Mosquitos are just annoying. Don't be one.

It's a common refrain in activist circles these days: "If you think you're too small to make a difference, you've never been in bed with a mosquito." I've been suspicious of this slogan from the beginning, and the title of this post explains why in brief. But last night I realized that extending the metaphor, to show in detail why it doesn't work, would be both entertaining and educational.

First of all, what does a mosquito hope to accomplish? Basically, it wants blood in the same way activists want money thrown at their causes (well, not just thrown, but that's how most governments and corporations probably see it). Now, you'd have to be a die-hard environmentalist to even think about wanting to feed mosquitos. Can you imagine that a mosquito bite would convince you to open a vein and let the little bloodsuckers drink their fill? Not only would this be the moral equivalent of negotiating with terrorists, you may also believe (with some justification) that there are easily enough mosquitos out there to drain you dry--and sadly, large politiconomic entities believe the same thing about activist groups.

Now, what does a mosquito bite actually accomplish? Well, it's annoying and painful, so its victim will likely do one of three things.

1. Get out a flyswatter: riot police at demonstrations are probably the closest analogy. (Amusingly, flyswatters are meant for flies, not mosquitos, and likewise riot police are meant for riots, not peaceful demonstrations.)



2. Put on some bug spray: rhetoric designed to convince the activists that they're wasting their time and should bug off.



3. Put up a mosquito net: reduced access to corporate and government officials, which allows them to avoid most of the constant and annoying petitioning and hate mail from activists. (Of course, a few of us still manage to get through the net.)

There is a fourth possibility: the victim could give the mosquitos what they want, for example by putting out a pan of cow blood. The analogous situation would be governments raising taxes or corporations raising prices to cover the costs of acceding to activists' demands, effectively taking the resources from elsewhere rather than paying out of their own coffers. But high taxes can lose you elections and high prices can lose you market share, so the cow-blood option is usually a last resort.

One last thought: what if a mosquito bite gives you a deadly disease? That could be a metaphor for those rare occasions when activist pressure actually ruins a corporation or administration that refused to change its ways. We may cheer such victories, but I would bet that in most cases they merely further harden our remaining opponents against us. Do we really want to be fighting such a war? Is it one we have any hope of winning? Perhaps, but not if we continue to think of ourselves as mosquitos.


P.S. Another common liberal slogan these days is that "America is losing the war on terror." This strikes me as rather absurd, because there is simply no way that terrorists can "defeat" the United States. Can you imagine us "surrendering" to terrorists even if they somehow managed to nuke five of our major cities? Because that's the absolute maximum they're ever likely to be capable of.

People who don't believe in global warming

I once read a review that said that Michael Crichton's "Big Theme" is the hubris of scientists. In most of his works, this is manifested in unexpected side effects of otherwise wonderful technologies: runaway dinosaurs, deadly nanites, etc. But in his latest "novel," State of Fear, he takes an altogether different tack, accusing scientists of making up such side effects in order to enhance their careers. The side effect Crichton claims to be faked is, of course, global warming.

Larry Niven, an author I have much greater respect for, also doesn't believe in global warming, because "the predictions have been flaky." Now, it's perfectly reasonable to view a theory as discredited if you don't think it has stood up to experiment, but what I find interesting is that these nonbelievers don't have much of an alternative theory to put in its place. The theory of the greenhouse effect is derived from basic chemistry and physics, and states simply that the current quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere should trap enough of the Sun's heat to result in warming. Since few would deny the chemical properties of these gases or dispute the measurements of their atmospheric concentrations, the nonbelievers are forced to claim that something is countering the effects of the greenhouse gases and preventing greenhouse warming from occurring.

As far as I can tell, the something that Niven has come up with is that the current interglacial period is coming to an end, and only our heroic polluting efforts are holding back the tide of ice that would otherwise be crushing our civilization. (See the "novel" Fallen Angels by Niven and Jerry Pournelle.) Not only does it seem awfully convenient timing for a multi-millenial cycle to enter a downswing during the century when our civilization's exponential growth and change curves are turning sharply upward, it also seems unlikely to me that anyone has made any tests of the Niven hypothesis. I might be willing to at least consider switching camps if I found out otherwise; it would also help to know for certain that the oil industry didn't bribe Crichton to write State of Fear.


P.S. Even if I did switch camps, I could still be an environmentalist, startlingly enough. An environmentalist who doesn't believe in global warming? Well, global warming is simply not a necessary condition for biosphere collapse. I used to have a nice flowchart describing all the contributing factors, but I lost it. Aargh.