Christmas Wishes

Luboš Motl has some nice Christmas music (Czech, I think) up.

He also has this rather bizarre attack on Scott Aaronson. To be sure, Scott had a couple of impolite things to say about Motl in the targetted piece:

Of course, when your de facto spokesman is the self-parodying Luboš Motl — who often manages to excoriate feminists, climatologists, and loop quantum gravity theorists in the very same sentence — it’s hard not to seem reasonable by comparison.

Unfair? Compare the following from Profesor Motl's post:

Corruption has become the holy standard and some fields completely depend on it. Feminist career scholars who belong to the diversity industry financially depend on their pseudoscience about the absence of differences between the sexes much like a large fraction of the climate scientists' funding depends on spreading unsubstantiated fears and much like the loop quantum gravity research depends on spreading myths about the existence of "alternatives" to string theory even though these "alternatives" are nothing else than artifacts of confused, superficial, and sloppy thinking.

That, folks, is irony - of the apparently unintentional and hence best kind. Note that although I included an extra sentence for background, the triple play is indeed contained in one sentence.

Luboš bases his attack on an obviously intentionally ironic paragraph of Aaronson's post. He also seems pretty incensed that the Stanford physics faculty not only invited Aaronson to speak (and paid his way), but also failed to burn him at the stake in the course of his colloquium - and even talked politely to him.

So Santa, could you just bring Luboš that irony recognition gene for Christmas? He apparently didn't get one in the initial genetic complement. It would help him a lot.