Eternal vigilance

Dear Chinese: Don't send a person to the moon

2012-01-26T19:45:00.000-05:00

To my Chinese friends and their countrymen:

I read with dismay a recent report that the Chinese state is thinking about sending humans to the moon. Meanwhile, our own idiot politicians are spewing a lot of hot air about the glory of space colonization. While these minor-demagogues justify these projects in the name of "national greatness", these activities should instead be viewed as sources of shame. We should not allow these thieves in government to spend our money on their silly propaganda campaigns while our neighbors are suffering from want of anything.

Lest you think that I object to China's technological advancement, I can only say that I welcome the discoveries that Chinese scientists are contributing to human knowledge, and I look forward to the immense expansion of scientific research and technological progress that will occur as Chinese prosperity increases. It is for this reason that I hope that China will not squander its resources on space colonization -- these funds should be allocated in a manner that accomplishes scientific and commercial goals; instead, we are at risk of being drawn into a space race that only benefits the egos of politicians.

American patents, Chinese slavery

2012-01-23T00:29:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I made the argument that copyright is slavery, yet I admitted that it is only a tiny bit of slavery. Today, B. Psycho inadvertently reminds me that I should not have made any such concession; Intellectual Property plays a central role in a system that comes quite close to total slavery -- the devil's bargain between American tech companies and the Chinese state.

The gist of this accusation is Chinese workers allow themselves to be worked like slaves only because various restrictions on commerce (such as Apple's patents) prevent them from making a living any other way. These laws undermine the traditional method by which a free man would earn a living -- by working under an established and experienced mentor, and eventually setting up his own enterprise using the skills he learned on the job and the reputation that he developed. However, in the modern world, this form of upward mobility is prohibited by the law (both here and in China), creating permanent classes of employers and employees -- masters and slaves. In the Apple/China situation, patents prevent the workers from being independent, but other legal arrangements can produce a similar effect. The most glaring in my mind are the "non-compete" clauses found in many employment contracts; it's too bad that most progressives are satisfied to reform slavery without eradicating it.

Copyright is Slavery

2012-01-21T13:34:00.000-05:00

With the recent protests against SOPA and PIPA, the prosecution of Megaupload's staff, and the subsequent Anonymous attacks on the websites of various copyright enforcers (e.g. DoJ, RIAA, MPAA), it is time to distill this issue to its essence: copyright is slavery.

This statement may seem a bit extreme, since our own experience demonstrates that copyright is compatible with basic political and economic freedoms (more or less). Still, I stand by this blunt statement; copyright may be just a tiny slice of slavery, but it is still slavery.

Copyright is slavery because it empowers one person to prohibit another person from engaging in a fundamental human activity -- the sharing of songs and stories. The owners of copyright will argue that these songs and stories would not exist except for the efforts of the copyright owner (and perhaps the copyright system itself), and therefore the copyright owner does not deprive anyone of anything. This may be true in the narrow sense -- that a particular song or story would be unavailable -- but it ignores how these songs and stories interact with the human brain and are assembled into "a personal cultural catalog", as I'll call it. It is this catalog that is unjustly privatized by copyright, ultimately giving copyright owners a sort of ownership over other persons. Furthermore, the commercial value of copyright is largely derived from how humans relate to each other by sharing stories and songs, so copyright results in the privatization of our social lives by third parties and the centralization of cultural control.

Supporters of copyright dismiss the idea that our personal cultural catalogs are in any way relevant to the legitimacy of their copyrights. They point out that the assembly of our catalogs are our business, and that they did not force us to listen to their songs, nor did they force us to obsess over the characters of their stories. In some sense (they claim), copyright can be viewed as a contract between the producers and consumers of culture, where access to the story or song is only granted if the consumer agrees to respect the copyright of the producer; given this contract, if the consumer decides to weave the story or song into their own life, that is their own decision taken as a free person. Leaving aside the issue of whether slavery contracts are legitimate, this contract theory of copyright does not hold water. The main reason is that no such contract exists. Without an explicit contract (agreed to before any exchange takes place), a person cannot be expected to understand the implications of the restrictions that are being placed on him. Furthermore, there are only some situations in which such a contract could even be feasible -- such as when purchasing a book or entering a movie theater; the idea of a contract is absurd when copyrighted content is broadcast to our radios or televisions. Finally, the most important parts of our cultural catalogs are collected when we are children, and children cannot be expected to enter into contracts that will restrict their actions for their entire lives.

So that's my argument that copyright is a form of slavery. A quick Google search did not reveal any other arguments for this position. Still, if you want a more elaborate legalistic examination of the issue, I refer you to Stephan Kinsella.

Let's wrap up with a song (Copyright Slavery, by Der Plan [German with some English phrases])

Philip Coogan’s Paper Promises

2012-01-19T23:38:00.000-05:00

Tyler Cowen is promoting Philip Coogan’s *Paper Promises*.

The Amazon blurb reads:

For the past forty years western economies have splurged on debt. Now, as the reality dawns that many debts cannot be repaid, we find ourselves again in crisis. But the oncoming defaults have a time-worn place in our economic history. As with the crises in the 1930s and 1970s, governments will fall, currencies will lose their value, and new systems will emerge. Just as Britain set the terms of the international system in the nineteenth century, and America in the twentieth century, a new system will be set by today's creditors in China and the Middle East. In the process, rich will be pitted against poor, young against old, public sector workers against taxpayers and one country against another.

So, this raises the question of what will happen if America (and the debt-ridden world) does not accept the system proposed by China and the Middle East. I suppose we would be cut off from their credit. I hope that we have the self-respect to do so. Given that the credit offered by China and the Middle East is just wealth that has been looted by those states, we would be morally justified in rejecting it.

Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout

2012-01-17T11:10:00.000-05:00

Wikipedia will be offline tomorrow in protest of two bills before Congess -- SOPA and PROIP. The reason is basically this:

We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.

But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.

More at: English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout - Wikimedia Foundation

International Trade

2012-01-16T14:03:00.001-05:00

This is a plank of my "Left-Libertarian Platform". This post may be updated to better explain the left-libertarian position on this issue, and therefore the comments section is not the best place for esoteric discussion. However, I would appreciate comments that help to clarify the left-libertarian position. Please let me know if I have overlooked an important aspect of this issue, if many left-libertarians disagree with my description of the issue, or if there is a particularly good external resource discussing this issue in depth.

America's political and economic elite have internationalized protectionism and monopoly under the deceptive banner of "Free Trade Agreements". These treaties restrict the actions of citizens on both side of the border, while transferring state powers from representative local institutions to international corporations. The entire notion of these agreements is based on the cowardly logic that our domestic economic dysfunction is caused by the economic decisions of foreign countries. Rather than fret over their "unfair" trade practices, our leaders should be focusing on removing the rot from our own institutions.

Free trade does not require hundred-page treaties; it can and should be implemented by simple, unilateral decisions to remove barriers to cross-border trade. If a foreign country wishes to offer us subsidized exports, then we should take advantage of that opportunity rather than waste time pondering what the market would look like in an idealized world where every nation adopted our preferred economic policies. These treaties are one of many ways that America's ruling class co-opts the political system of developing countries, to the detriment of the citizens of both countries, thereby fueling resentment against the USA. [see Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks]

While there are legitimate concerns about developing commercial relations with tyrannical regimes that plunder their people's wealth, such concerns are rarely a factor in deciding actual American trade policy. More often, trade restrictions are designed to protect the (often ill-gotten) wealth of American companies abroad, or suppress any challenge to American geopolitical superiority.

Left-libertarians support the following changes to American foreign trade policy:

End the embargo on Cuba
Stop demanding that trade partners enact domestic economic reforms (particularly with respect to foreign ownership of capital) as a condition for allowing Americans to trade with them.

Copyright, Patents, and Trademark

2012-01-15T17:11:00.001-05:00

The existing system of intellectual property (IP) in the USA is corrupt. This system is supposed to promote innovation, facilitate honest commerce, and fairly reward productive work; yet, in reality it stifles creativity, enables fraud, and allows a plutocratic elite to transform their political power into monopoly profits. To make maters worse, in response to public disdain for the restrictive privileges granted to the IP industry, Congress is resorting to increasingly intrusive enforcement methods that threaten to disrupt the Internet and limit freedom of speech (e.g. the DMCA).

Left-libertarians support radical reform, if not abolition, of the intellectual property system in America and worldwide. In addition to the harm caused to Americans -- as consumers, producers, and citizens -- the USA's IP cartel is restricting prosperity-promoting international trade. They demand punitive trade restrictions on any country that does not provide them with powers similar to those that they have in the USA. These mandates are enshrined in treaties such as NAFTA and CAFTA, which have had the effect of limiting access to life-saving drugs (along with other technologies) for the residents of these developing nations. The people of America have been used as bargaining chips in these efforts to extend the USA's exploitative system of IP to countries that America's plutocratic elite have plundered for many decades (with the help of local elites). [see International Trade]

To address these problems, we must first recognize that intellectual property is a government policy (as specified in the USA's Constitution), not a natural right (as asserted by advocates such as Sonny Bono). As such, we are justified in limiting these grants of monopoly privilege in whatever manner serves the public interest. We support the following reforms to limit the powers granted by IP:

Immediate revocation of any copyright that has extended beyond its initial time-span (i.e. nullification of the retroactive provisions of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension act).
Elimination of the variable-time components of copyright duration (e.g. "life + 70 years) so that there is never any doubt over whether a copyright is still effective.
Reduction of the term of copyright so that important aspects of culture become public within a reasonable time. The initial term of American copyright (14-28 years) is sufficient to maintain most of the commercial value of most copyrights, while recognizing the role of the general public in creating value for cultural goods.
Expansion of "fair use" exemptions to prevent copyright from being used as a tool for silencing critics.

Patent:

Greater scrutiny of inventions before granting patents, so that competing inventors do not need an army of lawyers to protect them from unjustified patent suits.
Greater stringency on the criteria used for deciding if an invention is patent-worthy.

Trademark:

Non-transferability of trademark to parties that cannot reasonably be expected to provide a product or service that is comparable to that provided by the original owner of the trademark (e.g. the Cult Awareness Network).

Enforcement:

Limiting IP enforcement to civil cases seeking monetary compensation comparable to the lost profits arising from IP infringement.
Revoking IP (partially or fully) whenever the owner exaggerates the powers granted by IP, or denies the fair use rights of others.

A left libertarian platform

2012-01-15T15:31:00.000-05:00

It is often hard to describe what "left libertarianism" is, particularly because the movement includes many idiosyncratic (and strongly expressed) opinions. Furthermore, any explanation is at risk of being bogged down by preconceived notions about "libertarianism" and "anarchism". Finally, it is often difficult to clearly distinguish between ideology and utopianism.

To avoid these communication problems, I'd like to lay out the main agenda of left-libertarianism in the form of a political party platform. I'm not suggesting that left-libs actually attempt to implement this platform through electoral and legislative politics; I'm just trying to present the left-lib perspective in a manner that is compatible with mainstream political discourse. I'd like these articles to be accessible to readers who are not familiar with libertarian debates. I also would like for readers to decide that they support part of the left-lib agenda even if they don't accept the more abstract conclusions about institutional analysis and moral philosophy, or the ultimate goals of some activists.

Inevitably, the opinions expressed here are my own, being informed by my engagement with the Left Libertarian community. Some planks will be summaries of common arguments made by left-libs, others will be my own attempt to understand an issue in light of the principles and concerns that seem to motivate left-libertarianism. I see two main principles in left-libertarianism: eliminate legal (i.e. forcible) obligations as much as possible; eliminate barriers to attaining the basic necessities of life.

Below are a list of issues that I intend to address. I appreciate any input; whether it be suggestion for additional planks, independent attempts to write a plank, or links to influential writings on these issues.

Planks:
Copyright, Patents, and Trademarks
International Trade
Immigration
Labor law
Cultural diversity
Terrorism
Banking
Secrecy
Free speech
Religious freedom
Sexism
Debt
Military intervention
Taxes
Victimless crimes
Death penalty
Social services
Corporations
Elections
Contracts
Privacy
Pollution
Licensing
Police and prosecuters
International development
Education
Domestic slavery
Abortion
Healthcare
Guns
Due process

The election horserace is not news

2012-01-04T16:04:00.002-05:00

Once again, we have descended into election season and the news media will be full of campaign coverage. This is a damaging habit for our society; many important issues will be ignored, and these conversations will reinforce the pernicious attitude that electoral politics are of supreme importance. While many intelligent people have written rants against this sadly predictable shift in attention, I'm thinking that we can do more. I'm thinking that this could be the motivation for a movement to pressure the news media to maintain coverage of broad issues, and not dwell of the idiocy of the campaign. What do you think?

I don't have many ideas right now for how to organize this opposition, aside from writing a letter to my typical news station -- NPR. But I'll give a little outline of how much coverage is appropriate for the campaign.

The first consideration is whether campaign news is useful -- will it affect any of my decisions. I can see two possible uses: helping me decide which candidate (if any) to support; and helping me to anticipate policy changes that may occur over the next five years. However, most of this coverage is useless to the vast majority of people who will be voting for a candidate: either they have already decided, they aren't paying attention, or they will wait to see what the situation is as their own election-day approaches. I'm guessing that the only people who find this information useful are the big donors and party activists who are trying to figure out who has the best shot... but these political junkies will get their news from specialized publications, not mainstream outlets. As for predicting future policies, that's pretty useless at this point: elections are pretty unpredictable, as are the actual policies that will be implemented by the elected candidate. After all, G.W. Bush gave every indication that he was opposed to nation-building ("humble foreign policy" and all), and we saw how his Presidency played out.

So even if this reporting is not useful, it is still news. I'd still like to hear the results from the Iowa caucus, and that Bachmann dropped out. That would take all of 30 seconds to report; it does not justify an hour of "special coverage", plus all-day analysis the next day. Also, it is good to be informed about how our political system works, and so it's good to have an occasional feature story about how political campaigns are waged, but the day-to-day updates are just absurd.

So why do the news agencies focus on the election? Is it because they think it's important? These people do tend to be political junkies. Is it because it is easy? They can collect all their facts from election judges and campaigns (and polling data is common enough). However, I don't see how it's any easier for a talk-show to focus on this issue over any other -- there are plenty of other experts to invite on the show (but maybe political advocates are more eager and polished than non-political experts?). Finally, do they think this is what their audience wants? There are plenty of political junkies out there. This comes down to being a culture war of sorts (without the violence and harassment of the Republican's culture war) -- will news programming be determined by the interests of partisan hacks and those who have succumbed to the cult of the Presidency, or by the rest of us who realize that real life and real change is best found in places other than the campaign trail?

Michael Eisen on censoring dangerous knowledge

2011-12-24T00:49:00.001-05:00

Michael Eisen has some interesting comments on the validity of (self-) censoring scientific publications. He argues that this increase in the transmisability of the flu (among ferrets) is not particularly important, and therefore this should be seen as being purely a test case for whether the scientific establishment will self-censor, and what do we define as "dangerous knowledge". As many pundits have pointed out, suppressing the details of the experiments is unlikely to make anyone any safer -- either because the details will be leaked easily enough, or because it would be straightforward for anyone with the relevant skill-set to replicate the experiments, with or without the details.

Philosophical Diquisitions on Enhancement Technology

2011-12-24T00:40:00.004-05:00

John Danaher has another excellent Disquisition, revisiting the topic of artificial enhancement of human abilities and whether it should generally be seen as a type of cheating.

What Republicans don't get about racism

2011-12-23T10:20:00.000-05:00

The racist "Ron Paul" newsletters are in the news again (just heard about it on NPR). If you know the story, basically Ron Paul and his supports claim that the racist comments were written by a staff member and slipped by Paul's lax editorial oversight; Paul disagrees with all of it, and there's nothing more to say. Unfortunately for Paul, there is more to say, and I doubt that he will say it because -- like most Republicans -- he doesn't understand the totalitarian danger that lurks in racism.

Most Republicans recognize that "racism is wrong", but it is the wrong sort of "wrong". They think of it as an intellectual error. Or a type of meanness. Either way, they think of it as a failure of the individual who is racist. They ignore any social aspects of racism more profound than self-segregation. They ignore that racism is fundamentally a political ideology, justifying the oppression of some people by others. They ignore that its continued prevalence is a social failure, not just a personal failure.

Most Republicans have internalized the conclusion that racism is "very wrong", but they way they apply this conclusion illustrates that they still don't get it. They still focus on the individual expressions of racism, while ignoring the social structure behind it. If one black racist acts threatening towards a white guy, they throw a fit and then get all self-righteous when the traditional anti-racist coalitions don't see it as anything more important than regular street crime. Republicans do this because they don't see the political nature of racism, and they can't distinguish between racism that is politically impotent (i.e. black racism) and racism that could lead to tyranny (i.e. white racism).

This is the stuff that Ron Paul doesn't get about racism, and why he too often tolerates the company of racists (e.g. the people who wrote his newsletters and his 2008 anti-Latino advertisements) -- he doesn't get how these individual acts fit into a larger system of oppression.

For more thoughts on related issues, see Gary Chartier's summary of the relationship between "left-wing market anarchism and Ron Paul"

When knowledge is dangerous

2011-12-21T01:40:00.001-05:00

Well, it's finally happened: in the course of researching a disease, someone has created a virus that could decimate the human population, and states are moving towards censoring the findings:

For the first time ever, a government advisory board is asking scientific journals not to publish details of certain biomedical experiments, for fear that the information could be used by terrorists to create deadly viruses and touch off epidemics.

In the experiments, conducted in the United States and the Netherlands, scientists created a highly transmissible form of a deadly flu virus that does not normally spread from person to person. It was an ominous step, because easy transmission can lead the virus to spread all over the world. The work was done in ferrets, which are considered a good model for predicting what flu viruses will do in people.

The intent of the "authorities" (both scientific and legal) seems to be that the details of these experiments be restricted, so that only "legitimate scientists" have access to the information needed to replicate the experiments. I'm torn on this issue: clearly we don't want to hand a weapon of mass destruction to a homicidal maniac, but this restriction on scientific communication could usher in its own problems.

I don't have a clear thesis to argue for, so I just want to list a number of points that need to be considered while debating this decision:

The scientific establishment (epitomized by the journals Nature and Science) wants to maintain its independence from political institutions and will resist any formal censorship. That is all well and good, but we still need to be concerned about self-censorship. The openness of science is integral both to its progress (addressed below) and to its authority among the public. This notion of "legitimate scientists" risks encouraging the notion that professional scientists are elitist snobs who want to rule over the ignorant masses, in part by keeping them ignorant. This type of move is very dangerous both for science and for democracy.
Censorship can at best delay the independent development of this technology (10-20 years, I'd say). It also is likely to retard the progress of mainstream research into infectious diseases, with the extent dependent upon how well implement the system of access is. Regardless of the calculus here, the point is that we cannot stop technologies from spreading to our enemies, and the best strategy for protecting ourselves may paradoxically be to allow technologies to spread freely, while dedicating our resources on maximizing our own capabilities to respond to infectious diseases -- whether natural or engineered.
The release of a pathogen like this new flu virus will probably be either ineffective or suicidal. Either the virus won't spread well and the outbreak will not expand, or it will expand rapidly and affect the entire globe. Anyone seeking to use it as a tool for "Clash of Civilizations" terrorism would be extremely foolish. While the terrorist may be able to inoculate himself and his close associates, the only societies that could engage in widespread inoculation are Western and Japan. So there would be some terrorists who may be able to use this weapon effectively, but they aren't our typical Islamist boogeymen (think: Unabomber, or White Supremacists)

I'm sure that they'll be a lot of debate on this topic in the future.

The international post-humanist movement

2011-12-12T20:37:00.000-05:00

I'm getting sick of these "all American" fascists trying to shut up anyone who offers a cultural vision that threatens to supplant their own religo-national ideal. I'm used to them attacking liberals and progressives (by which, I do not mean Democrats), but their recent anti-Islamic crusades are really starting to bug me. First, the fashion police attack Dunkin Donuts because of a scarf worn by Rachel Ray; now the WWJD-shirts are trying to drive advertisers away from the show "All-American Muslim". Oh, and then there's the whole "Ground Zero Mosque" BS.

I'm not gonna let them ostracize every group that disagrees with their bizarre belief system.

I'm getting sick of these skirmishes. I want to confront them directly, because I know that these stone-throwers can be defeated -- just like al Quaeda and its sympathizers can be. These movements are primitive, and are heading to the dustbin of history. I figure that the best way to neutralize them (and minimize the damage that they do) is to have them focus their hatred on a social movement that they have no hope of defeating. For that role, I propose:

The International Transhumanist Movement

Basically, the point here is to tell these barbarians that everything they hold sacred is a load of crap, and that we fully intend to leave them in the dust. We will tell them that all of their differences -- be them religious or nationalist -- are nothing compared to the difference between the post-humanist goal and everything that has come before. We embrace science and technology. We seek artificial intelligence, and we will happily become cyborgs. We will put all of their superstitions behind us, and realize a wonderful world of technophilic hedonism. We intend to become so powerful that they will be little more than ants to us, and their culture will only continue to exist due to our grace.

The problem is, we have only been drifting in this general direction, not seeking it whole-heartedly. There are a few organizations seeking to address the issues of our post-human future, but they do not engage in the culture war. Perhaps there is good reason -- maybe the idea of post-humanity is repulsive to most people. I just read Ian Bank's "Use of Weapons" (part of the Culture series), and I'm kinda jazzed about the possibility to live a pleasant life while simultaneously undermining these authoritarian movements.

I don't know what is the best strategy, but I expect that the conservatives will start attacking the transhumanist movement within my lifetime, as an ideal target for their politicized nostalgia. For now, I can rest knowing that technophilic hedonism is well established in our culture...

All intellectuals should learn how to program a computer

2011-12-11T00:10:00.000-05:00

Mattan Griffen at General Assembly argues that all entrepreneurs need to learn how to write computer programs. He basically argues that if you have an idea about how to make the world a better place, you need to be able to implement it at least at a rudimentary level. He sums it up in this pithy assertion:

Very quickly, society is becoming divided into two groups: those that understand how to code and therefore manipulate the very structure of the world around them, and those that don't – those whose lives are being designed and directed by those that do know how to code

I'll extend this, and assert that all intellectuals need to learn how to write programs. The gist of my argument is that we now have ready access to incredibly powerful tools for manipulating information. If you cannot use these tools, then you cannot manipulate information at the same level as your peers, and therefore you cannot participate in the modern intellectual community.

Personally, I have encountered many situations where a "philosophical" issue would benefit greatly from the sorts of calculations that computers can perform easily. Most notable is the demand for mathematical modelling or simulation: it often is not possible to fully explore the implications of your assumptions without explicit modelling. This applies to political philosophy and social theory just as it applies to biology. I have even seen students of the history of science who could have benefited from computer simulations -- for instance, some classic scientific texts (e.g. Galleleo's) describe experimental results that are inconsistent with modern scientific knowledge; historians may try to examine this issue by recreating the experimental conditions of the historical scientist, but this requires immense work and ends up being a guessing game. Computer simulations can examine the effect of possible confounds much more efficiently.

An added bonus of formal modelling is that it forces the thinker to be explicit about their assumptions, so it is a great aid to communication. Too often, philosophers (both amateur and professional) are just talking past each other.

So, my advice to all the young thinkers is this: if you want to learn how to think, learn how to program.

Update: I suppose that I should provide some tips on how to learn programming. Personally, I took a college level class, and then taught myself in the context of some projects I was working on, and I just picked up bits and pieces from different sources (another self-taught programmer, some books, and some websites). It probably was not the most efficient approach, but it worked well enough.

Right now, I can recommend two sources:

Eclipse for Total Beginners (to learn Java)
The Alice programming environment (a toy language for 3-D storytelling)

good luck.

All nations are invented

2011-12-10T23:53:00.000-05:00

A big fuss is being made over Gingrich's comment that the Palestinians are an 'invented' people. I don't really understand what Gingrich was trying to get at -- this assertion is often used as a premise to deny the legitimacy of Palestinian demands for self-governance. Maybe this is what Gingrich was getting at, but he does say that he supports the idea of Palestinian statehood (as long as they don't fight for it, I guess)... so it's hard to say. Either way, his "invention" comment seems to be a non-sequiter in the context of where he spoke it, so I can only assume that he's using some sort of dog-whistle to get votes from the supremacist wing of the (Christian) Zionist movement.

Anyway, the discussion of whether any particular nation was "invented" is kinda pointless, since nationality is intrinsically a myth. All nations are invented.

The "University challenge" -- decreasing costs; increasing access

2011-12-10T16:46:00.000-05:00

At the Economist magazine, the "Schumpeter" columnist discusses some changes in the structure of higher education, and offers some suggestions for decreasing costs and thereby increasing access to education:

Schumpeter: University challenge | The Economist

I don't have any particular comment on this, but one of the commenters at The Economist website brought up the "University of the People" which seems to be an establishment-backed effort to develop a model for low-cost online education.

Physics simulations: ideal gas

2011-12-08T19:45:00.001-05:00

I'm thinking of shifting my focus more towards educational issues, with a focus on how education shapes power relationships in our society. I figure that part of the "libertarian agenda" in education consists of empowering people to control their own education, so that they aren't forced to participate in any hierarchical/oppressive institutions.

As such, building awareness of new educational tools is key. In that spirit, I recommend PhET, which produces simulations to help instill an intuitive understanding of scientific concepts. The most recent simulation is pretty good... a simulation of transitions between states of matter, and also seems to demonstrate some aspects of the ideal gas law (i.e. PV=nRT). The only problem I noticed is that when the user increases the volume, thereby decompressing the substance, the temperature does not drop... or maybe it's been too long since I studied thermodynamics.

Anyway, check it out:

Click to Run

Vegimite > Marmite

2011-12-04T19:53:00.001-05:00

It's so hard to get my hands on Vegimite and Marmite here in the USA. If stores do carry these yeast extracts, the portions are small and the price is high. For a long time, I couldn't find Vegimite at all, even though it was it was what originally turned me on to yeast extract as a food (I've always loved YE it as a microbiological growth medium...which I actually did eat once). Fortunately, today I encountered a store clearance at a grocery store and was happy to find the awesome Australian ale dregs, so I was finally able to compare the two side-by-side.

This confirmed my suspicions, Vegimite is better than Marmite, which explains why the Marmite never lived up to the high expectations that had been established by Vegimite. By smell, the Vegimite is more hoppy. I'll be evaluting the taste again in the near future... I'm so happy.

For you serious people, I am NOT turning this into a food blog.

In fact, I'm thinking that I'm going to focus much more on educational (and scientific) issues, as opposed to broader issues about power relations. I've got a bunch of topics that I want to address, but I'm slowed down by my long-windedness. If you've got any topic you want discussed, advice for how to approach this topic, or good blogs for me to check out, please leave a comment.

Market Communism

2011-12-01T18:35:00.001-05:00

NPR's "All Things Considered" aired an inspiring story about and Indian medical charity and how they manage to fund eye surgery for patients without the means to pay (India Eye Care Center Finds Middle Way To Capitalism : NPR). Basically, they charge the market rate to the rich, which in turn subsidies the poor:

That high quality allows Aravind to attract patients who are willing to pay market rates. Then it takes the large profit made on those surgeries to fund free and subsidized surgeries for poor people — like K. Karuthagangachi....

it's only possible to provide free surgeries on the scale that Aravind does by running an operating surplus, like a profit-making company. That's what Aravind manages to do, even though it's legally a charitable trust.

On one hand, this is not all that surprising--American hospitals (and often lawyers) operate on a similar principle. My fear is that, like their American counterparts, these organizations may eventually turn into "profit-making" enterprises for their highly paid managers, while using their supposed "non-profit" status as a way of winning special privileges from the local community.

Anyway, this story shows the stereotypical Indian twist -- finding a way to radically reduce the cost of a service:

Fifteen years after it was founded, Aravind's ability to provide free and subsidized surgeries was being limited by the high cost and availability of the intraocular lenses needed for cataract surgery. That's not a problem most charitable organizations could overcome...
But Aravind attacked the problem with the help of an American social entrepreneur named David Green. Green had been helping Aravind collect donated lenses to be implanted in their cataract patients. But donations were averaging only about 25,000 a year. That wasn't nearly enough to meet Aravind's needs, and the lenses cost several hundred dollars to buy. So Green helped Aravind set up its own lens manufacturer on-site, a subsidiary named Aurolab.

"Now today Aurolab sells, I think this year it will be 1.8 million lenses," he says. "So you can see that when you have a business model, an economic model, it enables something to scale because it's not dependent upon charity, which is fickle."

And even more remarkable: By squeezing out profits made by middlemen in the production and distribution chain, Aurolab is now providing some lenses at the astoundingly low price of just $2.

This is a refreshing story showing how a "communist-minded" person can leverage "capitalist" processes to transform the lives of many who have been left out of the system. This isn't traditional philanthropy -- since the market service and the charitable service are intimately connected. We could even say that the charitable impulse came first, and the marketing impulse followed in its wake. The desire to help the poor inspired a business model that may not have occurred to a person who was only looking for profit. In contrast to the doctrinaire bickering that I always read on the web (touting the primacy of profit-driven capitalism or charity-driven communism), it is nice to see that in some situations, charity can drive advances in productivity and market savvy can help those who are incapable of helping themselves. Maybe there is hope for humanity.

Don't hollow out the military; shrink it

2011-11-21T12:30:00.001-05:00

The military establishment is claiming that across-the-board budget cuts would "hollow out" the military. They are probably right -- the USA probably cannot maintain a global military presence with a smaller military budget.

The solution is clear: pull back on the military's forward deployment and aggressive posturing. For instance, don't establish a new base in Darwin, Australia.

Let's see if that becomes part of the debate. I bet only Ron Paul would make this point.

"See the violence inherent in the system"

2011-11-20T16:37:00.001-05:00

Previously, I described how some of the Occupy tactics were inherently radical and were an open challenge to the authority of the established system of power (i.e. law enforcement). In such a situation, the protesters should expect a forceful response. However, that does not mean that I believe that they deserved what they got. A humane (and self-confident) system should not resort to such violence in order to enforce its laws on non-violent resisters.

One of the main distinctions that I made was between breaking the law and obstructing law-enforcement. Law breaking is not radical, especially if the law-breakers passively accept being arrested; obstructing law-enforcement is radical. While I think that the Nov 9 protests at UC Berkeley fall into the later category, the Nov 18 protests at UC Davis seem to be a simple act of law-breaking, yet it was met with a similar level of violence (update below). Here's the video:

Given the brutal responses to these Occupy Cal protests, and other Occupy protests around the country, the public mood is starting to change (at least, mine is). William Lind provides an interesting comment on the tactical achievements of these protests. James Fallows offers some well-worded comments from the mainstream liberal perspective.

this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population... And by the way, when did we accept the idea that local police forces would always dress up in riot gear that used to be associated with storm troopers and dystopian sci-fi movies?

Now brutal police tactics are becoming the issue. Public outrage over police behavior can move in two directions -- reform or revolution. Of course, reform is what mainstream liberals (and probably most of the student protestors) are hoping for; they want a system that is basically like today's, but a little more sensitive to people's rights and needs. The alternative is a radical restructuring of our social relations, which is probably the desired outcome for some of the protesters. The non-violent protests of Nov 9 were bound to provoke some sort of forceful response -- yet they were still not violent. They force observers to ask themselves whether "the system" is worth this sort of violence. My preferred outcome is a little of each -- that we strongly question the law enforcement mandates (such as drug prohibition) that have enlarged our police forces and created constant conflict between law enforcement and much of the public (a hope echoed by E.D. Kain)

It all brings to mind a scene the comic/satirical classic, Monty Python and the Holy Grail -- when some peasants refuse to recognize the authority King Aurthur and are subsequently manhandled into submission:

Come, see the violence inherent in the system.

Update: I found another video of the UC Davis event that shows a broader perspective, and it looks like the line of students were blocking the cops who were trying to leave with a protestor who they had arrested. So these students were obstructing law-enforcement.

Update 2: This 3-part video shows the whole confrontation. In part 2, around 6 minutes, you can see the crowd encircling the cops yelling "set them free" after which a "mic check" is held and someone announces that they cops will be allowed to leave only if they release the people who they had arrested (for setting up camps, or something).

Occupy America

2011-11-19T22:36:00.000-05:00

Shit. I'm starting to get the feeling that America is under occupation...

New Video of Police Brutality at Occupy Oakland - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine

What is the economic value of a college degree?

2011-11-19T20:27:00.001-05:00

I've been pondering whether tuition-free university education for everyone is a worthwhile ideal (I doubt it). However, some people claim that such opportunities are essential to prevent the economic division of our society into "haves and have-nots". One of the favorite statistics offered by this crowd is the income difference between people with degrees and those without. Any educated person should recognize that such statistics are just the starting point for deciding what the value of a degree is (i.e. correlation is not causation). The obvious considerations is that people who complete college tend to have been born with more opportunities in their life (colleges select for motivated people from higher SES groups), and that these are surely contributing to the income differences, independent of actually attending college. There is also the feature of "indentured servitude" resulting from college debt -- the graduates HAVE to work hard to cover their expenses.

Anyway, I found one good discussion of what the value may be (though it isn't a proper analysis of the factors involved). For the most part it provides recommendations for books and reports looking at the issue.

Something more for me to read.

Occupy Cal: what can you learn at university?

2011-11-19T11:20:00.000-05:00

Part I: Occupy Cal, and the function of the university
Part II: Occupy Cal: The exclusive university

The Occupy Cal protestors have accused the university of functioning to divide the "haves" from the "have nots". Everyone recognizes that attending a university can provide economic advantages, and that many people are not able to attend a university (especially not their top-choice), so it's easy to see the logic behind that assertion of divisiveness. I argued that the exclusivity of universities contributes to their economic efficiency and educational effectiveness, so increasing enrollment and decreasing tuition is not an option. How can a university provide its services without excluding a large portion of our society from economic, intellectual, social, and political opportunities?

To address this issue, I intend to examine the benefits that the university provides to its students, and whether the university structure is the only way (or even the best way) for most people to gain those benefits. If there are alternative ways to acquire those benefits that do not require selectivity in admissions, then the university can either reform to adopt those more inclusive practices, or alternative institutions can provide these services to the people who were excluded from the university.

Since the professed ideal of the university is to advance learning, I'll start with that topic (a separate post will address the issue of getting "one's foot in the door" by way of professional networking and credentials). As described below, I do not believe that an institution like the University of California is the appropriate context for most people to study.

To begin, it is worth noting that many people -- both those who hold degrees and those who don't -- dismiss the effectiveness of formal education, especially higher education (see yesterday's comment). Many people are fond of the expression "The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.", or dismiss degrees as "Bull Shit, More Shit, Piled Higher and Deeper". I can attest that many people have developed strong critical thinking and writing skills without formal "higher education". There are also many examples of successful entrepreneurs who did not attend a university. A degree clearly is not a perfect predictor of economic or intellectual potential. Likewise, I have seen many students (in both high school and universities) who clearly had no motivation for book learning, and were therefore wasting their time by enrolling in classes; they would have learned more at almost any job.

With that being said, I do believe that many people (including myself) benefit greatly from the education offered at a university. I can think of no better way to quickly absorb a field of knowledge than to have a series of experts tell you what to study and how to verify that you have learned it. During that four-year grind through one abstraction after the next, it can be helpful to have a carrot dangled in front of you (in the form of a degree and the opportunities it offers) to make sure you stay focused and learn the full breadth of knowledge within the field.

What may be apparent for the above regimen is that there is no reason that it should cost $15,000 a year (UC budget pdf). Many universities have placed their curricula online specifically to facilitate independent study, and professors regularly post their syllabi online for their students. If a student studies 10 subjects in a year, then books should cost about $1000 if they are being purchased from the university book store, and work is being done to lower this price. If this is all a university offers (as some people suggest that it is), then a motivated student should be able to teach themselves the standard subjects without the expense or bother of the university.

The problem with the above setup is that it does not provide the student with either the peer group or the expert feedback that can address the student's confusions and assure that he does not walk away with a false understanding of the topic. If simply finding a few study partners were sufficient, then a university would not be needed-- meeting at the local library should be possible. However, it may not be easy to find good study partners from the general population; the academic exclusivity of the university (applied even at the level of individual courses) identifies groups of students with similar capabilities, and the administrative structure of the class pressures students to study the material at the same pace. If we could develop a system to allow independent students to find appropriate study partners -- those who are able to study the topic at the specified pace-- then this benefit of the university would be diminished. One troubling possibility is that by attracting competent students to their community, the university depletes their availability in the outside community, and essentially gains leverage via a network effect and a sort of "vendor lock-in" applying to the higher-education industry as a whole.

But leaving aside the availability of study partners, we still have to consider the traditional explanation for why the university is a good learning environment -- expert guidance. Peers often cannot identify each other's mistakes or explain concepts effectively. Only experts can reliably correct students or answer their questions. This part of teaching is very labor intensive, and since the labor comes from experts, it can be very expensive. To top it off, upper-level classes (in sciences, at least) often cover current research topics and rely on the extensive expertise of the instructor. Sometimes the course material is so new that it has not been synthesized into any standard text, and a detailed syllabus cannot be provided prior to the beginning of the semester. At this level, the content of the course can sometimes be dominated by the contribution of the students themselves, and relies on an extensive shared body of knowledge that can be hard to create outside of a formal program with several years of instruction.

The expense of this type of education forces us to ask "exactly what kind of higher education can be provided to the entire population?". Higher education is typically divided into three categories, and California supports all three as public institutions: the research university, the teaching university, and the community college. The first category is the most expensive to maintain, in part because it demands the highest level of expertise from the faculty (expertise arising from ongoing cutting-edge research). This is what I'm normally thinking of when I discuss the university, and the exclusiveness arises directly from the fact that there simply are not enough experts at this level to teach every student in this style. Furthermore, most students probably would not benefit from the type of instruction offered by these experts; only students who have mastered the broad knowledge of a field of study are at a level to understand what these professors are trying to teach. To top it off, these professors are not necessarily the best teachers, and they stereotypically have a hard time explaining concepts to people who do not already have extensive knowledge of the field.

The alternative is to learn from those experts who decided to focus on teaching, with research being a minor part of their activities (all people who hold a Ph.D. in sciences have successfully conducted research at some point). These professors are often better teachers than the professors who focus on research -- having more experience at teaching, and paying more attention to the theory of teaching. These professors would probably be the main workforce of "universal higher education". At the large research universities they often teach the lower-level classes, and they dominate at the smaller colleges that don't maintain active research programs. The third group of experts are those who have mastered their field of study, but have not conducted research of their own. We commonly see this among high-school teachers and the teaching-assistants at universities, but there is no reason that this level of expertise wouldn't be sufficient for most adult learning. My impression is that many instructors at the community college level have this sort of expertise.

The point of all of this is that when we talk about "universal higher education", we shouldn't be thinking of institutions like the University of California -- we should be thinking of the California Community Colleges. Rather than focusing on the institutions that educate the students with the greatest academic achievement, we should be focusing on the institutions that help the people who have had the most trouble. Even if the coursework offered by these institutions is no more advanced than that offered by many high-schools, there is still value in making these services available to the general public because many people were unable to learn these topics in high school, for a variety of reasons.

Focusing on community colleges rather than 4-year bachelor-degree programs is not only much more cost effective (~1/3 of the cost for instruction, as I understand it), but it also is more compatible with the ideal of a widely-educated population. Community colleges are spread throughout the community (as their name implies), enabling students to take classes without structuring their entire lives around study. This saves a lot of money that would have to be spent on room and board, and also allows a student to attend classes while holding down a regular job or raising children. While universities are attempting to be more accommodating to "non-traditional" (i.e. older) students, the basic structure of the 4-year program is optimized for young adults with no family commitments, and it would be foolish to try to extend that to the entire population.

Finally, we need to consider the elitist attitudes that prevent us from allocating our intellectual resources in a way that includes everyone. This "elitism" does not arise from the pragmatic exclusivity of the institutions of higher learning, but instead comes from our tendency to focus on the pinnacles of intellectual achievement rather than focus on enabling intellectual engagement among the broad base of society. This elitism is expressed in part by the attempts to increase the accessibility to the elite University of California, which necessarily draws resources away from the community college system. This largely reflects the selfish ambition of people with moderate opportunities who want to have the best opportunities, regardless of the poor opportunities that others have.

The other elitism comes from the fact that public science funding is often allocated to pure research in a way that provides no broad educational benefit. The decision to hire full-time researchers at national laboratories necessarily depletes the pool of experts who could be participating in broader (i.e. undergraduate) educational activities. Even professors at academic institutions often acquire so many grants that it eats into the time that they allocate to teaching. Our public scientific funding agencies has decided to pursue scientific advancement that is disconnected from broad education. This may be an appropriate decision, especially if we like our new technologies-- but if we care about public education, we need to consider how these decisions affect the allocation of intellectual resources. Scientific progress will continue at a rapid pace even if all public research funding is linked to broader educational activities, and the academic establishment needs to take a hard look at how it uses the resources that it has before it complains that outside forces are preventing it from achieving its educational mission.

What do university administrators do?

2011-11-18T02:45:00.000-05:00

One of the main targets of the Occupy Cal movement is administrator salaries, connecting the increase of these salaries with the increase in tuition. The administrators shoot back by pointing out that their salaries make up a tiny portion of university expenditures, and that the real problem is that the legislature (the EVIL Republicans!) has cut university subsidies.

I don't know what the salaries are at Cal itself, but I've noticed extravagant salaries at other institutions (up to $1 million /year for top administrators), which doesn't always match the salaries of football coaches, but is substantially more than the salaries of even the most prominent professors.

With salaries like this, I'd expect the administrative activities of the university to be seamless-- professors would be able to quickly hire technicians, and graduate students would not have a two-month gap in their health insurance coverage following the annual renewal of coverage. But that's just a fantasy land.

I'd like to know how school administrators command such high salaries, and what they are spending their time on if not actually making sure that the administration runs smoothly. Maybe they are just glorified lobbyists, trying to eek more money out of the state. Maybe they are well-dressed sycophants, drawing money from the pockets of wealthy alumni, or perhaps they are slick PR men running immense propaganda campaigns. Maybe they are exceptionally competent administrators, but their fiefdom is so immense that it is impossible to run it efficiently.

Well, I'll hopefully find an answer as I finish reading Benjamin Ginsberg's essay at The Washington Monthgly -- Administrators Ate My Tuition. Being a PoliSci professor and JHU, he may have some insight (or he may just be venting faculty frustrations).

Occupy Cal: The exclusive university

2011-11-16T18:19:00.000-05:00

Part I: Occupy Cal, and the function of the university.

Tuesday's protest at the University of California Berkeley campus included a declaration of an "Open University", which apparently is meant to provide a free education to anyone who wants to participate. This action is clearly motivated by the perception that university is unnecessarily exclusive, and consequently divides our society into "haves" and "have nots".

While economic success is clearly obtainable without a university degree, formal higher education is still widely perceived as the most reliable course to personal prosperity. Such education is intended to provide students with useful (i.e. marketable) skills early in their adult lives, but also enables them to build social relationships that will be advantageous throughout life. While most people recognize the value of these opportunities, it is easy to resent the fact that some people have these opportunities while others are excluded. This resentment is especially pronounced if those opportunities improve a person's ability to compete for economic and social goods without increasing the total amount of such goods in our society. I intend to address the social implications of these opportunities in a future post, but for now I want to focus on a factor of university organization that impacts both of them -- the exclusivity of the university.

Plenty of people are unable to attend the university of their choice (or any university at all) -- either they are explicitly rejected during the application process, or they decide that they do not have the financial resources to pay for tuition while also covering food, shelter, and healthcare for themselves and any dependents. Exclusion for financial reasons seems particularly unfair, since it depends more of the economic success of a student's parents than on their own virtues. Furthermore, to the extent that a university education increases a person's future earnings, economic exclusion from the university contributes to a multi-generational stratification of society based on wealth.

The origin of this economic exclusion is obvious -- the university needs money to operate (e.g. maintain buildings and pay salaries), and it therefore needs some way to motivate people to contribute money. The most straight-forward way to raise revenues is to change fees to the people who benefit most directly from the services provided, and exclude those people if they do not pay. Alternatives exist; for example, money can be raised from philanthropists or can be allocated politically. Our current university system relies on a combination of these revenue sources, with complicated mechanisms designed to maintain both accessibility and adequate instructional resources (e.g. scholarships, loans, subsidies, work-study).

The current debate over the role of the university is driven primarily by concerns over increasing tuition and the consequent student debt. The question is how to reduce the burden on the students themselves? One option is to reduce university expenditures, perhaps by increasing administrative efficiency or reducing salaries of the top administrators. The "Open University" model suggests one path to reducing administrative costs -- abandoning the evaluation and credentialing activities of the university. But more attention is given to the loss of political funding for higher education, and protestors seem most concerned with maintaining the status quo for the California educational system.

The other form of exclusivity is based on academic potential. There are pedagogic reasons for this exclusivity -- uniformity of student capabilities makes it easier to teach students simultaneously, and it increases the chance that students will be able to help each other understand the course material. This is the same reason that many courses have prerequisites. Many educational reformers have tried to integrate classrooms with students of different academic ability, but my understanding is that this normally ends up slowing the progress of the most capable students. While it may sound "elitist" to the students who are excluded, I believe it is totally appropriate to seek the company of people who will advance one's own goals while avoiding those who would inhibit them. If this exclusion is institutionalized at the level of the university, so be it.

California has maintained a three-tier system of public higher education, which traditionally allows for some exclusivity on the basis of academic potential while minimizing exclusion based on economic resources. The UC system has traditionally relied greatly on academic exclusivity, since it only had a limited number of openings for students, but everyone wanted to attend due to the extremely low tuition. This structure is changing as the UC system expands enrollment and raises tuition; UC is perhaps becoming more like other universities around the country.

Overall, I think that academic exclusivity is a good thing (in the absence of a good teaching model where all students benefit from a mixed-ability academic community), and while economic exclusivity is unfortunate, it is pretty much unavoidable at the scale of the general population. Economic exclusivity is pretty much unavoidable for anything that has a cost--as a university education does-- and the failure to pass those costs onto the final consumer results in the squandering of resources (I've seen it first-hand). Even with these costs, access can be provided to the most promising and motivated students by way of scholarships. I'd be hesitant to provide such funding to the mass of young adults who drift towards university education with giving much thought to it. These students often have plenty of time but little money, and have yet to realize the value of their time. By placing a dollar amount on the educational services that they are requesting, we can encourage them to think about what they expect to gain from attending university, and perhaps prevent a few of them from squandering a couple years of their lives engaged in activities that are not appropriate for them.

There is always room for improvement in our institutions, and perhaps we will find ways to deliver higher-educational services with less expense, or in a way that does not segregate students based on academic ability yet still enables the most capable students to excel. Until then, the exclusivity of the university is something that we have to work with, and reflects the simple truth that a university education is not right for everyone.

Occupy Cal: Whose univeristy?

2011-11-16T15:41:00.003-05:00

The Occupy Cal crowd has decided to set up camp on the campus of UC Berkeley, despite the UC administration's vows to disassemble it. No doubt the protestors will feign surprise/outrage when the police try to evict them.

As indicated by the chants of the protestors, the issue comes down to this: whose university is it? The protestors claim some sort of democratic authority (on behalf of both the university community and the broader public for whom the university was nominally founded), yet for all their democratic/consensual formalities, they are incapable of representing those groups. They are only capable of representing those people who are willing to spend their time participating in those primitive "General Assemblies" and who are willing to lend legitimacy to the Occupy movement by participating. In the end, the Occupiers have no democratic legitimacy.

Still, the Occupiers are attempting to declare themselves as the legitimate government/owner of the university, or whatever other location they decide to occupy. This is bound to draw a forceful response from the other institutions that claim ownership/sovereignty over those sites. In some situations, that conflict may be intentional and necessary, yet I don't see how the demands of these protestors justify such conflict. Their main message is that they want the state to provide additional funding to the university -- but their tactics delegitimize those very institutions that they are seeking to expand. WTF?

In the end, these skirmishes have come down to establishing "the right to occupy" as part of the first amendment right to assemble and petition the government. I don't see the point in picking this fight. I don't want to live in a society where any mob of political activists can just set up camp in any public space -- thereby excluding everyone else from using that space.

I'm not even sure why tents matter -- except that some of the more theatrical activists like the symbolism (even as they ignore the substance). There may be some issue with people traveling great distances to participate in the protest, and not being able to afford proper housing in the area. However well this logic applies to Washington D.C. or Sacramento, I don't see how it could be relevant to these local protests (unless homelessness were some major part of the agenda). My suspicion is that these protestors are simply seeking to emulate the occupation of Tahrir Square without acknowledging the conditions that prompted Egyptians to use occupation as a tactic -- both their vulnerability to kidnapping if they dispersed, and eventually their demand for the overthrow of the government.

In the end, the university does not belong to a bunch of protestors (especially when most are the recipients of services), and declaring an "Open University" does not in any way make the benefits of the university available to the general public.

Occupy Cal, and the function of the university

2011-11-14T08:48:00.002-05:00

The "Occupy Cal" crowd is pissed about how the University and the police treated them last Wednesday, and are calling for a "general strike" at the University of California Berkeley campus for this coming Tuesday (Nov 15). This is modeled on the "strike" at the Oakland port at the beginning of the month.

I've put the word "strike" in quotes because it does not fit the definition of "strike" as I understand it -- being the refusal of workers to continue doing their regular jobs. In both of the above "strikes", the organizers are seeking to disrupt regular economic activity by bringing in large numbers of protestors who normally do not directly participate in those economic activities.

In this case, someone supporting this action has explained why UC Berkeley is being targeted in this way:

“In calling for a strike, activists realize that the university’s function in society is to create a division between haves and have-nots. Therefore, this is meant as a special kind of strike, one where all those who have been excluded from the UC system converge on the campus and help occupy it. At the same time as we shut the university down, we open it up to all who have been excluded from it,”

This statement brings up some important issues; however, if I were to take it literally, I would say that it presents a view of our society that is both terribly naive and borderline paranoid. Instead, I will be charitable to the authors and assume that they presented this narrow view of things for the sake of rhetorical impact, and for the same reason selected as "the function" of the university one incidental effect of its activity. I assume that they intended to start a conversation among the stakeholders in the University system (UC, and academia as a whole), so let's get started.

What is the function of the university (and UC in particular)? I interpret "the function of an institution" to mean the goal being sought by the people who support and participate in that insititution. With that interpretation, the function of the university (and especially UC) is clearly not to divide our society. Still, divisiveness may be an unfortunate consequence of how the institution operates. An undeniable truth is that the people who participate in the university are often seeking their own prosperity; they are the getters, and are likely to become the "haves". This in itself is not particularly profound -- people regularly participate in activities that advance their own prosperity (from maintaining one's own home, to providing commercial services, to learning skill sets, and even seeking collaborators for projects). This is all normal and appropriate, and it is likewise appropriate that we form exclusive institutions to coordinate activities among people who are capable of advancing each other's productivity.

So how does the university produce social division by providing educational services? Stay tuned for more ideas on how that occurs (to the extent that it does), and what might be done to reduce those divisions.

Do they understand what they are doing?

2011-11-12T15:15:00.003-05:00

This past Wednesday, riot police tried to disperse a large group from the campus of UC Berkeley. As pointed out by the Chancellor, the protestors engaged in activities that were outside of what he understands to be the tradition of "peaceful" resistance. I wonder if the protestors understood that they had crossed that threshold, and what it implies about their attitudes towards established legal authority.

For those unfamiliar with the events, this is how I understand the course of events: there was a big rally, then some people set up tents, cops amassed and told the protesters to take their tents and leave, protesters refused. A negotiator said that the protestors could occupy the plaza constantly for a week, as long as no camping equipment was set up and people didn't sleep there. When the protesters rejected this offer, the cops tried to dismantle the campsite, but were blocked by a crowd. The cops then beat their way through the crowd and took the tents.

Here's the video of part:

Here is the core of the Chancellor's letter:

It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience. By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers’ efforts to remove the tent. These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.

...

We call on the protesters to observe campus policy or, if they choose to defy the policy, to engage in truly non-violent civil disobedience and to accept the consequences of their decisions.

Basically, the distinction that he is making is between those who use the legal system as a stage on which to protest-- using their arrest for theatrical purpose-- and those who stand outside of the legal system and try to gain sympathy when the legal system imposes itself on them.

This later activity is fundamentally radical, since it rejects the legitimacy of the legal system itself. The only alternative to the use of force is the abdication of authority by either the University administration or the police. We've seen this tactic used repeatedly in the Occupy protests, but it is also paired with rhetoric that suggests that the protestors don't comprehend how these actions are an immediate and radical threat to the establishment (e.g. "stop beating students"). On the other hand, the rhetoric of "occupation" is inherently radical, but it doesn't seem to be a turn-off to the non-radical left. People apparently treat it as nothing more than a brand. But we've also seen this contradiction in the Tea Party movement, where they simultaneously spouted radical rhetoric (including the name) even as they demanded respect from the establishment.

In the end, I'm not sure exactly what these people wish to achieve, or how they expect their actions to achieve these goals. It seems that the protests have become focused on the tactics of protest themselves -- the perpetual occupation of public space for the sake of protest, and camping as a form of protest. Right now, I don't find these to be particularly compelling reasons to get involved.

However, there are some good fights to be picked over this issue. There are plenty of cities with overly restrictive requirements for permits to gather. It may be interesting to see these rules presented as a form of class-warfare, which weaken the ability of regular people to engage in political propaganda, even as the wealthy have the alternative outlet of mass-media.

Why "99%" is not about income

2011-11-12T14:58:00.002-05:00

In a previous post, a comment suggested that I am trying to tell the Occupy movement (i.e. the 99%ers) what they care about. The 99% slogan is clearly about income/wealth inequality, yet I insist that the "real issue" is special privileges.

I'll briefly state why I don't think that I'm projecting my own values onto their action:

1) 99% is just a slogan. It cannot encompass the subtleties of the issue.
2) Many of them have explicitly stated that their main concern is that the 1% "give back" to the community that enabled their success. There is apparent tolerance for a large income disparity, as long as there is a social safety net and opportunity for upward mobility (e.g. education subsidies).
3) Many of them have distinguished between the worthy rich (e.g. Steve Jobs) and the unworthy rich (e.g. bailed-out bankers)
4) I'd bet that if you surveyed the group, almost everyone would say that there is a problem with special privilege and subtle corruption of public institutions. A lot of them (maybe a majority) may say that income disparity itself is a problem, but I'd bet that almost all of them would also say that privilege/corruption is a problem. So I think I'm safe if I treat "privilege/corruption" as a concern that I share with the Occupy crowd, and put income inequality (per se) on the back burner.
5) If you follow the campaign finance reform movement (which I think is a big part of the Occupy movement), the concern with wealth inequality is derived from a concern with unequal political influence.

At the end of the day, I also believe that much of the wealth inequality in our country arises from special privileges and corruption of public institutions. Maybe the Occupiers don't agree, but I don't think I'm projecting my opinions on them when I focus on the solution as I see it.

The 99% are to blame

2011-11-11T11:05:00.002-05:00

This past week saw two "riots" on college campuses. There was a bit of a scuffle with cops as the Occupy Cal group (i.e. the "99%-ers) tried to establish a campsite on campus. Across the country at Penn State, a spontaneous riot broke out following the announcement of Joe Paterno's dismissal for his failure to adequately respond to news that one of his assistant coaches was raping 10-year olds in the team showers.

Each of these confrontations is worthy of much discussion, but what I find most interesting at the moment is how the events at Penn State undermine the narrative being presented by the Occupy crowd.

Joe Parterno is the 1%. Even by the standards of University faculty, sports coaches have extremely high pay. Paterno was bringing in around a million dollars a year, while several other head-coaches bring in multimillion dollars salaries. University payscales are a perfect microcosm of the more widespread inequalities that the Occupy movement decries.

My view is that "gods are not allowed to make mistakes"-- when someone of Paterno's stature and power is this neglectful of his duties, he deserves to be thrown out on his ass. However, consider the reaction of the great masses in the Penn State community -- they defended Paterno, with massive public protest. They embraced the idea that a person like Paterno is above the law; he is so great that he can do no wrong. Even more telling, there was no Karl Rove manipulating public opinion behind the scenes. This was totally spontaneous.

I have read innumerable essays by concerned leftists pondering why the lower classes repeatedly vote against their own interests. These overly partisan egalitarians find the obvious answer -- it's the other party! (i.e. the Republicans). If they would open their eyes, this riot (which is just part of a long-standing phenomenon) would put their partisan theories to lie. There is no need for sophisticated propaganda to create massive inequality. A college education does not cause people to open up their eyes to what really matters. The truth is that most people are morons. Most people are willing slaves who fantasize about having a king. They dream of a benevelent lord who will provide them with bread and circus, absolving them of any responsibility for their own lives.

A half-century of middle class unionism and public universities has done nothing to lessen this peasant mentality among the masses. It's time to consider the possibility that democracy has failed. Democracy is impossible because when power is given to the masses, they give it right back. Those of us who want freedom will have to find it ourselves. If we want a society of equals, we will have to find it separately from the servile masses. We obviously can't physically separate ourselves from them, but we can weaken the institutions that they use to force themselves on us.

Stopping others from working is not a "general strike"

2011-11-03T04:02:00.000-04:00

Occupy Oakland has jumped the shark with today's "general strike". From a population of over 7 million (in the San Francisco Bay Area), they managed to assemble maybe 7000 people. Based on this support from 0.1%, they felt that they had the prerogative to shut down the Oakland Port and disrupt the lives of the people who work there. I haven't heard from the organizers, but I can't imagine any reason that the port would be viewed as particularly evil -- it seems that they were just looking for a choke point in the local and national economy.

Protests shut Oakland port, tensions flare in streets | Reuters

If you're pissed at the government, then block government buildings. Leave the port alone.

Absolute Sexual Equality

2011-10-29T18:34:00.000-04:00

Over at Philosophical Disquisitions, John Danaher is discussing the "Polygamy, Incest, Bestiality" (PIB) slippery slope objection to homosexuality. He reviews several attempts to counter this argument by describing how homosexual activity is different from PIB, and (paraphrasing John Corvino) rightly points out that there is logically no need to make such arguments because the people who equate homosexuality to PIB do not provide any argument supporting that position (the only similarity being that they are all "forbidden" or "gross").

Along those lines, the PIB argument really isn't an argument in itself; it seems to be a reductio ad absurdum for some unspecified justification for acceptance of homosexuality. The logic seems to be:

1) You say that we should accept homosexuality because of principle X.
2) Principle X would cause us to accept PIB (or pedophilia) .
3) Therefore, principle X is invalid.

Of course, the force of this argument relies entirely on what "principle X" actually is; if principle X does not apply to PIB, then the PIB-argument is pointless.

So this brings us to my favorite "principle X" : absolute sexual equality.

My principle is that I should not treat a person differently due solely to their biological sex (aside from my own sexual relationships). I realized that this principle applies to homosexuality when I read that some opponents of the sexual Equal Rights Amendment had predicted that the ERA would forbid discrimination against homosexual relationships. Many proponents of the ERA reject this interpretation. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say anything about that -- but I do agree that the principle of sexual non-discrimination implies acceptance of homosexuality.

Attempts to distinguish homophobia from sexism often rest on the idea of reciprocal equality: that discrimination against homosexuality will limit a man's options just as much as it would limit a woman's options-- both men and women would be limited to sexual relationships with the opposite sex (let's ignore the intersex in this argument).

Superficially, this argument seems reasonable, but for any American it should quickly raise a red-flag, since it is reminiscent of the principle of "separate but equal". Based on history, we know that an arrangement that is superficially egalitarian can act as a cover for severe oppression. Based on logic, we know that when we treat people differently, it is very difficult to perfectly balance the moral worth of those differences; this is especially true in a world where people have different opinions regarding the moral worth of different conditions. In essence, requiring that men marry women and women marry men is the same as requiring that men work outside of the home and women work inside the home. We may believe that we can put aside our personal preferences and assert than marrying a man is objectively just as good as marrying a woman. However, as with a belief that working inside the home is just as good as working outside the home, this is actually a personal preference and not an objective description of reality. Furthermore, we cannot give the benefit of the doubt to these assertions of equal value, because such arrangements are quite easy to manipulate in favor of one group or the other (as we have seen in history).

For the sake of illustration, consider these two ways in which this "reciprocal equality" could lead to clearly non-equal outcomes. These may seem silly on their own, but they are sufficient to demonstrate the inequality implicit in considering sex when judging relationships.

The first inequality arises from the physical and emotional differences between men and women. For instance, men (as a group) are stronger than women (as a group); if we were to forbid a person from choosing a partner from either group, then we clearly would be influencing the likely characteristics of the partner that they eventually find.

The second aspect of inequality is apparent when the population is divided into two "reciprocal" groups that vary drastically in size. Consider splitting the human population into two groups, each of which is forbidden from marrying within its own group. Now imagine that one group constitutes 90% of the population, and the other is 10%; the 10% is clearly the elite group here, having their choice of partners from the other group, whereas most of the members of the larger group will be effectively forbidden from marrying at all (unless the members of the smaller group can take multiple spouses). Normally, the population of males and females is nearly equal, so this isn't a big deal, but this thought experiment does emphasize the fact that men and women are selecting their partners from different groups, competing for attention with a different group of people, and that these group dynamics will influence the likely outcome of their quests to find partners. To bring this back to the real world, some societies have experienced substantial imbalances between the male and female population -- a deficit of males following major wars, and a deficit of females is societies that practice prenatal sex selection.

Now that I've stated my position, let's consider how it compares to the position of others. Many people consider themselves "anti-sexist", yet would balk at taking this position of non-discrimination between homosexual and heterosexual couples. Looking at the marriage issue and their behavior in general, they apparently think that discrimination is quite appropriate; they actually are sexist, they only object to the idea that one sex is superior to the other. They will treat men and women differently in everyday encounters and believe that it is totally just for the law to recognize these categories for issues such as marriage. My objection to such categorization is both moral and empirical. Morally, individuals should be free to structure their lives as they see fit, and pigeonholing a person into a gender role places a fairly arbitrary restriction on their freedom. Empirically, many people lack the stereotypical traits of their gender on which theories of sexual discrimination are based (e.g. many men have less strength than the median strength among women). Trying to force a person into a role based on their genitalia is a simplistic approach that ignores the many ways in which each person deviates from any sexual ideal.

On the other side, there may be people who consider my view of sexual equality to be limited, in that I do consider there to be difference between men and women. These differences are apparent both in how I relate to them sexually (which only applies to my wife now) and that the male and female populations differ in many socially important respects. I won't deny that our sexual preferences and relationships have myriad ramifications in other aspects of society (thereby undermining the idea of sexual non-discrimination); however, by recognizing that the male and female populations are in fact different, I do not automatically assume that any difference in social/economic standing is due to discrimination. There is simply no getting around the fact that people are different from each other, and the details of how these differences arise (e.g. genetic, chemical, social) are not really important. We cannot and should not treat each individual identically, all we can do is make sure that our discrimination is not based on unsound ideology and prejudice.

So to bring this back to the issue of social acceptance of homosexuality and the "PIB objection", I think that it is immediately clear that this principle of equality does not compel us to accept polygamy, pedophilia, or bestiality. A variant of this principle (non-discrimination on the basis of parentage) could be used to argue that incest should not be discouraged. Of course, this would in no way affect the situations where incest could be viewed as rape (whether statutory or forcible). I'm not too concerned by this use of the argument to destigmatize incest,partly because I don't think that cousin marriage needs to be stigmatized, and so this issue is limited to sibling marriage. More importantly, most of these arguments for sexual equality do not apply strongly to incest -- primarily because the the prohibition of incestuous sexual activity does not place a substantial restriction on a person's choice of mates.

The advancement of sexual equality is one of the major struggles of our age, and no attempt to equate it with sexual perversion should distract us from eliminating sexual discrimination from our institutions.

Cousin marriage: science, prejudice, and lifestyle mandates

2011-10-29T13:17:00.001-04:00

Reposted from Freedom Democrats, 2009.

A perspective from PLoS Biology by Diane Paul and Hamish Spencer argues that there is no scientific basis for social stigma and laws against marriages of first cousins. The basic argument is that the risk of birth defects from first-cousin mating is negligible, and fear of such defects is the only basis for these attitudes and laws. This issue is interesting to libertarians as an illustration of how lawmakers often pretend that they are implementing the scientific management of society, when in fact their acts are based on nothing more than ignorant prejudice.

This issue is also interesting in how it connects with the evolution of our views towards government:

The laws must also be viewed in the context of a new, post–Civil War acceptance of the need for state oversight of education, commerce, and health and safety, including marriage and the family. Beginning in the 1860s, many states passed anti-miscegenation laws, increased the statutory age of marriage, and adopted or expanded medical and mental-capacity restrictions in marriage law. Thus, laws prohibiting cousin marriage were but one aspect of a more general trend to broaden state authority in areas previously considered private. And unlike the situation in Britain and much of Europe, cousin marriage in the US was associated not with the aristocracy and upper middle class but with much easier targets: immigrants and the rural poor.

One flaw in the argument from Paul and Spencer is that they emphasize the low costs of mating among cousins, but they ignore the low costs of prohibiting cousins from marrying--laws against cousin incest produce a negligible reduction in the pool of prospective spouses (as opposed to laws against same-sex marriage or inter-racial marriage, for example). I'm sure that this issue is terribly important for those few people who are romantically in love with their cousins, but it will never get onto the radar screen of anyone who is considering the total welfare of humanity, or the overall injustice in the world.

Paul and Spencer also largely ignore the social issues around cousin marriages. From modern American perspective, cousin marriages may disrupt the stability of the extended family. Conversely, in some societies, cousin-marriages seem to increase family stability and support--providing the child with benefits that may outweigh the risks of genetic problems (I'll link to the report if I can find it). We could also speculate that frequent cousin marriages may result in a more fragmented society with insular families: at its most extreme, it may facilitate the formation of cult-like social structures. Ultimately, I suspect that day-to-day social concerns play a much more direct role in policy formation than expert-mediated scientific knowledge.

A Google search reveals a fair amount of commentary on this issue. At Slate.com, William Salaten notes that we will soon be able to genotype everyone to look for couples who carry identical alleles: if we embrace the logic of the prohibition on marriage of cousins, does that mean that genetic testing (a la GATTACA) should be a mandatory part of a marriage application, and the application be rejected if both individuals carry a potentially harmful recessive allele? Of course, as GATTACA illustrates, genetic selection on in vitro embryos is a solution to that problem.

Pirate parties and the new economic power

2011-10-20T12:57:00.001-04:00

A few posts back, I ruminated on a potential shift in the nature of economic power and how that could play out in the political realm. The rise of the Pirate parties seems to fit into the process that I was pondering:

the success of the Pirate Party cannot simply be explained away by saying it’s a symptom of social exclusion or ignorance. The supporters of the new party are anything but on the margins – they are highly educated and media savvy. And above all, they are young and in a position to attract like-minded individuals in cities all over the country. To a certain extent, they represent the future elite of Germany. For mainstream-party strategists, realising that they are unable to connect with this section of society must come as a kick in the teeth.

From How Germany’s Pirates might sink the mainstream parties | Matthias Heitmann | spiked

Anyway, this suggests that the "new power" may be centered on the ability to generate large ad-hoc communities around current issues, and motivate these communities to act. So the new power is based on social networking assets (including both old-fashioned "people skills", familiarity with those newfangled devices, and a reputation that encourages others to pay attention), as opposed to the old powers built on land ownership, industrial ownership, and institutional control. The funny thing is that the assets of this new power are pretty much identical to the assets of the financial industry-- the main difference being that these assets are now widely distributed, and the "clients" are not just millionaires and large institutions.

Frankly, they don't deserve our protection

2011-10-17T00:58:00.000-04:00

I know that most "realists" will say that the assassination of a diplomat on our soil is a clear casus belli, but I think we have to ask whether we really want to make any sacrifices to protect members of the Saudi government. They are scum. That doesn't meant that we can't talk with them and try to work with them under some circumstances, but it does mean that I have no interest in making any sacrifices to protect them, regardless of the circumstances.

The judicial system: The feeblest branch | The Economist

2011-10-10T02:03:00.000-04:00

This is crazy:

A typical lawsuit now goes to trial within a couple of years, says Ms Feinstein, but that could soon stretch to five years. The backlog of traffic infractions is already so daunting that it compromises enforcement (and the deterrence of bad driving). And so on. The Californian constitution guarantees criminal defendants a right to speedy trial, but it does not technically require courts to administer civil law at all, Ms Feinstein says. So, in theory, civil adjudication could stop altogether, as it already has on one judicial circuit in Georgia. That, she says would bring about the “unravelling of society”.

The judicial system: The feeblest branch | The Economist

While pondering whether a smooth transition to anarchy is possible, I had thought of the government dismantling itself by folding up the executive branch-- leaving a court to adjudicate disputes between people, and a (possibly reformed) legislative branch to set the rules for such adjudication. Here we seem to have the opposite: the state continuing to micro-manage the lives of the people, but refusing to settle disputes. It's as if the people in charge are trying really hard to leave behind the minarchist ideal of the "night-watchman state".

Following the invasion of Iraq, I had a nagging feeling that Bush and Co. were trying to liquidate the welfare state -- Bush created large deficits by cutting taxes (retroactively!) on the rich, and then guaranteed a long term drain of the budget by invading Iraq even as we were facing a major nation-building challenge in Afghanistan. Before long, we'd have a debt crisis requiring the gutting of state economic support (ranging from Social Security to education funding), but we'd still have to pay taxes (directly or indirectly) to avoid default and to maintain the armed-forces of the state (both domestic and deployed). Our only interaction with the state would be the police-man's baton.

The new economic power

2011-10-08T14:33:00.002-04:00

Even when I'm trying to focus on my job, I get drawn into thinking about social activism. My most recent distraction comes from two articles by Pieter Hintjens. The main essay is called "A User's Guide to the Digital Revolution", the introduction to a book called Software and Silicon. Hintjens presents recent economic developments as a "digital revolution" on par with the "industrial revolution" of the early 19th century, and predicts similarly radical changes in social organization and political power. In a slapdash theory of class struggle, he makes analogies between then and now:

The new social concentrations of 19th century cities allowed an entrepreneurial middle class to emerge, and quite rapidly their economic power turned into political power, and in 1848 there was political revolution across Europe and the establishment of parliamentary democracy in many countries. Political change follows economic change, which follows social change.

Hintjens posits that the "old money" ruling class attempts to constrain the rising power of the "new money" entrepreneurial class with laws such as the Corn Laws of 19th century Britain, or the Intellectual Property laws of today's global system.

This narrative is all well and good (though it seems simplistic relative to the theories described in my current nightstand-book: a biography of Friedrich Engles), but it got me thinking about how the economic power of the "new money" differs from the "old money" in such a way that it demands radical change to the political system. Today, it seems that new money merges seamlessly into the old money; software entrepreneurs sell their start-ups or they draw salaries and dividends, which they then deposit in banks or stock-market investment funds -- just like everyone else with money. This is not anything like the difference between the landed aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie in the 19th century.

For there to be a true conflict between a rising economic class and the establishment, the new power has to be fundamentally different and incompatible with the old power. The aristocratic and bourgeoisie power structures were ideologically incompatible, and functionally non-convertible (though some industrialists were granted titles of nobility). I have to look hard -- and squint -- to see that sort of conflict in existing classes.

Hintjens provides a hint of this new form of power in another essay, called Testing Considered Evil. While this is superficially a technical essay about software design methodology, it is actually part of a manifesto about economic organization and how to motivate workers. Here is where we begin to see a radical form of economic power; Hintjens is focusing on how to get programmers involved (and obsessed) with Open Source Software development. This is economic activity that falls outside of the established channels -- it doesn't generate cash revenues, or any sort of property that can be owned by a corporation. The only economic asset gained by the entrepreneur is organizational: a network of motivated programmers, and a reputation that enables the entrepreneur to call on their services.

When this form of economic organization is viewed alongside the efforts of people such as the "Occupy Wall Street" crowd, I can imagine that something big is happening, and that tomorrow's power will not look like yesterday's.

Please stay tuned...

2011-10-06T00:03:00.002-04:00

...for this message from our sponsor:

"Diaspora* means a brighter future for all of us"

2011-09-22T01:07:00.000-04:00

Diaspora is an interesting project, and seems to be finally bearing some fruit. It is essentially a user-owned social networking system (e.g. Facebook)

According to a recent press release from the group (Diaspora* means a brighter future for all of us):

Diaspora’s distributed design is a huge part of it. Like the Internet itself, Diaspora* isn’t housed in any one place, and it’s not controlled by any one entity (including us). We’ve created software that lets you set up and run your own social network on your own “pod” (or server) and connect your network to the larger Diaspora* ecosystem...
This means you can do what you want. You can express yourself candidly, and be your authentic self. You can go by whatever name you like on Diaspora*. Pseudonyms are fine, and this both protects you (if you want to say something your boss or your parents disagree with) and opens the door to real connection.

The Mass Transit Police State

2011-08-14T22:03:00.000-04:00

Normally, I'd think that this is just pathetic partisan fearmongering without any basis in reality:

the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

However, when a heavily subsidized commuter train system (BART) attacks the First Amendment...

My favorite sci-fi fantasy books

2011-08-11T21:18:00.006-04:00

Something fun... my thoughts on the "Top 100 Sci-Fi Fantasy books": audience picks from NPR's.

Following Russel Arben Fox, I've noted which ones I've read... and I've added some notes. I have one comment in preface: it's hard to believe that all these stories get lumped together in one category; the tone and style varies so much! It's also a shame that they separated these from stories of supernatural horror.

1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien

I read it once in middle school, and once when I was thirty. I appreciated it much more upon my second reading (especially the romance). I then got sucked in and read "The Children of Hurin" (powerful, though the quality of the writing varied...as might be expected given that Tolkien left it unfinished). Then read the Silmarillion(below).

2. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

Load's of fun... though I may like the Dirk Gently stories better.

3. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card

Clever story... and the series develops in an interesting direction.

6. 1984, by George Orwell

I read it more than once... then saw the movie.

7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

I heard it first on audiotape, then I read it.

8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov

I've read much of Asimov's work, and my favorite story is not on this list ("The Gods Themselves")

9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

Brilliant. Both in concept and execution. I've read it two or three times.

13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell

14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson

16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov

17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein

19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

28. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut

30. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess

Read this, and think about the riots in London.

31. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

Really? Decent book, excellent movie, awesome drinking game.

32. Watership Down, by Richard Adams

Didn't think this was Sci-Fi... but a good book. I read it twice; both as child and adult.

33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey

35. A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller

Brilliant vision. Excellent writing... if you like dark humor. I read it two or three times.

44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven

I don't recall if I read this. I know I read a story that took place on the ringworld though. I've read so many of Niven's stories, it's hard to keep them straight. He's a great storyteller and explores a lot of interesting (speculative) social issues, but I don't find any of his stories particularly profound. The only one I read twice was "Protector".

46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien

An ambitious attempt to create a new genre of modern literature. Brilliant.

53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

Neat idea, and amusing writing... but should have been half as long.

54. World War Z, by Max Brooks

Started off strong... but quickly turned to drivel. I don't think I actually finished it, even though I had selected it as "light" beach reading.

76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke

I read this or another book about Rama.

80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire

Fun series, good stories. I get a kick out of imagining how to resist a totalitarian regime.

84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart

This is one of the first "adult" books that I read...I didn't realize it had such a following. Maybe I should read it again.

94. The Caves Of Steel, by Isaac Asimov

So, that comes to 26 / 100. I'll add three more books/series to the list:

The Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. This book was engrossing (though he spent too much time explaining his mythology), and got me into Lovecraft. Unfortunately, none of his other stories were as good as this one.
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. This is a great work of supernatural horror (Lovecraftian)-- but it's presented as a space-exploration story.
The Berserker series by Fred Sabrahagen. I haven't read these since I was a kid, so they may be juvenile... but they sure made an impression on me.

I seen the movie version of many of those books, and had never even realized that there had been a book!

Phillip Dick has been on my reading list since I've seen three or four movies based on his books, and since I saw that Neuromancer won the "Phillip Dick award".

Ian Banks has also been on my reading list; the culture series sounds awesome. I looked for it at my local library, but found "Song of Stone" instead, which is itself an excellent story (though hardly Sci-Fi/Fantasy).

Update: I saw Flatland at the local bookstore in the SciFi/Fantasy section. If it belongs in that category (rather than, say, philosophy), then it belongs on this list.

The value of radical political thought

2011-08-06T10:25:00.007-04:00

Outline:
the conservative presumption
conceptual limit: ideals
conceptual limit: the ambiguity of tradition
contextual limit: the existence of problems
contextual limit: the sustainability of the status quo

Gary Chartier recently tried to outline how the state harms the most vulnerable members of society ("Should Bleeding Hearts Be Anarchists?"). The post was basically a "hit-and-run", lacking any substantial explanation or examples, and the comment thread was largely a muddle of semantic ambiguity and unsupported assertions about moral values. However, one of the arguments against anarchism stood out as being worth a considered response:

Damien S. wrote:

The anarchist bears the burden because the anarchist is arguing for change, radical change even. I can look around the world and see dozens of states that are pleasant though not perfect places to live in. The anarchist brings no such evidence to the table.

This is essentially the conservative case against any radicalism. Or rather, it is the conservative presumption against radicalism. It is a rule of thumb that helps to generate good strategies, as long as circumstances don't clearly demand alternative strategies. On its own, it is quite reasonable, but it also has very limited applicability, which I wish to explore here. I hope to provide an explanation for why it is worthwhile to give serious consideration to radical ideas, even if this conservative presumption is itself taken seriously.

As a preliminary note, the conservative presumption is not the only good presumption out there. In particular, I consider it to be equal to the libertarian presumption. Here's how I phrase the two:

Conservative: If there is no problem, don't change anything.
Libertarian: If a person is causing no harm, don't interfere with his actions.

Clearly, in a somewhat authoritarian/communitarian society like ours, these two principles are often at odds. For instance, the libertarian presumption would weigh in favor of decriminalizing drugs, whereas the conservative presumption would favor continuation of the existing policy (assuming that the drug war has no substantial problems). However, this tension is not insurmountable, and can be resolved with compromises such as incremental decriminalization resulting in a heavily taxed and regulated drug market. The two presumptions can even reinforce each other; in America, this is most prominently seen in the arguments over gun-control.

With that being said, I'd like to consider the limits of the conservative presumption on its own merits, and how this affects our interaction with radical political ideas such as anarchism.

The first limitation is that the presumption only applies to actions and institutions, not to thoughts and ideas. The fact that the state exists does not mean that we have to accept every argument put forth extolling its benefits, even if those arguments have seeped into mainstream political culture. A person is perfectly capable of holding the opinion that the state is a worthless if not dangerous institution, while still going to work and paying taxes; the conservative presumption encourages us to continue acting like a "responsible citizen" regardless of these theoretical conclusions. A convinced anarchist does not have to seek constitutional reforms that would undermine state power (as if an anarchist would consider this line of activism worthwhile to begin with), nor does the anarchist need to assassinate state agents or instigate riots.1

The second limit on the conservative presumption is that it does not always indicate that one course of action is preferred over another. This is most obvious when we are seeking a solution for a problem that has never been seen before: if both solutions are novel, then we will have to evaluate them on the basis of other criteria, such as which one most favors one's ideals. More subtly, this limit arises when it is impossible to truly maintain traditional arrangements, and we are forced to chose between two aspects of the status quo. An example of this is the American Civil War, where the southerners were faced with either the abolition of slavery or rebellion against the USA. This sort of limit is also encountered when we consider the diversity of traditional behaviors; for instance, America has always been a "government of law", yet many Americans have openly or covertly resisted laws that they deemed unjust or misguided. Examples include the fugitive slave laws, alcohol prohibition, the military draft, Jim Crow laws, and laws against homosexuality. Once these scofflaws are recognized as part of the American tradition (indeed, they are heroes of American history), it becomes less than clear that an anarchist is encouraging radical behavior when he asserts that we have no obligation to obey bad laws.

In addition to these conceptual limits to the conservative presumption, there are also contextual limits. As I described it above, the conservative presumption assumes that there are no problems; once we encounter serious problems in our lives, the presumption against change is discarded. When the status quo is bad enough, a change may be worthwhile even if the final outcome is uncertain. Especially when a person's hardship can clearly be attributed to a particular institution, their best strategy may be to undermine that institution, even if they suspect that the elimination of their target will have sweeping and unpredictable consequences.

Many Americans may live in conditions that provide rational incentive to attack fundamental social institutions. For instance, many Americans are impoverished or in jail. Indeed, poverty and police supervision (such as incarceration) tend to be focused in particular cities and neighborhoods, creating an environment that justifies radicalism even among those who are not personally impoverished or in jail. Those who manage to avoid outright poverty and incarceration may still feel that the dominant institutions of our society have failed them. Living in fear of thugs and gangs, hemmed-in by a transportation system designed for the benefit of others, or condemned to malnutrition by geographical and financial inaccessibility of nutritious food-- many people have good reason to doubt that existing social institutions will allow them or their loved-ones to live fulfilling lives.

Historically, the promise of progress and the myth of democratic authority have persuaded many dissatisfied Americans to go along with the powers-that-be and relinquish control over their own lives. But over the past few decades, it has become unclear whether "progress" sill includes Americans with lower socio-economic status. Likewise, the traditional vehicles of working-class political power have withered, thereby undermining confidence that the political system is truly democratic. If people in this situation abandon faith in the authorities and take responsibility for their lives, the conservative presumption will hold little sway over them (and to address the original question -- bleeding-heart elites may want to support them).

It's worth noting that the above paragraphs refer to other people; I have lived my life comfortably in the upper half of the socio-economic scale. I feel no pressing need to change our fundamental social institutions, even if several of them limit the flourishing of myself and my peers. Presumably, most of the readers and writers at blogs like "Bleeding Heart Libertarians" have similar security. But even for the comfortable middle-class (and elite), there is good reason to seriously consider -- and even promote-- radical political ideas.

Those of us who are served well by existing institutions still need to consider the conditions under which these institutions might collapse, what sort of institutions we would build following a collapse, and how we could minimize the hardships associated with the transition from failed institutions to new ones. We need to consider these scenarios because collapse is inevitable-- all systems collapse; political/economic systems are prone to crisis every few generations, and they only survive their crises if they are substantially reformed.

Our current institutions could last for several generations more, or they could collapse in the next decade. The fact that America is "the strongest nation" should not be taken as evidence for the stability of the American system, since even powerful political systems can collapse in the space of a few years (for instance, the USSR). Furthermore, our institutions are showing signs of strain from several chronic problems, and similar troubles are faced by other liberal capitalist nations: unbalanced financial systems, natural resource depletion, high unemployment and economic stagnation, political paralysis, and frequent military interventions that fail to produce a clear victory...but could easily instigate a exhausting arms-race or devastating war.

Radical political thought prepares the American middle class for the eventual crisis that we will encounter. It helps us to avoid getting excited over false crises (such as high levels of immigration), and recognize the decisions that are likely to provoke a true crisis (such as military adventurism). It will help us to recognize when our institutions have outlived their usefulness, and prevent us from desperately clinging to them as they collapse. Overall, radical political thought will help us to prepare ourselves -- economically, socially, and emotionally-- for the inevitable transition to new social institutions that are better adapted to our current conditions and desires.

When the time comes to replace our current institutions with new ones, we will either undertake the project guided by a set of principles that will ensure the greatest opportunities for our children and grand-children, or we will cling to past glories and desperately grasp for solutions to unanticipated hardships. If America does not prepare itself with radical political theory, then it will devolve into an emotionalist mob that is easily manipulated by the empty promises and scapegoating of demagogues.

1: Of course, there are many reasons for a person to refrain from violence, regardless of ideological opinions or a unwillingness to upset the existing system. Two that come to mind immediately are first, a pacifist presumption, and second, a rational limit on how much one is willing to personally sacrifice to promote a political agenda.

Nation building, from the bottom up

2011-06-25T10:31:00.001-04:00

The Economist has a brief description of the state-building process in Somaliland, a de facto independent region within de jure jurisdiction of Somolia.

Aid and Somaliland: Mo money mo problems

The basic thesis is that in the absence of foreign support for the Somaliland state, the government was forced into developing a web of alliances and relationships with regional leaders, resulting in a government that is accountable to the people. Contrast this with the internationally recognized government of Somalia, a pathetic assemblage of warlords who have been constantly attempting to subdue the Somali people by force, backed by immense funding and direct military intervention from foreign states, including the USA.

I've been wondering for awhile if the USA's "nation building" activities have been fundamentally misguided, in that they are largely "state building" activities. This top-down approach assumes that foreigners can establish a functioning legal and political system, which will then create the conditions for the development of the economic and social relations that define a nation. This is the basic approach that Westerners have collectively used when dealing with their former colonies, and 50 years after decolonization, much of the territory assigned to these artificial states is still racked by warfare. I'm afraid of what will happen if the internationally recognized Somali government ever subdues Mogadishu, and then then seeks to assert its dominance over Somaliland.

This top-down approach ignores the fact that a legal and political system must be compatible with local culture, and even the most sensitive foreign intervention will probably fail to identify the appropriate structure for a given society. Even a native would often fail to establish a sustainable national system, simply because many of these societies lack the basic institutional framework on which a national government could be built .

The opposite approach would be "bottom up" nation-building: encouraging commercial relations and the development of dispute-settling frameworks. Once local institutions are developed, they can provide the framework for creating national institutions (for instance, when the USA was established, it was a relatively simple matter of getting 13 states with similar cultures to agree on a national constitution). This seems to be how the Islamic Courts Union got established in Somalia.

Of course, most "realists" would assert that a proper nation-building strategy would address the whole range of issues -- seeking synergies between the top-down and bottom-up approach. For instance, commercial relationships and a fair legal system help to support each other. However, when we allow the state to take the lead on nation-building programs, we will most likely see a bias towards state-building. In part, this is the consequence of perspective: the agents of the state think in terms of the state. But it also results from the ulterior motives of any outside participant in nation-building. They are not simply seeking security and prosperity (or even stability) for the people of the post-colonial territory in question, they are seeking their own economic and geo-political advantage. States have the ability to exploit their people, and by getting involved in the establishment of new nation-states, the ruling class of one nation essentially inserts itself into the ruling class of another nation.

This feature of state behavior is worth keeping in mind, lest we get fooled into once again bearing "the white man's burden".

"The man who screwed an entire country ": Berlusconi

2011-06-18T12:15:00.000-04:00

The Economist has provided an aptly named review of Silvio Berlusconi's Prime Ministership: The man who screwed an entire country.

While they focus on his economic policies (or lack thereof), I was most stricken by this comment:

Over the years, he has been tried more than a dozen times for fraud, false accounting or bribery. His defenders claim that he has never been convicted, but this is untrue. Several cases have seen convictions, only for them to be set aside because the convoluted proceedings led to trials being timed out by a statute of limitations—at least twice because Mr Berlusconi himself changed the law.

As hard as it is to admit this, George W. Bush looked tame by comparison. When Bush pardoned Scooter Libby of obstruction of justice (without spending a day in jail), I interpreted it as a message to all of his other henchmen that they were above the law. However, the extent of Berlusconi's crimes and the length that he will go to in order to retain power makes Bush look like an amateur. With any luck, the Italians will soon reign in this would-be tyrant.

Following the Libby pardon, I suspected that the Bush administration was covering up a variety of abuses of power. None have come to light yet, and if they aren't revealed in the next few years, I'm guessing we will never have solid evidence of anything. It's possible that the Libby affair was a one-off situation; alternative, it's possible that Obama and the Democrats endorsed any secret and extra-legal activities of the Bush administration, and so they will continue to play along.

Italians win referendums

2011-06-15T08:01:00.000-04:00

Italian Referendums Deal A Blow To Berlusconi : NPR:

Without commenting on the content of these referendums, I must say that I am impressed by how the Italian people successfully opposed Berlusconi's formidable political/propaganda machine.

Italians turned out in large numbers for four referendums and voted overwhelmingly this week to overturn key legislation passed by the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Berlusconi had urged voters to boycott referendums on nuclear power, privatization of water utilities and trial immunity for the prime minister and other government officials. The vote was a humiliating defeat for the scandal-prone prime minister but does not automatically lead to his government's collapse.
...
Italy's three government-run TV networks and the three owned by Berlusconi himself more or less ignored the referendum campaign. The prime minister and several government officials said openly they would not vote, and urged Italians to go to the beach instead.

...

Cheers erupted when it was announced that turnout topped 57 percent, surpassing the quorum needed to validate the vote — the first time since 1995 the referendum quorum had been reached.

...

Each referendum was approved by around 95 percent of voters.

Is it wrong to pay a bribe?

2011-05-09T21:37:00.001-04:00

There's recently been a bit of commotion about government corruption in India (particularly, bribery), with a lot of public pressure to eliminate it. According to the Economist magazine, (A novel way to combat corruption: Who to punish), one aspect of the debate is whether the laws should be changed to actually eliminate criminal penalties for people who pay bribes, as long as they are only paying to secure a service to which they are legally entitled.

There is some debate as to what the consequences of such laws would be. Such concerns seem irrelevant to me. It is praiseworthy to resist a demand for a bribe, but it should not be treated as an obligation. People need to get on with their lives, and can't be expected to bear the arbitrarily large burden associated with having licenses revoked or not being given access to money that is rightfully theirs.

The proposal described in the Economist is probably the most orderly way to deal with the problem. If some communitarian view of justice demands that the victim of corruption be held accountable for the crime (and he has no realistic administrative or legal remedy), then maybe the victim should have an alternative. Perhaps ad hoc tribunals should be able to run a corrupt official out of town. Or more realistically, if the state cannot effectively administer all of its regulations, the people at the top should aggressively move to eliminate them. If they can't do that, then their power should be eliminated.

UniLeaks: wikileaks for education

2011-04-23T18:43:00.005-04:00

I just came across a new website called UniLeaks, which solicits...

restricted or censored material of political, ethical, diplomatic or historical significance which is in some way connected to higher education, an agency or government body working in partnership with an institution, e.g., a University.

As yet, I do not see the point in creating a system targeted at particular institutions. Maybe this is a way to attract specialists who would be interested in these documents. However, my first suspicion is that this is the work of anti-intellectuals who are digging for any possible dirt on academia.

In part, this is because I can't imagine that they would find particularly interesting documents that are distinctive of universities. The most likely "dirt" will relate to fund-raising, resource allocation, and employee relations -- just like with any large institution. My fear is that these people will be digging for documents like the stolen* emails at the center of Climategate, which they can then pass to the right-wing noise machine for selective quoting.

As I suggested in Privacy and Transparency at the University, this strategy seems to be increasingly common among some political factions. Michael Mann suffered legal harassment as a result of the Climategate brouhaha, and Frances Fox Piven was singled out and demonized by Glenn Beck at the height of his popularity. This may be a strategy of attacking soft targets -- mid-level public figures who will never wield political power and do not have a mass-audience.

With that being said, I am cautiously optimistic about the establishment of UniLeaks. I am deeply interested in maintaining transparency and accountability (but also political independence) among universities. I am also hopeful that the proliferation of Wikileaks-style organizations will help to move these whistle-blower systems into the political mainstream, and reduce the risk of retaliation.

Update: I found an article about UniLeaks in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The rhetoric used by the (Australian) administrator of the site seems to be a mixture of academia-idealist (e.g. students are not clients), and government-accountability (e.g. universities get a lot of state money). Also, some articles noted that this is just one of many specialized WikiLeaks clones.

*I say that these emails were stolen rather than leaked, because a leak requires that someone had legitimate access to the documents being leaked. Since no-one should have had access to the email database at the center of Climategate, that data must have been stolen.

Iceland: the friendly rogue state

2011-04-10T17:20:00.000-04:00

Iceland's voters have rejected a plan by their government to cover the losses of Iceland's banks (and their foreign creditors). This is creating tension with the British and Dutch governments, which will probably keep Iceland outside of some of the main international financial systems; as such, Iceland will not participate in the heavily regulated and subsidized regime that defines modern global capitalism. They seem to be rejecting the speculation-driven growth that had created an illusion of great wealth, only to leave them with a shattered economy.

Having told the foreign economic powers to "shove off", Iceland has also freed themselves of any need to appease them in its other activities. Perhaps the next conflict will come over the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a set of laws that will help journalists and dissidents to criticize the powerful with less fear of retribution. Before long, the champions of corporate capitalism may start pointing to Iceland as a "rogue state" that refuses to play by the rules. If that should be the case, we need to remember that their only "crime" would have been to decide to live as free and equal members of a political community.

Privacy and Transparency at the University

2011-04-03T13:28:00.007-04:00

The Mackinac think-tank has filed a broad Freedom of Information Act request for the emails of professors of labor studies at three universities run by the state of Michigan. This appears to be nothing more than political harassment, similar to the harassment of climate researcher Michael Mann by Virginia's Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, following the "Climategate" brouhaha. It is specifically to avoid this type of political pressure that we have the notion of "academic freedom", and that universities jealously guard their independence from the state.

The heavy use of the Internet by university professors has clearly opened them up to new forms of encroachment by political actors. Universities should dedicate some serious thought to how they manage their data, so as to keep private communications private, and properly document and release any information that should be made public.

I propose that, by default, all internal communications of university staff and students should be considered private, and should be handled in a way that maintains confidentiality. To accomplish this, university IT departments should develop encryption standards for individual email accounts and encourage their universal adoption. This is not a terribly difficult technical issue, as strong encryption systems have already been developed and deployed, such as Pretty Good Privacy. One of the big hurdles to adopting PGP encryption is to establish a network of users with trusted encryption keys; universities are in a perfect position to accomplish this.

This idea of secure communication within universities probably scares a number of people -- I've repeatedly heard mumblings about universities being sinister, oppressive forces in society (for example, view the first comment on this blog post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians). You don't have to be an anti-intellectual conspiracy theorist to insist that universities develop a high level of transparency. Universities provide some important public services where the quality of the final product (e.g. research results, student certification) cannot be easily evaluated without knowledge of the process by which it was produced. To maintain public trust, universities should develop a process that provides relevant information to anyone with a legitimate interest.

Documents relating to student evaluation should be available, both to administrators and to each student or their representative. If encrypted emails are among these documents, the student should keep a copy, and perhaps the university could keep a copy of the student's encrypted emails (at least, any from a professor), which could be recovered if the student provides his decryption key. One nice side-effect of widespread encryption would be widespread signing of electronic documents (using the same key), so that if a document is deemed relevant to an accusation, its authenticity can be easily validated.

Finally, we have the raw data that goes into research publications. The issues here are complicated, and many extend beyond individual universities. For instance, data accessibility has been a major source of contention in climate research, but much of the raw data is treated as a commercial asset by non-academic institutions, so there is little that universities can do. Additionally, scientists will always hesitate to release data until they have had a chance to analyze it themselves. Each field of research probably has to develop its own process for making raw data accessible. For instance, biologists have developed a massive database of DNA sequences (Genbank), and all major journals require that any sequence discussed in a publication be submitted to the database. There is currently a push to mandate the publication of the source code for any program used in an analysis. There has even been some frivolous dispute over accessibility to the raw data from traditional microbiological techniques (which is rarely digitized).*

The complete archiving of research data is an unreachable ideal, though it may become more common with the increasing automation of data collection. Every innovation in data collection and data storage will require researchers to develop new systems for archiving data, possibly leading to the loss of older data archived with obsolete systems. University IT departments (and perhaps librarian/archivists) may be able to provide resources that enable researchers to record their data in an accessible form, but ultimately the focus and extent of archiving and distribution will be determined by the value of the data to other researchers, not curious laymen.

*Addition: There are also experiments relating to transparency in the peer-review process.

Books: Inside Wikileaks

2011-04-02T17:10:00.002-04:00

Daniel Domscheit-Berg (DDB), a hacker and member of the Chaos Computer Club, had been keeping an eye on Wikileaks for over a year, nursing a suspicion that it was some sort of front for an intelligence agency. That suspicion fell away in November of 2007, when Wikileaks published the Guantanamo Bay handbooks. Shortly thereafter, DDB invited Julian Assange to speak at the December meeting of the Chaos Computer Club, and began collaborating with Assange on the Wikileaks project, becoming a major coordinator of Wikileaks activities in Europe. By September of 2010, DDB had fallen out with Assange, and left Wikileaks to establish a competing system, called OpenLeaks (I've added the blog to my list).

This book is a description of DDB's experience working with Wikileaks. The main theme of the book is the unstable genius of Assange, which provides the context within which all of the technical, administrative, and political problems of Wikileaks had to be addressed.

DDB obviously has a bone to pick with Assange, and is using this book to publicize his own competing project. Like everything, it should be read with a skeptical eye -- this is simply the story that one man is telling. I actually had trouble finding independent information about DDB. His Wikipedia entry is sparse, and I only found one news article describing the release of this book. (ForeignPolicy.com has posted a video of a recent interview.)

Anyway, this book provides some insight into what drives an entrepreneur like Assange. Wikileaks was a visionary project, and perhaps such a project can only be pushed through by someone with an exaggerated sense of his own importance. Based on DDB's story, not only did Assange essentially dedicate his life to this high-risk project, but he also had the charisma to convince several volunteers and journalists to make substantial contributions to Wikileaks. This type of achievement is not possible for people with a healthy sense of their own limits.

DDB's thesis is that Assange's egocentrism* is destroying the project. DDB presents Assange as insisting of keeping total control over the project, while also being a completely inept administrator. I suspect that many visionary projects encounter this type of problem. The entrepreneur basically has to get the project off of the ground on his own because no-one else understands what he is trying to achieve, or they doubt that it is possible. Once the project has demonstrated success, the visionary entrepreneur will suddenly have collaborators, but he will not necessarily have any ability to manage a team. Even worse for a visionary project like Wikileaks, the entrepreneur cannot assume that his team-mates actually have a clear understanding of his own goals for the project -- after all, there are no examples from which they can derive shared expectations or even terminology. The visionary project has to deal with all of the problems of any start-up, plus the additional burden of having to deal with issues that no-one has dealt with before.

DDB sees three major core objectives for a project like Wikileaks:

Maintain the anonymity of the source (while possibly enabling further communication)
Organize and filter the documents, perhaps removing information about private persons.
Publicize the documents.

These objectives can conflict with each other, especially when resources are scarce. DDB describes these conflicts, how Wikileaks tried to balance these objectives, and how the conflicts led to arguments among volunteers on the project.

Ultimately, DDB decided to start a competing institution, OpenLeaks. I wish him luck in this endeavor. This represents a maturation of the industry that Wikileaks established. Now we know what an institution like Wikileaks can accomplish. Now some people (like DDB) have first-hand experience tackling the problems of these anonymous leak systems. The only question now is how many of these institutions can be supported, and how will the public interact with them. Should a leak-source provide documents to both Wikileaks and OpenLeaks? Will that increase the chance of being identified? Will it assure prompt publication, or would it just waste resources with duplicate effort? How can a new institution gain the trust of potential sources? How does it demonstrate its ability to maintain anonymity?

It appears that the Wikileaks revolution has only just begun, and at some point it may be able to continue even if Wikileaks itself fails.

*my word, not DDB's; not meant as a psychological diagnosis

Panel urges TSA to implement ‘trusted travelers’ program - The Washington Post

2011-03-16T23:37:00.000-04:00

There's recently been a lot of talk about a "trusted travelers" program, where a person could win the privilege of going through an expediated (less intrusive and less bothersome) security check once they have passed a background check and provide biometric identification.

According to The Washington Post:

Even a voluntary trusted-traveler approach would require passengers to provide credit information, tax returns and other personal data to verify that members pose little or no risk.

I'm not sure what I think of this as a stand-alone policy. I'm suspicious of the long term political implications, as frequent fliers (who tend to be richer and have more political influence) are treated differently from the politically faceless masses. I also wonder if this will be used to punish and neutralize people with unpopular political views. For instance, would they "trust" an anarchist who has never advocated violence? Finally, will this be used as an excuse to open an investigation on anyone who applies for Trusted Traveller status? The backfround check could reveal suspicious financial patterns, perhaps related to drug purchases. Alternatively, it could end up being another enforcement tool for the Copyright lords.

In the end, the reality is that many people would need to submit to a background check just so that they can efficiently engage in an activity that is practically essential for the business and social lives of many Americans. Just another brick in the new class barrier.

Politics has failed

2011-03-12T12:12:00.003-05:00

The ongoing budget stalemates, at both the state and federal level, are just the most recent demonstration that American political institutions are in decline. As far as such institutions go, they are still pretty good; however, we can only expect them to become an increasing burden on our society. These institutions are committed to maintaining the status-quo, yet they have made so many implicit promises over the past decades that they cannot realistically fulfill all of them, let alone face new challenges. They will continue to devise band-aid solutions to mounting problems, and continue to prop up other failing institutions (e.g. banks), thereby draining an ever increasing amount of our economic produce.

In contrast, many developing countries (e.g. Brazil, India, China) are ambitiously reforming their core political and economic institutions, which may soon be just as good as America's. While nationalists present this as some sort of threat, we should be thankful for the rise of these other economies that will provide alternatives to our own ailing institutions and pick up the slack for our own decreasing ability to innovate. With our institutions becoming increasingly parasitic, the only opportunity for economic growth will come from technological advances and disruption of our lethargic economic institutions (despite political backing) by way of new competitors. America will continue to contribute to some advances, but not enough on our own to maintain our standard of living in a world with fewer natural resources per person.

This is really our only path forward -- to replace our current bloated institutions with new ones. The hope of reform from within the political system is dead. President Obama was elected on the hope that he could bring this reform, and revive the legitimacy of the state. Two years into his term, there's no sign of success. Obama and his allies dedicated their political capital to major initiatives that changed everything but solved nothing. All they did was reallocate the spoils of power among various special interest groups.

Obama hasn't even done much to increase the transparency, efficiency, or lawfulness of the state. Treaties are still negotiated in secret (e.g. ACTA and such), without public comment, but with plenty of input from corporate bosses. Government departments (e.g. Treasury) still cover up mistakes and corruption. We've actually seen a startling increase in harassment of political opponents under Obama, as Wikileaks was systematically crippled the state-corporation cartel, and Private Bradley Manning has been threatened with exaggerated charges and mistreated prior to his trial.

The end fact is that the state is the enemy of the people. It's officials constitute a class with separate interests and ideology than the public at large. They act to increase the power of their offices and their own wealth. They are co-opted by various wealthy interests (e.g. big corporations) who help them acquire power through elections, exercise power once in office, and reward them with plush jobs after retirement -- as long as these officials manipulate the markets to increase the profits of their benefactors.

There is no real hope of reforming the state. It is evil by nature. We can try to restrain it by political means, but our best hope is to directly break its economic grip on our lives, while we build institutions that actually do serve our needs.

Update: Another good essay on this topic at C4SS: The Last “Political” Essay

The Innocence Project -- puts your money to good use

2011-03-08T21:55:00.003-05:00

The Innocence Project is fund-raising via The Liberty Papers: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is — The Innocence Project

Getting innocent people out of prison? I don’t see how you can argue with that. Note also that The Innocence Project is spending their time and money on the ground, helping actual convicts. This is not an activism organization lobbying your legislators, it exists to actual help individual convicts trying to prove their innocence.

This is surely one of the best uses of my charity/activism budgets.

It helps people directly, unlike donations to political campaigns or regular advocacy groups
It benefits the "least-advantaged members of society", unlike donations to cultural institutions
It increases the total productivity of society be enabling the released prisoner to fulfill his social and economic roles, unlike institutions that only relieve suffering of the targeted individuals
It increases awareness of widespread injustices, unlike charities that help people in the shadows
It improves my own society, unlike charities that intervene in foreign societies

All in all, the Innocence Project may be the best charity around in terms of its potential to produce immediate and lasting benefits to myself and the people I care about, without potentially offending any reasonable people or displacing more sustainable solutions.

My only concern would be that we would come to rely on pro-bono lawyers to defend the accused, rather than modifying our court system to provide sufficient resources for the accused. However, the current indifference of the politicians to the plight of the falsely convicted is not a response to pro-bono defense lawyers. In fact, these advocates for the wrongly convicted may be the only ones who can bring public attention to this problem, thereby changing public attitudes towards punitive laws and placing pressure on politicians to actually think about justice when they write their laws and construct their budgets.

To Israelis and Palestinians

2011-02-22T09:41:00.002-05:00

I don't want your fucking war.

Don't try to sell it to me. Don't tell me how evil or barbaric "the other side" is. Don't try to delegitimize entire nations or deny their right to basic freedoms -- whether individual or communal. When you do that, you only discredit yourself.

If you want me to respect you and your institutions, then don't allow fanatics to gain influence in those institutions. I will not support any institution that implements the agenda of fanatics. I don't care if "the other side" is more fanatical.

Your nationalist squabble is on the other side of the planet. Don't bring it here.

PATRIOT Act extended

2011-02-16T21:26:00.000-05:00

After my earlier post accusing Tea Party types of not being particularly libertarian, there was some talk about them possibly blocking the reauthorization of the PATRIOT act. Well, it has finally gone through, and here's how they voted. Of note, Bachman "aye"; Sen. Rand "nay" (same for Rep. Rand, of course).

Corruption is worse than terrorism

2011-02-16T21:16:00.000-05:00

Chetan Bhagat, writing from India, asserts that corruption is worse than terrorism:

Corruption is worse than terrorism. Terrorists blow up existing infrastructure such as roads, airports and power plants. Corruption prevents such infrastructure from being made in the first place. Terrorists take innocent lives. Corrupt politicians prevent hospitals from being built, which means innocent lives that could be saved are not.

The rest of the letter is worth reading for its perspective on corruption in India, but I wanted to focus on this particular excerpt because it mirrors a dispute that occurs in our own country also. This dispute essentially boils down to "utilitarianism vs. moralism". From the utilitarian perspective, our efforts should be focused on those issues that have the greatest impact on our welfare; in contrast, moralism insists on focusing on the individuals who are most evil. This creates a tension between giving our attention to evils that are mild but ubiquitous (driven by the petty sins that are common in humans) and giving our attention to the evils that are extreme but rare (driven by the exceptional sins of a few individuals). From the utilitarian perspective, terrorism is a relatively small threat, definitely not deserving of the great efforts we have gone to in order to reduce it (not to mention the suffering we have caused). However, from the moralist perspective, there really isn't anything worse than intentionally killing civilians.

I often wonder how to reconcile these two impulses. Maybe the "moralist" focus on evil actually has a utilitarian basis, arising from the great variation in the damage done by people with ill intent. While terrorists only kill a few hundred people a year worldwide, there's a slight chance that they could kill several million next year. It is easy to focus on these worst case scenarios when we talk about terrorism, but I suspect that these are nothing more than rationalizations for the venting of our anger. We don't need evil intentions to create catastrophes -- we have created numerous disasters just by our ubiquitous indifference to the harm that we are doing. The prime example of this is the collateral damage that the USA has caused in our "wars on terrorism", which was easy to predict beforehand.

Ultimately, I am discouraged from finding a justification for moralism because it is increasing clear that the moralists are themselves immoral. Using "collateral damage" as an example: it is immoral to knowingly cause a person's death, even if that was no the desired outcome. These moralists often cloak their crimes in rhetoric of "personal responsibility", but there is no personal responsibility when a person causes actual harm in the hopes of reducing the potential harm that someone else may cause. Each person is responsible for the harm that they cause, and talking about another person's irresponsibility does not provide any excuse for one's own actions.

And so we come full circle, and we ask "how do we achieve the greatest good with the resources that we have?" To do so, we seek good wherever we can find it. We face down evil if that is necessary, but otherwise, we allow the evil ones to wallow in their own filth. As long as we create faster than they can destroy, we will win.

Patents and progress in the method of discovery

2011-02-12T12:34:00.004-05:00

I am often shocked by the rapid advances of scientific techniques, and how major accomplishments from a decade ago can be repeated with a tiny fraction of the effort. Recent advances in biology -- particularly with DNA sequencing and synthesis - may be exceptional, but the basic principle surely holds across all sciences: advances in the methodology of discovery will increase the ease with which future discoveries are made.

Through the recent past, the most general advances are probably related to computing -- the storage, transmission, and analysis of data. These advances are continuing, along with advances in artificial intelligence and robotics. Regardless of whether these advances will create a technological "singularity", they will surely contribute to additional discoveries in all fields of science.

Recently, a "robotic scientist" has even been built. Specifically, this "scientist" is a geneticist, with a very limited toolkit (both in design and implementation of experiments). However, as a proof of concept, it does raise the specter that robotic systems will soon be able to make discoveries that traditionally required a lot of time from highly trained scientists. Perhaps over the course of a decade, we will see 100-fold reductions in the price of discovery, across many fields of research.

If we put this rate of advancement in the context of patent law, we see a startling incongruity. Patents grant a 20 year monopoly to the inventor of a new tool or process, supposedly providing incentive for research and development. This monopoly allows the inventor to capture all of the benefits of the new invention for himself -- which makes like more costly for everyone else, but seems fair as long as we assume that it was necessary to produce the invention in the first place. While this assumption has always had some problems, it seems extremely shaky in light of the current rate of progress.

Great Book: Founding Myths by Ray Raphael

2011-02-12T12:26:00.005-05:00

Having finished Ray Raphael's "Founding Myths", I want to reiterate my recommendation of this book. It was exceptionally enlightening for a book that is so short and accessible. I effectively covers historical aspects of the Revolutionary War that are typically ignored, while also providing an overview of how the study of the Revolution has been changed over time.

Guns: Liberty or Authority?

2011-02-08T19:31:00.001-05:00

When in comes to gun laws, I am typically "pro-choice". There are several reasons that I oppose restrictions on gun ownership:

Simple liberty: in general, a person should be able to do what he wants to do unless it directly interferes with the right of another person to do as they wish. To prohibit gun ownership is to instigate actual violence in the hope of restricting a remote potential for violence.
Economic liberty: Guns play an important economic role for some people, particularly for use in hunting or removing predators from the vicinity of livestock.
Personal security: some people reasonably feel that owning a gun increases their personal security.
Political security: Political authorities have a tendency to transform into tyrannies; in these situations, guns may be useful as a last-resort form of resistance.

While those are my reasons for supporting a right to own guns, much of the "gun lobby" clearly does not share all of these concerns (even if we ignore the people who sell guns for profit). For one thing, much of the gun lobby is specifically pro-gun, rather than being pro-freedom, regardless of their rhetoric. Many of them clearly do not embrace the general libertarian principle of "live and let live", since they often favor drug prohibition and various other "conservative" restrictions on personal liberty. For all their talk about "free markets", they aren't even supporters of general economic liberty, since they are quite comfortable with restrictive zoning, professional license regulations, and state-granted monopolies, among other things. But it's really over the notion of political security that we part ways.

The mainstream gun lobby (e.g. the NRA, Republicans, and socially conservative Democrats) has quite an authoritarian streak. They may talk about the right to resist tyranny, but I often get the feeling that they are most concerned with their own ability to intimidate others into submission. This desire to intimidate and control others is apparent in their militaristic foreign policies, their obsession with severe punishment of criminals (even petty or victimless criminals), and their desire to limit the sexual options of others (e.g. restricting information about pregnancy and STD prevention, disparaging homosexual relationships).

So how is this desire to intimidate others displayed in their conception of political security?

First, despite their assertion of the importance of an armed citizenry, this group has no real critique of government, nor a theory of tyranny. Most of them regularly embrace the expansion of the state's surveillance and detention abilities. The only serious thought of resistance comes from the fringe militia movements, which are anxiously awaiting the initiation of mass arrests or a systematic civilian disarmament program, at which point they will rise up. The other place where people talk of imminent armed resistance is at the Tea Parties. But here, they assert the right to armed resistance even in the absence of any serious assault on our liberties, or any assault on the people's ability to resist tyranny. They speak as though abstract and mild restrictions on liberty are sufficient to warrant armed resistance -- "threats" as limited and fleeting as losing an election, or the implementation of moderate health care reform. Michael Austin documented and summarized how easily some conservatives turn to the rhetoric of rebellion:

[O]ur modern revolutionaries...have tried to co-opt the rhetoric of the Founding Fathers without accepting any of the responsibility that they pledged their lives to, who have repeatedly called the President of the United States a tyrant and a dictator, who have insisted (without a shred of evidence) that he is not a citizen of the United States, and who have equated government spending with slavery and health-care reform with satanic evil. People within this faction have accused entire congressional majorities of trying to destroy America, and they have called for revolution by any means necessary.

Here we see a startling partisan double standard -- a strong and active state is a good thing as long as their people are in control, but as soon as this group finds themselves in the minority and the state does anything that they dislike, armed resistance is appropriate. This is not a freedom movement: when one faction within society clings to power, that is tyranny.

It isn't only in their rhetoric that pro-gun conservatives show their authoritarian tendencies. If you look at the National Rifle Association's "law enforcement training staff", you'll see a man who had to resign from the Fort Lauderdale police after being video-taped abusing his authority. This obviously does not bother the NRA. As with many gun loving conservatives, they worship the police and military, and almost any excess on the part of the government's gunmen can be excused as either being necessary to keep the riffraff in line, or an unfortunate but unavoidable mistake resulting from the demands of the job. This is not the attitude of anyone who has seriously contemplated resistance to tyranny.

Their authoritarian streak is also apparent in how they respond to constitutional crises in foreign countries. At the only Tea Party rally that I observed, there was outspoken support for the coup in Honduras. These people who claimed to represent "regular Americans" were obsessing over an issue that most Americans could not have cared less about. While the coup was arguably a win for democracy, it was clear that their concern was with the specter of socialism, and fears that President Obama would support the ousted socialist President Zelaya.

While Zelaya may have been leading Hondoras towards a dictatorship (albeit a popular one), the current crisis in Egypt has presented a clear alternative between a brutal tyrant and a popular uprising. Yet in this case, popular "anti-government" conservatives, such as Glenn Beck, have sided with the tyrant. They have chosen fear-based "stability" over the uncertainty of a democratic election, where socialists or Islamists could win power. This decision has clearly demonstrated that these conservatives fear freedom more than they fear tyranny. In such a context, the apparent purpose of the "right to bear arms" is to keep the rabble down.

Look to the rhetorical foundation for this "right to armed rebellion"--the Revolutionary War--and the "imperative to suppress slave rebellions" will be clearly seen as an equal basis for this concern with guns. As described in Founding Myths, one of the main fears of the rebellious colonists, particularly in Virginia and the southern states, arose from the risk of "domestic insurrection", i.e. slave revolts. In essence, if the British crown had disarmed the Southern colonists, then the colonists would have had this sword dangling over their heads, restrained only by the will of the British military. Much of today's pro-gun rhetoric evokes the same fears of a rampaging underclass.

Given the evidence above, there is good reason to suspect that their concern with gun ownership is driven by a desire to exclude poor people from political power. My final evidence for this takes us back to the gun lobby's dismissal of any form of direct resistance other than armed rebellion -- they don't talk of non-violent mass actions such as boycotts, strikes, or the less-violent disruption of commerce; instead, the conservative gun advocates go straight for bodily violence. This suggests that they do not expect to have the numbers needed to effectively implement the less-violent strategies. Their power depends on their control of property, including weapons -- not their numbers.

Having seen the authoritarian nature of the conservative (i.e. mainstream) pro-gun lobby in the USA, what is a libertarian to do? Participation in mainstream, single-issue advocacy groups is often presented as a strategy to achieve the limited goals of that group and to publicize libertarian ideas. However, if these mainstream groups are providing support to anti-libertarian activists and politicians, then any achievements on that single issue may be outweighed by regression on other issues. To anyone with a libertarian perspective on government, protection of the right to own guns would have to be a lower priority than resistance to military adventurism and the expansion of a police state.

Is there any way to protect the right to own guns without undermining more fundamental rights? Might there even be some synergy to be had? An extreme strategy would be to subsume all pro-gun activities inside of the libertarian movement -- essentially creating a "gun rights committee of the Libertarian Party". What this gains in purity, it loses in popularity (even if "Libertarian Party" is understood to be the decentralized, informal libertarian movement). The alternative is to try to establish non-political organizations that appeal to gun owners. Competing with the NRA may be difficult, but there may be other constituencies of gun owners who are not well served by the NRA -- the Pink Pistols may be a prototype for such a group, as may others who are turned off by the NRA's authoritarian and Republican tendencies.

In the end, I won't personally do much about this because I am not a gun owner, and I don't think that they are a terribly important issue. However, every time that I give a passive defense of the right to bear arms (e.g. "live and let live") or point out the numerous weaknesses in the arguments to ban guns, I'm going to get branded as one of those people (described above). While the actual prohibition of guns would not be a crippling blow to liberty, this issue is one of the main battlegrounds against the authoritarian mindset. Any time someone tells me that we have to establish a structure of systematic and widespread violence against non-violent people (e.g. confiscating property and arresting people) in order to prevent sporadic and relatively rare violence by others, I'm going to have to respond.

Update: Shortly after I wrote the above post, news came in that the PATRIOT act re-authorization had a mild setback in the House, as several Republicans defected from the party leadership and voted against re-authorization. Rumor was that this had something to do with the Tea Party, strengthening their claim to being a libertarian movement. Upon further consideration, there seems to be no difference between the Tea Party and the Republican Party in general, both groups overwhelmingly supporting the re-authorization.

I also came across a nice example of a conservative trembling at the thought of Democracy, because most people just can't be trusted.

Erosion of the rule of law

2011-02-05T21:50:00.000-05:00

From Time Magazine:

Opinion: Tea Party's Rand Paul Correct, Laser-Pointer Law Absurd - TIME

It takes only about five seconds of thought to see that Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's amendment to impose federal penalties — up to a five-year prison sentence — for [aiming a laser pointer at a plane] would be completely useless. How exactly would it be enforced?

That is a VERY important question... how is the law enforced? One way to enforce a law is to identify situations where it has been broken, and then catch the perpetrator. The other way to enforce the law is to choose a person to prosecute, and them watch him until he commits a crime. In a country where the vast majority of crimes are never prosecuted, and the "criminals" often don't know that they are breaking the law, it won't be to hard to follow the later strategy.

Those reasonable anarchists

2011-02-05T09:13:00.002-05:00

It's no secret that I find much value in anarchist writings; particularly in anarchist criticisms of statist ideology and institutions. When I see the clear thinking of such essays, I sometimes wonder how anarchists got the reputation for being unreasonable. Of course, there are less "rational" or "realistic" aspects of anarchism. For instance, anarchists put a lot of effort into dreaming up institutions that will replace the state, and the problems of establishing these institutions may seem insurmountable, making the anarchists into a bunch of dreamers. At the extreme, there are frequent calls of alarm and the repetition of conspiracy theories (aside from those "conspiracies" that have been well documented, even if ignored by most people).

Anyway, even the most extreme and alarmist anarchists are no more wild-eyed than plenty of "respectable" voices in mainstream political debate. Over the past few days, I checked in on the local talk-radio station, and got an earful of conspiracy theory and alarmism from nationally syndicated conservative stars -- Glenn Beck and Michael Savage.

If this type of stuff is respectable these days, then there is no good reason that anarchism shouldn't be mainstream.

Easy but important reading: "Founding Myths" by Ray Raphael

2011-01-30T15:23:00.006-05:00

Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past by Ray Raphael.

Who was Sam Adams? According to Ray Raphael, "Sam" Adams is only a myth, loosely based on a man named Samuel Adams who was one of many activists involved in organizing resistance to British rule in Boston. Raphael traces the development of this myth, including the origins of the name "Sam", and how Adams came to be credited with masterminding the resistance to British rule. Throughout, he evaluates the ideological basis of the myth, and how it contrasts with the reality of Massachusetts politics at the time.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in American history, the American Revolution, or political revolutions in general. The book is interesting for a couple of reasons, yet still an easier read than most history books. Raphael revisits several familiar stories from the American Revolution, but uniquely emphasizes the role of "regular people", which is often overlooked in mainstream histories that focus on the men who held high offices in the government. Aside from providing a different perspective on the Revolution, Raphael uses these stories as case studies to illustrate how history is written -- or perhaps, how myths are made. For each of these stories, Raphael starts off by describing the oft-repeated myth, and then describing how it is wrong, why he believes that it is wrong, and how other historians got it wrong in the first place.

While the scholarship is impressive, this is not a dry academic work; as the subtitle makes clear, Raphael has an ideological agenda. He clearly states that he is interested in emphasizing the hyper-democracy of the revolutionary era, and tearing down the elitist stories concocted by later writers. While I happen to sympathize with his ideological aims, I often feel that his ideological assertions are heavy handed and that he is being unfair to the people that he disagrees with. While this could get irritating, I don't think that it detracts from the serious scholarship.

Despite being a serious book, it is still easy to read. In part this is due to Raphael's writing style, but moreso to the structure of the book. Each chapter discusses a different "myth", so it is easy to put it down for a week, and then resume with the next chapter. Also, most Americans are familiar with the basic stories, and should not have any trouble remembering the context for the issues being discussed.

My only qualification to recommending this book is that this is not an introduction to American history or the Revolutionary war. It assumes that the reader is familiar with the basic geography and politics of the Revolutionary era.

"Anarchy" in Cairo

2011-01-30T09:14:00.005-05:00

Reports from Cairo indicate that state authority has collapsed, except for a military presence at a few strategic locations (reports NPR). The police have fled, prisons have emptied, and shops have been looted. Citizens are forming neighborhood defense squads. Apparently, this prevents people from protesting, but it seems that the protests have served their purpose (eliminating the Mubarak government) and the revolution has entered into a second stage.

Sunday is a business day in Egypt, but shops are largely closed in Cairo. The NPR reporter suggested that this is mainly due to security concerns. However, another thought occurred to me: do they have a currency anymore? I'd like to know what has happened to the Egyptian currency. A government-issued currency typically becomes worthless when that government is on the verge of collapse. However, I've seen little indication that that the Egyptian protesters are pushing for the type of revolution that would nullify the currency -- many of them seem to simply want Mubarak to leave.

So this period of "anarchy" is unlikely to last long, since the Egyptian people probably are not anarchists. As with many revolutions, this one may quickly degenerate into a civil war among various statist factions, each seeking to dominate the entire society.

Afterthoughts:

Rising food prices (i.e. inflation of a sort) may have been the trigger for these protests.
As of Friday, the Egyptian pound was falling on international exchanges, as were other currencies in the Middle East. Likewise, the credit rating of the Egyptian state had been downgraded. Egyptian banks are closed due to the protests (by government order, I believe).
Fun Facts from Wikipedia: this all started on "National Police Day".

Update:

John Robb at Global Guerrillas reports rumors of police being involved in the looting, and speculates about the use of looting as a counter-insurgency strategy. Tip to Reason.

Networked justice

2011-01-26T21:03:00.003-05:00

In the 18th century, Thomas Paine argued that the structure of an agrarian society demanded a particular notion of justice relating to the use of land -- what he called "Agrarian Justice". His basic idea was that for us to live as free persons, we must have a set of rights that allows us to survive as a full participant in the economic system of our society. I'm thinking that it is time for us to reconsider our list of basic rights, due to our increasing reliance on networked computer systems. Perhaps this would be called "networked justice".

The basic problem is that most Americans rely on markets for almost everything -- even our most basic and immediate needs. We don't grow our own food, or even stock more than we would eat in a week; instead, we make regular trips to the grocery store. But we don't even make direct payments to the grocer anymore; instead, we rely on a bank to debit our account and credit the grocer's account. This reliance on intermediaries for all of our commercial transactions creates a serious danger arising from the risk of being cut off. As our institutions become increasingly dispersed, and we exchange money with people all over the planet, we become increasingly reliant on other people's computer networks, such as those owned by banks.

As we have seen with the recent Wikileaks drama, the risk of being cut off is real. Accounts can be shut down on the flimsiest pretense, even without formal criminal charges. This type of attack on a person would have been impossible a few decades ago, since it is essentially equivalent to convincing everyone in a community to refuse to sell anything to a person. In today's cashless society, this boycott can be enforced with the cooperation of only a handful of companies.

It isn't only limited to bank accounts. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has repeatedly warned, we are even more vulnerable to similar attacks on our ability to communicate. We increasingly rely on internet service providers or hosting services to communicate with our far-flung associates, yet all of this can be cut off on the basis of nothing more than suspicion of copyright infringement.

I can see three ways out of this. None of them is totally satisfying, so all three probably deserve some attention. One option is legal reform, which would protect service providers from pressure to cut off services from clients in the absence of a criminal conviction, or at least an indictment. The second is to establish alternative institutions, where services are provided by a distributed network of our peers. The goal here is to create electronic cash-like systems for commerce, and word-of-mouth like systems for communication. Many dedicated activists are working to build systems that provide basic social services on a mutual-aid model, but there remain substantial technical and organizational hurdles, not to mention the fact that they are competing with the state-subsidized establishment. The last option is live lifestyles that are less sensitive to the disruption of services. This can only take us so far before the economic costs become too large, but Americans are complacently disinterested in economic self-sufficiency. That is, we are disinterested until we lose our jobs or are struck by a natural disaster which cuts off services -- by which point it is too late.

Investment law, Facebook, and Goldman Sachs

2011-01-19T19:26:00.004-05:00

What would you think of a government that:

Reserved certain investment opportunities for a select class of citizens, and
Prohibited the investment banks involved in the deals from talking to newspapers about such deals?

Would it be any worse if these special investment opportunities were explicitly restricted to wealthy citizens? Would you wonder why the rich get richer while the middle class fades away? Is the restriction on talking to reporters a violation of press freedom, and is it meant to keep the general populace ignorant of these special privileges granted to an elite few?

Well, as everyone is finally learning, this is exactly the situation in the USA. The recent buzz about the Goldman-Sachs/Facebook deal, and its retraction, has put this law on the front page of newspapers across the countries. Of course, the oddity of this situation will be explained away with paternalistic comments about protecting "average investors" from risky investments. Who knows what's really going through the heads of the people who established and enforce this law... I don't have the time to figure it out. But it is odd.

Are you on the inside or the outside?

2010-12-20T23:21:00.003-05:00

Many commentators have been describing the new forms of segregation in American society -- where people are either members of an "in" group with special privileges, or you aren't. Much of the talk has focused on the segregation of workers into "protected" jobs from which they cannot be fired, and the rest who cannot get steady employment, in large part as a side effect of the protection system.

However, we are also seeing increasing segregation of Americans into the group with security clearance, who have access to massive government databases, and the rest of us who are forbidden to access this information. This segregation has troubling similarities to the system of the Chinese Communist Party, which maintains separate media systems for privileged insiders and the ignorant masses.

The Washington Post has taken the lead in exposing the scale of "Top Secret America", first by revealing that hundreds of thousands of Americans have this clearance, indicating that such clearance is increasingly a requirement for a decent job (like Party membership in Communist countries). Now the Post has described a massive database of "suspicious" Americans, which is available to pretty much every law enforcement agent. So next time a cop stops you for some trivial reason, he can check to see if you've ever done anything suspicious, and adjust his behavior accordingly. This is a good reason to use a pseudonym on the Internet.

A summary is here: Monitoring America: How the U.S. Sees You - CBS News

The best quote:

"The old view that 'if we fight the terrorists abroad, we won't have to fight them here' is just that - the old view," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told police and firefighters recently.

Apparently the mainstream media is finally waking up to what commentators like Kevin Carson have been describing for years:

Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.

Anyway, this reminds us that the main resistance to this trend is being attacked by "the authorities" as we speak, and these authorities are called out by John Wilkins in Statism and Wikileaks.

the real lesson is the extent to which the professional political classes of the west are statists. They have no concern for their citizenry. They have no concern for their economies or even for the corporations or big labor organisations they nominally represent. They only care that they are in power, or might get into power, and so the state is what they care about, so they can have that power.

The last thing on my mind today is the fact that the Dream Act failed to pass. It sounded pretty innocuous to me, but there are enough authoritarian nationalists in Congress that even this law couldn't pass. Not a big surprise, but the likely hypocrisy of these nationalists was conveniently illuminated by the contrast against a recent essay describing the pseudo-liberal argument against affirmative action that conservatives trot out so often -- "since we're all equal, all discrimination is wrong". Of course, this ignores the central role of group identity in our society. Sometimes this group identity is implicit (e.g. cultural affinity), sometimes it is explicit (e.g. citizenship, family), but either way it is very important. If a person can't recognize that and consider how this factors into our decisions, then they are pretty naive. If they continue to advocate for group identity in one situation, even as they dismiss its complexities in another, then they are just hypocrites. I don't know what this particular author believes about nationality and migration, but if he's like most conservatives who use terms like "equality" or "individualism", then he's just an opportunist who will use whatever argument he can to secure privileges for himself and his favored identity group.

My respectability vs. their legitimacy

2010-12-19T21:31:00.001-05:00

Over the past few years, I've been conversing with a bunch of anarchists, and have come to accept their basic arguments. Anarchists have a bad reputation, so I've been using a pseudonym for these online conversations. In fact, I now use the name Ricketson (from Benjamin Ricketson Tucker) in all my online political discussions, though this is simply because I prefer that a Google search of my real name points to my professional writings and not my political opinions.

The core doctrine of anarchism is that all coercive power, particularly the state, is illegitimate and should be resisted. As such, it can be difficult to support anarchist causes while maintaining respectability in mainstream society, where state power is generally taken for granted and is often considered an essential part of a good society. On top of that social pressure, there is also the fact that anarchists position themselves directly at odds with an institution that regularly deprives people of property, liberty, and life; so associating with anarchists brings some physical risks, and it is very important for anarchists to know what actions will provoke the state to action and stay within those bounds.

Fortunately, the USA and its citizens are generally tolerant of abstract political opinions, so there is a lot of room for advocacy of anarchic social reforms. However, anarchists necessarily push the limits of that tolerance in their attacks on the legitimacy of the state and its laws. If laws of the state are illegitimate, then interfering with the enforcement of those laws is implicitly legitimate, as long as the circumstances are appropriate.

However, not all law-breaking is the same. Anarchist "direct action" can come in the form of scofflawry*, civil disobedience, and outright resistance against the enforcers of the law. Anarchists are safe as long as their opposition to the law is kept abstract (even the American Declaration of Independence advocates the right to resist the state), but they could get in hot water if they were to support particular acts of resistance. Even if they stay within the formal limits of the law, they would risk attracting the attention of law enforcement agencies and facing extra-legal harassment from these powerful groups. I've got a family to support, and don't want to go there.

The recent brouhaha surrounding Wikileaks illustrates these dynamics. For details, go to Wikileaks Watch at the Ruling Class Blog, but there are two important points relevant to the topic of this essay: first, a person who says "the wrong thing" can be targeted for extra-legal harassment by the USA; second, reciprocal harassment of the state and its allies will be taken very seriously by the state.

The harassment of Wikileaks is a prime example of extra-legal (i.e. no due process) harassment in response to "saying the wrong thing". Following their publication of a whole bunch of slightly confidential documents, Wikileaks' website suffered a denial-of-service attack, law enforcement agencies effectively froze several accounts associated with Wikileaks, and several high profile politicians called for extra-legal action to be taken against Wikileaks.

In response to this harassment, several of the instigators and collaborators have been themselves targeted for similar harassment, such as denial-of-service attacks on their websites. This has sparked debate among anarchists over whether this counter-harassment is justified. Some of the rhetoric has made me question whether I can openly associate with these people (for instance, by making a donation) and maintain my mainstream respectability (i.e. avoid unwanted attention from powerful institutions).

It's one thing to make abstract arguments for breaking the law; it's another to provide moral support for people who are breaking a specific law as we speak. The difference is even greater when the law-breakers are physically interfering with another person's activities (an "attack", in the broadest sense of the word).

Finally, the justification of the law-breaking is important. The DoS attacks by "Anonymous" are often portrayed as Civil Disobedience; such cases are treated as limited threats by the established powers, but they can still be met with substantial retaliation. However, if the attacks are viewed as resistance (i.e. an attempt to directly block the exercise of power) , the full power of the state will be brought against the lawbreakers and their supporters. In this case, Anonymous has really escalated the seriousness of the Wikileaks situation. Compare the "Civil Disobedience - Resistance" of Anonymous with the "Scofflawry - Civil Disobedience" of Wikileaks. It isn't even clear that Wikileaks did anything illegal, but there is no doubt that the acts of Anonymous are illegal. Furthermore, Anonymous has a clear victim. This type of escalation had better be necessary, or else I am going to stay a mile away.

Through my associations with anarchists, I have been comforted by those who swear off confrontation, insisting that their goal is to expose the illegitimacy of the state and start building the institutions that will replace the state. Not only do I believe that they make an important point about what is the most productive strategy for improving society, but I feel comfortable that associating with such people will not bring me to the attention of the police.

I hope this doesn't sound like I'm whining about how hard it is for me to contribute to "the cause"; I did not write this to make excuses for myself or belittle those who have shouldered the responsibility for developing and communicating anarchist ideas. I just want to make a small point about the tactics of a political movement -- if we want to gain mainstream influence, then mainstream people need to feel comfortable associating with us.

*I believe that I have coined the term "scofflawry". Is there a better term for the habit of evading law enforcement? Scofflawry is a bit awkward, but is conveniently parallel to outlawry.

Good riddence: Emilio Massera obit in Economist

2010-12-04T23:17:00.001-05:00

The Economist magazine has an obituary for Emilio Massera. I'd never heard of him before, but apparently, he was the admiral of the "dirty war" during Argentinia's military dictatorship. We can thank him for converting "disappeared" to a transitive verb. This obituary brings up one question: what was the role of the Vatican (bank) in this immense crime?

Emilio Massera | The Economist

Update: The link to the Vatican Bank was through a secret society, "Propaganda Due".

WikiLeaks changes domain name

2010-12-04T11:51:00.000-05:00

In the face of a distributed denial of service attack, WikiLeaks has been forced to change its domain name.

It can also be accessed directly by IP address: http://213.251.145.96/

On "The Statist Media"

2010-11-19T15:46:00.001-05:00

Radley Balko proposes that the "legacy media" (i.e. mainstream media) is authoritarian, not liberal (due to their treatment of the TSA body scanner policy). I don't have much to say on this, except that these institutions cannot be pigeon-holed into any preconceived ideological categories. They have their own interests and their own culture, and this article provides some insight into that culture: The Statist Media | The Agitator

Update: The EFF provides instructions for filing complaints against the TSA.

Our own Cultural Revolution?

2010-11-17T21:54:00.006-05:00

As an academic with some Chinese colleagues, I've heard the horror stories of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ™. I've never even considered whether it could happen in America, but a couple of essays from conservative academics have pushed the possibility into my mind.

First, the stage is set by the class/culture war masterpiece from Angelo Cordevilla, "America's Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution", presenting the "ruling class" as culturally disconnected from the rest of the country (oddly called "the country class", even though for the past century or so the majority of Americans have lived in cities). As is common in these criticisms of the liberal elite, academics take much of the blame for ignoring the culture of the common man, who just isn't going to take it anymore. The second reading, Whoring it in Higher Education from Jason Peters, bemoans the loss of academic integrity in the face of financial incentives. He seems to be saying that everyone involved in higher education, from the students to the professors, has abandoned the nobility of learning in favor of social status and prosperity.

The following excerpt is what reminded me of the Cultural Revolution:

I’d like to see more people with soft hands working harder, professors and students alike. I would allow no one on a liberal arts college campus to eat in the cafeteria who has not participated that week in serious food production.
And I would make more stringent demands on faculty members who enjoy arguing in the faculty dining room the merits of various single-malt scotches. Let them argue, but let them do some real work first. Let them, for example, castrate a ram for every gyro they eat.

Of course, Professor Peters is not suggesting that this solution be forced upon schools from the outside, let alone that children be separated from their parents or that unrepentant ivory tower snobs be executed. I see no reason the believe that anything like the Cultural Revolution is likely, but I wonder if there might be the slightest seed of it somewhere in contemporary political movements like the Tea Party. America is different from China of the 1960's both in the large portion of population that may qualify as "elite" (e.g. college educated) and the mobility among classes. However, if the economy continues as it has, with lawyers, bankers, and computer programmers getting additional raises even as the non-college crowd struggles to make ends meet...then maybe, just maybe.

Where's the respect?

2010-11-11T22:02:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I wrote that the rhetoric and political agenda of conservative Christianity can easily be interpreted as disrespectful towards those of us who don't share their religious views and policy preferences (Don't say "abortion is murder"). This rhetoric is often moralistic -- suggesting that anyone who disagrees is fundamentally degenerate, rather than simply being mistaken about one rather small part of life. The political agenda is often punitive -- insisting that certain behaviors are obligatory or prohibited, rather than simply being encouraged or discouraged.

While I believe that conservative Christians are the main source of this disrespect in public discourse, I figure that I should try to figure out where they may feel disrespected by the people whom they disagree with. Unfortunately, many public figures make constant spurious claims that Christians are the victims of frequent disrespect, yet the examples that they cite (e.g. "The War on Christmas") are typically nothing more than non-Christians challenging the cultural dominance of Christianity.

Here are the issues where I expect that conservative Christians (really, social conservatives more generally) may feel that their sense of morality is being disparaged, or that they are being prohibited from engaging in important aspects of their desired lifestyle.

Animal rights: There's nothing worse than being called a murderer. Animal rights activists can get pretty extreme in their rhetoric. Luckily, the absolutists have no real political or social influence. While conservatives may call these people "leftists", in fact they are just as likely to target their fellow "leftists" as anyone else. In fact, one of their favorite targets is another stereotypical "leftist" group -- biologists engaged in animal research. Another favorite target of animal rightists is the hedonistic, fur-clad cosmopolitan elite who the cultural conservatives often rail against. Regular Americans eating cheeseburgers almost never receive any attention from these people. The small-town family farm of conservative ideal is typically viewed as being a pretty humane system for producing meat. Vegetarians are definitely more common on "the left" than "the right", but they are typically pretty tolerant of us carnivores, and there isn't any reason that a Christian must eat meat (is there?). The only real conflict between traditionalists and vegetarians arises over hunting, but vegetarians will typically cede the issue if the hunters make the case that it is an important part of non-elite culture and livelihood (but British fox hunting doesn't get a pass).
Gun prohibition: As with hunting, some extremists will attribute base motives to people who want to own guns, such as bloodlust or a desire to dominate others (frankly, many Republicans have done a lot to connect these ideas in public perception). However, most calls for restricting gun ownership are framed as utilitarian anti-crime measures. As with meat-eating, gun ownership doesn't have anything to do with Christianity, though guns do play a role in some traditional lifestyles. The prospect of broad gun prohibition is politically plausible, but remote. If conservatives are concerned about losing their guns, that risk is nothing compared to the prohibitions that they are imposing on others.
Multiculturalism/Libertinism: Conservatives are often depicted as "hateful" or "dictatorial" for holding others to certain standards. This is often a reasonable response to attempts by conservatives to impose their cultural preferences on others. However, this hostile response is not justified if the conservative is trying to persuade others to change their lifestyle in the absence of coercion. But unless we have a culturally libertarian state (including unlimited immigration), non-conservatives will be justifiably suspicious that any advocacy for cultural uniformity is just a prelude to violence.
Abortion: Opposition to abortion is often ascribed to an attitude that women are subordinate to men. This accusation is probably made to quickly in many cases, but I cannot say that it is unprovoked; if you want to dictate major life decisions to women, be prepared to be called "sexist". While not all opponents of abortion are sexist, there is good evidence than a good portion of them are, and America traditionally was sexist, so a traditionalist should not be too shocked by this accusation.

To sum it up, these non-traditionalist moralists typically have little influence and very rarely pass legislation that severely interferes with the continuation of traditions. The only issue where I think that traditionalists could reasonably feel disrespected by mainstream attitudes is with regards to gun ownership, and even there they face rather weak opposition.

Aside from partisan posturing and attacks on politicians, most disrespect in public discourse originates from conservatives.

Let's talk, but don't say "abortion is murder"

2010-11-10T17:36:00.000-05:00

Todd Hartch, has written an interesting essay about what drove him to get involved in the gay marriage debate at his workplace. Many of us try to avoid the topics of politics and religion at our workplaces, but things are a little different for Mr. Hartch since he's a (tenured) professor of history at a public university. He's also a socially conservative Christian, and like many conservatives, feels that he's been pressured to keep his mouth shut by the fabled "campus political correctness".

I am probably the ideological opposite of Prof. Hartch, but I liked a lot of what he said in his essay, and my first impulse is to endorse his call for his political/ideological allies to speak up. Below are some of the key points of his essay, with my thoughts interjected:

Campus Political Correctness and the Costs of Free Speech

For at least two generations, Catholics, Orthodox, Evangelicals, and other religious conservatives have sought to “get along” with the prevailing American campus culture of relativism and moral license. We have dedicated ourselves to academic excellence, to fair and balanced teaching, and to keeping a low profile. We have kept quiet in department meetings, in the faculty senate, and on university committees. We have bitten our tongues when colleagues disparaged our religion, our morality, and our most cherished beliefs. We have convinced our colleagues that religious conservatives can be surprisingly thoughtful and urbane.

The above description matches my own impression of the situation in academia (at least in the sciences). I have a number of conservative religious colleagues who allow their religious identity to be known, but don't make a fuss when they disagree with others. Political comments are often shared among like-minded colleagues, though a few faculty members will make leftist/anti-religious comments to broader audiences and sometimes earn a rebuke for unprofessional behavior.

Overall, most members of the department follow the same strategy as Hartch described. It's just good manners. There is good reason to avoid this sort of confrontation with one's colleagues. At best, it distracts from work, and it may even make it impossible for colleagues to work together.

In the end, what have such actions won for us? ...Our jobs are secure and our careers give every sign of continuing success.

We have watched, though, as our campuses veered farther and farther off course. Sexual license is now taken for granted. Mentions of abortion, homosexuality, and even bestiality [I think Hartch didn't get the joke -R] hardly merit a second glance in our campus papers. Many students have never heard a rational conservative argument about any moral issue.

I agree that rational conservative voices are hard to find. At least, it's hard to find any who can speak meaningfully about social issues to a person who doesn't share their own religious and cultural identity (Hartch is only the second such writer that I've encountered).

This is something that conservatives should keep in mind if they want to engage in thoughtful discussions with others. Hartch was bothered by derisive comments targeted at his culture, but I think that conservatives most often are the ones dishing out derisive comments. Liberals may make snide comments about conservatives in their private conversations, but conservatives regularly announce to the world that liberals are degenerates who are destroying everything good in our society. Off the top of my head, I recall a Republican candidate for Congress who attacked his Democratic opponent for supporting "San Francisco values", and the Pope recently blamed atheists for Nazism. These are mainstream conservative Christians. To further illustrate the point, conservatives regularly use moral reasoning to justify criminal punishment of many actions that others engage in (e.g. drug use).

A thoughtful conservative will have to keep this in mind when he tries to hold a conversation with others: mainstream conservatism regularly denigrates the morality of others and even threatens others with physical punishment. The epitome is probably the rhetoric around abortion. Mainstream conservatives regularly equate abortion with murder and the holocaust. If you tell your colleague that "abortion is murder", think about what you are saying. This person may have had an abortion, or may know someone who had an abortion. In that situation, you would be calling that person or their friend a murderer. That's quite a loaded word, and even if you don't mean to say that abortion should be punished by imprisonment or execution, it isn't hard for another person to make that inference (at least at an emotional level).

Many conservative positions can be viewed as threatening, and must be thoughtfully worded if they are not going to start a fight. I've seen what happens when the words "abortion is murder" are uttered to the wrong person. So, if you want to have a thoughtful conversation, don't say "abortion is murder"; you may also want to be clear to distance yourself from anyone who does make those statements in public.

Perhaps all this might be justified if students were somehow benefitting from this atmosphere of license and relativism. The opposite is the case. Most students, even at the best universities, have no passion, no love of learning. Focused on careers, at best, or, more often, on nothing at all, they approach texts that have changed the world as if they were being forced to read the dictionary. Faced with the results of painstaking research, they yawn and check their phones. They do less homework than American students have ever done before because professors have relaxed their requirements. The result is that, amazingly enough, students are bored in their modern Sodom.

What is to be done?

...

It’s time to speak up. It is time to make a public case for truth, for human dignity, for academic standards, and for the joy of learning. I guarantee that students will not be bored when they see us defending the truth. (I should point out that speaking up is not a synonym for being rude.)

I agree that students typically don't appreciate the opportunities that they have at a university, and faculty have a responsibility to engage them in any way possible. If that means discussing politics and morality, then so be it. If there is anyplace where Americans can have a respectful political discussion, it is on campus.

We need to go into this process knowing that the risks are real....we risk our jobs. There’s not much that can be said to minimize this threat, but I can propose that if universities make it a common practice to fire their vocally conservative professors, it will publicize our arguments more than anything we could do on our own.

Interestingly, most calls to fire politicized professors (e.g. Ward Churchill) come from conservatives. David Horowitz has made it his mission to discourage professors from discussing political, moral, or religious issues with their students.

However, let's assume that universities manage to protect the free speech rights of everyone. Professors still must not appear to be prostletyzing to their students. Hartch has provided examples of how professors can participate in these discussions outside of the classroom, but even there the power relationship between students and professors still holds. A professor will have to be impeccably respectful of others in order to avoid intimidating students into silence on this issue. I think this will be difficult if a professor such as Hartch effectively says "my sexual impulses are healthy, while yours are worthless if not destructive".

Finally...

[W]e need to dialogue with those most opposed to our ideas. Some professors and students will respond to our more visible presence on campus with anger and ridicule, but some will want to understand us. With this latter group we must make every effort to communicate clearly and to forge relationships of trust and respect.

Well, good luck with all this. Such discussions should have intellectual value, and they may even overcome some of the divisiveness of mainstream political discourse. Finally, a tradition of open discussion of issues outside of one's own specialty may allow truly fringe opinions to be expressed openly. Maybe the radicals will be a bit more visible. Maybe recent immigrants will become stronger advocates for their traditional religions. There is also the chance that the anti-religious expressions that Hartch wants to counter will become much more frequent and ubiquitous as more people feel comfortable discussing these issues.

As you may have noticed, my own opinions are well outside of the mainstream (largely opposite to Hartch's). As things stand, I avoid talking about a lot of my political and moral opinions. When I do discuss these issues, I take care to avoid direct contradiction of mainstream values (though I will openly question the value of voting). I was more open about my fringe opinions during my first couple of years in college, but as I entered a more professional environment, I kept my mouth shut more and more.

Whatever happens, part of the purpose of the university is to hash out these issues and clearly expose the purely idiotic arguments that are so common in public discourse.

For further thought: International travel is part of the job description for many academics. Would open discussion of sensitive issues interfere with their ability to travel, particularly to more restrictive countries? Even in the USA, one academic was denied entrance due to what he had said about drug use, and another may have been denied entrance dues to his political opinions (since visa's can be denied without any evidence, we can't really know).

Fraud everywhere

2010-11-03T17:50:00.002-04:00

From News of the Weird:

A lawyer in Xian, China, filed a lawsuit in September against a movie house and film distributor for wasting her time -- because she was exposed to 20 minutes of advertisements that began at the posted time for the actual movie to begin. Ms. Chen Xiaomei is requesting a refund (equivalent of about $5.20) plus damages of an equal amount, plus the equivalent of about 15 cents for "emotional" damages -- plus an apology. [The Guardian (London), 9-8-10]

I hope she wins. In fact, I hope that she comes to America leads a billion-dollar class-action fraud lawsuit against the movie theaters and movie studios. If the movie studios will sue their audience for illegally distributing copyrighted material, then we should sue them for this sort of systematic nickel-and-dime fraud that regularly emanates from the marketing departments of corporate America.

Fair is fair, but I'm willing to accept a truce if they are.

The Democrats deserve to lose.

2010-10-31T13:31:00.002-04:00

I made the mistake of watching TV this weekend, and was treated to the massive flood of campaign advertisements (mostly negative). One in particular stood out as especially disgusting. It comes from the DSCC, is completely xenophobic, and is embedded below.

This add attacks Pat Toomey for his stance on trade with China. It starts off by focusing on Toomey's opposition to trade barriers with China, blaming them for "costing Pennsylvania nearly 100,000 jobs". This is bad enough. Apparently Democrats have no idea of how to stabilize the American economy, so all they can do is target China as a scapegoat*. However, it gets worse.

The advertisement finished by criticizing Toomey for welcoming China's economic growth, as though it's a problem that hundreds of millions of Chinese have risen above poverty in the past three decades. One advertisement (which I cannot find) even suggests that Toomey is betraying America because he considers the welfare of Chinese to have some value (and therefore he should seek a position in the Chinese government). To top it off, the advertisement end with a message in a fortune cookie.

All in all, this advertisement campaign reflects very poorly on the Democrats. First, it validates the impression that their economic strategy is identical to Hugo Chavez's: isolate and centralize. Second, it indicates that their foreign policy views economic growth outside of the USA as a threat. Finally, it demonstrates that their political strategy is to find scapegoats* for our economic problems. If I weren't so cynical about politic advertisements, I'd say that the Democrats were fascists.

*The Chinese have sold us cheap goods and given us cheap loans. Our misuse of those resources is not their fault. We could have used them to increase our own productivity, but instead we went on a wasteful consumption binge. Likewise, the fact that some people cannot find work is not due to the fact that foreigners sell us cheap goods; it is due to how we organize our own economic resources.

Let's get rid of the lawyers

2010-10-09T18:00:00.000-04:00

A lawyer friend of mine once asked "why are you a libertarian?" I didn't have a good answer on hand so I said "Because we have too many lawyers". It didn't take me long to regret having missed the opportunity to explain my views in a serious manner, but having had a decade or so to mull it over, I realize that there is an element of truth in it.

I believe that the increasing "legalization" of society is both bad and unnecessary. By "legalization", I mean the fact that we need to consult lawyers -- either while making a decision of after we make a decision that exposes us to legal risk. The problem is that lawyers aren't cheap (of course, if they were, it would imply that their job were simple and each of us could be our own lawyer). The large fees paid to lawyers don't only represent a great drain on the productivity of society, these large fees mean that lawyers are inaccessible to many people in our society and consequently these people are vulnerable to threats of lawsuits against which they cannot defend themselves (for example....here, here, and here).

To be clear, I don't mean to imply that lawyers are intrinsically engaged in immoral or parasitic conduct; given how our legal system is structured, their work in necessary and it is part of how our society organizes itself. Lawyers (as a profession) even go out of their way to provide counsel to those people who cannot afford to hire lawyers at market rates; however, such charity does not undo the fundamental injustice of the situation, in either its magnitude or intrinsic nature*.

With that being said, let's get to the point: how can we change our laws to reduce the need for lawyers (and truly place them on the list of "Unneccesary People")? I propose that we abolish any legal actions arising from the following:

Misuse of speech (e.g. libel, slander, inflicting emotional distress): The remedy for bad speech is good speech.
Misuse of confidence(e.g Breach of contract, release of secrets, fraud): Be careful who you trust. Liberty is inalienable, and all relationships are "at will".
Social Management (e.g Intellectual property, victimless crimes): Social structures and norms should arise from the bottom-up, in a non-violent manner.

Notice that the one part of the legal system that I did not propose gutting is the tort system. I don't see any way around needing a very serious legal system when one person forces himself on another. All proposals that I've seen to reform the tort system are nothing more than attempts to make it easier for the uber-parasites (with their corporate protections and armies of lawyers) to bully and steal from everyone else.

Likewise, there will be some situations in which there is no straightforward principle by which to decide ownership (for instance, with joint possessions, such as when a marriage or business partnership is being dissolved). These will require legal intervention.

As for the offences that I propose to remove from legal jurisdiction, this does not mean that those behaviors (e.g. slander) are acceptable; it only means that they should be dealt with in a non-violent manner.

The first two categories that I mentioned can be addressed within a reputation-based system. If a person is telling lies, then it should be made clear that he is a liar. If a person reneges on contracts, then it should be made clear that he cannot be trusted with responsibilities. These issues can be handled in an unstructured manner (as they often are), but they could also benefit from a formal process analogous to a lawsuit. However, the difference would be that there would be no forced confiscation of property or imprisonment; the lawsuit would conclude by publicly noting that a person has been found to be in the wrong (or not) with respect to a particular dispute, and he may be given instructions on what to do to resolve the dispute.

The laws designed for social management (whether funding public goods, or enforcing some view of morality or professional standards) should be enforced by non-violent social pressure. I doubt that any centralized formal system would be needed for their enforcement. Tax law could be included in this list, but this gets into a much more radical proposal than what I want to discuss now.

*The law profession in many ways looks like a state-enforced cartel.

Can I ever vote Republican?

2010-10-03T16:09:00.006-04:00

I just added "Divided We Stand" to the blogroll on the right. I first encountered the author, "MW", at the Freedom Democrats blog, back when the Republicans controlled the entire Federal Government. He made the case that single-party government is generally a bad thing. Single-party rule leads to extreme, unstable policies, and also facilitates corruption. Speaking to libertarian concerns, single-party rule results in greater government spending.

I generally buy his argument. What's more, I dislike fanatical partisanship, and the core of the "Divided Government" strategy is the realization that voters should treat parties as part of the system of government, rather than identifying with one or the other. However, the limitation of the strategy is that voters need to vote for parties rather than individual candidates, and we can't have a strong preference for the policies of one party over the others.

So the question that faces me in November is whether I can vote against the Democrats. This shouldn't be too hard for me -- I've voted Democrat occasionally, but have never beet terribly happy with the party or the candidates. For instance, I don't have any particular fondness for Bob Casey, but I despised Rick Santorum, so I voted for Casey in 2006 (and the Republicans had the Presidency regardless).

Anyway, for the upcoming election, I looked at my choices to find a Republican Congressional candidate that I could vote for. No luck.

First, there's Pat Toomey for Senate. I don't remember what I dislike about him, but he left a bad impression six years ago when he challenged Specter for the Republican nomination. I also don't care for the Democrat, Joe Sestak.

There's also the House race, so I went to Project Vote Smart to get some info on who is challenging Mike Doyle (with whom I disagree a lot); and it is Melissa A. Haluszczak. She's an unknown (no ratings from interest groups), so I check out her website. Let's see if she takes any positions that are intolerable...

Under "Issues", there is Immigration. It's the only one I look at. Straight off, she calls for a range of punitive measures against illegal immigrants. She tops it off with a call to make English the national language. As an afterthought, she notes that immigrants (legal ones) are decent people. Okay, that about does it. There is no way I could support this woman.

So I'm not going to vote for either of the Republicans, but I'm also not going to vote for either Democrat--neither of them are good enough to justify the power that the Democratic party has. I guess that I am essentially going to sit out this election, and cast a protest vote (Haluszczak doesn't have a chance anyway). The Greens have candidates for both positions, and their issue positions range from exciting to tolerable -- except for their apparent desire to eliminate private-sector employment (e.g. 32 hour work week). The Libertarians have put up a candidate for Senate, but he doesn't have any web presence yet (nor does their candidate for Governor!), which is a bad sign for their campaigns this late in the process.

Apparently, it's okay to have paranoids running the state

2010-09-18T10:48:00.001-04:00

Well, the title says it all:

WDUQNews: Homeland Security Newsletter Said Anti-Drilling Protesters Could Be Threats

Governor Ed Rendell says he’s angry and embarrassed Pennsylvania’s Office of Homeland Security provided information about environmental protests to drilling companies. But no administration officials will be fired or disciplined for the controversial security bulletin.

Of course no-one will be fired. No-one was fired for harassing professors Ferrel and Kurtz, no-one ever gets fired for this type of behavior. Harassing any American with an opinion might as well be official state policy. Rendell obviously sees no problem in the fact that the people running Homeland Security have no respect for our First Amendment rights. These people may even be downright paranoid....but that shouldn't stop them from holding a powerful government office.

Update: State Senator Ferlo is calling for someone's head.

That bigoted pope...

2010-09-16T22:15:00.003-04:00

To the extent that Catholicism is defined by acceptance of the authority of the pope (in any role -- religious, political, or corporate), I am anti-Catholic.*

In part it is because of my opposition to hierarchical social systems, and in part it is because of the pernicious opinions repeatedly expressed by the pope and other church leaders.

Most recently, the pope has claimed that the Nazis were the product of atheism:

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny” (Caritas in Veritate, 29).

I have to interpret this as slander. You may question whether he really meant to say that Nazism was the product of atheism--he doesn't say it directly, but in the context of his speech I cannot find any other interpretation for the above paragraph.

The Nazis were not atheist my any means. Based on what I know about Nazi politics, what I remember from books like "They thought they were free" and read in Wikipedia, the Nazis were not an atheist movement. Like all totalitarian regimes, they sought to destroy any independent authority (such as churches), but they did not do this by promoting atheism. At one point they promoted a pagan religious system, but they faced too much resistance from the German people so they instead settled for co-opting Christianity.

The idea that they would advocate atheism is ridiculous in light of the fact that one of the main pillars of the fascist regimes was anti-communism -- and the communist movement at that time was dominated by an explicitly anti-theist school of thought

The pope's defenders will probably say that even though the Nazi party did not advocate for atheism, the leaders had rejected God and were atheists at heart. Leaving aside the fact that this probably makes all non-Catholics into atheists, it is nothing more than the classic bigots defense. Bigots regularly redefine identity words (white, black, jew, atheist) so that they can use it to belittle others and redefine the world according to their hateful ideology. "White" means greedy. "Black" means lustful. They redefine these terms as a way of denying any association with unpopular people (a few popes come to mind), while associating those outcasts with whatever group the bigot wants to scapegoat.

If the pope thinks that he can see into people's souls (and all atheists are the same), then he is either delusional or a liar. If he is saying that the Nazis advocated atheism, he is either as ignorant as your typical Klansman, or he's just another power-monger who values the influence of his own institution over human fellowship or the truth. In other words, he's probably what he would call "an atheist".

*The other level at which I am anti-Catholic is political. The Catholic Church regularly acts as a political advocacy group (and they are especially blunt about it in Latin America), so to say that one is anti-Catholic is no different than saying that one is anti-Republican or anti-Nazi. Of course, the Catholic Church is nowhere near as bad as the Nazis at the moment, but the basic issue is the same.

tip to Evolving thoughts

Happy Patriot's Day

2010-09-11T18:34:00.002-04:00

Too bad that about 2.3 million Americans are in prison.

Do you trust your political opponents?

2010-08-22T14:30:00.001-04:00

Via Libérale et libertaire, I've been discussing "the Horowitz Challenge":

The next time you’re engaged in a political discussion with someone who has very strong views different from your own, ask them if they can name two famous thinkers or politicians whose politics are opposed to theirs who they also think are very smart and genuinely concerned with making the world a better place. If they can’t, it’s not clear they are able to grant the good faith such discussions should have.

I'm stuck on the criteria of "genuinely concerned with making the world a better place". Sure, plenty of my political opponents want to make the world a better place, but they are domineering and even megalomaniacal about it. Basically, the way that they would make the world a better place is to force everyone else to conform to their own ethical and ideological system.

I can really only interpret "make the world a better place" as meaning "generally improve the welfare of humanity." There are plenty of people out there (including many Americans) who clearly indicate that they view vast swaths of humanity as their enemy, for no reason other than a difference in culture, values, or lifestyle. These people will identify someone as an enemy even if that person has never expressed any ill intent towards them, or acted in any way that is clearly harmful to others.

These people are commonly known as culture warriors. Some culture warriors only use the arsenal of cultural confrontation -- such as rhetoric. However, others think nothing of using violence (including the state). This later group ranges from the "Clash of Civilization" Islamophobes who want to bomb foreign countries back to the stone age and shut down mosques in America, to the Drug Warriors who intend to "scare straight" all of those hippies and ravers. These people clearly do not want to make the world a better place for people with different cultures. They explicitly intend to cripple others who pose no material threat to themselves.

The thing about these people is that their enemies list knows no bounds. We see that it is generally the same group of people who attack all of these different subcultural groups. In contemporary America, they are generally a particular type of Republican. They attack religions minorities, cultural minorities, political minorities. If many of these minorities are free from harassment in modern America, it is only because we have fought these bigots to a standstill or we have learned how to avoid their attention, and they have turned their attention to less powerful groups. However, if those less powerful groups weren't around to distract them, then they would again turn their hate towards the more established minorities.

So basically, I believe that these people want to destroy me. There is no excuse for their advocacy of policies such as imprisonment (or even fines) for things like drug use. People who do so are my enemy, and I cannot trust them. I can only have a good faith debate with them in the most abstract sense, but ultimately, for my self preservation and the preservation of everything I value, I must hide from them and undermine their agenda at every opportunity.

Religious War in NYC

2010-08-16T19:51:00.005-04:00

It never ends. The Right-Wing Noise Machine* has found a new spin for the (near) Ground Zero (semi) Mosque** (GZM) story, assuring that it will live for another week. I had the rare opportunity to listen to Rush Limbaugh today, and he was ranting about Saint Nicholas church not being rebuilt. The basic story is that the church building was adjacent to the WTC site, and was crushed when the south tower fell. The church has yet to be rebuilt due problems coordinating with the Port Authority, which is responsible for the renovation and rebuilding of the WTC site.

Some bloviators are contrasting the difficulties facing this church against the supposed ease with which the the GZM project is proceeding. They take this as evidence that government officials --and by extension "the elite", which includes everyone who disagrees with them-- favor Islam over Christianity. This recent spectacle of demagoguery comes to us thanks to George Demos, a Republican candidate for Congress in NY. He apparently finds it easier to get elected on a campaign of FUD targeted at local activists, instead of directing constituent attention to substantial policy issues, or even his competition in the election. While I'm sure that the St. Nicholas congregants appreciate the attention that their cause is getting, I'm guessing that they (especially the officers) want nothing to do with this divisive issue of the GZM

Before picking apart the comparison between the GZM and St. Nicholas church, I want to present this Google Earth image of the WTC site. There are two things to pay attention to:

St Nicholas is within the reconstruction/renovation zone, immediately adjacent to the WTC site. It is in the SE corner (there's a map with this NYT story). It is actually in a location where the Port Authority wants to build a park and an underground bus/truck screening center.***
The Cordoba House is two full blocks away from the WTC site (I have it marked in the map). It is intended to be 13 stories tall. I counted 16 stories on the building that separates it from the WTC site.

View Larger Map

(Update: street view)

View Larger Map
Okay, here are some important differences between the church and the mosque:

The church site is in the middle of an incredibly complex reconstruction and renovation project. The Port Authority may have bumbled this project, and made it more complex than is necessary, but nobody is forbidding the church from building in that area (immediately adjacent to the WTC). The problems arise from trying to figure out what is the best site for the building, how it will fit into new zoning regulations, and who will pay for it. The zoning issue would not exist if they were simply planning to rebuild the original building, but they want to build a much larger structure. The financial issue is especially tricky since the Port Authority is building underneath the WTC site, including the church site.
In contrast, the opponents of the mosque would forbid them from building anywhere in the general vicinity of the WTC. Furthermore, the barriers that they would place in front of the mosque construction are not based on any practical considerations -- they just dislike the religion that would be the focus of the project.

I guess that's really the entire difference between the two construction projects. One is held up by a coordination problem, the other would be forbidden for ideological reasons. The opponents of the mosque act like they are so liberal because they don't want to expel all Muslims from the USA, they just insist that Muslims keep their heads down and constantly apologize for the actions of other Muslims. It is ridiculous that they accuse Bloomberg and others of facilitating the mosque, when all that they have done is speak up for it in the face of this ideological onslaught being led by Republican office-seekers.

Notes:
*I don't think I've ever used the term "Right Wing noise-machine", but I couldn't think of any better description of those media outlets who pick up on Republican talking points and never shut up about them.
**The GZM is not on the WTC site, or even adjacet to it. It also apparently would not even qualify as a mosque since it will have a food court and performance space. It will have a large prayer room and hold Friday services, but that will only occupy a portion of the building. It is also said to be built from glass and steel, so it won't have the traditional architecture of a mosque.
***The transportation system that they are building makes no sense to me. Maybe it will work out well, but it seems like they have too many conflicting demands. Maybe that's just how transportation is in NYC.

Why all the Chinese comment spam?

2010-08-14T14:50:00.002-04:00

This may explain why CAPTCHA is unable to keep the Chinese comment spam off of my blog -- Chinese sweatshops are full of workers who are paid to post this spam. What confuses me is that Google has not elected to harness the power of these spammers by using Re-CAPTCHA.

from CAPTCHA Economics at Marginal Revolution:

Bottom line:

Prices run about $1 per thousand CAPTCHAs solved, depending on the time of day and demand.

The median response time to solve a CAPTCHA is 14 seconds and accuracy runs about 90%.

"[T]he business of solving CAPTCHAs,...is a well developed, highly-competitive industry with the capacity to solve on the order of a million CAPTCHAs per day."

Responding to Muslim influence

2010-08-10T01:21:00.005-04:00

please pardon this ramble from 2AM

I'm increasingly bothered by the continuing fuss (not debate) over the Cordoba House, a.k.a "the ground zero mosque". As I mentioned before, this is a particularly strong exhibition of irrationalist xenophobic nationalism. The irrationalism of this whole thing is emphasized with how much energy is being harnessed for ... nothing.

I say that there is no debate (and all the agitation is focused on irrational feelings) because nothing can be done about the Cordoba house. There is nothing illegal about building it, and there cannot be anything illegal about it because to do so would blatantly violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Their donors are very unlikely to back out of this project (though maybe if the donor list is made public, they can be intimidated). In other words, there is no legal way to force the Cordoba House to shut down. In spite of this, a bunch of people are making this into a political issue.

I'm figuring that the politicians are just demagogues who have decided that they can ride this non-issue to power. Other organizers are probably more concerned with creating an "us vs. them" mentality (and constructing mailing lists). In that way, it reminds me of the anti-war protests that were held on the eve of the Iraq invasion (after the decisions had been made and the elections completed).

Anyway, there seem to be two semi-reasonable concerns related to the construction of this "mosque", and the general increase of Muslim influence in America. First, there is concern that foreign terrorists will be able to blend into these American Muslim communities. Second, is that Muslims will become a political force in some places, as they apparently have in Europe, and start demanding that we change our ways in order to not offend their sensibilities.

Neither of these concerns are totally reasonable for the basic reason that my fears do not justify the infringement of other people's liberty. It applies to gun ownership, just as it does to religious movements.

This second issue ties into some of the plans being laid by opponents of the mosque. Over at Free Republic, there is a semi-serious proposal to perform various "anti-muslim" acts in the vicinity of the mosque, from opening a gay bar, to a pork factory. Of course, these proposals are meant to explicitly antagonize the Muslims, in retaliation for the perceived insult of building a mosque near ground zero.

But we could also approach them as an issue of setting boundaries. We want to make sure that the congregation here doesn't start to think that the area around the building is their private property and that they can dictate what others do there (whether promote homosexuality, serve alcohol, process pork, or wear skimpy clothing).

There may be some benefit in making it clear that they have to tolerate us just as we are willing to tolerate them. After all, despite all of their liberal platitudes, the people building this mosque have political views that are on the far right of the American culture wars.

Revival of irrationalism?

2010-07-31T22:24:00.004-04:00

I haven't been closely following the furor over the proposed Islamic Center in NYC, but now that the ADL has come out against the building of the center, I'm starting to think this is something more than the regular nationalistic posturing.

From their statement, their opposition is based on nothing more than vague conspiracy theories (the ADL should be sensitive to such defamation). But from a NYT article, one particular quote caught my attention:

“It’s the wrong place,” Mr. Foxman said. “Find another place.”
Asked why the opposition of the families was so pivotal in the decision, Mr. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, said they were entitled to their emotions.
“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” he said. Referring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”

According to the NYT article, most of the opposition to this project comes from outside of NYC...from nationalist demagogues who want to absorb the WTC site into their holy-war mythology.

So, Foxman is saying that we should embrace this nationalistic irrationalism, and allow one group of people to push around another group because we sympathize with the trauma felt by the pushers. Well, I'll let Foxman in on a little secret -- there's lot's of trauma in the world, and very little of it gets into the national news. If we single out certain victims because everyone noticed and shared in their trauma, then we are not being compassionate, we are playing politics. And it is the ugliest and worst kind of politics -- the same kind that gave us the Nazis.

Symbolism for President!

2010-07-24T20:35:00.003-04:00

The content below was originally published at Freedom Democrats back in August of 2008. It came to mind due to a good essay about racism and race-based voting that I commented on over at the Libertarian Standard.

The below pro-Obama video is funny in the "turn your own arguments against you" kinda of way. I don't have a whole lot to say about the theme behind it, except to point out that electing a President is largely about symbolism. Modern Presidents are as much (or more so) a symbol as an administrator. The act of voting is purely symbolic.

Why shouldn't we consciously choose symbolism, especially when the real substance is hidden behind smoke and mirrors?

The threat of cyberwar (roundup)

2010-07-20T20:00:00.003-04:00

There has recently been a good bit of media coverage of the issue of "cyberwar". An article at the Economist gives a good overview of the debates regarding the threat of cyberwar and what America and its allies are doing to prepare. They describe two basic levels of cyberwar -- espionage and sabotage:

The next step after penetrating networks to steal data is to disrupt or manipulate them.

Since so much of this discussion is focused on surveillance and secrecy, I'm going to include recent articles on those topics. I won't provide any substantial commentary, just some choice quotes.

NPR has an article covering the concerns of cyber-alarmists; James Gosler describes the challenge and our inadequate preparation:

"You can have vulnerabilities in the fundamentals of the technology, you can have vulnerabilities introduced based on how that technology is implemented, and you can have vulnerabilities introduced through the artificial applications that are built on that fundamental technology," Gosler says. "It takes a very skilled person to operate at that level, and we don't have enough of them."
Gosler estimates there are now only 1,000 people in the entire United States with the sophisticated skills needed for the most demanding cyberdefense tasks. To meet the computer security needs of U.S. government agencies and large corporations, he says, a force of 20,000 to 30,000 similarly skilled specialists is needed.

So basically, every smart person in the US should work for the CIA/NSA. That's a bit of exaggeration, but Gosler is still suggesting a massive allocation of resources to the field of cyberdefense, a large portion of which will involve secret government agencies (for a sense of scale, there are about 30,000 science and engineering PhD's awarded each year in the USA).

For all the hype about the threat from China, the Economist has this to say:

Western spooks think China deploys the most assiduous, and most shameless, cyberspies, but Russian ones are probably more skilled and subtle. Top of the league, say the spooks, are still America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ, which may explain why Western countries have until recently been reluctant to complain too loudly about computer snooping.

Of course the USA is still the best at cracking codes and spying on communications (rember the establishment of warrentless wiretaps from the NSA). But that doesn't mean we should let down our guard. Here's a long but telling quote from the NPR story:

The cyber manpower crisis in the United States stands in sharp contrast to the situation in China, where the training of computer experts is a top national priority ...

The Chinese government, in fact, appears to be systematically building a cyberwarrior force.

"Every military district of the Peoples' Liberation Army runs a competition every spring," says Alan Paller of SANS, "and they search for kids who might have gotten caught hacking."

One of the Chinese youths who won that competition had earlier been caught hacking into a Japanese computer, according to Paller, only to be rewarded with extra training....

Some members of Congress, eager to follow China's example, are now promoting a U.S. Cyber Challenge, a national talent search at the high school level....
Last year's preliminary Cyber Challenge game was won by a 17-year-old from Connecticut — Michael Coppola — who was smart enough to hack into the game computer and add points to his own score.
... the competition judges were so impressed by Coppola's ability to hack into the computer game that they actually rewarded him for changing his score.
"It's cheating," Michael says, "but it's like the entire game is cheating."

Indeed. People who know how to cheat will soon be on the front lines of cyber defense...

So,the ethic of these new "cyber-soldiers" is to do whatever it takes to win (Just one more way that the USA emulates the People's [sic] Republic of China). They are even rewarding "soldiers" who attack non-target computers as part of their strategy. As they say, the "whole game is cheating". So much for the myth that there can be rules in war...this seems morally equivalent to Germany marching through Belgium to attack France, or Hamas launching rockets at Israel from within urban areas. What is the chance that these "cyber-warriors" will flinch at taking over your personal computer to use it as a weapon against their enemies? Not much different from the Russian mafia with their bot-nets.

Well, I'm out of time, but here are a couple of other stories to think about:

The American security apparatus is out of control, and now includes almost a million people with top-secret security clearance. Soon enough, there won't be anything special about having security clearance -- what will make you special is if you don't have security clearance. To paraphrase Noam Chomsky: covert actions are only secret from the domestic population.

For some context, Kevin Carson has been expounding on how the National Security apparatus is becoming involved (or can be expected to get involved in) in all sorts of traditional law-enforcement activities, from the drug war, to copyright infringement, and just harassing dissidents.

Update: I should mention that this was inspired by a post at "The Ruling Class" blog, called, of all things, The Ruling Class.

from Confessions of a Community College Dean: When Students are Homophobic

2010-07-18T19:38:00.001-04:00

Confessions of a Community College Dean: When Students are Homophobic

This is an interesting little story about how a teacher (and school administrators) should respond to bigotry from students.

The comments are pretty good also (aside from the partisan sparring over whether conservatives/Republicans are bigots). My only contribution is to point out that everyone has power....even "subordinates". Power is a diverse and dynamic thing -- not a simple and static hierarchy. It can be direct (physical threats) or indirect (social influence). Indirect power can be formal (a landlord being able to call the cops to evict a tenant) or informal (defaming someone's character).

Krugman the Hegemon

2010-06-13T10:27:00.001-04:00

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen picks apart Paul Krugmn's vague proposal that the US should "send a message to the Germans: we are not going to let them export the consequences of their obsession with austerity".

Leaving aside the technical issues (which Cowen covers), I want to point out a deeper problem with Krugman's proposal (applying to both China and Germany). Krugman basically wants to use other countries as a scapegoat for the fact that the American economic system is unstable. His solution to the problem of our own instability is to find some way to pressure other countries to adopt policies that complement our own system, or perhaps retreat into isolationism.

I don't see how it is the fault of Germans or Chinese if Americans want to spend all of our money on frivolous shit. If the Germans and Chinese want to sell us stuff at deflated prices, then we should either take advantage of these bargains to build useful infrastructure, or we should not buy their stuff. This is our choice, and it seems disingenuous to blame others for these problems.

Of course, this entire debate is built around the consumerist economic model, where everyone needs to buy silly junk just to make sure that everyone else can have a job. Of course, it skips the obvious question of why each person's ability to make a living is dependent upon these macroeconomic conditions. Aside from the basic issues of the benefits arising from cooperation/trade, why is it that our employment is structured in a manner where some people have much more money than they really need, while others can barely scrounge up a meal.

Aside from these issues of wealth distribution, there is also the problem that our consumerist economy may not be sustainable. We are depleting mineral resources, over-harvesting biological resources, and polluting our environment -- but our lead economists can only offer solutions that involve ever-increasing demand for stuff, no matter how pointless that stuff is in itself.

America's Climate Choices

2010-05-19T11:53:00.000-04:00

The National Research Council (part of the National Academies) has released three new reports as part of the series called America's Climate Choices. The three reports are Advancing the Science of Climate Change,Limiting the Magnitude of Climate Change, and Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change.

I believe that these should be treated as authoritative resources on this issue. The National Academies are institutions composed of America's most accomplished researchers, with a long history of excellence and political independence (though its members probably do have a leftish bias). I'm much more comfortable with their conclusions than I am with the U.N.'s ad hoc organizations such as theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While the IPCC basically agrees with the conclusions put forth by other bodies of experts, the fact that it has a narrow charter from the UN makes me doubt its political independence, both in terms of its agenda and its selection of experts. America is fortunate enough to have its own collection of domestic experts who can report on these topics from an American perspective.

Two more reports are in progress, and these above reports are considered "pre-publication" so there is some restrictions on how you can read them. However, short summary reports (PDFs) are freely available, and the full report can be read on the web for free, or downloaded for only $2.50. I expect that it will be free in the future, as other National Academy reports are.

Competition as the foundation of a fair society

2010-04-13T10:56:00.009-04:00

Cross-posted to FreedomDemocrats

Support for competitive markets is often associated with aristocratic ideas such as elevating the innately talented and motivating the innately lazy. Alternatively, some advocates for competitive markets focus on their role in distributing information, thereby guiding workers towards the projects that are most valuable to other members of society. In all this talk about excellence and efficiency, where is the concern for fairness?

In popular perception, competition is the antithesis of fairness. Competition in games results in winners and losers. There is no difference between losing by one point and losing by a hundred; either way, the loser gets nothing. To make things worse, there is always some luck involved in competitions, so even if two competitors are truly equal, one of them will still lose (especially if there is a "sudden death overtime" rule). Such a winner-takes-all setup may be good and fine for recreation, but it is hardly the way that we want to make a living and structure our community. People want some stability in their lives, and an economic system that provides no individual stability is practically worthless, regardless of its society-wide benefits. What's more, human society and productivity is premised upon cooperative behaviors, so cut-throat competition undermines the foundation of a productive economy.

With this perspective, it is easy to view economic competition as a maladaptive behavior to be suppressed, rather than it being the foundation of a fair and prosperous economy. However, this anti-competitive perspective ignores the fundamental differences between economic competition and the "game competition" described above.

First, economic competition is secondary to, and supportive of cooperation. For instance, salesmen don't compete with each other in a vacuum; they compete for the privilege of doing business with a customer. The primary interaction here is the mutually beneficial exchange between the customer and the salesman. The competition between salesmen is secondary. Contrary to the hypothesis that economic competition destroys cooperation, the competition between salesmen actually increases the total number of mutually beneficial transactions between salesmen and customers because it encourages salesmen to provide better deals to their customers.

Second, economic competition is not necessarily a winner-takes-all game. Consider the competition among salesmen again. Each salesman has a limited ability to identify customers and convince them to do business with him. Most simply, he does not have the time to sit down with every person in his town to negotiate deals, nor does he have the logistical capacity to provide them with every product that they may want. The limits of any one salesman means that there is unsatisfied demand that can be met by other salesmen. A good salesman will have a higher income than his less effective peers (because he either has a larger market or makes a greater profit on each sale), but he will not prevent them from making a decent living--at least in markets that approximate this simplistic model of a competitive market.

Our values of fairness and cooperation are only violated when competition takes the form of a winner-take-all game--which I'll call hyper-competition. In fact, hyper-competition often arises because something has undermined regular competition, and replaced its fair distribution mechanisms with the unfair distribution mechanisms of a monopoly following a brief, intense competition (examples below). Consequently, those of us interested in economic fairness should advocate for regular competition, and fight against hyper-competition.

--Examples of hyper-competition--

Patents: Patents are form of intellectual property--a state privilege that provides the owner with the right to exclude others from selling a particular good or service. Patents are initially granted to the inventor of a strategy to solve a problem. Because it is possible for multiple inventors to develop the same general strategy for solving a problem, patents can create a race to be the first to record their solution to the problem. Consequently, competing teams may lose all of their investment if they are not the first to find a solution. Side note: Ayn Rand, with her aristocratic view of competition, justifies this situation by treating it as a normal part of competition, and treating patents as laws of nature rather than laws of men.

Corporations in a market: There's an argument to be made that for corporations in a new market, "slow growth equals slow death". The idea is that a large competitor automatically has a major advantage over their smaller rivals, due to various economies of scale, and will eventually crowd out their rivals. This may be the most prevalent form of hyper-competition in our economy, and this may make it seem like an intrinsic part of competitive markets. Kevin Carson has written a lot about artificial contributors to economies of scale, but the above author (inspired by Geoffrey Moore) doesn't seem to focus on the same mechanisms that Carson has. Instead, this author seems to focus on how consumer's respond to bigness; the companies benefit from name recognition, the network effect, and a general credibility that is associated with bigness. These observations suggest that hyper-competition arises from the corporate structure itself, and its ability to expand to fill the entire market, no matter how big. This may not be a problem if the corporate structure allowed for high levels of autonomy within the corporation (for instance, a franchise brand), but most corporations completely subsume all aspects of production, not just the components (e.g. branding and intellectual propety) that are particularly responsive to scale.

Tournament Markets: Some labor markets fall into a tournament (winner-take-all) structure. This is actually well studied by economists (see Wikipedia for links). This tournament structure may result from reputational positive-feedback -- achievements generate reputation, which produces opportunities, leading to more achievements. This plays a role in academia, and is similar to the corporate competition mentioned above. Sometimes employers explicitly use tournament logic as a strategy to motivate employees, though its value is debatable.

Monopolistic practices: In general, if one market participant can exclude newcomers from entering the market, then it can gain very large rewards for being the first to be established. There are many practices in this category, but the most egregious are those that are enabled by the state, such as the enforcement of non-compete clauses in employee contracts. These practices can even apply more broadly, by making sure that certain high-paying professions are more accessible to those who are born into wealth, thereby protecting wealth that may have been earned (or plundered) in earlier competitive activities. See the Conservative Nanny State for examples.

Elections: Elections are perhaps the cleanest example of a winner-take-all competition that has a real impact on our lives. As with any job opening, the individual candidates will "win" or "lose", but because those candidates represent different factions in society, elections result in widespread winning and losing across society. Many citizens don't ever win, because none of the "serious" candidates share their concerns. Even in the legislature, the pattern of "winning and losing" continues as the majority passes legislation over the objection of the minority, though members of the legislative minority still get some influence.

Indeed, the hyper-competition of politics seems to be the source of much of the hyper-competition in society as large, as various special interest groups vie for political power that they can transform into special economic privileges. The observation of deep hyper-competition at the core of the state should give pause to any who intend to use the state to promote fairness in society. Perhaps their first goal should be to assure fairness within the state itself.

What do scientists think? (last post for awhile)

2010-01-09T08:56:00.002-05:00

Many contentious social and political issues are informed by scientific research. Debates on these issues often appeal to the authority of the researchers in this field. Consulting experts is good component of a decision-making strategy when we don't have the time to thoroughly investigate some issue personally.

However, this still requires that we answer two questions:

who are the credible experts?
what do they think?

I'll get back to these issues in a moment, but I first want to point to a underutilized resource for answering these questions: the National Academies, including the National Academy of Sciences(NAS). The National Academies regularly produce reports on issues of interest to the public, including Climate Change, and Evolution. The National Academies assemble committees of experts on a given topic, which then produce reports that state the opinions of the experts and also review much of the evidence behind their opinions. If you want to know what scientists believe about some field of research and why they believe it, first go to the NAS.

Given the availability of these resources, it's distressing that many people harbor severe misimpressions about expert opinion. Typical errors include the misidentification of experts and exaggeration of the influence of fringe opinions within the research community.

One common error in identifying experts is to consider all scientists to be experts in all fields of research, or all members of a field (e.g. biology) to be experts in all subfields within that field. Even within a subfield (e.g. microbial evolution), there are many lines of research being performed and expertise is not evenly distributed. I think that part of the reason for this error is that the public often isn't aware of the vast amount of research being done these days (which is only going to increase as the global economy expands).

It's true that a scientist may be better than a non-scientist at interpreting the debates in a random field of science, but there are still plenty of people who will have greater expertise than that random scientist. This is the idea behind the reports issued by the NAS: non-scientists turn to scientists as a whole for expertise, and scientists then identify those among their ranks with the greatest expertise.

Another common error regarding expert opinion is to identify one or a few experts (or near-experts) with a particular opinion and then interpreting that opinion to be common among the community of researchers. To make it worse, this one dissident's deviation from the standard opinion is often exaggerated and interpreted as dissent from the core components of the standard theory, rather than being dissent from a particular aspect of the theory (I've seen this with evolution, global warming, and HIV as the cause of AIDS).

Dissent is essential to scientific progress, and scientists often give disproportionate attention to dissenting opinions, if for no other reason than that without disagreement there is nothing to research. However, this emphasis on dissent within the scientific community should not translate into giving dissenters excess influence in public discourse. There are many reasons that a person can arrive at an erroneous conclusion, so there is not much information in the fact that people disagree. Going by the principle that there is one correct opinion and many erroneous opinions, we should pay attention when a large number of experts agree on a point, and not give much attention to the scattered and diverse dissensions (unless you are interested in the issue for purely intellectual reasons).

Unfortunately, the public and the press is good at finding a few voices that provide whatever opinion they want to hear, yet are incapable of surveying the opinion of the large number of experts who hold the dominant opinion...probably because those experts are doing research rather than writing blogs or talking to reporters. This is why we have reports from the NAS.

People also feel that they should be directly informed about the issues affecting their lives, and want to see both sides of "the debate", even though the debate is often driven by groups with an economic or ideological interest in persuading others to the view the world in a particular way. For those who want to rely on experts for guidance but not conclusions, the public debate often degrades into an exchange between two experts (e.g. ClimateSci and RealClimate). While the reader will still have nothing resembling expertise, I suppose that they can more directly evaluate the credibility of the two experts. However, they need to keep in mind that if the blogger representing the dominant view does something that discredits his personal opinion, the reader still has to contend with the credibility of everyone else who supports the majority view.

Science denialism

2009-12-30T10:22:00.003-05:00

Despite some accusations, global warming theory is not a fad. See the following paper:

Peterson, Thomas & Connolley, William & Fleck, John (September 2008). The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus. American Meteorological Society. http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/89/9/pdf/i1520-0477-89-9-1325.pdf

The hypothesis was proposed over 100 years ago, and has been a focus of serious research since the 1950s or so, and has been the consensus opinion of climate researchers for about 20 years now.

The fact that most of the public kept their heads in the sand* through this process is irrelevant. Science does not progress by going back to square one at the request of every ignoramus who decides that he wants to passively investigate some phenomenon as a part time hobby.

This post was inspired by the discussions at Libertarians for Junk Science, and is related to my post at Freedom Democrats The Politicization of Climate Science.

*with the help of plenty of profiteers driven by ulterior motives

Politicization of Climate Sciences

2009-12-12T10:27:00.001-05:00

Written for Freedom Democrats

In the wake of Climategate, climate researcher Mike Hulme has articulated the ideal role of science in public discourse. Basically, he declares that scientific debates should be kept separate from ethical debates (leaving aside bias inherent in hypothesis generation and choice of research directions), while still informing our actions. This is a nice ideal, but ignores the fact that people will enter scientific debates with ulterior motives and it can be hard for the layman to distinguish between the sincere scientist and these charlatans.

In contrast to Mike Hulme's call for the separation of science and politics, we have his colleague James Hansen (head of NASA's Goddard) who is quite happy to transform his scientific prestige into a platform for political moralizing. In reviewing Hansen's new book for DailyKos, DarkSyde introduces him in this manner:

To be a top climate scientist today means being up to speed in graduate level physics, advanced mathematics, planetary astronomy, meteorology, paleontology, oceanography, bio and geo-chemistry, dealing with programmers and constantly shifting computer architectures, and now on top of everything else, you have to be a tireless political activist and media celebrity.(emphasis mine)

No, you don't have to be a political activist...at least not in Hulme's model of science and politics. The scientific method strives for consensus, while the political method strives for domination; If Hansen and DarkSyde want to make politicians out of scientists, then they should expect politicized resistance and deal with it as a political dispute.

When Hansen compares carbon emission credits to the Indulgences that sparked the reformation, he just sounds like a moralizing fool (even to someone like me who agrees with his preference for a carbon tax, in this case).

There is no necessary connection between doing research and political advocacy. A scientist does have a responsibility to communicate his findings to the public, and when his findings have urgent implications, there is not time to allow the knowledge to percolate through the formal education system (i.e. inform other researchers, who inform their students at university, who become teachers in the primary and secondary schools). So there is an imperative for some member of the field to directly communicate the field's findings to the general public, which probably means being "a media celebrity". However, this is an issue for all academic disciplines, and it is not a requirement for everyone in the field--certain individuals naturally distinguish themselves within the field as communicators and politicians (often taking jobs such as heading major research institutions), and these individuals are the natural public spokespersons of the field.

But what if the research findings have implications for economic policy? If the spokesperson ignored those implications, they would be neglectful in their communication to the public, but taking a position politicizes the field of study. Following Hulme's model, I suggest that that the scientist make a point of contacting political activists, informing them of the situation, and allowing them to advocate for policy changes. This may even include sitting down with them for a public Q&A, where the scientist acts as a resource on which they draw as they suggest policy responses. This could be either a live discussion, or a book where the first chapter describes the scientific situation and the subsequent chapters are written by activists/politicians who explore the implications.

I'm not saying that scientists should avoid politics all together, just that they shouldn't use their prestige as a practicing scientist to gain exceptional authority in their political advocacy (at least until they have retired).

"Causes celebre" in the gay marriage culture wars

2009-12-03T15:00:00.001-05:00

Written for Freedom Democrats

The culture wars surrounding gay marriage are dragging on, and each side has a new anecdote showing how they are the victim of injustice.

First well take a well known injustice from the gay marriage proponents, the risk of being prohibited from visiting one's partner in the hospital:

...after the 39-year-old was rushed by ambulance to a Florida medical center, she fought for her life alone.
Her partner of 18 years, Janice Langbehn, said she was not allowed to see Pond for eight hours as she lay dying, and their children were never given the chance to say goodbye.

A libertarian radical may want to avoid the issue of state recognition of marriage and look at what gives a hospital the right to turn away visitors, or what gives visitors the right to demand access to a patient...but such investigations would be largely academic and as a practical issue, we need to recognize (as the commentators here do) that the state has no business granting special privileges to people who adhere to a particular lifestyle or ideology. Any two people should be able to enter into a partnership with all of the rights and privileges typically associated with marriage.

The other story supports the contention of gay marriage opponents that the recognition of gay marriage will result in everyone being forced to express approval of gay marriages. This is basically the communitarian position that our lives cannot be coherently partitioned into public and private aspects. In this particular case, we are dealing with the social pressure to acknowledge major events in the lives of our co-workers and sympathize with their feelings regarding these events--our economic lives cannot be separated from our social and family relationships. A Massachusetts man claims that he was fired for refusing to express support for his coworker's same-sex marriage.

Vadala claims the woman...mentioned four times that she had married her partner. He said he then left the store briefly to visit the airport's chapel before returning.

"I found it offensive that she repeatedly brought it up," Vadala said. "By the fourth time she mentioned it, I felt God wanted me to express how I felt about the matter, so I did. But my tone was downright apologetic. I said, 'Regarding your homosexuality, I think that's bad stuff.'"

The woman, according to Vadala, then said, "Human resources, buddy — keep your opinions to yourself," before exiting the store.

Two days later, Vadala, who had been employed for just a matter of weeks, received a termination letter citing the company's zero-tolerance policy regarding "harassment" and "inappropriate and unprofessional" comments.

This story lends some credibility to the assertion that state recognition of gay marriage will essentially force everyone to kowtow to the idea that a gay marriage is just as valuable to a heterosexual marriage. I would normally consider that argument to be pure paranoia, but even with the example before me I have little sympathy for that concern. First, if these people are concerned about employers using their influence to silence their employees, then they shouldn't be fussing over gay marriage, they should be objecting to the fact that employment can typically be terminated without cause. Gays have to live with this reality every day when they hide their romantic lives from their employers out of fear of being fired for being gay. At least this guy got fired because of how he interacted with his coworker. Second, their "solution" is actually a more extreme version of the "problem": for fear of ideological conformity being imposed in the workplace, they want to impose an ideological conformity on the entire society. Funk that.

What were the Soviets thinking?

2009-10-30T16:45:00.000-04:00

Cross-posted to FreedomDemocrats

The issue of trust is one that is central to politics, but often seems to get left out political philosophy. Our decisions of who to trust and how we can trust them depend on what we expect to occur if others get a power advantage over us. Conversely, this influences how we use our power when we gain advantages over others. All of this is of course based on our experiences*, and cannot be fully encapsulated in an ahistorical philosophy.

During the much of the Cold War, the balance of power was actually a balance of terror--the strategy of nuclear deterrence known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). My childhood was in the 1980's, in America. Even in my community of middle-class liberals, the Soviet threat was ever present. I'm not surprized to see that the Bulliten of the Atomic Scientists marks the early 80's as a period of increased risk of global nuclear war.

All of that fear is put into a broader perspective by Nicholas Thompson's article at Wired describing the Soviet doomsday machine. I'm not sure if I believe the facts presented (it seems to be based on rumors and an interview with a single Russian expat), but it is interesting to think about how the MAD stalemate would be influenced by a system that could launch a nuclear strike even if the entire civilian and military command structure was destroyed. At the least, the story got me in the mood for Halloween.

Another interesting fact of the Cold War is that the commies saw themselves (and their military interventions) as a progressive force. After all, most of their military actions were primarily targeted at at repressive feudal or colonial regimes--not at liberal democratic counties directly. Glenn Greenwald discussed the universality of war propaganda, in which he notes how the justifications of Russian soldiers in Afghanistan were eerily similar to the justifications of our own soldiers. So from the Soviet perspective, if they got power in Afghanistan, the country would be egalitarian, peaceful, and prosperous, but if their enemies gained power, it would remain repressive, warring, and impoverished.

Finally, here is probably the biggest issue underlying the entire Cold War, and I have no direct information about what the Soviets thought: What did they think would happen if they lost?

I know the American/Western side of this equation: their totalitarian system would be imposed on us, just as it had been imposed on East Germany. We had popular visions of such a system, ranging from Orwell's classic novel 1984 (also a pretty good movie) to the Swayze movie Red Dawn (one of my favorites for awhile, incidentally made in 1984, and being remade next year).

But what did the Soviet Union's public think would happen to them if their military were weak? Was it the classic "rape and pillage" of invading hordes? Or were their fears founded in Marxist theory? Did they expect trans-national corporations to establish polluting, dangerous factories while paying starvation wages and dismantling all social services, including the education system? Or perhaps even worse, their countries would become decapitalized colonies, producing commodities for export. Perhaps they would even become the battlefield for colonial wars among Western powers, who would inevitably start fighting among themselves once The Revolution was crushed.

I know that the Soviet state produced extensive propaganda, and that much of the public saw through it. But for those who feared losing the Cold War, does anyone know what they thought the consequences would be?

*For Drama and SciFi fans, the recent SyFy TV series, Battlestar Galactica, does an excellent job examining the issue of trust between warring groups.

Manned space exploration -- what a crock!

2009-08-28T10:36:00.007-04:00

Cross-posted to Freedom Democrats. (note for new readers)
Frustration is the leitmotif in the lives of most men, particularly today—the frustration of inarticulate desires, with no knowledge of the means to achieve them. In the sight and hearing of a crumbling world, Apollo 11 enacted the story of an audacious purpose, its execution, its triumph, and the means that achieved it—the story and the demonstration of man’s highest potential.
--Ayn Rand
As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
--Henry David Thoreau

One of the things that has always baffled me about Ayn Rand (a self-described rational egoist and free-marketer) was her gushing endorsement of NASA's manned space flight program. She celebrates it as a symbol of the potential of rationality, but completely ignores the fact that this rationality emanated from the centralized, coercive state. The fact that this was a government program should have given her cause to consider whether this sort of project was, or ever could be, the product of free men. Another reason to pause is the recognition that this project was instigated in direct response to a challenge from the USSR--"let's see if we can beat them at their own game"!
Manned space exploration is pure political propaganda, financed by tribute from slaves. Rand should have seen that, but she (and her present-day disciples) are apparently blind to it. Erika Holzer says that Rand treated centralized, coercive planning as a given and figured that we might as well get something worthwhile (i.e. technology-based spectacles) out of it. But when Rand writes "Apollo 11’s triumph is not political; it is philosophical" she is elevating her own wishful thinking over the actual forces that drive human behavior. The Apollo program was political from its conception to its execution. It was conceived to justify corporate liberalism at home, and American hegemony abroad. It was designed to engage the sense of wonder of 10 year-old boys while also speaking to their hardnosed elders by demonstrating the awesome power of the USA.
The issue of practical benefits is absent from Rand's assessment of the Apollo program. Holzer even endorses the view (expressed by Krauthammer), that considerations of practicality are a distraction from the true purpose of the spectacle. However, this illustrates exactly why no rational, free man would expend substantial effort on this project. Krauthammer says that "we retreated" from the moon, but the truth is that "we" had no reason to stay. "We" went there simply to show that "we" could do it. Any attempt to create a permanent human presence on the moon or send people to Mars using modern technology would be the largest boondoggle in human history. Maybe these projects would be feasible after extensive robotic exploration and infrastructure development, but not in the near future.
There's a reason I've been putting we in quotes: the most perverse message from these "individualist" cheerleaders of manned space flight is that they portray human greatness as a social project rather than an individual project. They speak as though the only alternative to manned space flight is to vainly obsess over the eradication of poverty or get lost in shallow self-gratification (egoism, perhaps?). They ignore the possibility of redirecting money from manned space flight to basic scientific research, both terrestrial and cosmic. Most fundamentally they deny the possibility that individuals, left with control over their lives and the fruit of their labors, could ever contribute to anything worthwhile.
Note: The title may lead some readers to expect a full argument against sending people into space (see comments). Instead, these readers will find nothing more than an individualist criticism of Ayn Rand's argument for manned space exploration as a form of ideological propaganda. If there are any other serious arguments for manned space exploration, I do not know of them and this essay does not address them. I have not seen any serious proposals for a manned space exploration program that had scientific or economic goals. If such proposals existed, then I would retract the title, but so far everyone (including Presidents Kennedy and Bush) seem to view manned space exploration as ideological propaganda. My disdain for current proposals for manned space exploration do not extend to robotic exploration, or continued experimentation with long term (but near-Earth) space habitation, nor does it apply to some hypothetical future time when manned space exploration could have a serious economic or scientific purpose.

Common sense: it's what they asked for

2009-08-26T18:57:00.000-04:00

Cross posted to Freedom Democrats

Glen Greenwald complains about how Glen Beck is presenting himself as a modern day Thomas Paine, by writing his own pamphlet called "Common Sense". I'm not sure exactly what Beck is getting at in the book, but I have no respect for his intellect (though his rants are quite amusing) so I won't be reading it. However, I doubt that Beck and his audience are really ready to hold up Thomas Paine as their mascot.

If you want to read some brilliant writing that contains innovative and profound thoughts (penned by a brave man), check out Pain's writing:

Common Sense: A masterpiece of radical political propaganda. Paine took an idea that had previously seemed like common sense (allegiance to the monarchy) and presented it as pure madness.
Agrarian Justice: An argument for the citizen's dividend funded by a land tax. As a matter of practicality, Paine suggested a lump sum payment to all young adults and regular payments to the elderly, all funded by an inheritance tax (which would effectively be a land tax, since he lived in an agrarian society).
The Age of Reason: A critical examination of Christianity.
Rights of Man: Defending the French Revolution against Burkean criticism.

To top off Paine's anti-conservative credentials, he typically presented elected government as the incarnation of the people's will, and would probably be baffled by the application of "Common Sense" to such a government (but maybe not if he had seen how the American experiment has turned out).