Sadly, we can't all rise again

Another Easter holiday has passed and after all that relaxation and delicious chocolate we call sit back and listen to the media tell us all about the worst possible aspect of the 4-day break.

This Easter saw the worst road toll in 17 years. Thanks for that little bit of joyous information there, media. So how many tens of people were horrifically killed on our roads this most doomed of years? Only eleven you say... I’m not saying I was hoping for more deaths, it’s just that when you hear about the worst road toll in 17 years you think it’s got to be pretty big. After all, in the last ten years alone there are approximately 500,000 more light passenger vehicles on the road (a 21% increase), and nearly a million more vehicles in total (MoT - NZ Vehicle Fleet Statistics); surely that alone would cause the road toll to rise. So if you make a big deal about it, it’s got to be worse than a slight increase due the larger number of vehicles on our roads?

They say it’s the worst in 17 years. Nominally perhaps, but statistically? Between 2004 and 2008 the average annual road toll was 404 (MoT - Road Toll). That’s roughly 1.1 road deaths per day. So in any typical block of four days you would expect there to be 4.4 deaths on our roads. So the road toll was 2 and a half times greater than any random selection of four days. OK, that’s pretty bad. But that’s just a typical daily average taken across a whole year; long weekends do not contain typical days when it comes to traffic. I can’t find statistics for the increase in volume, however conservatively I would say there is at least twice as much traffic on the roads over Easter, particularly on State Highways where people are more likely to speed and overtake in a dangerous fashion. Taking that into account, one would expect an increase on the average road toll. And what’s this, the road toll includes Thursday afternoon and early Tuesday morning? Nearly half the daily traffic flow is in the afternoon, so that could account for more of the increase on the average road toll. Even though it finishes at 6am on Tuesday, that’s still time to include some people who are merely commuting to work. Their deaths are equally tragic, but they can hardly be considered to be part of the ‘holiday road toll’, yet they are.

Don’t get me wrong, eleven deaths is a lot. It’s at least eleven too many, and people definitely need to be more careful rather than thoughtless douche-bags. But, minor fluctuations in the daily average aside, the Easter road toll itself has barely changed in 30 years (MoT - Holiday Road Toll); despite the fact that if there has been an increase of more than one million vehicles on our roads in the past decade then there are at least two million more vehicles than 30 years ago. Since 1980 the average Easter road toll has been 9.4 (±0.8), so a road toll of 11 is statistically only 1 death above the 30 year average. The average Easter road toll in the 1980s was 13; in the 90s it was 9.4 and in the 00s it had dropped to 5.6. If we convert that to deaths per million vehicles (the numbers being no more than an educated guess) that works out at roughly: 1980 (1 million vehicles) – 10 deaths, 1990 (1.5 million vehicles) – 6.3 deaths, 2000 (2 million vehicles) - 2.8 deaths.

If anything the media should be focussing on how something seems to be getting through to people, since the road toll is barely changing despite a near exponential increase in vehicles on our roads. I know there are still idiots and thoughtless pricks on the roads, however on the whole the road-going public appear to be doing something right. Instead the media chooses to ram the worst of the weekends news down our throats like we all spent the weekend speeding through crowds of children. I’m surprised they don’t just go all in and show us a nightly running average of the road toll over the past few days just to remind us that no matter how relaxed or responsible we get, there is death. They could fit it in somewhere between the 6:30pm rain prediction and the 6:45pm rain prediction.

What goes around

In order to solve traffic woes, quell the uprising of the vocal cyclist and probably, in some misguided and convoluted way, to save the polar bears, it was decided in recent history that bicycles would follow the same rules as any other road-going vehicle. ‘At last’, sighed the previously oppressed cyclist, ‘I can finally claim my rightful place on the road’. However, there was a problem. Cyclists didn’t have a rightful place on the road. The majority of roads were never designed for more than two cars to travel safely past each other at speed. Add to this equation a vulnerable meat-sack on a flimsy metal frame and it won’t be long before that place on the road that was so passionately sought becomes more permanent than one would ever have wished. So what then? The footpath? That’s not safe for anyone involved. Cyclists have become the pariahs of the transportation world, all because the government made a knee-jerk response to a growing problem. I’ve recently come across a secret that evidently wasn’t available to the government at the time. Bicycles are not the same things as the motor vehicles that New Zealand roads have traditionally been designed for. There are more and more cycle lanes being put in, and it is a major consideration when designing new roads. That’s good; I’m not saying that cyclists should stay off the roads. What I am saying is that a lot more thought needs to be put into how bicycles are treated on the roads other than just upgrading them to the status of something they are not.

For a start, motorists are tested on their knowledge of the road rules before being allowed to drive a vehicle on the road. Some motorists are still more than a bit hazy on the finer details, but at least the little card in their wallet proves that at some point before getting behind the wheel they had at least glanced over the road code. The first paragraph of the ‘Official New Zealand Code for Cyclists’ states that: “Before cycling on the road you must know the road rules. They apply to cyclists as well as those using motor vehicles”. How many cyclists do you think there are that have read and understood the road code before getting on their bike and heading off to school/work? Granted, many will have a driver’s licence, but what about all those children that adopt all the legal responsibility of motorists every time they head off to school? There should be some form of standardised testing for cyclists to ensure that the majority of them know the road code that they are legally obligated to follow each time they get behind the handlebars. It wouldn’t have to be as involved as the road code for motorists, there’s no need for an 8 year old kid to know that the load on a trailer cannot extend more than 4 metres behind the rear axle just to get his 10-speed to school and back, just as long as cyclists could carry a little card in their wallet that proved that at some point they understood the road code basics. ‘How can an 8 year old be expected to sit a test like that?’ I hear you ask. Maybe they can’t, but then how can you expect them to go out on the roads and compete for their little bit of tar seal alongside road rule-resistant bus drivers and adrenalin-fuelled couriers without demonstrating a basic understanding of who gives way to who?

The second point I wish to make is that if a bicycle is legally the same as a motor vehicle, how come cyclists don’t need to obtain a warrant of fitness or a vehicle licence (that’s ‘vehicle registration’ to those who haven't caught up with the latest lingo from the NZTA (that's the LTSA))? A bicycle frame snapping due to structural rust while a cyclist is travelling at 50kph through traffic is just as likely to end in tears as a similar fault with a motor vehicle. Again, it doesn’t need to be as intensive or anywhere near as expensive (but then neither does a WOF for a motor vehicle); it just makes sense that if the stature of bicycles is going to be promoted to big bad motor vehicle, there should be checks in place to reduce injury and prevent deaths in the same fashion. As for vehicle licensing, why should cyclists have lanes designed specifically for them and not be required to pay for them in any direct way? Not all bicycles would need to obtain these of course; if you only take your bike out to the park every other Sunday then there’s no more need to licence it than there is for a motocross bike or a farm tractor.

Thirdly, just because there is currently no cycling license, WOF or vehicle licensing does that mean that cyclists are both above the law and above common sense? Any cyclist riding without a helmet is asking for a visit to the emergency room. Any cyclist whose helmet is dangling from their handlebars is asking for sterilisation. Yet I have seen numerous cyclists riding sans helmet, recently right past a police officer, and I strongly doubt there is much chance they’ll get reprimanded accordingly. What about cyclists who ride with the flow of traffic, despite council money being spent on the cycle lane that runs right alongside them? I’ll say it again, roads are not designed with cyclists in mind; cycle lanes most definitely are. If cyclists have all the rights of a motorist on the road, then does that mean that as a motorist I have every right to drive up the cycle lane? Of course not, so surely cyclists should be legally required to use cycle lanes where provided, and be fined if caught using the roads alongside them. The point of all road rules is public safety, and if there’s a safer option for one particular road user then they should be made to use it. No one wants to hit a cyclist any more than a cyclist wants to be hit, as a general rule anyway.

Cyclists should be able to get to work without being forced to devolve into motorists. For this to be a safe option, however, a lot more thought needs to be put into legislation to protect the safety of all road users. Bikes are not cars, and it will take a lot more than a 1.5 metre bubble to bring harmony to our increasingly congested roads.

Hungry, hungry hypocrisy

Aren’t people strange? Why just the other day someone was having a dispute with their neighbour over the number of dogs he had on his property. This man thought he would solve the problem himself. He had the foresight to get his neighbour to sign a document giving him permission to get his shotgun and rifle and go about “destroying” each of the dogs himself. Pity he didn’t have the foresight to inform the authorities. How strange. Although, that’s not the strangest part. It’s the most horrible, the most sickening and the most inexcusable, but not the strangest. What I find strangest are some of the responses and attitudes of the general public. Not that they disagree with his method of choice, but rather the hypocrisy that flows so freely from them.

Today I noticed that there was a group on facebook entitled “The sickos who killed 33 dogs in NZ should be publicly shot”. On this group’s ‘wall’ there are countless outcries of disapproval, including such hypocritical pearls as “Shoot them in the knees leave them for dead” and “I hate violence, but COKSUCKERS like him can get tortured alive !!!!!!!!”. One kind soul has even provided the man’s name, address and mobile number, just in case someone feels the need to act out their grammatically-deficient threats. Now I am in no way condoning what the man did. I’m a dog owner, and it made me nauseous just to think about it. I strongly believe that there should be harsher penalties for cruelty to animals, particularly towards animals registered as pets. It just terrifies me that someone can effectively say ‘what that person did was totally sick; how could someone even THINK of doing something so horrible? I’d like to gut him with a knife and feed him to my dogs’.

The belief that it’s okay to commit acts of great violence towards people who have committed acts of great violence is in itself barbaric. I don’t doubt that the majority of people who make these bold statements would never, and could never, act on them themselves. So presumably they’re asking some higher power to commit these acts. Are these acts then acceptable if done in the name of justice? I’d agree that Police should be able to use force to diffuse a situation. There are non-lethal solutions; however they shouldn’t be convicted if lethal force is required as a last resort. That’s a different story. While it is taking lives in the name of justice, the offender is still offending and therefore still poses a threat. Calling for violence in the name of justice when the offender poses no threat is archaic and disturbing. Public hangings stopped being trendy for a reason. Wishing for violence makes you no different from the perpetrators of violence before they acted on it. By all means, call for justice though. People shouldn’t get away with actions that negatively affect the lives of others. That’s why we have a justice system, which brings me to another point.

The problem with the justice system is that our society is stuck in limbo; somewhere between capital punishment and group discussions. While some members of the public may demand blood, the truth is that it wouldn’t make any difference to their lives whether the guilty party was dead or locked up. In fact, if any of those people ever put their gallows where their mouth is, they might get enough of that blood on their hands to realise that the death penalty is really a lose-lose kind of deal. So instead we lock our criminals up in small rooms and feed them for a pre-defined period of time until we let them out again. How quaint. Whenever I drive over the Khyber Pass on-ramp in Newmarket and look down at the stone walls of Mt Eden prison I get a feeling of depressed confusion. We’ve repeatedly sent people into space, we’ve got remote control toys on the surface of Mars, video calling is available to anyone with an internet connection and movies can be filmed and shown in all three glorious dimensions. We’re living in the future, and yet locking criminals up in small rooms and feeding them for a pre-defined period of time until we let them out again is the best we can come up with?

There are other options I suppose, such as home detention and mental health counselling. I think part of society wants an alternative approach, it’s just too hard to deal with, and much easier to keep locking people up in small rooms. I can’t offer any better alternatives myself. Puppies Behind Bars sounds like a good idea, although it’s more part of the prison system than an alternative to it. The program “trains inmates to raise puppies to become service dogs for the disabled and explosive detection canines for law enforcement”. That may just be the worst possible treatment for the person mentioned above, or it could be the absolute best. Helping criminals understand how their actions have impacted on the lives of others by putting them in their shoes may not be such a bad idea.

I guess the question is do we genuinely want to rehabilitate criminals so that they can become functioning members of society, or do we just want to vent our rage and anger before putting them out of sight and out of mind? Is it even possible to change someone’s mindset enough for the justice system to ever work? I like to think so. I also hold onto the hope that society’s mindset will continue to change. It’s taken a long time for the death sentence to be frowned upon, with any luck the prison system is next. I just hope that in the meantime there are enough people who are refraining from wishing horrendous torture upon criminals long enough to come up with a decent alternative.

The SkyCity's the limit

I love a good movie. I even love quite a few bad movies. What I don’t love is the ever increasing cost one has to pay for the privilege of seeing the movie on the big screen. There was a time when a night at the movies cost nothing more than a lazy Kate from mum, half for the pre-movie combo and half for the movie itself. Admittedly, there was probably a time when a movie cost nothing more than sixpence from Aunt Mildred, half for the movie itself and half for a to the local opium dealer. I don’t remember those times, and there’s a chance they never existed, so let’s stick with the age of the lazy tenner. As time passed the price of tickets increased. That’s not all that strange, the price of everything increases over time due to inflation, with the exception of air travel, for some reason. It’s important that I note here, before I get swept away by the rant inside, that when I refer to ‘cinema’ or ‘they’, I am really referring to SkyCity Cinemas, who own somewhere in the region of 97% of cinemas in New Zealand. There are plenty of other, non-SkyCity cinemas in New Zealand that may be doing a damn fine job, or a damn lousy one, I just haven’t had much experience with them so I’m unable to comment.

In New Zealand the inflation rate is currently 4.3%. So if a movie cost $5 in 1992, due to inflation alone it should have cost $7.38 in the third quarter of 2009 (thank you RBNZ for the handy calculator). Instead, movie tickets were $15.50 in the third quarter of 2009. But wait, you smugly decree, you were a child in 1992, a child’s ticket would have cost $5, not an adult’s. Smugly noted. However, in the third quarter of 2009 a child’s ticket cost $9.50. That’s more than $2 higher than inflation. Not all that much for the individual, but when there are more movie cinemas than ever, implying that movie attendance is higher than ever, that’s a lot of extra profit for movie industry. I’m sure a similar situation exists for adult ticket prices.

During the age of the lazy tenner, 1992, the highest-grossing movie was Aladdin, bringing in US$504,100,000, that’s NZ$931,276,556 at the 1992 exchange rate (thank you again RBNZ). That’s a lot of money, especially when the movie only cost US$23 million to make. You would assume then, accounting for inflation, that in 2009 the highest-grossing movie would make about US$777,122,000. After all, there was a recession on, times were tough, biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Ahh, but when you’re eating soggy newspaper for dinner and living in a shoe box in the middle of the street, what better way to spend the money you earned shining shoes outside the local speakeasy than visiting the world of Pandora in ground-breaking 3D. A world where creatures are almost identical to those on Earth but with an extra pair of limbs; a world where nobody ever takes down their Christmas lights; a world where it’s somehow more cost effective to transfer the consciousness of a biologist into a genetically matched Alien body to go out and observe the local flora than it is for them to simply wear one of those gas masks. It’s also a world where inflation means nothing. US$777,122,000? Try doubling it. In less than a month Avatar grossed US$1,346,805,340 worldwide. That’s 10 digits right there. Titanic has only managed to gross US$1.8 billion in 12 years. Granted, charging an extra $1.50 for the novelty of seeing it in 3D (which is totally worth it by the way) helps boost profits. It’s not like it was the only movie to post an obscene profit in 2009 though. Harry Potter raked in US$934 million, Ice Age 3 got US$887 million and Transformers 2 took in US$835 million. Good lord, even Alvin and the Chipmunks managed to get their grubby little paws on US$177 million, and that was just in a week, or should I say in a 'squeak'? No, definitely not.

The rise in movie ticket prices, therefore, can’t be because of inflation, and since inflation takes into account increases in the average wage, it can’t be blamed on the high-rolling individuals the cinemas employ. Movies are continuing to haul in more money than Scrooge McDuck could swim in, so it’s not a failing movie industry that’s driving the price up. I’d like to say its pure greed; however I don’t have all the facts. What if the mob has SkyCity’s daughter and is demanding they increase their ticket prices at a slightly greater rate than inflation over a 20 year period or they’ll kill her? What if SkyCity is in some sort of corporate competition to see who can offer their customers the least value-for-money? Well, if the latter is the case, I hardly think SkyCity can win. The tobacco companies not only charge a lot for a product that costs very little to produce, but they actually say on their packaging that using their product will kill you or worse and people still freely hand over their money! We’re still a good few years away from paying $25 to sit in a cinema while being heavily irradiated, so for now you can rest assured that at least buying a movie ticket is better value than a packet of cigarettes.

I think I lost the point somewhere in the last paragraph. I’ll try and get back on track long enough to wrap this up. Movie companies, like most other companies, exist solely to make the biggest profit they can. I’m sure there a few very wealthy people sitting in a room screaming “another 50 cents!” and rolling around on the floor laughing as they watch more and more people flock to fill up the ever-increasing numbers of cinemas. To those people I begrudgingly quote Brian Tamaki: enough is enough. We get it, you all make a lot of money and you’re diamond-encrusted lifestyles are very impressive. But please, why don’t you try offering us, the loyal customers, a brief respite from your profit-mongering so that we can enjoy the cinema without having to decide between a couple of hours in Pandora and a weekend in Wellington. I promise if you cut a little off the top, maybe taking it back to the age of the lazy tenner, without the combo, I’ll see twice as many movies. That’s a 33% increase in profits. And even if others don’t follow my lead then worst case scenario is that you lose a bit of that wealth and have to go back to simpler, gold-encrusted lifestyles. I’m sure James Cameron can lend you a few million if times get really tough, he owes you that much.

Blessed be the Lord God Almighty...in bed

St Matthew's-in-the-city are raising a new billboard for the Christmas period that brings into question the traditional story of Jesus' birth. You can read about it here.

As a non-religious person, it is quite refreshing to see something that I can actually respect a religious organisation for.

One of the biggest problems with organised religion is their failure to move with the times by clinging to archaic story-telling as though it were inarguable fact. This billboard shows a level of self-awareness that I feel the Church will need more of it is to survive through this age of free-flowing knowledge and understanding.

Besides, self-deprecating humour is so hot right now. Bravo Mr Cardy.

UPDATE 23/12/2009: The billboard has been defaced three times (once at knife-point!?) so the church has said it's not going to put it up again. Strike another one up for the crazy people, or is that strike another one AGAINST the crazy people? I just can't tell any more...

On the egotism of Man

Edit 22/01/2019: I just wanted to say that I am no longer quite the climate change sceptic I once was. I never flat out denied it, I was just cautious. It’s been a while now, and while I don’t know enough to be 100% convinced of man-made climate change, I defer to the thousands of much more knowledgeable people that assure me it’s a scientific certainty. I could delete this post in light of this revelation, but that would be revisionist and cowardly, so I choose to clambour up what little moral high ground I can find in this situation and leave it where it is.

The Copenhagen summit has kicked off and I’m a little worried. When you put that many World leaders in a room and tell then to save the planet, surely no good can come from it.

Let me start by saying that I’m not completely down with all this global warming talk. I’ll accept, at least for the sake of this rant, that global temperatures are rising, and that within 50 years I will be able to hold off switching on the heat pump for an extra week or two. However, I’m not willing to accept that there is enough evidence to say, without a doubt, that humans are solely responsible. I find it typically egotistical for us humans to think we’re destroying the Earth. There are a quite a lot of us, but I know for a fact there is quite a bit of this planet that is human free, roughly 99% of the planet in fact. And not all of that human-inhabited 1% is in a position to be held responsible for having any effect on the world outside their own village. We hear the words ‘scientific consensus’ thrown around like they have meaning. I can tell you, sitting where I am in this world of science, that there is often little consensus. There are, however, scientists who seek funding anyway they can, and therefore follow the trail of money to wherever it may lead. They may convince themselves they believe in the things they seek to prove, however you can’t survive in this industry by holding onto your beliefs. Science has become little more than a business, far from the academic think-tank it once was.

Undeniably, the most popular evidence for man-made global warming is the level of atmospheric CO₂. I can not see how anyone can definitively say that this is causing the globe to warm. “But surely you can’t deny that CO₂ levels in the atmosphere have increased at a rate beyond that occurring in nature alone?” Maybe I could, if I did some more research, but that’s not my point. What I’m saying is that an increase in any two things over time does not necessarily mean they are directly related. Time is a confounding factor in many studies, one that often makes it impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions. Both the number of books you’ve read and the price of milk has increased in the last 10 years; does that mean I should blame your literary thirst for driving up the cost of my morning cereal? Granted, atmospheric CO₂ may be a different story because if it’s responsible for the greenhouse effect then surely the more of it there is the bigger the effect and the higher the temperatures. Just don’t show me a line graph of CO₂ levels and global temperatures plotted against time to prove it, or I might be forced to add the price of milk to that graph and blow your mind. If it is the cause of rising temperatures, it’s bound to be far more complicated, and not something that be easily proven by presenting simple proportional relationships.

So, let us move back to the Copenhagen summit. Is it a bad thing to get all these people together to discuss climate change? Not if this sort of thing happened quite often to discuss the World’s problems. My problem is that ‘climate change’ is such a big talking point at the moment that it distracts from the more important, tangible problems that are more than evident throughout the world. Think about the significance of having all that power focussed on a single issue. Why not shift the focus of that power over to something like, say, World hunger? At least that’s a problem that can be seen to be affecting people, and has a potential solution. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to arrange this many World leaders to get together in one room? I don’t, although I can safely assume it’s a fair bit. The money needed for security alone could probably feed an African nation for at least a couple of years.

Reduce CO₂ emissions by all means, that can’t be a bad thing. However, I beg of you, separate the air-quality issues from the doomsday scenario. I’m sick of being told that every coffee I drink emits the same amount of CO₂ as slapping an orphan across the face with a bottlenose dolphin. Don’t make me feel guilty by using convoluted equations based on vague relationships and clouded logic to blame the end of the world on my mundane lifestyle. And to all the powerful people attending Copenhagen, please don’t come up with some convoluted, misguided, ill-informed tax scheme that will inevitably punish the poorest individuals. Do you think it will be the big companies that will suffer? BP and ExxonMobil forced to change their heathen ways? Hardly. They have way too much political influence to let anything affect them. I’m sure that if anything happens to their profits they, with all their infinite compassion and respect for consumers, will just raise the cost of petrol. Or, if forced to investigate alternative fuels, will simply find a way to produce oil from the tears of baby fur seals, just to make a point.

A few months ago I went to a seminar from a visiting scientist who had investigated a number of schemes being adopted by British companies designed to charge their suppliers based on their CO₂-equivalent emissions. These schemes calculated emissions based on a number of factors, one of which is deforestation. The problem here is that not everyone has records of what their land was used for prior to the magical year of 1990. If you have no records of your crop prior to that year, the calculations default to the maximum. What this means is that if a Kenyan farmer cut down a few trees on a section of grassland to plant his beans, but kept no records of what had been done, it is assumed that he levelled a section of Malaysian rainforest. This farmer, who is hardly raking in the shillings in the first place, can now only get a fraction of what he was getting for his crop, all because a supermarket chain in Britain wants to put a ‘Carbon Neutral’ sticker on their packet of beans. I fail to see how anybody wins in that scenario.

The other danger of giving CO₂ our full attention is that it gives us false hope that we can stop what is happening. What happens if we invest all this time and money into reducing CO₂ emissions, solely for the purpose of slowing global warming, and then in 20 years time we realise it had nothing to do with it and we’re not prepared for the consequences? I have a feeling that we’re busy burning all our books, all the while refusing to accept what’s happening and adjust our grocery budget.

Let’s all take a deep breath, brush aside the hype for a second and think about this. After all, every deep breath locks up the same amount of CO₂ as giving a sugar-coated rainbow to a unicorn.

Indifference is the new hate

I have uncovered the reason so many things get banned. See, people who really love something can actually live without it. They think, “I really, really love this thing. But if it wasn’t here I guess I’d find something else”. Friends, family and pets excepted of course. On the other hand, people who really hate something can’t live with it at all. It eats them up inside. The mere existence of this thing is a pox on their livelihood. “I cannot enjoy life until this thing, however easily ignored it may be, is eliminated from being!”

And for this reason there are protests against things, front-page articles about the state of things, instant-opinions from melodramatic current-affairs shows and naïve, uninformed bumper stickers.

How often do you see a front-page spread about how much people love their local park? Or a current-affairs segment on the nations indifference towards supermarkets?

That’s not news, that’s just life.

Let’s say something exists. This thing is hated by some and loved by others. The haters express opinions; this leads to articles, television-induced opinions and new adornments for your car. The lovers sit back and watch all this take place while they bitch and moan to other lovers whenever they get the chance. Eventually this thing gets destroyed/cancelled/discontinued/eliminated. Both haters and lovers now move on to something else. The haters find something new to hate, the lovers find something new to love and the media finds something new to link to P.

In the end, no one really cares any more.

So why did this thing get disappeared? It's because even though love and indifference make up two-thirds of the emotional spectrum, they only account for about one-eighth when it comes time for action.

The moral of this story is not ‘If you love something, fight for it’. That’ll just cause more front-page articles. The moral is this: if you love something, and its very existence is being threatened, it’s best to become indifferent to it quickly. That way, if the haters succeed, you’ll be first up not to care, and if they fail you can fall in love, all over again.