Post 15: In The Unexpected Flurries A Young Man's Fancy Lightly Turns To Thoughts Of Love

Samuel here.

So! Turns out I'm pretty unreliable. Surprise! But I'm back. I currently have two really heavy politics-type images that I really badly want to write about, but I also have two really heavy politics-type essays that are consuming all my liberal self-righteousness. So to my one reader who actually appreciates my 8 page diatribes on libertarianism (Simon, although I'm beginning to suspect he only reads them to get context for Philippe's comments), I will post some politics-type thing within the next week.

I was going to write a summary of the article, which can be found here, but when I finished writing the post I decided that it's not absolutely necessary to read it in order to understand what I'm talking about. So while I very strongly encourage you to read the article, so that you can start reading my post with an opinion of your own already formed, I don't think it's necessary enough that I'm going to bother writing a summary. This should be useful for those of you with enough time to read exactly 6 paragraphs but no more.

You all know how I feel about ad hominems. If you don't know that I avoid personal attacks like the plague, then you are an idiot. I know that it would be impolitic for me to point out that things obviously just never worked out for the author, and she ended up in a loveless marriage out of desperation. It would be similarly crass of me to ask how her husband must have felt when he read that he and his wife "were never nuts about each other". I also would have to be pretty tactless to point out that everything she says about her ex-boyfriends seems to suggest that she is just really good at falling in love with really awful people. And this is my first complaint about this article: it's just one massive case study in sample bias. All of her reasons for not appreciating romance seem to be that she has fallen in love with tons of assholes. The article would be completely different if she had fallen in love with some non-assholes. Her error is that she thinks that a substantial number of people also only fall in love with assholes. She also says that she has friends with the same problem. But I have no clue why the solution is to ignore romance. It seems to me that the solution is simply to get out of unhealthy relationships. The author is railing against romantic love, calling it "responsible for more mischief and misery than any other myth", but I don't get it. What does that mean? That's not just hyperbole; it's abstracted enough from anything verifiable that it's simply nonsense.

I'm not someone who normally says that you should follow your feelings over your thoughts. You might wonder why I would prize an evolutionary relic over, say, reason. The answer comes in two parts. Firstly, axiomatically, it is more fun to be romantically involved with someone you love than with someone you do not love (this is, in one sentence, why I disagree with her article). The axiom comes with the addendum that certain negative qualities make for exceptions (if the person you love is abusive, say, or if they don't like dinosaurs). Disagree with my axiom?* Go fall in love. Then get back to me. Secondly, I'm not sure how much I agree that romantic love is an evolutionary relic. Understand that I have literally no formal training in biology, but nonetheless this is something I have been thinking a lot about lately by means of universally accessible thought experiments. The theory of evolution suggests that a female should pick her mate based on who can provide the most physically viable offspring, while a male should be out mating with as many females as he possibly can. Why, then, would a woman ever feel romantic love for anyone but the most physically sound specimens, and why would a man not feel romantic love for as many people as possible? There are three obvious answers, neither of them very satisfactory. One is that we see exactly this behaviour in cultural stereotypes: attractive men have muscles, and men shop around and cheat on their spouses. But I still don't understand why, if love is a purely evolutionary exercise, it wouldn't be the best idea for women to just only mate with football players. I recognize that you need a varied gene pool to not all get wiped out with the same disease, so you can't restrict all the action to too few dudes, but surely there's some trade-off there that involves fewer men getting any. The second answer is that women are attracted to muscleheads and men are attracted to everyone, but we all have to settle for what we can get. This is unsatisfactory because it would imply that if someone's in love with me and some other dude without glasses and terrible knees comes along, she will automatically leave me. So I automatically reject it on the basis of my own overconfidence. The third answer is much more subtle: while women mating with super buff guys and men mating with everyone is the ultimate result of evolution, it is an ongoing process and we have not yet reached a point of optimal efficiency to perpetuate a species. Evidence of this exists in the persistence of, say, asexuality and homosexuality (I realize the persistence of varying sexual orientations is way more complicated than that. Forgive me). So some day almost all women will be attracted exclusively to male football players and almost all men will be attracted to every fertile woman. But, and I could be wrong about this, I think this is what we see in the non-human animal world. I think evolution selected for that behaviour pretty quickly, and by now everyone who's left pretty much has that algorithm down. So none of the answers satisfy me.

Here is my solution: I think that romantic engagements are a cultural, not a natural, construct. What is the stereotypical description of a romantic interest? "He's smart, he's interesting, he's funny..." None of these have to do with reproductive viability. I think that when we claim that love is simply an evolutionary tool, we leave out something quintessentially human. I think that with sentience comes a subconscious ability to select a romantic partner on the basis of intellect, how interesting they are, and other cerebral cortex-type things. And you know what? Language agrees with me! That's why we distinguish between love and lust. Someone you love is someone you want to spend as much time with as possible, with whatever cultural and natural addenda that includes. Someone you lust after is simply someone you want to procreate with. I do not specifically advocate following lustful impulses, much as I do not advocate following hateful or vengeful or angry impulses. I advocate following your heart. And I don't see this as being even a little bit contradictory with my generally Mind Over Matter philosophy. I think that romance, and the constructs we have invented to house it (relationships, marriages), are uniquely human and almost universally good.

Now, the woman who wrote the article obviously has a bit of a problem. She seems to only fall in love with jerks. In her case, I think she made the right decision. Maybe if you have a long track record of falling in love with assholes then you should not be following your heart. This isn't too uncommon a thing (I know people like that), and clearly there is often something slightly haywire with the human ability to select romantic partners. But she turns this into a blanket condemnation of romance. It's like losing to a final boss 10 times and deciding that the video game is impossible. Her article is just a temper tantrum. Love didn't work out for her. That's sad. But leave the rest of us alone.

*Dearest darling math people: I know that I use the word "axiom" quite loosely sometimes. As a social science student and a physical science student with a mad insatiable rigor fetish, I recognise that a lot of claims like "you're happier with someone you love than with someone you don't love" can get pretty murky and impossible to verify. I call them axioms because I have arrived at them from personal experience, whether that means firsthand experience or my general understanding of the subject. I treat them as unverifiable, and therefore axiomatic, because I can offer no better proof than "try it for yourself".

Sorry!

Samuel here.


So those of you who read last week's article to the end will already know that I'm not uploading a post this week. Sorry! Once the blog is a bit more established, I'll have a storehouse of articles so that I can always have something to upload (that's part of how I'm going to spend Reading Week), but with the blog as new as it is, it's still the best I can do to write a post 3-4 days in advance. I promise to make up for this next week, when I talk about [SPOILER ALERT] 1) why bitter old ladies shouldn't write blanket condemnations of romantic love (seems like a bit of a no-brainer, but apparently someone needs to hear it) and 2) why people who can recognize a picture of Snooki but not of Ayaan Hirsi Ali aren't necessarily terrible humans.


But, for now, I'd better go do some physics. Stay tuned!

Post 12: Where 1984 Isn't Coming True

SPECIAL NOTE: Given that Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885, and Mussolini, the figure most associated with Fascism didn't come to prominence until at least 1919, I think it's safe to say this quote is about a century off. This is a minor nitpick, but those desperate to uncover the "truth" about politics might lead by example, and take the three seconds necessary to uncover the truth about their own quotations.

Let's start off with something we probably all know, but too often are willing to forget. Fascism was real. There were Fascist governments, Fascist armies, Fascist secret police forces and, by the millions, Fascist victims, those who were beaten, jailed, and very often killed by forces too powerful to even try to stop. It was the great scourge of the 20th century. The same is true of Communist regimes, and of theocratic ones. Right wing or left, religious or atheist, dictators have, and do, dominate large parts of the world. They have done so for millenia, they might very well continue to do so, though, thankfully, trends in the last fifty years suggest they may be on the decline.

I would imagine none of this to be a great surprise to any reader, who may wonder what the point of such a lengthy opening memento might be. You're right. Here it is: You can do those victims of dictatorship no greater disservice than to equate your suffering to theirs, and that's precisely what posters like this try to do. "People were rounded off and sent to concentration camps? I feel you man - Ron Paul wasn't invited to the Fox News debates. Fascists are everywhere." "Forced collectivization in the Soviet Union? Rough business. Sounds to me of Obamacare." What could be more insulting to victims of autocracy that, despite everything we know about their atrocities, all the education and testimony and direct evidence we have about how truly cruel these regimes were, there's still a compulsive need among a great many of us to make it about ourselves (going much further in this direction might risk some overlap with Samuel's most recent post - which, interesting and provocative, can be found directly below -, but don't forget we're still partially in preamble mode here).

>This problem isn't a universal one. Godwin's Law, and more recently the First World Problems meme has done a lot to spoof this attitude, but even they can't do the job (my own Law says that as a conversation, online or no, goes longer, the likelihood of any topic being broached approaches one) or worse, becomes a tool of those who don't really get it ("Whining about homework? What a First World Problem. Let's talk about some real concerns... like Harper being a Nazi.")

Whenever the topic of dictatorship coming to America (or Canada, or Western Europe, or wherever else it won't happen) arises, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is inevitably brought up. I'm not personally a fan, but it would be pretty stupid to try to deny the book it's status as one of the most important of the last century, and, while far from the first dystopian work, the one against which all others have and will be judged. Its extremely vivid depiction of how totalitarian government could control every aspect of its citizen's lives hit most of its readers particularly hard, and for the last sixty years almost every sentence has been parsed, deconstructed, and hotly debated by every totem on the pole, from top tier academics and literary critics to seventh graders, many of whom act like they're its first readers. For these men and women, Nineteen Eighty-Four is no longer a fiction or even an allegory, it's a both predictor and descriptor of the future. The first world will turn out like this they say. Every new bit of legislation brings us closer and closer to Orwell's vision, which is entirely accurate. It is my assertion, as no doubt you've guessed, that this is far from the case. As I see it, the publication of this book virtually guaranteed it would never, at least in the first world, become a reality. Because of how iconic things like "Big Brother" or "NewSpeak" have become, as a population we've become so overcautious about their possibly coming true we've almost eliminated the chance they ever will. But this is only the beginning of where this book's devotees go wrong.

>For starters, there's not much evidence that this was, as Orwell saw it, a prediction of things to come. In fact, most evidence seems to suggest it was instead a satire of pre-existing totalitarian regimes, especially the Soviet Union, with little sprinkles of World War II-era Great Britain, where censorship and rationing was at a relative high. Rather like Animal Farm, his other main claim to literary fame, Orwell is doing what he, and all satirists are famous for, exaggerating the worst of what already exists in order to make fun of it. Defenders of Nineteen Eighty-Four-as-prophecy might then question my attempt to guess Orwell's motivations, or instead point out that just because the author has a certain attitude toward his own work, does not mean that it's the correct one. To some extent I agree (I may even write another post just to deal with the topic), this point I made may be tenuous. But I would also say that the side that has tenuous evidence is always preferable to the side that has none.

More important than how Orwell looked at his work, or what inspired it, is the question of how accurate he was. I can think of one example in particular in which he was very wrong. I mentioned NewSpeak earlier. In the novel, the government, in an attempt to stifle the free speech of its citizens, create NewSpeak, an increasingly simplified form of the English language. The party reasons that, by banning certain words, its citizens will be unable to express certain concepts. But this is absurd. Orwell seems to be under the impression that words determine thoughts (a strong version of what's known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; the Wikipedia link can be found at the bottom of the article), a once popular theory long since debunked and tossed aside by linguists. But it doesn't take much linguistic training to see how silly the concept really is. Look at euphemisms: When coloured became considered offensive, people started saying negro. When that became offensive, the term became black. When that became (to some) offensive, we started saying African-American. At no point did banning the word coloured (or negro, or black) restrict anybody's concept or ability to express the idea behind the word. We just came up with new ones. That one aspect of the book, no matter how crucial, is inaccurate is not in itself a total damning of its credibility, and I hate to give the impression of short changing you out of a fuller analysis, but in the interest of both not taking up reams of space, and staying on point (we're not going to become a dictatorship), I should start to think about calling it quits.

The writing of this post made me think about the general direction this blog is heading in and it seems that we've made our theme overreaction, or, more specifically, how best to avoid or rectify it. This wasn't really intentional, although perhaps it was unavoidable given our stated purpose (a place to put especially long rebuttals to statuses our friends posted). Needless to say, I feel I should close on the same note our other posts have all, in one form or another, have: With a sincere request we chill the fuck out. There are no ghosts in the attic, no monsters under the bed, and no spectres in our government.

PS: For those interested in learning more about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Post 11: Wherein The World Is Really Really Cool

Samuel here.

You guys! Little-known fact, you guys: hating the world is not a passport to Coolsville. I know plenty of people who will tell you at great length that humans are fucked up and society sucks, but I personally believe that the world houses some pretty rad dudes. Let's explore this at length!

So we fucked up everything, huh? We fucked up everything. Well, what are you reading right now? I'm no one important. I just woke up this morning and decided that I had some things to say. It took me about two hours to write something that anybody in any place at any time can just sit down and read. Basically forever.

Where are you? Because I'm in my room. I'm alone. I'm not talking to anyone. You could be in Bangladesh. It is strictly irrelevant. We can still communicate just as easily.

This thing that you're reading my post with, what else can it do? Just take half a second to think about that. Until 100 years ago, just two human generations, anything you were seeing was actually in front of you. Until 150 years ago, three human generations, anything you were hearing was right there with you. Until 5,000 years ago, maybe 170 human generations, anything you were learning was from someone who was literally right beside you. For tens of millions of years of human history (depending on what you consider to be human), you could only experience things in your immediate vicinity. In our grandparents' lifetime that permanently changed. We are no longer restricted by time and place. It doesn't matter to us. It's that simple.

Go to a window. Look up. Since you're on the internet, and are therefore only awake at night, I'm going to assume you can see the moon. Take a good look at it. People have been there. People have been there! That is incomprehensible.

Much of the world still lives in the Middle Ages. We have the capital to lift them out of it. But that has changed tremendously, and increasingly rapidly, in the past 50 years, and almost every political scientist and economist will tell you that it's going to keep happening and it's going to happen faster.

We have traversed the Earth and we have ascended into space just to make sure we didn't miss anything, and now I can sit at home with a $200 computer and a free copy of Google Earth and I can literally see any part of any piece of land on Earth. I can take sightseeing tours through Madrid for free without leaving my room, and anything I could possibly want to know about Madrid's history or politics or architecture is instantly available to me on Wikipedia. And if I want to actually go to Madrid, how do I get there? I fly. It takes me a couple hours.

Literacy. Medicine. Plumbing. I could literally write fifty pages about how mind-bogglingly better things are than they used to be. I am thoroughly, firmly, unshakeably convinced that we have created for ourselves an awe-inspiring, free, and functional world. I think that the vast majority of the people I know are very good people, and I think that the vast majority of people alive are, too.

I lead an indescribably good life. Nothing truly bad has ever happened to me. I have never had a sibling or a close friend die. That's ridiculously new in the timespan of human history. I have never caught polio or scrofula or the bubonic plague. I was born with severe myopia, but it couldn't matter less; I happen to have been one of the maybe 0.000001% of history's myopic humans who has access to corrective glasses. It doesn't even begin to affect my quality of life. The kings and the queens of history would kill to enjoy the quality of education, health care, or transportation that I do. They would be floored to encounter the ease with which I can communicate with anyone in the entire world. What does it say about our society that any reasonably intelligent person with a decent work ethic can, within a couple decades of their birth, learn something substantial about the universe that literally nobody in human history has ever known before? Ever met someone with a PhD? I bet you have. One of the most dominant institutions in our society, the institution of higher education, is designed to enable ordinary people to figure out things that literally no one in the history of the human race has ever figured out before. That is completely new to the last generation. It is pretty much unique to the last fifty years.

Even our political structure is fucking awesome. You hate politicians, right? Well, get a life, dingus. Do you know how remarkable it is to have freedom of speech? To have literally no meaningful fear whatsoever of police officers spontaneously arresting and torturing you, to be able to choose your career for yourself and to live your life with a person you love, to have finally freed yourself from the shackles of institutionalized racism is something tremendously remarkable. Mitt Romney doesn't excite you? Barack Obama turned his back on you by not horsewhipping senators into not fillibustering? Stephen Harper is...Stephen Harper seems kind of mean? What absurdly petty complaints! You're getting handed a briefcase full of money and you're complaining that the bills are folded wrong. The fact that you even know what Barack Obama is doing on any given day should be more than enough reason not to whine so much.

How about the morning after pill? How about abortion? 1966 is the hallmark year in the history of women's liberation. Sex, whether rape or consensual, no longer has to change your life forever. That is the most empowering thing I can imagine. And it just happened. It just happened.

Look, I get that some things suck. I'm the first to tell you --- and I have at great length, in previous posts --- that poverty today is more widespread and more preventable and more despicable than I can possibly describe, let alone conceive of. I am deathly afraid of nuclear weapons; I cannot believe that everyone who will ever get their hands on them will fear their own destruction more than they wish for the destruction of others. I am frightened by epidemics, I am frightened by decreasing biodiversity, I am frightened by those who insist that birth control is more wicked than the systemic disempowerment of women. But how long have these been problems? 40 years? 50 years? 70 years? Not even the blink of an eye. We're in a race against the clock, but it's really not the first time. And what happens if the worst should happen? What are we losing? Nothing except what we've built ourselves. If we fucked everything up, why does it even matter if we lose it all? And what have we fucked up other than the stuff that could make us lose it all? It's a self-defeating argument: "nothing we have is worth having because it threatens what we have". Listen to yourself, cartoon! Everything meaningful that we are risking is relegated to this planet, and is our responsibility. At worst, all we risk is undoing our work. We fucked everything up? Give me a break.

As Louis C. K. says, "everything's awesome, and nobody's happy". It's one of the most important messages I have ever heard from anyone. I live in a democracy where I befriend whomever I want. I love my fellow humans and I can tell them anywhere at any time. I have never met a human who does not work for the good of the human race, and I doubt that you have, either. Time and time again, we confront our demons, and time and time again it is our angels that prevail. What Earthly reason could I have to want to devolve? I am the blessed member of a blessed species. And anyone who thinks otherwise can respond in the comments section with their impossibly common near-infinite-distance instantaneous communications device.

At the risk of blunting the message, I would like to add an unrelated post script: please do leave a comment. We write these for other people to read, so the more comments we get, the happier we are. And if you leave a comment giving us advice (longer, shorter, post about this dumb thing on my news feed), the better we will understand what people want from us. And anyone who knows me understands that disagreeing with me is an excellent way to make me write unreasonable amounts of stuff, which is always great fun. So commenting can only ever be a win-win situation.

Other important Post-Script note: I will not be updating next Wednesday. I have a math midterm that day and a physics midterm two days after, so I will be doing super important stuff that night (drowning my sorrows). However, the next week is reading week, so I'll update at least twice then. Until then, keep on trucking.

Post 9: Wherein There Is Exciting News

Samuel here.

So, it is possible that you've noticed that there was no scheduled update yesterday. Sorry for not giving you notice on that, but we would like to gloss over this fact with some exciting news:

Simon and I were finding the two updates a week thing a bit prohibitive in terms of time commitment, especially since we are now entering the midterm season and the real crunch time in terms of assignments. Believe it or not, it does take a reasonable amount of time to put these posts together, and we felt that in the long run it simply would not be sustainable. So we offered Mr. Ian Martin an exciting package ("write for us and Philippe will argue with you!"), and we are pleased to announce that he will be taking over the Sunday evening time slot. He is a good writer and a humorous individual, and he gets as angry about things on Facebook as the next guy, so he makes a welcome addition to the team.

This need not mean the end of collaborative blog posts, though; if people want us to, I imagine we can work something out so that the three of us can collaborate on posts in the future. But you would have to express an interest in that, because we sure aren't running this blog for our own amusement. Well, okay, we are running this blog for our own amusement. But you're important to us, too!

Also, in general, thanks for reading. We are getting substantially more page views (and comments) than I think either of us expected we would be getting 2 weeks in, and that's awesome. So, thanks!

Post 8: Wherein finally SPACE

Samuel here.

First thing is first! Simon and I keep noticing a very large spike in pageviews on midnight on the days when we update. That is SUPER gratifying, because it means that people are actually hanging around the site when it is supposed to update. What it also means is that we can't slack off and upload, say, 58 minutes late because we slept for 2 hours last night and had to start and finish 2 problem sets today around an ordinary day of classes. So rest assured that that sort of thing doesn't happen around here! No, sir! Also, I'm sorry. Now, on to the meaty stuff.

Did you know I like space? I like space! So when Newt Gingrich recently announced he wanted a base on the moon by 2020, I got pretty excited. I have spent much of the past week fantasizing about Newt Gingrich's space policy winning him a landslide victory in Florida, forcing Romney and Obama to both adopt daring plans to spend lots and lots of money on stuff I think is cool. While I'm not exactly holding out for that, I would like to discuss why I think Gingrich wanting a moon colony is super awesome. The person who wrote this status didn't exactly give me a lot of meaty opposition to sink my teeth into, so I get to be a bit freer with my structure this time around. But I will address the comments at the end.

I'm not going to discuss in this article why I think that space exploration and colonization are necessary, because I simply don't have enough time or space; I am essentially building my life around that philosophy, so I would like to give it a little more room than a weekly blog post allows for. So, for the sake of this post, let me take the axiom that space exploration and colonization are both desirable.

                                                                                                             

Anyone who thinks that space policy is the most important aspect of this election should be out campaigning for Newt Gingrich right now. Every other candidate's space policy sucks. Throughout this whole Republican primary, everyone but Gingrich has consistently brushed off questions about NASA by making irrelevant statements about government funding or about really, really caring about the middle class. Newt Gingrich has always taken a hard line in favour of government-led exploration and colonization of space. That impresses me a great deal. I acknowledge that his motives are different from mine; Gingrich wants to see increased space exploration because he wants to feel that America Is Great Again. But space exploration is a very, very tough line to sell. People see it as a waste of tax dollars and a waste of resources, as too abstract and complex a concept to be worth their attention. But it's very easy to sell "the Chinese are going to win". So if you can sell it that way, you sell it that way. No one disparages the moon landing for being the epitome of Cold War tensions, and we wouldn't disparage a moon base if it was the product of a bunch of old white guys being afraid of Chinese people. For such is the nature of democracy.

            "Hold on", you say, "slow down! We must immediately know why Newt Gingrich is the best candidate on space policy!"

            Good! Let's talk Republicans.

Herman Cain probably put the second-most thought into space policy. He wanted to de-fund NASA, and instead provide incentives to private corporations. But that doesn't make any sense at all. If his objection is to the government directly employing space systems engineers, he has to understand that pumping as much money into the private sector will employ just as many engineers. If he wants to cut spending, just cut the NASA budget (please don't cut the NASA budget!). If he wants nationalistic space innovation, obviously it's better for NASA to be an organ of the government. What suddenly defunding NASA would do is to take all of the people who know everything about space travel, destroy the structure within which they operate, and scatter them about the world. We would see a massive spike in space disasters from upstart companies that simply didn't have the expertise to launch craft, we would see a whole lot of way too risky business plans that would flop and take taxpayer dollars with them, and worst of all I'm not convinced we would ever see any exploration or colonization again. There is no profit incentive in exploration or research. No private company would ever have launched the Hubble Space Telescope or the International Space Station. SpaceX sure isn't going to pay to house a woman on Mars. Private companies simply perform a very different function than government-mandated ones. NASA exists for far-seeing presidents to tell the world that they want a man on the moon and they're going to get it before the end of the decade. Boeing does not take orders from the president, and it shouldn't have to.

Mitt Romney has been relentlessly jabbing at Newt Gingrich for the idea of having a moonbase by the year 2020. He claims that such elaborate schemes would be to the detriment of the U.S. economy. I am fundamentally confused by that idea. Firstly, well over $500,000,000,000 is spent annually on the American military, and the recent post-Iraq cuts of $23,000,000,000 by the Obama administration --- with the consent and encouragement of the highest ranking officers --- shows that that budget is malleable. I do not buy the argument that America lacks the funds to launch at least a barebones attempt at colonization. Secondly, where does he imagine those funds are going? The government isn't going to outsource space R&D to Kazakhstan. Newt Gingrich knew what he was doing when he announced bold plans for space just before the Florida primary. NASA cuts cost jobs in Cape Canaveral. NASA grants make jobs in Cape Canaveral. It's as simple as that. Now, I know the Republicans aren't generally the biggest proponents of Keynes, but Gingrich had no trouble playing that tune on the space coast when he made his announcement. Once again, Mitt Romney is taking the easy way out.

Rick Santorum seemingly has no opinions about space. That's like having no opinion about dinosaurs. It's like thinking that love is "pretty okay". It's like going for a walk alone late at night and all you can think about is arithmetic. I can only surmise that Rick Santorum is made of cardboard.

Ron Paul, of course, would de-fund everything. That goes against the axiom that I arbitrarily selected, so sucks to be Ron Paul in this analysis.

And I will ignore Michele Bachmann and John Huntsman and whoever else may at one point have been running, because they certainly were not memorable for their space policy.

I am also going to ignore Barack Obama for the time being, in the hopes that his space policy develops over the course of the general election. I don't like to compare actions to words, so I would like to wait to hear from him again about this first. If the Democratic party line doesn't change, though, please tune in for more whining. But let me say this, for now: I want the manned space program back.

So why do I like what Newt Gingrich has to say? Well, honestly, I don't really like it. But it's way better than most people would have you think it is. Firstly, there are few humans alive today who would not agree that the landing on the moon was one of the greatest moments in the history of our species. Let us not forget that that was, if you'll excuse the expression, totally just a shot in the dark. There was absolutely no reason for Kennedy to believe that it would be possible to place men on the moon by 1970. And yet, with sufficient political willpower and a shitload of money, they accomplished it.

Unlike the second commenter on the status, I have no trouble believing that a similar fiscal and political push would get us a permanent colony on the moon by 2020. The first commenter suggests a concrete platform, but that would require either bringing concrete there (and mixing it along the way?), or synthesizing, pouring, and moulding concrete on the moon, which is absurd at best (sorry to harp on this, but I once lost a space design contest to someone who suggested exactly that for a Mars colony). No, we easily have the technology to build a moonbase, and I have seen it myself. Basically, you just send some of these rovers to the moon and have them flatten out a spot of ground. Then you can stably land craft there. Inflate some places to live and all the rest is for the biologists to figure out. For those of you who think that the political molasses is too strong for us to fund colonization projects within our lifetime, I would like to direct you to Project Horizon and more generally to this Wikipedia article. Is it night? Are the skies clear? If so, walk outside and look up. And then you will truly understand why we can and will summon the political courage to branch out into space.

"That's all fine and dandy", you say, unaware that nobody actually speaks like that, "but there are still huge engineering problems with colonizing the moon!" Yup. Watch. We'll fix them. We always do.

"But how does that justify campaigning on that platform? We want our politicians to have vision, but not to be impractical." This is usually true. But I don't see anything wrong with wanting to do something really, really worthwhile that you aren't sure you'll be able to do. The only problem with impracticality in politics is if it could be damaging; removing social security or Medicare, for instance, is impractical. By all means, if we're making people suffer because we're colonizing the moon, then we're monsters (moonsters?). But there is absolutely no reason that Gingrich should have to hurt people in order to get to the moon.

I think that the third commenter perfectly sums up everything that was wrong with the public reaction to Gingrich's suggestion (the youtube link is a link to circus music). This is the most courageous thing I have seen anyone do in this election cycle so far, and Newt Gingrich should be applauded for trying to sell something that he believes in. I can only hope the Democratic Party picks up their tremendous slack, and --- this is hard for me to write --- follows in the footsteps of Newton Leroy Gingrich.

P.S. I'm not going to touch all that stuff he said about lunar statehood. What a nutbar.

Keep on trucking.