So far, the main distinction there I've noted is the intuitive interface relative to how information or posts are shared. Facebook's main complaint (at least of people willing to stay on it and use it) is the arduous loops that one must go through to filter information and keep some of it private from, say, a boss/co-worker/professor/parent and yet still share it with actual "friends".
Google took all that problem of going into the privacy settings, setting up groups of friends, etc, and made it a visually satisfying drag and drop system. This has little impact on me since I don't use facebook to share photos and post what I'm eating for dinner or if I'm out and about, and instead am the annoying political facebooker that I'm sure most people filter out, but to whom most of my posts are readily visible. I don't care very much if people know I'm an atheist or know I'm libertarian, and so on, and these are the things I post on there. What concerns me is my actual private life, which I don't post on there.
It's possible this would be a distinction with google plus for me that would be worth using, but I imagine this difference is far more important and noteworthy for the average facebook-er. At least until (if?) Zuckerberg figures out that this is the principle market share problem he has going forward. Complex privacy settings and poor filtering controls that can be simplified into an intuitive interface? Check. Google's got that.
Otherwise, it's pretty much the same sort of stuff. "+1" instead of "likes" is a little more satisfying. More of a novelty satisfaction than a meaningful one. Other than the difficult decision of "liking" some story or post about something saddening or tragic, in the same way that Netflix users indicate that they "like" Schlinder's List but end up watching "Fast and the Furious" or some similar piece of crapulence. Or people listening to the car stereo self-report listening to more talk/news or jazz than the popcorn syrup stuff that they actually do listen to most of the time. This semantic change allows us to preserve our outward signaling that we are not all self-absorbed egomaniacs while the interface change allows us to continue being self-absorbed egomaniacs.
Bottom line: I suspect it will end up being more popular as it's more in line with human nature than total openness and transparency.
13 July 2011
Why I am anti-exceptionalist
Because the people popularising "exceptionalism" are idiots
And don't quite understand what it is that makes the American system unique or functional or even superior.
It isn't that phrase, because governments around the world have now adopted some semblance of a republican virtue of self-ownership and self-determination. The variety of such is of course extreme, but as noted, a very secular country like say, Denmark, or even (supposedly socialist) Sweden possess actually considerable freedoms endowed to their citizens which their governments are bound to protect. The Danes in fact seem to come out "freer" routinely even on quasi-empirical "economic freedom" models used by right-wing American think tanks. There are gradients where these countries also use generous welfare states that American voters recoil and flinch from, largely because of their redistributive tax policies and emphasis on raw cash transfers instead of the inefficient transfer payments that we tend toward. But it is also much easier to start a business, run it out of your home, and so on, practical and meaningful freedoms that many Americans lack (not to mention fewer counter-productive moralising restrictions on narcotics, prostitution. Or fewer restrictive air travel screenings).
Freedom is not merely a straight line beyond which only Americans, much less god-fearing Americans, possess a such thing, and the sooner we understand this the easier it will be to improve our situation where we decide what to do with those tyrannical behaviors and government restrictions in our own society rather than to pretend that no other society may have a learned or practised freedom that we lack whilst protesting loudly and with impassioned speeches about a rhetorical freedom that we do possess instead.
And don't quite understand what it is that makes the American system unique or functional or even superior.
It isn't that phrase, because governments around the world have now adopted some semblance of a republican virtue of self-ownership and self-determination. The variety of such is of course extreme, but as noted, a very secular country like say, Denmark, or even (supposedly socialist) Sweden possess actually considerable freedoms endowed to their citizens which their governments are bound to protect. The Danes in fact seem to come out "freer" routinely even on quasi-empirical "economic freedom" models used by right-wing American think tanks. There are gradients where these countries also use generous welfare states that American voters recoil and flinch from, largely because of their redistributive tax policies and emphasis on raw cash transfers instead of the inefficient transfer payments that we tend toward. But it is also much easier to start a business, run it out of your home, and so on, practical and meaningful freedoms that many Americans lack (not to mention fewer counter-productive moralising restrictions on narcotics, prostitution. Or fewer restrictive air travel screenings).
Freedom is not merely a straight line beyond which only Americans, much less god-fearing Americans, possess a such thing, and the sooner we understand this the easier it will be to improve our situation where we decide what to do with those tyrannical behaviors and government restrictions in our own society rather than to pretend that no other society may have a learned or practised freedom that we lack whilst protesting loudly and with impassioned speeches about a rhetorical freedom that we do possess instead.
09 July 2011
More on Independence Day
"Then I began asking what they were doing volunteering to engage in wars that are unjustified and unjust, and once I asked that question I no longer thought they deserve my thanks"
This is basically the problem with unblinkered support for "the troops". Realistically, some troops are volunteering to, euphemistically speaking, "serve their country", and some troops are volunteering, almost explicitly, to fight in its wars (as happened after Pearl Harbor and 9-11, among other historical events). The portion of the latter is probably somewhat smaller than is indicated here, but nevertheless with a volunteer professional military class it would be impossible to conduct such wars of choice or conduct them in the manner we have if people began to cease to volunteer entirely for such services. That means to me that there's a not small number of "troops" who don't deserve my support at all because they are engaged in practices that are tragic and wasteful at best, or immoral at worst (cops and other authorities fully engaged in the prosecution of the drug war, ATF/FBI/etc, are in a similar boat for me).
It's not necessary to protest that these people are themselves (all) immoral, merely that they're engaged in something hideous and cruel and that this action should stop before I would lend credence to their service and dedication to the country. If the people asked to carry such things out begin to refuse to do so, we might get somewhere. Because clearly the people asking them to carry it out (us, most of the time, sometimes just a few of us, but usually most of us are to blame)... aren't going to stop asking too much of a sacrifice of them for pitiful causes.
This is basically the problem with unblinkered support for "the troops". Realistically, some troops are volunteering to, euphemistically speaking, "serve their country", and some troops are volunteering, almost explicitly, to fight in its wars (as happened after Pearl Harbor and 9-11, among other historical events). The portion of the latter is probably somewhat smaller than is indicated here, but nevertheless with a volunteer professional military class it would be impossible to conduct such wars of choice or conduct them in the manner we have if people began to cease to volunteer entirely for such services. That means to me that there's a not small number of "troops" who don't deserve my support at all because they are engaged in practices that are tragic and wasteful at best, or immoral at worst (cops and other authorities fully engaged in the prosecution of the drug war, ATF/FBI/etc, are in a similar boat for me).
It's not necessary to protest that these people are themselves (all) immoral, merely that they're engaged in something hideous and cruel and that this action should stop before I would lend credence to their service and dedication to the country. If the people asked to carry such things out begin to refuse to do so, we might get somewhere. Because clearly the people asking them to carry it out (us, most of the time, sometimes just a few of us, but usually most of us are to blame)... aren't going to stop asking too much of a sacrifice of them for pitiful causes.
07 July 2011
On the theory of Hollywood
I had some thoughts watching the Hangover. (yes, sadly, I had "thoughts" while watching a thoughtless film).
1) It's not particularly funny overall. There are funny bits to be fair, but it's mostly useless to me. I'm guessing this was a movie intended to be watched stoned or drunk to increase it's effect. When comedy is constructed in that vein, I'm not surprised it is popular, but I have a hard time grasping its "genius". Music or poetry written on heroin, opium, or weed is a lot more successful and imaginative than comedy seems to be as it can still be enjoyed without sharing in the author's altered mental state.
2) I have to wonder why so many movies involving weddings include the following troupes.
a) That marriage is, for the man, the end of his meaningful existence.
b) That a wedding is an event that requires such careful planning and yet must be populated with disasters.
Neither of these strike me as particularly realistic.
Here's the problems.
Firstly, most of the people I know who are married seem quite happy with it. To be sure I'm aware not all marriages are happy and that bitter separations are somehow rendered impossible. But for the most part, when people try to find partners that help satisfy them in complementary ways and who are generally compatible in things like worldviews and habits, we tend to have pretty happy marriages result. That is more difficult than it sounds certainly. But the idea that a marriage means a man's life is over seems a little overdrawn. Unless the man's life is populated with the idea that he should remain a kidult and also sleep with many anonymous women and frequent strip clubs or prostitutes. In which case, no he shouldn't get married. But I'd have a hard time thinking up a woman who would want to marry such a man in the first place (without some other signaling effect like fame or money involved). So the idea that a plot line centered on this even exists seems silly to me.
Secondly, as I noted again over the weekend, the cost of interactions for a man relating to women increases as he gets older and adopts more responsibilities. It's just not that easy for most people to expend energy and time and resources to looking for women over and over and over. Eventually this process gets tiresome or tedious and is replaced by looking for particular types of women, narrowed down further to finding a relationship of some sort which has the added benefit of not requiring looking for women (or rather, sex). There are costs associated with relationships too of course, but these have to be measured against the benefits and the costs of the alternatives. In a world where men are getting married at 20 or 22, it might be true that these costs are more balanced. In a world like we generally have in developed societies when men get married later, those costs are heavily in favor of relationships. Considering Hollywood rarely depicts the couple getting married while in graduate school or college or even while working at McDonald's, I don't get their theory.
Thirdly, I don't see why weddings would require such careful and elaborate planning. I gather that ceremonies and rituals are more important to most people than they are to me. But it would seem like if as much effort and planning went into making successful MARRIAGES as goes into the ceremonial duties involved with these relationships, and in particular as goes into the duties as depicted in movies and television, we'd be a little better off as a society. I already find symbolism to be extremely troubling politically (it leads to a ton of ineffective, even immoral, policies), so when I see it at the individual level I get nervous. Maybe I'm missing something in the symbolism, but I do at least recognize there is an underlying set of work and effort required that escapes some people. Obviously such things are not easy to depict on film, but giving preference to symbols and idols over reality is not something I should think most people deign to do. Perhaps I'm wrong. As a side point, anything involving the complex moving parts of many human beings with their own demands on the event is liable to be a very disaster prone enterprise if "careful and exquisite planning" is involved. It's more or less the same reason why centralised economies and regulatory schemes fail because the "price signals" are different and even skewed and the planners do not actually know what they are, no matter how elegant their mechanisms are. Paying real money for such planning strikes me as a scam as a result.
Fourthly, the actual change and shift in life for men occurs when children arrive in a relationship. This is also true for women. Marriage isn't fundamentally all that different from a common two person relationship other than the public recognition of the relationship and a ceremony. The work involved is the same at least. Raising a child however a) doesn't have many symbols that can be easily presented instead of itself, so fortunately we have fewer illusions but a whole lot more mystery, b) is a three (or more) person relationship which heavily alters the dynamics of the pre-existing two person relationship, sometimes drastically or harmfully, c) is as a result much more work than a two person relationship and takes time and effort away from other non-children centered relationships outside of the parties involved (ie, a social life with mere friends as opposed to families). It might be better if more parents took a more loose approach to parenting, and realized that their children are other people in a relationship rather than pure extensions of themselves that can and must be molded in a particular way. But this still would require quite a lot of work and dynamic shifts in underlying relationships.
It is this shift that matters. And not the ring fingers.
1) It's not particularly funny overall. There are funny bits to be fair, but it's mostly useless to me. I'm guessing this was a movie intended to be watched stoned or drunk to increase it's effect. When comedy is constructed in that vein, I'm not surprised it is popular, but I have a hard time grasping its "genius". Music or poetry written on heroin, opium, or weed is a lot more successful and imaginative than comedy seems to be as it can still be enjoyed without sharing in the author's altered mental state.
2) I have to wonder why so many movies involving weddings include the following troupes.
a) That marriage is, for the man, the end of his meaningful existence.
b) That a wedding is an event that requires such careful planning and yet must be populated with disasters.
Neither of these strike me as particularly realistic.
Here's the problems.
Firstly, most of the people I know who are married seem quite happy with it. To be sure I'm aware not all marriages are happy and that bitter separations are somehow rendered impossible. But for the most part, when people try to find partners that help satisfy them in complementary ways and who are generally compatible in things like worldviews and habits, we tend to have pretty happy marriages result. That is more difficult than it sounds certainly. But the idea that a marriage means a man's life is over seems a little overdrawn. Unless the man's life is populated with the idea that he should remain a kidult and also sleep with many anonymous women and frequent strip clubs or prostitutes. In which case, no he shouldn't get married. But I'd have a hard time thinking up a woman who would want to marry such a man in the first place (without some other signaling effect like fame or money involved). So the idea that a plot line centered on this even exists seems silly to me.
Secondly, as I noted again over the weekend, the cost of interactions for a man relating to women increases as he gets older and adopts more responsibilities. It's just not that easy for most people to expend energy and time and resources to looking for women over and over and over. Eventually this process gets tiresome or tedious and is replaced by looking for particular types of women, narrowed down further to finding a relationship of some sort which has the added benefit of not requiring looking for women (or rather, sex). There are costs associated with relationships too of course, but these have to be measured against the benefits and the costs of the alternatives. In a world where men are getting married at 20 or 22, it might be true that these costs are more balanced. In a world like we generally have in developed societies when men get married later, those costs are heavily in favor of relationships. Considering Hollywood rarely depicts the couple getting married while in graduate school or college or even while working at McDonald's, I don't get their theory.
Thirdly, I don't see why weddings would require such careful and elaborate planning. I gather that ceremonies and rituals are more important to most people than they are to me. But it would seem like if as much effort and planning went into making successful MARRIAGES as goes into the ceremonial duties involved with these relationships, and in particular as goes into the duties as depicted in movies and television, we'd be a little better off as a society. I already find symbolism to be extremely troubling politically (it leads to a ton of ineffective, even immoral, policies), so when I see it at the individual level I get nervous. Maybe I'm missing something in the symbolism, but I do at least recognize there is an underlying set of work and effort required that escapes some people. Obviously such things are not easy to depict on film, but giving preference to symbols and idols over reality is not something I should think most people deign to do. Perhaps I'm wrong. As a side point, anything involving the complex moving parts of many human beings with their own demands on the event is liable to be a very disaster prone enterprise if "careful and exquisite planning" is involved. It's more or less the same reason why centralised economies and regulatory schemes fail because the "price signals" are different and even skewed and the planners do not actually know what they are, no matter how elegant their mechanisms are. Paying real money for such planning strikes me as a scam as a result.
Fourthly, the actual change and shift in life for men occurs when children arrive in a relationship. This is also true for women. Marriage isn't fundamentally all that different from a common two person relationship other than the public recognition of the relationship and a ceremony. The work involved is the same at least. Raising a child however a) doesn't have many symbols that can be easily presented instead of itself, so fortunately we have fewer illusions but a whole lot more mystery, b) is a three (or more) person relationship which heavily alters the dynamics of the pre-existing two person relationship, sometimes drastically or harmfully, c) is as a result much more work than a two person relationship and takes time and effort away from other non-children centered relationships outside of the parties involved (ie, a social life with mere friends as opposed to families). It might be better if more parents took a more loose approach to parenting, and realized that their children are other people in a relationship rather than pure extensions of themselves that can and must be molded in a particular way. But this still would require quite a lot of work and dynamic shifts in underlying relationships.
It is this shift that matters. And not the ring fingers.
Some thoughts on the debacle that is jury duty
1) Jury selection is necessary so long as we insist on using juries (I'm a little hopeful we could go to more online reviews of criminal cases). There are a lot of cases that get settled out of court of course.. which matters.
2) Juries should be selected a little more ahead of time, to prevent the inconvenience that it poses for the general public, what with jobs, day care, etc. This should be compromised with say a two week lead time by also removing more exclusions. The system used by my local federal court was completely designed it seemed to piss people off by not giving them a good idea whether they would be called in the next week until Friday. It should at least be available information the previous Monday. It isn't that complicated to use a computer programme to pull names out of a hat after scanning for routine exclusions or likely exclusions.
3) It wasn't even clear there was a big enough case load to justify the jury pool last month. Maybe they don't want the cases themselves individually identified to prevent jury tampering or whatever, but they should at least post a likely case load in terms of numbers of cases on their court website.
4) I still fully intend to try to get myself on a jury dealing with, in particular, drug cases. In order to nullify the convictions. There are other laws I might consider throwing out for civil liberties reasons or for political philosophical reasons as a form of civil disobedience, but considering there are thousands of laws on the books, it would be tiresome to list all of the ones I see as illegitimate morally and legally inconsistent with our civil liberties. And few of them are as destructive and commonly used as drug war laws.
2) Juries should be selected a little more ahead of time, to prevent the inconvenience that it poses for the general public, what with jobs, day care, etc. This should be compromised with say a two week lead time by also removing more exclusions. The system used by my local federal court was completely designed it seemed to piss people off by not giving them a good idea whether they would be called in the next week until Friday. It should at least be available information the previous Monday. It isn't that complicated to use a computer programme to pull names out of a hat after scanning for routine exclusions or likely exclusions.
3) It wasn't even clear there was a big enough case load to justify the jury pool last month. Maybe they don't want the cases themselves individually identified to prevent jury tampering or whatever, but they should at least post a likely case load in terms of numbers of cases on their court website.
4) I still fully intend to try to get myself on a jury dealing with, in particular, drug cases. In order to nullify the convictions. There are other laws I might consider throwing out for civil liberties reasons or for political philosophical reasons as a form of civil disobedience, but considering there are thousands of laws on the books, it would be tiresome to list all of the ones I see as illegitimate morally and legally inconsistent with our civil liberties. And few of them are as destructive and commonly used as drug war laws.
An incomplete list of why I more than likely will not be voting for President in 2012
1) Gary Johnson won't be on the ballot. Based on the trends for the actual Libertarian Party, as opposed to libertarian-leaning politicians (Johnson or Paul), they will nominate someone truly insane. Or else someone too mainline (Barr in 08?, the guy was basically a Republican, fuck that). Give me a politician who talks openly about the failure of the drug war and admits that as governor he did not "create jobs" (that honor belongs to others, not the government, usually). Most crucially he puts everything on the table in his budget plan (and it's an actual plan unlike Ron Paul).
He does not have a chance of winning in the GOP primary as a result. So I won't get to vote for the guy. Without someone on the ballot who gives me a reason to vote FOR, as Johnson does, I no longer see reasons to vote AGAINST as fully legitimate and satisfying.
2) The GOP likely won't nominate someone reasonable instead, but it is sounding like it will be either Romney or maybe Rick Perry. Neither of these are very popular with me, but in Romney's case, the distinctions between him and Obama are mostly rhetorical emphasis rather than real political decision making. Perry is openly flawed for me. I would be willing to consider voting against if it is Perry. Perhaps (the Willingham case alone helps there, but so does his state's budget deficit. Again, Johnson just looks so much better there that it's not even funny). If it's Romney like it looks like, as much as his rhetoric and foreign policy positions bother me (double Gitmo?, no thanks), they don't look to be all that different from Obama's real positions on these matters. As opposed to the caricatures drawn by conservatives. There are therefore fewer good reasons to vote AGAINST. Romney doesn't give me a reason to vote for either, of course.
3) Local or state matters will take precedence for me. Mind you I'm not likely to see any of my local or state preferences reflected by other voters in my state or local area, what with the level of statism here in the Midwest generally being very high,... but I'll at least feel free to express them.
4) Obama has done the following to fail to distinguish himself from his predecessor in order to convince me that voting for a quasi-liberal candidate has any impact on the process as opposed to voting for quasi-conservative ones.
a) Bombed Libya. And essentially ignored Congress. This is actually more excessive from Bush's lame war with Iraq, which at least sought Congressional approval, but bears the advantage of not being as flagrantly expensive a waste of military assets, lives, and of course treasure. I bear no ill will over Afghanistan and Iraq, basically he already told us that these were the policies he would pursue (as asinine as I found them to be and as rhetorically oversold as they were, especially in Iraq)). And bin Laden is dead after all. So there's that.
b) Failed to prosecute or recognize the torture violations during the previous administration. 2 (two!) minor guys become fall guys for the many deaths and scandalous/flagrant use of torture "legalised" by Yoo and others. At the very least, they should have sought to have the lawyers disbarred and the doctors involved stripped of medical licenses.
c) Expanded immigration enforcement and deportations. Not that conservatives have noticed, but Obama's effectively a bigger "wall" guy than Bush was. There's also the matter of there being fewer jobs for illegals, or anyone, to get, but that's a side issue for which little new blame can be firmly attached.
d) Talked rhetorically about supporting school reforms, but allowed Congress to throw charters, even modest and successful ones, in DC under the bus. Weak sauce. Backing unions to the hilt is abstractly expected from a left-leaning administration, but it's not matching policy with talk. When somebody talks like he has about school reform I want to see some more deeds than we've gotten.
e) Drug raids on medical marijuana producers and dispensaries have expanded even while he's talked about ending them. Also, chuckling about even amending, much less ending, the drug war policies of this country is not an appropriate response to questions about it. We're not all stoners first off. More importantly, people are dying Mr President. In other countries by the thousands (Mexico especially), and in our own inner cities (and some rural communities too), by the hundreds. To say nothing of the many people incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses and the damage this does to communities (especially inner-city black neighbourhoods). I was personally annoyed that I didn't get plucked last month for federal jury duty on the theory that I might get to practice a little activism on this issue. But that's a whole other story.
f) Failed to nominate replacements on the Federal Reserve board. Monetary policy responses seem to be a lot more important to the growth or sluggishness of growth in the general economy, not to mention about the only way to deal with supply shocks in food and energy prices. We've had a lot of agitated discussion revolving around recess appointees to the NLRB, but that board is basically useless by comparison (other than the Boeing decision, which is a mite troublesome).
g) In general I expect left-leaning political figures to have economic proposals and especially economic rhetoric which I find to be troublesome, sometimes extremely so. I also expect right-leaning political figures to be generally as useless on these matters, but with a more tolerable rhetorical flourish as they both seek to support statist policies to satisfy their corporate masters to crush the free market (the biggest enemy of capitalism seems to be "capitalists", in the sense that most big businesses seek to control their markets by using the shields of regulation and taxation as cudgels against their competitors). All of this is certainly a problem. But what I naturally expect from left-leaning politicians is a stronger support for things like basic civil liberties, relative tolerance of other cultures, etc. I instead hear a big whiffing noise on these issues from this administration (see above). I will grant there's some modest progress regarding federal anti-homosexuality policies, but this more from indifference than actual leadership on the issue. I'm pleased DADT is ending, and that DoMA isn't getting a full fledged legal defence from the government that instituted it. But I cannot say I'm really impressed when there were Republicans who had positions to the left of this (hell even Cheney's position was more appealing).
True a libertarian should support there being no federal (or even state) consideration of marriage contracts between consenting adults. But since the public broadly speaking likes having government/public sanction for their choice of (one) spouse, the perfect is kind of the enemy of the good herein. We will need to recognize these as legitimate if we are going to have policies to favor marriages with benefits and privileges. One good analogy I've seen compares the thought experiment that we have Social Security set up to implicitly exclude non-white people from retrieving funds that they've paid into. Clearly the forced provision of a government annuity to provide for retirement is a limitation on human freedom, more so than even forcing a provision of income toward retirement anywhere in the economy, a more utilitarian argument that I favor. But if we're going to have such things, and it certainly appears Social Security isn't going anywhere in our lifetimes (medicare/aid are a different story), we should not start excluding from participation in retrieving those funds people based on non-meritorious reasons like race. The same applies to excluding full marriage benefits and rights from homosexuals. That we don't get this sort of argument out of liberal politicians should be a problem. Similar problems emerged during the August anti-Muslim scare of last year (the "Burlington Coat Factory recreation center" fiasco), in that there were few people willing to take up the torch of defending the civil rights of Muslims against populist (ie, ignorant) rage.
He does not have a chance of winning in the GOP primary as a result. So I won't get to vote for the guy. Without someone on the ballot who gives me a reason to vote FOR, as Johnson does, I no longer see reasons to vote AGAINST as fully legitimate and satisfying.
2) The GOP likely won't nominate someone reasonable instead, but it is sounding like it will be either Romney or maybe Rick Perry. Neither of these are very popular with me, but in Romney's case, the distinctions between him and Obama are mostly rhetorical emphasis rather than real political decision making. Perry is openly flawed for me. I would be willing to consider voting against if it is Perry. Perhaps (the Willingham case alone helps there, but so does his state's budget deficit. Again, Johnson just looks so much better there that it's not even funny). If it's Romney like it looks like, as much as his rhetoric and foreign policy positions bother me (double Gitmo?, no thanks), they don't look to be all that different from Obama's real positions on these matters. As opposed to the caricatures drawn by conservatives. There are therefore fewer good reasons to vote AGAINST. Romney doesn't give me a reason to vote for either, of course.
3) Local or state matters will take precedence for me. Mind you I'm not likely to see any of my local or state preferences reflected by other voters in my state or local area, what with the level of statism here in the Midwest generally being very high,... but I'll at least feel free to express them.
4) Obama has done the following to fail to distinguish himself from his predecessor in order to convince me that voting for a quasi-liberal candidate has any impact on the process as opposed to voting for quasi-conservative ones.
a) Bombed Libya. And essentially ignored Congress. This is actually more excessive from Bush's lame war with Iraq, which at least sought Congressional approval, but bears the advantage of not being as flagrantly expensive a waste of military assets, lives, and of course treasure. I bear no ill will over Afghanistan and Iraq, basically he already told us that these were the policies he would pursue (as asinine as I found them to be and as rhetorically oversold as they were, especially in Iraq)). And bin Laden is dead after all. So there's that.
b) Failed to prosecute or recognize the torture violations during the previous administration. 2 (two!) minor guys become fall guys for the many deaths and scandalous/flagrant use of torture "legalised" by Yoo and others. At the very least, they should have sought to have the lawyers disbarred and the doctors involved stripped of medical licenses.
c) Expanded immigration enforcement and deportations. Not that conservatives have noticed, but Obama's effectively a bigger "wall" guy than Bush was. There's also the matter of there being fewer jobs for illegals, or anyone, to get, but that's a side issue for which little new blame can be firmly attached.
d) Talked rhetorically about supporting school reforms, but allowed Congress to throw charters, even modest and successful ones, in DC under the bus. Weak sauce. Backing unions to the hilt is abstractly expected from a left-leaning administration, but it's not matching policy with talk. When somebody talks like he has about school reform I want to see some more deeds than we've gotten.
e) Drug raids on medical marijuana producers and dispensaries have expanded even while he's talked about ending them. Also, chuckling about even amending, much less ending, the drug war policies of this country is not an appropriate response to questions about it. We're not all stoners first off. More importantly, people are dying Mr President. In other countries by the thousands (Mexico especially), and in our own inner cities (and some rural communities too), by the hundreds. To say nothing of the many people incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses and the damage this does to communities (especially inner-city black neighbourhoods). I was personally annoyed that I didn't get plucked last month for federal jury duty on the theory that I might get to practice a little activism on this issue. But that's a whole other story.
f) Failed to nominate replacements on the Federal Reserve board. Monetary policy responses seem to be a lot more important to the growth or sluggishness of growth in the general economy, not to mention about the only way to deal with supply shocks in food and energy prices. We've had a lot of agitated discussion revolving around recess appointees to the NLRB, but that board is basically useless by comparison (other than the Boeing decision, which is a mite troublesome).
g) In general I expect left-leaning political figures to have economic proposals and especially economic rhetoric which I find to be troublesome, sometimes extremely so. I also expect right-leaning political figures to be generally as useless on these matters, but with a more tolerable rhetorical flourish as they both seek to support statist policies to satisfy their corporate masters to crush the free market (the biggest enemy of capitalism seems to be "capitalists", in the sense that most big businesses seek to control their markets by using the shields of regulation and taxation as cudgels against their competitors). All of this is certainly a problem. But what I naturally expect from left-leaning politicians is a stronger support for things like basic civil liberties, relative tolerance of other cultures, etc. I instead hear a big whiffing noise on these issues from this administration (see above). I will grant there's some modest progress regarding federal anti-homosexuality policies, but this more from indifference than actual leadership on the issue. I'm pleased DADT is ending, and that DoMA isn't getting a full fledged legal defence from the government that instituted it. But I cannot say I'm really impressed when there were Republicans who had positions to the left of this (hell even Cheney's position was more appealing).
True a libertarian should support there being no federal (or even state) consideration of marriage contracts between consenting adults. But since the public broadly speaking likes having government/public sanction for their choice of (one) spouse, the perfect is kind of the enemy of the good herein. We will need to recognize these as legitimate if we are going to have policies to favor marriages with benefits and privileges. One good analogy I've seen compares the thought experiment that we have Social Security set up to implicitly exclude non-white people from retrieving funds that they've paid into. Clearly the forced provision of a government annuity to provide for retirement is a limitation on human freedom, more so than even forcing a provision of income toward retirement anywhere in the economy, a more utilitarian argument that I favor. But if we're going to have such things, and it certainly appears Social Security isn't going anywhere in our lifetimes (medicare/aid are a different story), we should not start excluding from participation in retrieving those funds people based on non-meritorious reasons like race. The same applies to excluding full marriage benefits and rights from homosexuals. That we don't get this sort of argument out of liberal politicians should be a problem. Similar problems emerged during the August anti-Muslim scare of last year (the "Burlington Coat Factory recreation center" fiasco), in that there were few people willing to take up the torch of defending the civil rights of Muslims against populist (ie, ignorant) rage.
05 July 2011
27 June 2011
Sleeptyme
In the past week, I've been to Seoul, Baltimore, NYC, and places unknown. I've been a South Asian law student, Malcolm Gladwell, inner-city reporter, and an assassin. I've experienced congestion road pricing schemes, fence building, social network exclusivity, police corruption, race relations between South and East Asia in America, George Carlin as a bad driver, rejecting homosexual advances, and the running of a convenience store.
All of this is largely possible by dreaming. Or rather by sleeping. A friend experienced monsters eating people tossed into a hole in the floor and other strangeness. Evolutionary speaking, dreams seem more or less to be the result of humans having brains, brains which remain reasonably active while one is asleep and continue to conjure up ideas, facts, and images. They're generally meaningless sets of incoherent imagery assembled into loose stories. But I'd submit that there are a couple of meaningful similarities between a dream world and our real world. Principally, the first is that dreams are inhabited by fears or wonders (people/friends dying, sexual encounters, places you've never been, etc). None of these seem always particularly "deserved" in the sense that there's always a working just system at play. The same applies in life.
"In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying." - A dream, the world asleep will begin to resemble more and more the world of the "living", awake, when one recognizes this "flaw", so to speak, of a belief in an ordered universe where justice is readily at hand. Our dreams possess no such system. Neither does reality. One should never worry that they are being punished for something they imagine they did wrong, and only the pangs of conscience that afflict them for things they did a wrong over, where a suffering is involved by their action (or inaction), should they begin to worry themselves. Imagined slights taken up by others, and in particular an imagined sense of balanced justice (say, an offence against "god") are not sufficient reasons for one to lose sleep and become fitful or insecure.
"It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream. When you have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a dream. It is said that the world we live in is not a bit different from this." - When the world resembles a dream for this reason, we can see more clearly what use we have for dreams. In expressing our fears and hopes, our aspirations and our paralysis, we're left free to make choices about which to follow in action. Asleep we are motionless, but travel widely and see great and fine works of others, perhaps even ourselves, and against this we see horrible things and will learn to accept them calmly or impassively as a manifest risk of our existence. We can get on a plane still having had a nightmare or a flicker of watching the plane explode, our bodies tumbling skyward and fatefully ground-ward to our unpleasant tinny of screams and eventual demise by acknowledging the likelihood of such things is more certain in a dream than in reality. Or we can witness pleasures possible only in fantastic realms and aspire to attain them.
In a dream we in effect control what is possible and select imagery, plots, or endings as we see fit in order to make a dream seem or appear coherent and meaningful. Our reality is little different. Some of our choices will be limited, imposed by conditions from others, but this is often because we choose to limit them ourselves. We have imagined far greater importance of ourselves and our actions upon others in still more of these cases of limitations. In the end however, what we're doing is settling upon things and activities that seem to appear coherent and meaningful.
All of this is largely possible by dreaming. Or rather by sleeping. A friend experienced monsters eating people tossed into a hole in the floor and other strangeness. Evolutionary speaking, dreams seem more or less to be the result of humans having brains, brains which remain reasonably active while one is asleep and continue to conjure up ideas, facts, and images. They're generally meaningless sets of incoherent imagery assembled into loose stories. But I'd submit that there are a couple of meaningful similarities between a dream world and our real world. Principally, the first is that dreams are inhabited by fears or wonders (people/friends dying, sexual encounters, places you've never been, etc). None of these seem always particularly "deserved" in the sense that there's always a working just system at play. The same applies in life.
"In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying." - A dream, the world asleep will begin to resemble more and more the world of the "living", awake, when one recognizes this "flaw", so to speak, of a belief in an ordered universe where justice is readily at hand. Our dreams possess no such system. Neither does reality. One should never worry that they are being punished for something they imagine they did wrong, and only the pangs of conscience that afflict them for things they did a wrong over, where a suffering is involved by their action (or inaction), should they begin to worry themselves. Imagined slights taken up by others, and in particular an imagined sense of balanced justice (say, an offence against "god") are not sufficient reasons for one to lose sleep and become fitful or insecure.
"It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream. When you have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a dream. It is said that the world we live in is not a bit different from this." - When the world resembles a dream for this reason, we can see more clearly what use we have for dreams. In expressing our fears and hopes, our aspirations and our paralysis, we're left free to make choices about which to follow in action. Asleep we are motionless, but travel widely and see great and fine works of others, perhaps even ourselves, and against this we see horrible things and will learn to accept them calmly or impassively as a manifest risk of our existence. We can get on a plane still having had a nightmare or a flicker of watching the plane explode, our bodies tumbling skyward and fatefully ground-ward to our unpleasant tinny of screams and eventual demise by acknowledging the likelihood of such things is more certain in a dream than in reality. Or we can witness pleasures possible only in fantastic realms and aspire to attain them.
In a dream we in effect control what is possible and select imagery, plots, or endings as we see fit in order to make a dream seem or appear coherent and meaningful. Our reality is little different. Some of our choices will be limited, imposed by conditions from others, but this is often because we choose to limit them ourselves. We have imagined far greater importance of ourselves and our actions upon others in still more of these cases of limitations. In the end however, what we're doing is settling upon things and activities that seem to appear coherent and meaningful.
War is hell
"The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion."
Except of course when you're fighting it in the "comfort" of an air conditioned tent in the middle of nowhere. I can see a use for temperature control so computers will work reliably, but you could just as easily put them in bunkers, buildings or mobile vehicles (with their own AC) instead of goddamned tents right? Whatever. If we can rack up this much of a utilities bill fighting a war, imagine what we've racked up for actually fighting. Or for medical bills.
Update: I actually think it is entirely reasonable that the US military uses air conditioning in tents, despite the profligate waste of energy this demonstrates against overall energy use globally, it certainly has practical uses when a military is deployed into a hostile territory that involves desert climates. The truly unreasonable part is what they are doing fighting there and in such numbers that billions would need to be expended on air conditioning (some) quarters and equipment. All of this in a country that lacks for air conditioning itself. Ie, isn't developed enough to possess even the hint of local demand for it because more basic social needs like clean water, basic medical care, schools/education, and roads don't properly exist. Air conditioning and other first world comfort concerns are one of the last problems you encounter as a country modernizes and develops a sort of democratic free market system. Heating systems and refrigeration come well in advance of this even. So the fact that we're spending more on A/C than we do on NASA in a failed state with no market system and no suitable infrastructure for electricity does raise some basic questions about missions and priorities.
Except of course when you're fighting it in the "comfort" of an air conditioned tent in the middle of nowhere. I can see a use for temperature control so computers will work reliably, but you could just as easily put them in bunkers, buildings or mobile vehicles (with their own AC) instead of goddamned tents right? Whatever. If we can rack up this much of a utilities bill fighting a war, imagine what we've racked up for actually fighting. Or for medical bills.
Update: I actually think it is entirely reasonable that the US military uses air conditioning in tents, despite the profligate waste of energy this demonstrates against overall energy use globally, it certainly has practical uses when a military is deployed into a hostile territory that involves desert climates. The truly unreasonable part is what they are doing fighting there and in such numbers that billions would need to be expended on air conditioning (some) quarters and equipment. All of this in a country that lacks for air conditioning itself. Ie, isn't developed enough to possess even the hint of local demand for it because more basic social needs like clean water, basic medical care, schools/education, and roads don't properly exist. Air conditioning and other first world comfort concerns are one of the last problems you encounter as a country modernizes and develops a sort of democratic free market system. Heating systems and refrigeration come well in advance of this even. So the fact that we're spending more on A/C than we do on NASA in a failed state with no market system and no suitable infrastructure for electricity does raise some basic questions about missions and priorities.
25 June 2011
Turing tests
I was really fascinated by the reaction kicked up by a cultural writer attempting to write an article about a relatively famous libertarian philosopher (Nozick, and to another extent Hayek).
To put it mildly, the reaction among even some liberal or conservative writers/economists has been "what?". Or something along the lines of "this guy doesn't know what he's talking about". It came down eventually to something like a Turing Test for ideology. If you can explain the opposing views from their perspective to the point of being able to appear like one of them, that makes your rejection of such views more plausible and complete. Because you clearly would be able to understand such views but still find them ridiculous. The association with Mill's defence of free speech on these grounds is not by accident. Mill effectively says that if there is no substantial opposition to a view then we should find opposition and arm it with the strongest arguments available before we can safely conclude there shouldn't need to be opposition to such a view, and that for this among other reasons, we need absolute protections of free speech in a free society. There are lots of public positions which have shifted over time (drug legalisation or homosexuals and marriage laws for instance) in part because these views were permitted to be expressed, questions asked, and the strongest available arguments were aired against the strongest arguments available in defence of the status quo. And it is the status quo that is being found wanting and is abandoned.
The real effective problem is that most people take very little time to try to understand the strongest arguments of their political or ideological oppositions. People in relatively obscure political movements (like libertarians) have plenty of time to try to understand the mainstream positions on anything and everything. It's all around you in those circumstances. So understanding the straw men, the weakest arguments, the populist movements, and even up into the academic defences with their boring technical treatises and complex mathematical equations comes pretty naturally when you're surrounded on all sides by people who breathe in and out and the same things get spouted out of their mouths. Outside of academic circles, libertarianism as a philosophy isn't extremely popular (it isn't very popular there either, but its general view toward public policy positions are more so there than among the general public). Although some "normal" people claim to be such but when questioned about it, they either don't know what it is (usually some vague associations with it being "not-communist/socialist" will come up) or adhere strongly to some very curious political positions that appear wholly incompatible with almost any version of libertarian political philosophy from pragmatic utilitarianism to the anarcho-capitalistic sentiments of Ayn Rand. Ie, they're actually conservatives who heard a fun word for something like "get government off my back" and ignored the part about "and everyone else's too".
Similar problems emerge in other areas of thought. It's pretty clear that atheists are not well understood. Whereas Christianity is rather well understood by minor factions both related or unrelated within American society. Mormons, Jews and atheists all score very highly on general knowledge of religion or religious dogma of any kind, including Christianity, and much higher on non-Christian views than Christians do on say, those "filthy" Muslims or Hindus, much less Jews, Mormons or atheists, all much less common than Islam or Hindu worship globally speaking. I view this as certainly related to the general level of education possessed by the average atheist/secularist (true as well for Mormons and Jews). But it's also obvious that being part of an obscure minority tends to give a very different amount of perspective relating to the more popular positions held by most people, and a lot of time and attention to pay to such things, examine them, twist them around, and still end up rejecting them.
That is to say: that most people believe a lot of bullshit (not just their religious beliefs, not by a mile) and don't bother to defend it or consider it very carefully at all. The reason these arguments on things like free trade or anti-technological biases or concerns about inflation keep coming back up again and again is that most people have a set of beliefs... and those beliefs don't match the reasonable conclusions drawn from evidence nor the reasonable intuitions that would be predictable from even mainstream economic theories (much less some more radical libertarian ones). You end up having to explain opportunity costs and fixed costs as a hedge against inflation to people buying houses because there's this psychology surrounding debt, even financial debt incurred in a housing expense that can be offset by inflation and unreasonably large tax deductions, that demands that we feel we get rid of it. You end up having to explain that the pot of goods for most of us includes more than just the everyday prices on gasoline and milk that we can see readily moving up and down and also includes purchases that we may make every couple of years, or if we're very fortunate couple of decades, on appliances, automobiles, televisions, and computer parts (and even houses) and that this matters for inflation too. And so on down the line into minimum wage laws, rent controls, trade restrictions, rent seeking public policies, regulatory capture and so on.
It's a mad world out there and most people have never studied it. So to expect them to understand the parts they don't know anything about would be a little silly. But to expect them to write articles about it as though their thoughts warrant consideration, we should expect them to have done a little research. Enough that they know not just the flimsy material that the average person flings around regarding an obscure subject (like libertarians and atheists) but they can be armed with the strongest arguments and explain or examine them. Maybe they will still reject them in favor of their own.
But they should at least attempt to understand by speaking in the voice of their enemies and opponents on these ideological fault lines. And not by casting such views in the most unflattering lights (real or imagined) in order to dismiss them.
To put it mildly, the reaction among even some liberal or conservative writers/economists has been "what?". Or something along the lines of "this guy doesn't know what he's talking about". It came down eventually to something like a Turing Test for ideology. If you can explain the opposing views from their perspective to the point of being able to appear like one of them, that makes your rejection of such views more plausible and complete. Because you clearly would be able to understand such views but still find them ridiculous. The association with Mill's defence of free speech on these grounds is not by accident. Mill effectively says that if there is no substantial opposition to a view then we should find opposition and arm it with the strongest arguments available before we can safely conclude there shouldn't need to be opposition to such a view, and that for this among other reasons, we need absolute protections of free speech in a free society. There are lots of public positions which have shifted over time (drug legalisation or homosexuals and marriage laws for instance) in part because these views were permitted to be expressed, questions asked, and the strongest available arguments were aired against the strongest arguments available in defence of the status quo. And it is the status quo that is being found wanting and is abandoned.
The real effective problem is that most people take very little time to try to understand the strongest arguments of their political or ideological oppositions. People in relatively obscure political movements (like libertarians) have plenty of time to try to understand the mainstream positions on anything and everything. It's all around you in those circumstances. So understanding the straw men, the weakest arguments, the populist movements, and even up into the academic defences with their boring technical treatises and complex mathematical equations comes pretty naturally when you're surrounded on all sides by people who breathe in and out and the same things get spouted out of their mouths. Outside of academic circles, libertarianism as a philosophy isn't extremely popular (it isn't very popular there either, but its general view toward public policy positions are more so there than among the general public). Although some "normal" people claim to be such but when questioned about it, they either don't know what it is (usually some vague associations with it being "not-communist/socialist" will come up) or adhere strongly to some very curious political positions that appear wholly incompatible with almost any version of libertarian political philosophy from pragmatic utilitarianism to the anarcho-capitalistic sentiments of Ayn Rand. Ie, they're actually conservatives who heard a fun word for something like "get government off my back" and ignored the part about "and everyone else's too".
Similar problems emerge in other areas of thought. It's pretty clear that atheists are not well understood. Whereas Christianity is rather well understood by minor factions both related or unrelated within American society. Mormons, Jews and atheists all score very highly on general knowledge of religion or religious dogma of any kind, including Christianity, and much higher on non-Christian views than Christians do on say, those "filthy" Muslims or Hindus, much less Jews, Mormons or atheists, all much less common than Islam or Hindu worship globally speaking. I view this as certainly related to the general level of education possessed by the average atheist/secularist (true as well for Mormons and Jews). But it's also obvious that being part of an obscure minority tends to give a very different amount of perspective relating to the more popular positions held by most people, and a lot of time and attention to pay to such things, examine them, twist them around, and still end up rejecting them.
That is to say: that most people believe a lot of bullshit (not just their religious beliefs, not by a mile) and don't bother to defend it or consider it very carefully at all. The reason these arguments on things like free trade or anti-technological biases or concerns about inflation keep coming back up again and again is that most people have a set of beliefs... and those beliefs don't match the reasonable conclusions drawn from evidence nor the reasonable intuitions that would be predictable from even mainstream economic theories (much less some more radical libertarian ones). You end up having to explain opportunity costs and fixed costs as a hedge against inflation to people buying houses because there's this psychology surrounding debt, even financial debt incurred in a housing expense that can be offset by inflation and unreasonably large tax deductions, that demands that we feel we get rid of it. You end up having to explain that the pot of goods for most of us includes more than just the everyday prices on gasoline and milk that we can see readily moving up and down and also includes purchases that we may make every couple of years, or if we're very fortunate couple of decades, on appliances, automobiles, televisions, and computer parts (and even houses) and that this matters for inflation too. And so on down the line into minimum wage laws, rent controls, trade restrictions, rent seeking public policies, regulatory capture and so on.
It's a mad world out there and most people have never studied it. So to expect them to understand the parts they don't know anything about would be a little silly. But to expect them to write articles about it as though their thoughts warrant consideration, we should expect them to have done a little research. Enough that they know not just the flimsy material that the average person flings around regarding an obscure subject (like libertarians and atheists) but they can be armed with the strongest arguments and explain or examine them. Maybe they will still reject them in favor of their own.
But they should at least attempt to understand by speaking in the voice of their enemies and opponents on these ideological fault lines. And not by casting such views in the most unflattering lights (real or imagined) in order to dismiss them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
