Saturday, March 22, 2008
The following was excised from a recent discussion on global warming in "The Age" newspaper,
as documented by The Australian:
as documented by The Australian:
- "Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment, though they have become extremely rare now. It is tempting to the layman to embrace with enthusiasm the latest bleak scenario because it fits the darkness of our soul, the prevailing cultural pessimism. The imagination, as Wallace Stevens once said, is always at the end of an era. But we should be asking, or expecting others to ask, for the provenance of the data, the assumptions fed into the computer model, the response of the peer review community, and so on. Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue.)" - Ian McEwan
The missing sentences do not appear anywhere else in The Age's version of the essay. The attribution reads: "Copyright Ian McEwan 2008" and there is no acknowledgment of editing by The Age.
Why did the paper decide to offer its readers McEwan lite? Was he, I wonder, consulted on the matter? And isn't there a nice irony that The Age chose to delete the line about ideologues not being very good at "absorbing inconvenient fact"?
Labels: global warming, religion, science
¶ 6:33 PM
Comments:
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Look at it this way: that's how the books of the Bible achieved their current form. Maybe you found an early variant of "I McEwan" (first McEwan).
Joking aside, I'm pretty sure that editing without permission is a violation of international copyright law. And even with permission, readers should be told it is an edited version.
Joking aside, I'm pretty sure that editing without permission is a violation of international copyright law. And even with permission, readers should be told it is an edited version.
In my previous blog I had discovered bash.org - it's a collection of conversations from instant messaging chat rooms.
and it cheered me up enormously. Samples:
....
Guillotine: The problem with being Democrat is that if you vote for
Obama, you're sexist. And if you vote for Hilary, you're racist. Its
easy being a Republican. No matter what you're retarded.
....
maiden: the wife is going to acupuncture to help us get pregnant...$65
a week
knightmare: I'd think if she needed little pricks to get pregnant you
would've gotten the job done months ago
....
DRPONEOS: pretty soon nike will open a shoe factory in the USA if the
dollar gets much more worthless
....
Neo-Tokyo: wouldn't you say suicide is a permenant solution to a
temporary problem?
[6]: I'm a Buddhist, I'd say suicide is a temporary solution to a
permanent problem.
....
Rose: ahaha...I remember this one time at a tattoo parlour
Rose: and this girl wanted a tattoo on her lower back
Rose: and she told the artist "yeah, I want something symbolic
Rose: so I wrote "Exit only" in chinese
....
grosslack: Hell is a place of everlasting damnation and fire.
locokamil: Your belief system is thermodynamically unsound.
....
And so on. My favorite:
....
xterm: The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there
should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take
the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
.... news of the weird cheered me up too. ....
I had a nice Easter with the people I'm staying with. The controversies about it never came up, although I was much bemused by the Chinese guest trying to work out the algorithm for setting the day. I guess it's still Easter in the States, so happy Easter!
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and it cheered me up enormously. Samples:
....
Guillotine: The problem with being Democrat is that if you vote for
Obama, you're sexist. And if you vote for Hilary, you're racist. Its
easy being a Republican. No matter what you're retarded.
....
maiden: the wife is going to acupuncture to help us get pregnant...$65
a week
knightmare: I'd think if she needed little pricks to get pregnant you
would've gotten the job done months ago
....
DRPONEOS: pretty soon nike will open a shoe factory in the USA if the
dollar gets much more worthless
....
Neo-Tokyo: wouldn't you say suicide is a permenant solution to a
temporary problem?
[6]: I'm a Buddhist, I'd say suicide is a temporary solution to a
permanent problem.
....
Rose: ahaha...I remember this one time at a tattoo parlour
Rose: and this girl wanted a tattoo on her lower back
Rose: and she told the artist "yeah, I want something symbolic
Rose: so I wrote "Exit only" in chinese
....
grosslack: Hell is a place of everlasting damnation and fire.
locokamil: Your belief system is thermodynamically unsound.
....
And so on. My favorite:
....
xterm: The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there
should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take
the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
.... news of the weird cheered me up too. ....
I had a nice Easter with the people I'm staying with. The controversies about it never came up, although I was much bemused by the Chinese guest trying to work out the algorithm for setting the day. I guess it's still Easter in the States, so happy Easter!
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