment since the age of 13 everything seemed to be in order until I came across this quote from the ethicist (I excerpt here from the article, my emphasis added):

'But ethicist Nick Tonti-Filippini said mainstream medicine did not recognise hormone treatments and surgery as treatment for gender dysphoria. He said it was a psychiatric disorder qualifying under American guidelines as a psychosis because "it's a belief out of accordance with reality".
"What you are trying to do is make a biological reality correspond to that false belief." he said.'

Well that set off my "danger danger" antenna. My understanding is that psychosis is an extreme level of measure, a non-functional state of mental operation. A level, let us remember for a moment, that was applied in the not-too-distant-past to creative types ( NZ author) and women not deemed suitably compliant or docile by their husbands and used as an excuse for labotomies, elcetric shock torture and extreme confinement. But also, and perhaps more importantly, the way this has been formulated as being abberant in relation to an objective "reality".

So apparently, whenever any of us have an idea or a wish to use our will to make reality different, we're possibly just plan psychotic. A line like this is inviting criticism of everything from hair dye, tattoos, and dressing in BSG costume through to going to university and even the entire field of science itself. Where does Mr Tonti-Filippini intend to draw the line?

What a double whammy. I presumed that if ethicists exist, they would be humanists. It seems this has been naive. It seems also, that Mr Tonti-Filippini would find many of my behaviours and desires to defy existing reality as being aberrant enough to justify the label psychotic and so deprive me of my capacity to contribute to the human endeavour of growth and expansion (in ways that do not simply involve the multiplication of our number) and nested inside that issue is his presumption of an objective "reality". In the words of Dylan Moran, "Why does no one say, let's be realistic, oil me ?" Why is reality presumed to be locked in, ordered, un-changeable?

It is easy enough to discover that much as Alex in the court case identifies as "he", our ethicist actually identifies himself as "Dr Tonti-Filippini, Catholic bio-ethicist". Ahh. A little bit more detail gives a lot more context to that right-wing quote. Of all the versions of this news story promulgated across the various news sites of the interwebs, no one bothered to do any more than repeat the copy and the flaws of the first story filed.

Proving in the end that judges in courts can still make thoughtful, humanist decisions, but we only hear about them through the irritating whine of bigots masquerading as informed specialists and the haze of lazy journalism. We, in the form of science have created from our own efforts amazing tools, but we clog their workings ourselves.

I welcome our robot overlords.

Trojan Catholics Decimate Australian Defences

I blame the Catholics for the recession/depression (have we decided yet which it is? I've been wagging my current affairs sessions).
YES YOU HEARD ME! The Fracking Catholics.
It seems like no one is brave enough (a slight exaggeration: allowable under 'Creative Commons: Poetic Licence') to stand up to their "my invisible friend is bigger than you and your invisible friend" crap and tell the Truth^TM.

Well here it is; the walls to the Australian economy were opened by World Youth Day 2008.

Oh Yeah. I went there.
The sub-prime crisis? The slowdown of China? Simply acts 2 and 3 to the opening volley fired by the Catholics.

Allow me to plagiarise a small section of David Marr's excellent essay "The Rise & Fall of 2008"(SMH Good Weekend 13Dec08) present some facts.

In July of 2008, after an agonisingly do-gooder buildup, Sydney was constipated by Catholics clogging the city's causeways (except that the City closed off hundreds of streets and asked all 9000 Cityrail staff to work all days). This catastrophic incursion had been anticipated in the possible millions, but only 223 000 turned up. Shame really, we'd catered for about 5 million, given the Randwick racecourse $42mill in venue hire fees (hope they threw in the PA for that!), set the 'annoyance laws' in place (that allowed for a fine of $5000 per offence) (until the full Bench found in July that these laws were invalid, but too late - they were current for the duration of the WYD event) and perhaps most generously (especially in light of other more token funding gestures), the State Government in a festive spirit despite the humbugs chipped-in towards the party with about $120mill.

Much as that's kinda annoying, that's not all of it.
Oh no. I mean, we could probably afford to host a party (let's see $120mill between 223k guests, that's about $538 per head. You get very noice entrees for that) but what we didn't see coming, was the biological attack. That's right, the dreaded Pilgrim Flu that washed through the city. Then? Then it mutated with the general Flu and spread throughout the country, taking down the people it struck for an average of 3 weeks.
I don't have any concrete idea what that ended up costing us, but sick leave in Australia this year came to nearly $27bill.

So, if you're shitted off about the economy right now or how crap Australian films are, or just pretty much in general (and who isn't?) then consider boycotting either Christmas or politicians (or both). After all, it is human nature to prefer to have someone to blame and it will make you feel better.

I feel better, don't you?

This rant presented with the support of a double shot of "Merlo Coffee: Blended, Roasted and Packed in Australia" (but not grown - don't get too excited) and by the letter C.