Facebook causes always have nice titles. They sound sane and sensible. Even so, I’ve always been careful not to join causes which I do not support. Things like animal rights etc.
So today, I went to check out my causes page. Turns out that I had only signed up for 2 causes whoses titles I agree with, since those titles are so broad and general as to render them appealing.
But when I went to click on the causes page, turns out that they have this bunch of “stated positions” as well, which I just cannot agree with.
Hence, I left both causes.
Let’s see why.
The first cause that came to my attention was:
STOP caLLing MUSLIMS TERRORISTS !
Fine enough. After all, Muslims aren’t terrorists, though many terrorists are Muslims. But of course, most Muslims aren’t. Important to get one’s sets and subsets right before going around hurling abuse.
But then, I saw the Cause’s position, for the first time:
- The majority Muslims are peace loving citizens and Islam is a beautiful harmonious faith which advocates peace.
- Throughout history Muslims , like people from all faiths too have been victims of indiscriminate acts of terrorisms.
- Islam condemns terrorism in all forms especially attacks on innocent women and children.
- The Media is undoubtedly using Islam and Muslims as convenient guinea pigs for the sake of making headlines.
- Terror has no faith.
Not much to disagree with on points 1 and 2, though 1 and 3 is somewhat debatable. After all, I have always been of the view that religious views are diverse, and the same text can have numerous interpretations, many of which have equal validity.
Unfortunately, I can’t agree with points 4 and 5. The media I come into contact with certainly does not “use Islam and Muslims as convenient guinea pigs”; if it is American media the guy is talking about then I am not a very good judge.
However, I judge from my own point of view, and point 4 is simply empirically false.
Point 5 is similarly empirically false. How can terror have no faith, when so many suicide bombers genuinely believe that they are doing God’s work? Clearly, terrorism thrives on religiosity, for it is religiosity that most easily throws away rational calculations that would normally deter an individual from becoming a terrorist by introducing the whole idea of a “better afterlife in heaven”.
Well, so that’s one cause gone.
The second cause I had signed up for and just left is:
Stop Global Warming
Sounds perfectly fine. Who wouldn’t want to stop global warming? The phenomena is well supported by science, and the consequences are grave for mankind.
But grave consequences does not mean we should go crazy and destroy everything we have built. Unfortunately, the cause seems to be that kind of crazy:
- Repower America with 100% clean electricity within ten years
- Promote global climate change awareness
- Support government incentives for reducing energy dependence, cutting emissions and using renewable energy sources
Nothing wrong with 2 of course, but what on earth is point 1 about? Seriously, 100% clean electricity? In 10 years? What kind of unrealistic cause is this?
Not just that it cannot be achieved. Would it even be desirable to be achieved? 100% clean energy would be terribly costly, and there’s simply no way we can ween ourselves off fossil fules anytime soon.
And there’s that dubious “energy independence” concept there. The oil market is global, and whatever happens to the oil industry will affect the US economy whether or not it uses oil or not, since its trading partners still use oil. One wonders if “energy independence” is anything more than rhetoric.
So no. I can’t be in a cause on facebook, displayed so publicly, when I do not agree with a substantial bit of the cause’s positions.
So that leaves me with zero causes. Haha, does this mean that I’m apathetic?
UPDATE: Browsing through the causes just makes me puke. The cause “The Race to End Cancer” has $16 544 donated, the cause “Society Against Child Abuse” has $24 071 donated, while “Animal Rights” has $35 295 donated. What the fuck?
It seems to me that people have become so self centered that they would rather ignore cancer, which happens far away but on actual people, than ignore animal rights, which benefit animals who simply have the arbitrary privellege of being re-modelled into soft toys or cartoon characters, just to soothe their violated sense of cuteness.
My god, how selfish.
December 24, 2008 at 8:38 pm |
Hi Daryl, haven’t read your blog for some time already. Just got some thing to say about the global warming thing, personally I don’t believe in global warming.
Unlike what many people think, carbon dioxide contributes only to a small proportion of the greehouse effect, like 20%. However there is another greenhouse gas that most of us overlook. It contributes up to 60% of ‘global warming’, and it’s called water vapour. Ozone is also a greenhouse gas contributing to around 10% of the greenhouse effect, so why don’t we futher destroy the ozone layer to cool our planet down?
My point is, we tend to overestimate the effects that our actions (burning fossil fuels, etc etc) have on our planet’s environment. But in fact many of the changes in the earth’s climate today are due to other natural causes.
Another example, if we think that the amount of pollution humans have released into the atmosphere is really large, perhaps we should compare that to the amount of toxic gases released into the environment annually by volcanic activity. (can’t remember the actual figures)
Also about what you mentioned earlier regarding terrorism. Don’t you think it’s unfair to say that religion causes people to behave irrationally, and therefore it promotes terrorism. Even though terror attacks commited in the name of ‘God’ may seem to be irrational behavior.
I’ve commented about terrorism before on Shreya’s blog, so I’ll just copy and paste the relavent stuff over since I’m lazy.
Terrorists are rationale people too, like the rest of us. They also have a father, a mother, some of them have children and a family to feed like the rest of us.
Given the other more peaceful options, I’m sure that most of them would not resort to violence. Sometimes we focus too much on the acts of terror themselves, than to actually look at the actual motivation behind these attacks. Not to say that murder should be justified in any way, but we also have to understand that those responsible for these ‘evil’ attacks often have no other choice.
Let’s take Al-Qaeda for example. What we often hear in the news is stuff like the 9/11 attacks, bomb attacks on US embassies, and stuff like that, which causes fear among westerners in general which is what TERRORism is all about, to cause fear.
But there are 2 sides to every story. From the 1991 gulf war to the invasion of afghanistan to the 2nd gulf war in 2003 thousands of innocent (muslim) civilians have been killed. Even ‘precision’ munitions like the American ‘JDAM’ bombs have a failure rate of around 15%, and thousands of these were dropped over afhghanistan and iraq.
I guess it would be fair to say that the US has caused at least equal or even greater terror to people living in the middle east compared to the fear that al-qaeda has instilled in those living on mainland USA.
Now all these attacks on US troops in places like iraq and afghanistan are taking place simply because the people there want to drive them americans out. In the same way the CIA is trying to weed out al-qaeda operatives living in the US.
When people are willing to commit acts of terror it doesn’t mean that they are religious fanatics or anything like that. It just means that people are not happy with the way things are, and there are no other options available to them to make things better, except to resort to violence.
Whether it is in the name of Allah, in the name of Jesus, or in the name of the Goddess of Mercy, unhappy people will always find a reason to justify their violent actions because there are no other available options through which they can solve the problems they are facing. Why do you think that al-qaeda has such an easy time finding recruits in places like Iraq to launch attacks on the US?
Heh but you’re right about the clean energy thing. There’s no such thing as 100% green energy. Not even in 10 years.
December 24, 2008 at 10:59 pm |
Hey Wilbur,
Even though I’m suspicious of any attempt of using climate change as an excuse for collectivist environmentalism, I am convinced that man-made climate change is happening, given what I know about the scientific literature out there.
Firstly, what about water vapour? Sure, it is strong greenhouse gas. We learn that in school at a young age.
But from what I know, water vapour is not crucial because it is regarded as a function of temperature. In other words, water itself is internal, since the amount of water on earth (in all its states) would remain roughly the same, given the water cycle. Given a sudden (hypothetical) rise in water vapour, the excess water would rain out.
Hence, the equilibrium amount of water vapour in the air (as opposed to in the oceans), would be an effect of how warm the earth is, and hence how much of the water evaporates.
That’s my understanding of the bits and pieces of climate science I’ve been reading. You, or any reader, may verify my understanding by checking out these articles. (All links open in a new window.)
Your point about ozone is similar, and even more obvious. Firstly, the amount of ozone has not been increasing, and hence increased ozone is not the reason why the earth is heating up. Secondly, it would be plain stupid to reduce ozone to reduce global warming because there would be terrible and costly effects.
Finally, let’s look at volcanic activity. You suggest that volcanic activity is overwhelmingly the cause for increased CO2 in the atmosphere. That cannot be true given the data from any of the dozens of sampling stations around the world.
Take this chart for example. If what you say about volcanic eruptions are true, then the chart should be full of spites, showing a burst of CO2 everytime there’s a significant volcanic eruption. Your hypothesis is quite clearly falsified by the data.
The fact of the matter is, the sum total of all actively out gassing volcanoes emit CO2 at a rate that is about 1/150th that of man-made emissions
I got my information on volcanos from here. Anyone more interested in climate change can look at this very good list of articles which I’ve read before and which have helped me understood climate change a little better.
On the matter of religion and terrorism, I am not quite in the mood for a detailed response here so I’ll just say this quickly.
Suicide bombers require a certain kind of fanaticism to fuel their act. Many things can provide this fanaticism. They might have done an honest cost benefit analysis whereby religious beliefs played no role whatsoever. It’s certainly possible.
But again, my claim is not that religion is the cause of every single terrorist act. It’s also not that religion is the sole cause of terrorist acts. My claim is that religion, as a great stimulator of fanaticism and by introducing specific notions of the afterlife which greatly distort any CBA, is an important cause of a significant number of terrorist acts.
My claim seems empirically true, given what we know about how many terrorist acts today happen in the name of some religious cause. Your comments are beside the point, and does not even begin to throw doubt on the empirical validity of my claim.
December 29, 2008 at 11:11 am |
I’m not certain if your grouse regarding the value of donations to Causes on Facebook is a valid one.
By my count, the Cancer Cause boats 2.23 million members as opposed 2.08 million for Animal Rights, which admittedly still trumps Child Abuse at 1.962 million.
A number of conclusions can be drawn, not least being that your conclusion is likely incorrect. More people do care about cancer than they do about animal rights, but perhaps individually less moved to give. ‘Violated sense of cuteness’ fits the bill well here.
Another conclusion that can deduced would be that there is no correlation between number of members and value of donations.