g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est




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Friday, November 25, 2005
12:46 - Sheee-yoot, you alien varmints!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20051124/bs_prweb/prweb314382_1

(top) link
So if the UN can't take control of the Internet away from the US and hand its governance over to China and Cuba and North Korea, at least Canada will be able to formulate the rules by which we make contact with alien civilizations that come by Earth. Because, see, the alternative is letting the stupid Americans shoot their six-guns at 'em the moment they come onto the radar screen, yellin' Get off our proppity!

On September 25, 2005, in a startling speech at the University of Toronto that caught the attention of mainstream newspapers and magazines, Paul Hellyer, Canada’s Defence Minister from 1963-67 under Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Prime Minister Lester Pearson, publicly stated: "UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head."

Mr. Hellyer went on to say, "I'm so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something."

Hellyer revealed, "The secrecy involved in all matters pertaining to the Roswell incident was unparalled. The classification was, from the outset, above top secret, so the vast majority of U.S. officials and politicians, let alone a mere allied minister of defence, were never in-the-loop."

Hellyer warned, "The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. He stated, "The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."

Hellyer’s speech ended with a standing ovation.

Now, totally leaving aside the obvious bizarreness of the guy's premise—and of the fact that it got a standing ovation from the intellectuals in the University of Toronto crowd—this whole thing just acts as a perfect illustration of how one could do a cartoon of global politics today. Sure, it sounds all florid and is full of multisyllabic words, but it all just boils down to some very simple, very simplistic impulses.

The idea in this case being that: Every group, race, and culture on this planet—or off it—has peaceful intentions and must be greeted with peace and accommodation. And the Americans, who are paranoid and trigger-happy and get off on randomly making war for no particular reason, will louse everything up for the rest of us.

Does that about cover it?

Now, it seems to me that even glancing at the details of the allegations makes the whole house of cards fall down. Let's assume, for example, that some alien civilization decides to come here and make contact. Now, that implies that they have faster-than-light capabilities and who knows what other technology, which certainly implies far superior weaponry than we've ever dreamed. So... if the aliens are coming here to make war on us, there's no way to even imagine that having "a forward base on the moon" would give us, who can barely get a satellite into orbit without throwing our economy for a loop, any kind of fighting chance in an "intergalactic war".

So the implication is that the US is not only so intrinsically violent and paranoid as to want to put up defenses in case the aliens should—by some off chance—not come in peace, but that we're so mortally stupid as to think it would do any good.

Know what I think? Some people, indeed the ones most lauded and laureated with the draperies of International Intellectualism, have a worldview that comes straight out of all those sci-fi movies where humans ruin their chances for Enlightenment and Uplift by being primitive and violent animals. Whereas their idea of the US's mindset, or lack thereof, comes straight out of the sci-fi movies where humanity is menaced by an implacable intergalactic plague. Our world is Independence Day and Aliens, theirs is Kodos and Kang and The Day the Earth Stood Still. We're about fending off the Klingons and Romulans, and they're about impressing Q.

Heaven forbid we should be something that didn't come out of a movie script.

All things considered, what business do we have presuming anything about the intentions or nature of any alien civilization? How do we know that disarming ourselves of all weapons is what will make the Alien Masters look kindly upon us? Isn't that just as naïve and presumptuous as the primitive Earthling societies that assumed that what the gods wanted in exchange for good weather and bountiful harvests was human sacrifice?

True, it's no less silly to put missiles on the moon, as though that would do any good if we were invaded by Reavers or Predators. But one has to admit that it's the only solution I've seen that doesn't owe its logical and moral rationale to some campy sci-fi movie. And somehow I have to imagine that if this talk about Bush persuading the military to establish a moon base is more than fantasy, there's a ream of analysis behind it that discusses tactics and technologies that Hollywood hasn't yet guessed at.

Is America's greatest failing, then, simply that we've trained Earth's politicians to think in terms of Hollywood plotlines, instead of weighing what's sensible, rational, and possible like I fantasize we did once upon a time?

(Via LGF.)


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© Brian Tiemann