If it's Not Perfect, It's Evil

The folks at CIF Watch soldier on in their attempt to discredit the Guardian and its commenters. I salute their ability to wade through that cesspool daily; it's not as if they're going to convince the Guardian to mend their ways; that's not an option.

I also visit the Gaurdian daily, but since I'm trying to undersand what makes them tick I often skip their ravings about Israel and try to capture the wider picture. Today they've offered a whooper, in the form of an article by one Leo Hickman, call it an anti-Borlaug obituary.

Those of you who were children in the 50s and 60s may share the memory of being told to finish our spinnach because the children in India were starving. Those born later, don't have that memory - because the children in India (mostly) stopped starving. Hundreds of millions of them. The man who did more than anyone to supply them with food when they didn't have it was Norman Borlaug, who passed away this week at the age of 95. You'd think he'd now be allowed to belong to the ages as one of humanity's most important heroes, ever.

Not if you're of the Guardian mind-frame, though. According to Mr. Hickman (and apparently others before him), Borlaug is partially to blame for global warming, which means that his achivement of saving hundreds of millions of lives then is at least partially outbalanced by the possibility that we may have warmer weather later.

The mind boggles.

After it winds down from boggling, however, there's a deeper comment here. That is the intolerance of revolutionaries and other ideologues for flawed reality. If a soultion to a problem is itself only limited, or even if it's nigh-perfect but causes secondary blemishes, it's not really a solution it all. Only by tearing reality down and building it again without flaws can we really get to where we should be; celebration of flawed achivements is evil because it suggests we should live in this world, not strive for that one.