According a a recent post in today’s Age, 4x4s, formally known as SUVs (sport utility vehicles) have been offsetting gains in fuel efficiency.
It is a point that I have known for so long, probably because my mother has long been angry that in many suburbs of Melbourne “every vehicle is either a BMW, a Mercedes or a four-wheel-drive”.
What I have learned independently, however, is that allowing 4x4s to have fuel consumption standards that are the same as those of commercial vehicles is the source of growth in 4x4 sales – along with the sinking of fuel prices into the depth of the Mariana Trench during the 1990s and over the past year. Less cheap petrol would certainly help but is politically suicidal, as is mass transit that would ire the mining and road lobbies.
However, making sure 4x4s are treated as ordinary passenger cars – even if as a distinct subset thereof – might well prevent or ameliorate the problems the United States has had with growth in 4x4 sales to something like half the passenger car market. Efforts to find a way of making the prices vehicles pay for the right to use roads correspond to the damage caused is another step, as would making sure all 4x4s pay the full luxury car tax – they are if anything less “essential” and more ecologically damaging than even a Rolls-Royce.
Sunday 30 August 2009
Friday 28 August 2009
An always-forgotten contrast: simplicity and frugality
One common myth is that the lower consumption of Europeans and East Asians versus people in Australia and North American really means they have simpler and less materialistic lives. I can testify, however, from having lived in Europe for a month during the Australian summer of 2006/2007, the the life people in Europe and one presumes East Asia lead is anything but "simple".
It is also, contrary to what many perceive,
exceedingly "consumerist" with a much greater variety of choices that is available in Australia leading people to want much more and also to want the most individual things possible. This is especially true of non-essentials like music and literature, where the much greater variety available in densely populated regions encourages radical tastes compared to the extremely conservative musical tastes of outer suburban Australia and Red America, where markets are smaller and only distinctly commercial music is viable for local selling.
I have long felt I have to explain these issues, but the author of a site called Blessed Simplicity does this very well. She points out that simplicity is ideally characterised by:
One is that trying to buy the very best good is a form of materialism - indeed the form of materialism so harmful it seems to Europe and East Asia today, as Heath and Potter point out so well. Another is that if there is "frugality" in Europe and East Asia, it is forced by economics to achieve the living standards they do - even if they are not as high in many ways as those of Australia and Red America.
Still, the distinction between "simplicity" (always voluntary) and "frugality" (often if not usually forced) is one so seldom made I cannot fail to take note. It is critical for any person critical of the hyper-materialism that, as fertility rates show, is threatening most of the world today.
It is also, contrary to what many perceive,
exceedingly "consumerist" with a much greater variety of choices that is available in Australia leading people to want much more and also to want the most individual things possible. This is especially true of non-essentials like music and literature, where the much greater variety available in densely populated regions encourages radical tastes compared to the extremely conservative musical tastes of outer suburban Australia and Red America, where markets are smaller and only distinctly commercial music is viable for local selling.I have long felt I have to explain these issues, but the author of a site called Blessed Simplicity does this very well. She points out that simplicity is ideally characterised by:
- homemade products
- individual, by-hand labour
- personal fulfillment
- goods like fresh bread, homemade soap, natural diapers for children and home-made remedies
- coupon-cutting
- buying cheap and shoddy goods rather that waiting to afford better less cheap ones
- deal-making to save money
- having to self-consciously saving money
One is that trying to buy the very best good is a form of materialism - indeed the form of materialism so harmful it seems to Europe and East Asia today, as Heath and Potter point out so well. Another is that if there is "frugality" in Europe and East Asia, it is forced by economics to achieve the living standards they do - even if they are not as high in many ways as those of Australia and Red America.
Still, the distinction between "simplicity" (always voluntary) and "frugality" (often if not usually forced) is one so seldom made I cannot fail to take note. It is critical for any person critical of the hyper-materialism that, as fertility rates show, is threatening most of the world today.
Rebuilding my laneway
This July, August and September the 
narrow stone laneway in which I have lived for the past eleven years is being 
rebuilt.
At first I though that the laneway might actually be being turned into a tar road - whcih I feel would be a genuine pity. It is actually being -resurfaced to make it less rough - my mother told me to recall my now-deceased father and how it was impossible to push his wheelchair westwards when we were taking him for an occasional trip from the nursing home in Balwyn where he lived for the last year and a half of his life.
The rebuilding of the laneway has been delayed by frequent heavy showers during most working days for the past month - curiously at a time when the weekends have been fine yet delightfully cool. The laneway has been grouted from its western end to the end of the swimming pool fence, but grouting to beyond my house was scheduled to have been done a week ago but has not been done yet owing to frequent showers during the working week. I have come to realise that this roadwork can only be done when the laneway is totally dry, so that even the sunny periods have not until today dried the moisture at the surface of the laneway sufficiently for grouting.
For me, it has been a little annoying because on one really wet afternoon I had to carry my bike through a huge pool of water. My mother said that the water was up to her knees when she came home that afternoon - at times I fear for the critical paper notes she carries every day from school!
narrow stone laneway in which I have lived for the past eleven years is being 
rebuilt.At first I though that the laneway might actually be being turned into a tar road - whcih I feel would be a genuine pity. It is actually being -resurfaced to make it less rough - my mother told me to recall my now-deceased father and how it was impossible to push his wheelchair westwards when we were taking him for an occasional trip from the nursing home in Balwyn where he lived for the last year and a half of his life.
The rebuilding of the laneway has been delayed by frequent heavy showers during most working days for the past month - curiously at a time when the weekends have been fine yet delightfully cool. The laneway has been grouted from its western end to the end of the swimming pool fence, but grouting to beyond my house was scheduled to have been done a week ago but has not been done yet owing to frequent showers during the working week. I have come to realise that this roadwork can only be done when the laneway is totally dry, so that even the sunny periods have not until today dried the moisture at the surface of the laneway sufficiently for grouting.
For me, it has been a little annoying because on one really wet afternoon I had to carry my bike through a huge pool of water. My mother said that the water was up to her knees when she came home that afternoon - at times I fear for the critical paper notes she carries every day from school!
Tuesday 25 August 2009
Are Asperger's Syndrome and political correctness linked?
Having been as a child one of the firs people diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and long known how it affects my behaviour and leads to my pushy and often aggressive manner in public places (pushing in queues, running up to accost people about obsessions) and my inability to feel what other people think, I have in recent years as a self-taught social scientist wondered whether the political views of people with Asperger's Syndrome and other "autism spectrum disorders" tends to be substantially different from the mainstream.
The effects of inability to empathise on one's political and cultural views is something that has interested me a great deal over the past two years when I did a course of books about personality psychology for RMIT. What I quite swiftly concluded was:
One book I recently discovered when browsing for information about Alfred Seguine Kinsey, the father of the controversial sex researcher, said that Alfred Charles Kinsey may have had Asperger's Syndrome. My response was not that of somebody stunned, but of somebody half-expectant of such a revelation. It makes sense from what I know about Asperger's Syndrome that people with it would be socially as a radical as Kinsey was considered in his lifetime, and that, as his modern detractors point out, Kinsey ignored criticism.
To look for potential links between Asperger's and social or political radicalism, I have relied on Benjamin Wiker's books Architects of the Culture of Death and Ten Books that Screwed up the World. They provide the best general guide to the ideas conservatives oppose, but I found only Kinsey and Charles Darwin (see here) as "Asperger's possibles". Bertrand Russell, another writer to have a book on the hit list of the Right, is also listed, but there is no mention of the following from Wiker's lists:
The effects of inability to empathise on one's political and cultural views is something that has interested me a great deal over the past two years when I did a course of books about personality psychology for RMIT. What I quite swiftly concluded was:
- the more empathetic a person is, the more conservative and small-government his/her politics will be
- this is because the more empathetic a person is, the more feeling (s)he will have for not infringing upon other's privacy and hence right to private property
- the most empathetic and compassionate people will have great sensitivity to violation of private property
- autistic and similar people will have no such sensitivity and hence favour big government and public property
One book I recently discovered when browsing for information about Alfred Seguine Kinsey, the father of the controversial sex researcher, said that Alfred Charles Kinsey may have had Asperger's Syndrome. My response was not that of somebody stunned, but of somebody half-expectant of such a revelation. It makes sense from what I know about Asperger's Syndrome that people with it would be socially as a radical as Kinsey was considered in his lifetime, and that, as his modern detractors point out, Kinsey ignored criticism.
To look for potential links between Asperger's and social or political radicalism, I have relied on Benjamin Wiker's books Architects of the Culture of Death and Ten Books that Screwed up the World. They provide the best general guide to the ideas conservatives oppose, but I found only Kinsey and Charles Darwin (see here) as "Asperger's possibles". Bertrand Russell, another writer to have a book on the hit list of the Right, is also listed, but there is no mention of the following from Wiker's lists:
- Thomas Hobbes
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Karl Marx
- Sigmund Freud
- John Stuart Mill
- Margaret Sanger
- Margaret Mead
- Peter Singer
- or Jack Kevorkian
Death of the Javan rhino?
In today's Jakarta Post (see the description here because I could not obtain accurate data from the paper) there is a description of the rainforest habitat of the critically endangered Javan Rhinoceros (Rhinoceros sondaicus) drying out because of weed invasion and global warming.
Whilst I accept that weed invasion is one of the most dangerous threats to wildlife throughout the world and that means of making far more attention paid to it are 100 percent desirable, the point made about climate change is hardly right. Even though an expanding tropical (monsoon) belt may shift the Intertropical Convergence Zone away from the equator, it is unlikely that rainfall in most of Java would be affected. Moreover,
rainfall data from this year's super-monsoon do not suggest the equatorial regions will lose rainfall even as the edges of the monsoon belt become massively wetter. A larger area occupied by the Intertropical Convergence Zone is exactly what the "tropical expansion" that has desiccated southern Australia in the past thirteen years and will desiccate Tasmania within a decade or so would constitute.
It may be that climate models suggest the equatorial regions' climates will turn into something like East Africa with a bimodal rainfall regime and two short or fairly short dry seasons every year. The problem is that the uniqueness of East Africa is as much a function of its topography creating, as in Sri Lanka, Vietnam and the Brazilian zona da mata, a climate in which rain comes from a "retreating monsoon" in the autumn. Rain shadows like that simply do not operate over the so-called "Maritime Continent" nor over most of South America.
Whilst I accept that weed invasion is one of the most dangerous threats to wildlife throughout the world and that means of making far more attention paid to it are 100 percent desirable, the point made about climate change is hardly right. Even though an expanding tropical (monsoon) belt may shift the Intertropical Convergence Zone away from the equator, it is unlikely that rainfall in most of Java would be affected. Moreover,
rainfall data from this year's super-monsoon do not suggest the equatorial regions will lose rainfall even as the edges of the monsoon belt become massively wetter. A larger area occupied by the Intertropical Convergence Zone is exactly what the "tropical expansion" that has desiccated southern Australia in the past thirteen years and will desiccate Tasmania within a decade or so would constitute.It may be that climate models suggest the equatorial regions' climates will turn into something like East Africa with a bimodal rainfall regime and two short or fairly short dry seasons every year. The problem is that the uniqueness of East Africa is as much a function of its topography creating, as in Sri Lanka, Vietnam and the Brazilian zona da mata, a climate in which rain comes from a "retreating monsoon" in the autumn. Rain shadows like that simply do not operate over the so-called "Maritime Continent" nor over most of South America.
Monday 24 August 2009
Is support for reduced emissions a dying breed of thought?
In this recent article for the Ballarat Courier, some extremely sensible suggestions are made that Australia should really try do much more.
When one considers:
When one considers:
- Australia is the country that on relatively elementary ecological grounds should have the lowest per capita emissions in the world
- Australia actually has the highest per capita emissions in the world
- There is little political pressure abroad to change this because the economic costs of sanctions would be intolerable for the selfish and materialistic cultures of modern Europe
write down their “hopes and fears” under a changing climateThe problem is that the newspaper points out that
- as many as ninety-seven out of one hundred and seventy-seven people involved were over fifty-five
- only thirty of the people involved were born after 1980
Such trends could well lead to an Australia with policies more pro-freeway and more pro-fossil fuel than ever at a time when the rest of the world has moved to completely renewable energy systems, especially if funding of public transport declines. As Europe, Asia and even the Americas shift to renewables, Australia is likely to gain monopsony access to the last oil reserves, which would further encourage fuel prices deeper into the Mariana Trench and increase global warming.
Sunday 23 August 2009
Rural Australia's future cannot be crop farming!
On the ABC today, National Party leader Warren Truss is saying that it will refuse to accept the woeful Emissions Trading Scheme because it will be
Such a climate shift would push humid temperate climates completely beyond Australia, and give the southern Murray-Darling Basin a climate equivalent to the historical climate of the erratically-watered Lake Eyre Basin. Moreover, the soils are such that a better comparison would be with the Gibson Desert to the Lake Eyre Basin’s west. Since the Gibson Desert has never been economic even for low-density beef cattle grazing, one can imagine that agriculture in the southern Murray-Darling Basin will be similarly difficult since even the high mountains are unlikely to provide permanent rivers with the northern super-monsoon driving air so hot as to regularly give 45˚C in summer. Should this super-monsoon actually reach the southern Murray-Darling, intense soil leaching will mean farmers in the long term would have to grow less nutritious tropical crops. If one looks at the ecological history of sub-Saharan Africa for a comparison, farming did not demonstrably prove sustainable over climate fluctuations outside the equatorial belt and mountainous East Africa with its young volcanic soils. This is a bad omen for Australian farming in a radically changed climate.
What the National Party has to realise sooner or later is that the only possible future for the vast expanses of Australia is the future that the (mistaken) Antarctic Treaty gave to that continent fifty years ago: namely a centre for high-cost, low-density eco-tourism. With its extremely ancient soils and absence of glaciers, Australia in the Quaternary is a relict of what the Earth has been like for most of geological time. Thus, devoting all or almost all the continent to conservation is the only ecologically sane use of its land and the only one consistent with long-term soil conservation and providing the large expanses needed to support most native species.
Being a net importer of food would also eliminate the lazy comfort in which Australians have basked for two hundred and twenty years as the ideas on which Western Civilisation was founded have been overturned under the pressures created by dense urban living. The would also give opportunities to farmers in a multitude of nations abroad to gain higher living standards.
“a massive tax on people in regional Australia”What this actually says is that the National Party is thinking only in the short-term. They possess no awareness that relatively simple paleoclimate models show that under likely carbon dioxide levels even with phase-out of fossil fuels everywhere but Australia, the arid “horse latitudes” will migrate roughly from around Coober Pedy to about 50˚S, or south of Tasmania.
Such a climate shift would push humid temperate climates completely beyond Australia, and give the southern Murray-Darling Basin a climate equivalent to the historical climate of the erratically-watered Lake Eyre Basin. Moreover, the soils are such that a better comparison would be with the Gibson Desert to the Lake Eyre Basin’s west. Since the Gibson Desert has never been economic even for low-density beef cattle grazing, one can imagine that agriculture in the southern Murray-Darling Basin will be similarly difficult since even the high mountains are unlikely to provide permanent rivers with the northern super-monsoon driving air so hot as to regularly give 45˚C in summer. Should this super-monsoon actually reach the southern Murray-Darling, intense soil leaching will mean farmers in the long term would have to grow less nutritious tropical crops. If one looks at the ecological history of sub-Saharan Africa for a comparison, farming did not demonstrably prove sustainable over climate fluctuations outside the equatorial belt and mountainous East Africa with its young volcanic soils. This is a bad omen for Australian farming in a radically changed climate.
What the National Party has to realise sooner or later is that the only possible future for the vast expanses of Australia is the future that the (mistaken) Antarctic Treaty gave to that continent fifty years ago: namely a centre for high-cost, low-density eco-tourism. With its extremely ancient soils and absence of glaciers, Australia in the Quaternary is a relict of what the Earth has been like for most of geological time. Thus, devoting all or almost all the continent to conservation is the only ecologically sane use of its land and the only one consistent with long-term soil conservation and providing the large expanses needed to support most native species.
Being a net importer of food would also eliminate the lazy comfort in which Australians have basked for two hundred and twenty years as the ideas on which Western Civilisation was founded have been overturned under the pressures created by dense urban living. The would also give opportunities to farmers in a multitude of nations abroad to gain higher living standards.
Saturday 15 August 2009
A strange list of "geniuses"
Recently, whilst I was looking for references to Dario Fo's play The Pope and the Witch, aggressively criticised here, I found Fo, not well-known here in conservative Australia, listed quite remarkably at number seven in a survey of "living geniuses" conducted by the Telegraph.
Though the list was published almost two years ago and quite a number of those listed have since died (including centenerian Hoffmann), I reproduce it below:
All in all, the list can best be described as showing the potential problems with a whimsical public who might never have enough time to think clearly about how correct their choices are.
Though the list was published almost two years ago and quite a number of those listed have since died (including centenerian Hoffmann), I reproduce it below:
| 1= | Albert Hoffman | (Swiss) | Chemist | 27 |
| 1= | Tim Berners-Lee | (British) | Computer Scientist | 27 |
| 3 | George Soros | (American) | Investor & Philanthropist | 25 |
| 4 | Matt Groening | (American) | Satirist & Animator | 24 |
| 5= | Nelson Mandela | (South African) | Politician & Diplomat | 23 |
| 5= | Frederick Sanger | (British) | Chemist | 23 |
| 7= | Dario Fo | (Italian) | Writer & Dramatist | 22 |
| 7= | Steven Hawking | (British) | Physicist | 22 |
| 9= | Oscar Niemeyer | (Brazilian) | Architect | 21 |
| 9= | Philip Glass | (American) | Composer | 21 |
| 9= | Grigory Perelman | (Russian) | Mathematician | 21 |
| 12= | Andrew Wiles | (British) | Mathematician | 20 |
| 12= | Li Hongzhi | (Chinese) | Spiritual Leader | 20 |
| 12= | Ali Javan | (Iranian) | Engineer | 20 |
| 15= | Brian Eno | (British) | Composer | 19 |
| 15= | Damian Hirst | (British) | Artist | 19 |
| 15= | Daniel Tammet | (British) | Savant & Linguist | 19 |
| 18 | Nicholson Baker | (American | Writer | 18 |
| 19 | Daniel Barenboim | (N/A) | Musician | 17 |
| 20= | Robert Crumb | (American) | Artist | 16 |
| 20= | Richard Dawkins | (British) | Biologist and philosopher | 16 |
| 20= | Larry Page & Sergey Brin | (American) | Publishers | 16 |
| 20= | Rupert Murdoch | (American) | Publisher | 16 |
| 20= | Geoffrey Hill | (British) | Poet | 16 |
| 25 | Garry Kasparov | (Russian) | Chess Player | 15 |
| 26= | The Dalai Lama | (Tibetan) | Spiritual Leader | 14 |
| 26= | Steven Spielberg | (American) | Film maker | 14 |
| 26= | Hiroshi Ishiguro | (Japanese) | Roboticist | 14 |
| 26= | Robert Edwards | (British) | Pioneer of IVF treatment | 14 |
| 26= | Seamus Heaney | (Irish) | Poet | 14 |
| 31 | Harold Pinter | (British) | Writer & Dramatist | 13 |
| 32= | Flossie Wong-Staal | (Chinese) | Bio-technologist | 12 |
| 32= | Bobby Fischer | (American) | Chess Player | 12 |
| 32= | Prince | (American) | Musician | 12 |
| 32= | Henryk Gorecki | (Polish) | Composer | 12 |
| 32= | Avram Noam Chomsky | (American) | Philosopher & linguist | 12 |
| 32= | Sebastian Thrun | (German) | Probabilistic roboticist | 12 |
| 32= | Nima Arkani Hamed | (Canadian) | Physicist | 12 |
| 32= | Margaret Turnbull | (American) | Astrobiologist | 12 |
| 40= | Elaine Pagels | (American) | Historian | 11 |
| 40= | Enrique Ostrea | (Philippino) | Pediatrics & neonatology | 11 |
| 40= | Gary Becker | (American) | Economist | 11 |
| 43= | Mohammed Ali | (American) | Boxer | 10 |
| 43= | Osama Bin Laden | (Saudi) | Islamicist | 10 |
| 43= | Bill Gates | (American) | Businessman | 10 |
| 43= | Philip Roth | (American) | Writer | 10 |
| 43= | James West | (American) | Invented the foil electrical microphone | 10 |
| 43= | Tuan Vo-Dinh | (Vietnamese) | Bio-Medical Scientist | 10 |
| 49= | Brian Wilson | (American) | Musician | 9 |
| 49= | Stevie Wonder | (American) | Singer songwriter | 9 |
| 49= | Vint Cerf | (American) | Computer scientist | 9 |
| 49= | Henry Kissinger | (American) | Diplomat and politician | 9 |
| 49= | Richard Branson | (British) | Publicist | 9 |
| 49= | Pardis Sabeti | (Iranian) | Biological anthropologist | 9 |
| 49= | Jon de Mol | (Dutch) | Television producer | 9 |
| 49= | Meryl Streep | (American) | Actress | 9 |
| 49= | Margaret Atwood | (Canadian) | Writer | 9 |
| 58= | Placido Domingo | (Spanish) | Singer | 8 |
| 58= | John Lasseter | (American) | Digital Animator | 8 |
| 58= | Shunpei Yamazaki | (Japanese) | Computer scientist & physicist | 8 |
| 58= | Jane Goodall | (British) | Ethologist & Anthropologist | 8 |
| 58= | Kirti Narayan Chaudhuri | (Indian) | Historian | 8 |
| 58= | John Goto | (British) | Photographer | 8 |
| 58= | Paul McCartney | (British) | Musician | 8 |
| 58= | Stephen King | (American) | Writer | 8 |
| 58= | Leonard Cohen | (Canadian) | Poet & musician | 8 |
| 67= | Aretha Franklin | (American) | Musician | 7 |
| 67= | David Bowie | (British) | Musician | 7 |
| 67= | Emily Oster | (American) | Economist | 7 |
| 67= | Steve Wozniak | (American) | Engineer and co-founder of Apple Computers | 7 |
| 67= | Martin Cooper | (American) | Inventor of the cell phone | 7 |
| 72= | George Lucas | (American) | Film maker | 6 |
| 72= | Nile Rogers | (American) | Musician (with Chic and producer) | 6 |
| 72= | Hans Zimmer | (German) | Composer | 6 |
| 72= | John Williams | (American) | Composer | 6 |
| 72= | Annette Baier | (New Zealander) | Philosopher | 6 |
| 72= | Dorothy Rowe | (British) | Psychologist | 6 |
| 72= | Ivan Marchuk | (Ukrainian) | Artist & sculptor | 6 |
| 72= | Robin Escovado | (American) | Composer | 6 |
| 72= | Mark Dean | (American) | Inventor & computer scientist | 6 |
| 72= | Rick Rubin | (American) | Musician & producer | 6 |
| 72= | Stan Lee | (American) | Publisher | 6 |
| 83= | David Warren | (Australian) | Engineer | 5 |
| 83= | Jon Fosse | (Norwegian) | Writer & dramatist | |
| 83= | Gjertrud Schnackenberg | (American) | Poet | 5 |
| 83= | Graham Linehan | (Irish) | Writer & dramatist | 5 |
| 83= | JK Rowling | (British) | Writer (Harry Potter) | 5 |
| 83= | Ken Russell | (British) | Film maker | 5 |
| 83= | Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov | (Russian) | Small arms designer | 5 |
| 83= | Erich Jarvis | (American) | Neurobiologist | 5 |
| 91= | Chad Varah | (British) | Founder of Samaritans | 4 |
| 91= | Nicolas Hayek | (Swiss) | Businessman and founder of Swatch | 4 |
| 91= | Alastair Hannay | (British) | Philosopher | 4 |
| 94= | Patricia Bath | (American) | Ophthalmologist | 3 |
| 94= | Thomas A. Jackson | (American) | Aerospace engineer | 3 |
| 94= | Dolly Parton | (American) | Singer | 3 |
| 94= | Morrissey | (British) | Singer and songwriter (The Smiths) | 3 |
| 94= | Michael Eavis | (British) | Organiser of Glastonbury | 3 |
| 94= | Ranulph Fiennes | (British) | Adventurer | 3 |
| 100. | Quentin Tarantino | (American) | Filmmaker | 2 |
All in all, the list can best be described as showing the potential problems with a whimsical public who might never have enough time to think clearly about how correct their choices are.
Those who think Britain's populace must be amazingly politically correct are basically accurate. The omission of Pope Benedict XVI, a man whom even his detractors know as exceptionally gifted intellectually, ought to lead people in Australia and "Red" America to realise they live in a different culture from Europe. Nor was not-yet-deceased Russian writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, whose acclaim extends beyond those who agree with his politics. Then one sees Richard Dawkins listed but none of his critics like Alistair McGrath or George Weigel or quite a number of others.
However, beyond politics, the list is so spotty that it is worth noting for that alone. Almost every person listed could be counterpointed by an omitted figure, and only a small number, such as poet Seamus Heaney, are acclaimed at all consistently as the best in their field. For that alone, the list certainly warns against trying to use people so poorly informed they make a spur-of-the-moment judgment. I for one have read criticism intensively for a long time and still reallise I am falling prey to this problem!
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