You know what I'm waiting for? I'm waiting for the shocking public revelation that the recent fossil of the 'missing link' fish is a hoax. Yeah, the one that seems captured at the moment when fish first began to flop about on land. The timing was just too convenient, you know? The "intelligent design" folks had come out and pushed their belief, the scientists had rallied together in a show of lab-coated anger and bespectacled surliness, creationism was yet again debunked as not being science, and then to put the nail in the coffin this fossil happens to appear, as though Nature herself were flashing the ID proponents a big green double-cheeked moon.
The timing on that is just too fortuitous, so I'm waiting for the revelation that it's a fake. This will of course breathe new life, or at least stoke new anger, in those folks who want to believe in science but also want to believe in Biblical inerrancy, and the whole debate will open up again and become if possible more rancorous.
I hate it when people on the side of the angels do this sort of thing. That whole Dan Rather flap, for instance. It's a known fact that Bush barely bothered with his National Guard duty, and of course the duty itself was draft dodging of the very first order. So why did some dip have to manufacture "evidence" that he performed poorly? It's not like it was necessary. And of course the conservative media machine immediately siezed upon this stupid penny-ante malfeasance to bury the real issue, which is of course that George W. Bush was a coward and a wastrel and his daddy pulled strings to keep him out of Viet Nam.
Another one that bugs me, and that keeps coming up what with the current flap over Iran's effort to get nuclear weapons, is the oft-repeated trope that the only country to ever actually use nuclear weapons on another country was the United States. The people who make this statement are almost always on the right side of the issue, and it's well-observed that the U.S. is not always the good guy. But the statement itself reveals a pig-headed ignorance of history, based on a complete lack of empathy for the world at the time and a fetishistic elevation of nuclear weapons to something more than they are.
Let me lay this out for you: the world was at war. A terrible war, wherein all sides had as stated goals the wholesale murder of the population of the other side. Japan had the Rape of Nanking, Unit 731, the Bataan Death March. The Soviet Union had the Katyn Massacre, the POW camps, and of course the purges. The Americans and British had firebombing: Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo. And the Nazis... need no references.
The decision to massacre civilians had already been made, and made in the context of all-out war. To overlook this is dishonest. No one made a decision to drop this new weapon as though wholesale slaughter was not already occurring.
And the nuclear bomb was different only in its efficiency. Does it really matter whether a person burst into flames in a superheated street, suffocated in an air-raid shelter, cooked as they sank into molten asphalt, or were incinerated by a nuclear blast? Whether they died in Tokyo or Nagasaki? I submit that it does not.
So stop it, already. Nuclear bombs are bad. Using one is beyond the pale. But to claim that "oh, well, the United States has already used them" as though that means anything outside of the context of the Second World War is ignorant, mendacious, and counter-productive.
On a more positive note, I'm currently reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and it's really good. The writing is good and the subject matter is fascinating, science and discovery and war and industry and, most of all, people. Highly recommended.
And if my opinion isn't sufficient, it did win a Pulitzer Prize.
- Sun Ra