My most recent weekly column at GuildMag is now online. The vast majority of links are to Beta Weekend Event articles of praise, complaint, suggestion, and regret that it’s over. The next event has not been announced, although ArenaNet had planned to have them on an approximately monthly basis until formal launch.
May 4, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
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Gordon O’Connor on the abortion debate
A fascinating moment in the House of Commons, as related by the editors at Maclean’s:
And then Gordon O’Connor rose from his seat on the government side, immediately behind the Prime Minister. O’Connor, a retired brigadier-general, is the chief Conservative whip — the living symbol, in other words, of the ministry’s discipline and unity. His words bit with surprising sharpness. “The House of Commons . . . is not a laboratory,” he admonished Woodworth. “It is not a house of faith, an academic setting or a hospital. It is a legislature, and a legislature deals with law.” The Criminal Code definition of a human being, he said, is not a medical one; it is a purely legal test defining the moment when personal rights receive protection independent from those of the mother. It is quite reasonable, he added, that this should happen at the moment of their physical separation.
O’Connor went further. He denounced the oft-repeated right-wing heckle that abortion is “unregulated” in Canada. It happens to be absent from the criminal law, O’Connor observed, but the provinces regulate their medical professions, and the doctors in turn regulate their own conduct. The provincial governments and the medical colleges have agreed that since abortion cannot be abolished, it ought to be provided safely by, and to those whose private judgment allows for it. “The decision of whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is essentially a moral decision,” said the whip, “and in a free and democratic society, the conscience of the individual must be paramount and take precedence over that of the state.”
O’Connor concluded by reaffirming that the Conservative determination not to reopen Canada’s abortion debate is unwavering. “Society has moved on and I do not believe this proposal should proceed,” he said. “As well, it is in opposition to our government’s position. Accordingly I will not support [this] motion. I will vote against it and I recommend that others oppose it.” [. . .]
What is interesting about O’Connor’s brief speech is that it frames reproductive choice as a matter of small-C conservative principles. He appealed not only to libertarian considerations of individual conscience, but to the idea that regulations should be made at the political level closest to the citizen. Viewed in this light, the Harper rule against legislating on abortion is not just a convenient, cynical means to social peace and election success. It suggests the influence within the government caucus of a Charter-friendly breed of conservative, one whose first instinct is not always to “stand athwart history yelling, stop.”
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A skeptical review of Get Real
Tim Black reviews the new book Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions by Eliane Glaser, calling it “enjoyably hyperactive”, but also pointing out some quite glaring flaws:
Politicians marshalling an army of PR consultants to appear authentic. Multinational companies selling products with folksy, homespun brands. Public inquiries that have nothing to do with the public. The paradoxes proliferate in journalist and academic Eliane Glaser’s enjoyably hyperactive new book, Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions. Her ambition is overarching: she wants to show us the way to the truth of the matter. She wants to cut through the crap. She wants us to follow the royal road of social critique. In short, she wants us to see things for what they are. (A bit rubbish, as it turns out.)
[. . .]
Glaser is even better when it comes to ‘scientism’. Awe-struck deference is everywhere, she argues, from Brian Cox’s television series Wonders of the Universe to the World of Wonders science museum in California. ‘Scientific wonder carries with it a sense of humility, which is ostensibly about meekness in the face of extraordinary facts’, she writes. ‘But it blurs into deference towards scientists, with their privileged access to those facts.’ Indeed, anything that Stephen Hawking says, be it about the existence of God or the plight of the planet, is treated as if it comes straight from the oracle’s mouth. ‘In modern culture, scientism is the new religion. God knows what happened to scepticism.’
This conflation of fact with value, this belief that science, having seemingly supplanted moral and political reasoning, can tell us what to do, is highly damaging, Glaser argues. Political decisions, necessitated by science, become a fait accompli. So when, in 2009, US President Barack Obama lifted the ban on federal funding for stem-cell research, he felt no need to make a moral, political case for the decision: ‘The promise that stem cells hold does not come from any particular ideology; it is the judgement of science.’ This is not to say that stem-cell research is a bad thing; rather, it is to say that a politician needs to make the case for it being a good thing.
Yet while there is plenty of critique in Get Real, there is plenty that is unquestioned, too. So no sooner has Glaser put scientism on the rack than, a few pages on, she’s espousing its most prominent manifestation: environmentalism. The chapter even begins with some all-too-persuasive facts from the mouths of Those To Whom We Must Defer: ‘Climate scientists generally agree that the safe limit for the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 350 parts per million (ppm). As I write this, we’re already at 390ppm.’ She soon proceeds to read off a number of Malthus-heavy assertions passed off as fact: ‘Global warming, population explosion, peak oil, biodiversity in freefall: Planet Earth is facing unprecedented and multiple crises. It is little wonder, therefore, that as the situation becomes more desperate, self-deception becomes more attractive. If the world is turning into a desert, it’s tempting to put your head in the sand.’
It’s a bizarre reversal. Having eviscerated the deference towards science in one section, in another she proceeds to lambast those who resist the science for their ‘denialism’. It does not seem to occur to Glaser that a principal reason for opposing the environmental orthodoxy is that it attempts to pass off a moral and political argument about how we should live our lives — low-consumption, little procreation and an acceptance of economic stagnation — as a scientific necessity. Could there be a more flagrant form of the scientism that Glaser so eloquently takes to task elsewhere?
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Printed electronics: from gimmick to gizmo
Bill Ray looks at some companies working in the printed electronics field:
“Printed electronics” is one of those terms one sees being bandied about without really knowing what it means or why it’s important. The premise of using printing techniques to create electrical circuits isn’t hard to comprehend, but not everyone agrees on what comprises a “printing technique” or why you might want to use one, so El Reg chatted to three companies at the forefront of the field.
According to these firms, the new printing technique is going to change the literal fabric upon which the electronics industry rests. That’s important as it’s not the electronics which change as a result of the printing process, but rather the material on which those electronics rest. So instead of being etched on silicon the circuits can be laid onto steel, plastic, or even paper, and it’s that change of substrate which links all the various techniques and makes printed electronics so exciting.
[. . .]
This is in contrast to Silicon Valley’s Kovio, which steps away from standard printing equipment but still uses ink-jet techniques to lay down working RFID chips onto a flexible steel substrate.
The mechanism is the same as a desktop ink-jet, only instead of ink the jets squirt out ca conductor into wires as little as eight microns thick, making up chips which will run up to 40MHz or so. But Kovio can print a lot of them very cheaply and hopes to get the Near Field Communications (NFC) standard extended to include its vision of printed RF barcodes, powered by induction from the reading device and able to respond with a standardised serial number.
[. . .]
Such a step is taken by PragmatIC, another Cambridge-based company and one we’ve mentioned before thanks to their light-up beer bottles and induction-powered screens. PragmatIC doesn’t so much print electronics as imprint them, creating a sandwich of materials and then, using a pre-cut die, press down and carve out the shape required.
That might be taking the concept a long way from printing, though PragmatIC reckons it takes printing back to its roots. Imprinting is also the process used to stamp out CDs and Blu-Ray disks, and so is known to work within very strict tolerances. PragmatIC reckons it can get down to 100nm objects placed with 10nm accuracy, leading to transistors around a square-micron in size which (PragmatIC claims) is comparable to silicon technologies.
That means chips can be made cheaper, but more importantly they can be laid onto any surface (there’s no baking in the PragmatIC process) so electronics can be dropped onto the back of polypropylene labels to create the flashing beer bottle or similar, assuming one can find a battery to power it and an LED to light up.
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Conrad Black is now, in Margaret Atwood’s words, “a very informed and outspoken commentator on prison reform”
Margaret Wente on the return of Conrad Black:
Margaret Atwood is delighted that Conrad Black is coming back to Canada. “He has a lot to say and contribute,” she e-mailed from New York on Wednesday. But she thinks the Harper government may not be delighted. Lord Black, she notes, “is now a very informed and outspoken commentator on prison reform, and does not think the government’s expensive mega-jails plan will work.”
Believe it or not, Ms. Atwood and Lord Black have become BFF. When Payback, her book on debt, came out in 2008, he gave it a favourable review from his jail cell. She likes his book too. “Conrad Black’s A Matter of Principle is a fascinating, erudite, & defiant prison memoir — must-read for lawyers, politicos, & gossips alike!” she tweeted after it came out last fall. Lord Black even made a guest appearance in the new documentary based on her book. At the premiere, she declared that he is “a new and different kind of Conrad.”
[. . .]
During his 37 months as a guest of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, Lord Black experienced several jailhouse conversions. Most notably, he became an impassioned advocate for prison reform. U.S. prisons, he argues, are full of millions of innocent, near-innocent, impoverished, unlucky wretches who are victims of “the carceral state.” He is convinced that the war on drugs is an abject failure, and he has called the Harper government’s crime policies “sadistic and malicious.” Not even Mr. Mulcair went that far.
Lord Black has also fallen out of love with the United States, a nation he once idolized. “Its greatness survives, certainly, despite chronic misgovernment, but my affection for it has faded,” he has written. Last fall he wrote that after his release, “I will leave the United States forever, all passion spent.” He has also rekindled a genuine appreciation for Canada, a nation he harshly criticized for years. The rapacious capitalism he once celebrated is less attractive to him now. He seems to have developed — dare I say it? — a social conscience.
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