The Real Problem with Unity '08

There is an article up at American Thinker that provides lots of interesting historical detail about the presidency of Andrew Johnson, the Democrat Abraham Lincoln chose as his running mate and who thus became his eventual successor.

Unfortunately, while the facts contained in this history lesson make for good reading, the argument they are marshaled to support does not follow from them. Author Michael Zak describes the disastrous Johnson Presidency in the vein of providing a warning that the idea of a bipartisan ticket in the upcoming 2008 presidential election would be a disaster.

The article fails in this respect on three counts. First, it assumes that there is any substantive difference -- There isn't. -- between the two parties from which the candidates would come. Second, it fails to examine the cultural origin of this similarity, as I discussed some time ago when considering the common political fantasy of a "third party" (of which Unity '08 is a variant) magically coming to the rescue:

And so, until the loony right takes a look in the mirror rather than dodging the issue by laughing at the equally loony left -- and vice versa -- there will be no alternatives to our current state of affairs, even if a third party, founded on better ideas, actually appears. Furthermore, for such a party to win, enough people would have to be more fully-consistent in their support for freedom to elect it or for it to have a lasting effect on the political landscape. (And such an occurrence would merely reflect a deeper cultural change among the electorate.)

Third -- and worst of all -- it ignores the biggest short-term disaster this election is most likely to bring. As noted in my previous blog post, John McCain is almost always regarded as the man who should head up such a ticket. How would the election of this co-sponsor of McCain-Feingold (i.e., censorship disguised as political "reform"), follower of the Church of Global Warming, and fan of National Service (to name just a few concrete vices) be anything but a disaster, no matter which ticket he headed up?

"Unity" is not the unlimited virtue some people believe it is, and Zak gets that much of the picture right. But when both parties are taking us down the same primrose path, the possibility of a Unity ticket merely distracts us from the real problem: We are going to have, in effect, at least two "unity tickets" come next November and John McCain stands an excellent chance of showing up on one of them. Even if I were I a Republican, I would have to campaign hard against John McCain, and even if he were running against Hillary Clinton.

We do not want any of what McCain has to offer, especially the discredit he would bring to the ideas -- economic freedom and strong national defense -- he would run on and immediately betray.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 168

Repeal Sarbanes-Oxley

Alex Epstein makes a good case for repealing Sarbanes-Oxley over at Principles in Practice.

That America's honest, productive businessmen are spending their time and shareholder money to "prove" they are not criminals — when they could be spending those hours and dollars on R&D, new product launches, or mergers and acquisitions — is a monumental injustice. Is it any wonder that misery among top executives is reported throughout corporate America, that top executives are departing at record rates, that more and more public companies are going private, that only a small fraction of the largest IPOs last year took place in the United States?

I completely agree. And let's not forget that on top of this fundamental injustice is the fact that the law may have the unintended consequence of deputizing attorneys, thanks to some very unfortunate creative prosecution by the Feds....

Calendar Day!

Radio Dismuke is today's entry in Page-a-Day's 2007 Wacky Web Sites: 365 For The Weird & Wired calendar. That and more over at Dismuke's blog.

Tipping Point

There is an interesting discussion about tipping going on over at Night Watchman. My position is somewhat like the Inspector's. I have agreed for years with Judith Martin (better known as "Miss Manners") that tipping should be abolished in favor of service workers being paid appropriately by their employers.

The fact is that what we have here is an incoherent system. In what sense do the servers work for the restaurateur if he does not pay them wages? Is it that he provides a venue and situation in which the servers can try to impress -- or press -- the customers into giving them handouts? And is that a dignified way to do business?

The just solution is to have employers pay the employees, passing on the cost to customers frankly, by building the amount into the cost of the dishes ordered.

There is nothing I find more uncomfortable than situations in which there are undefined and conflicting expectations and fears held by all parties. Tipping is not a huge deal, but it definitely falls under that same unpleasant category.

[Note: Myrhaf does bring up something I will clarify, in the name of erring on the side of being too clear: I most certainly do not think that tipping should be outlawed. Having said that, I refer the interested reader to the comments below regarding Myrhaf's example, which I think differs in kind from essentially mandatory tipping for standard service.]

A Day of Infamy

The Los Angeles Times noted yesterday that McCain-Feingold has turned five. Although blogger Brian Doherty wrongly agrees with the premise that political contributions are somehow inherently "corrupt", he does cite a prediction that I think is accurate:

While the Supreme Court has so far upheld the patently anti-Constitutional ban on advertising by citizens' groups 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election, the rise of Internet politics may eventually supercede this atrocity. Witness the anti-Hillary Clinton "1984" ad that caused such a stir on YouTube just last week. Such ads, cheaper than dirt (it costs money to distribute dirt, YouTube's free), will only be more important with every election cycle.

For this reason, look for Congress to start taking an interest in "unregulated" Internet speech any day now. Money has never been the issue. Cleansing our speech of impure thoughts about politicians is the real agenda. [bold added]

This law should have been overturned and ought to be repealed. But barring that, it would be poetic justice of a sort (and potentially a major disaster averted by accident) if this very law somehow caused John McCain to lose the Presidency.

But let's work to keep from having to depend on such luck!

-- CAV

Updates

3-30-06: Added note to section on tipping.

Rampant Criminalization

Jonathan Turley has an interesting column up at Jewish World Review in which he catalogs the astonishing array of new, victimless crimes that have sprung up like weeds over recent years. Here is just one example.

Consider the budding criminal career of Kay Leibrand. The 61-year-old grandmother lived a deceptively quiet life in Palo Alto, Calif., until the prosecutors outed her as a habitual horticultural offender. It appears that she allowed her hedge bushes to grow more than 2 feet high -- a crime in the city. Battling cancer, Leibrand had allowed her shrubbery to grow into a criminal enterprise. (After her arraignment and shortly before her jury trial, she was allowed to cut down her bushes and settle the case.) [bold added]

I found it no less astonishing that Congress had recently outlawed the sale of horse meat for human consumption and that public profanity is a crime in some locales.

Turley is right to say that this epidemic of criminalizing noncriminal behavior is political pandering and that it undermines respect for the law, but he could have gone further on both counts.

In considering just the question of why our government has become so intrusive, I said the following some time ago.

And so many of the same people who fight for criminals to be excused from responsibility will support the government taking an ever-larger role in making sure that what ordinary adults and even children used to be trusted to do will get done. A government official will inconvenience you at your own home to make you pump your tanks whether or not you would do that already. And law enforcement will overreact to reports that someone might have something remotely like a gun. And our lawmakers will get closer and closer to banning the possession of firearms outright.

In other words, the politicians are both merely cashing in on our general cultural breakdown and, ironically, serving as convenient scapegoats for the excess in regulations!

Furthermore -- and I have also commented on how such bad laws undermine respect for all law -- Turley doesn't tell the half of it on this score. Awhile back, city officials in Omaha were urging citizens to call 9-1-1 over violations of its new smoking ordinance!

At the moment, the only thing between a few lit cigarettes and a total collapse of the ability of the police department in Omaha to respond promptly to an [actual] emergency is whatever residual rationality the public has left. And that rationality has to be implemented in the form of breaking the law -- by turning a blind eye to a "crime" in progress!

We are not only all being made into "criminals". We are also becoming scofflaws as a matter of survival.

And finally, as we have seen elsewhere, this inordinate concern of the government with the behavior of those citizens it can expect to be law-abiding (from cultural inertia, if nothing else) contrasts with its eagerness to turn a blind eye to the actions, often including real crimes, of those it cannot. The logical end of what Turley describes, has, in other contexts, been called anarcho-tyranny.

The fact remains that the government cannot take care of us, but that it will "take care of us" if we do not begin reasserting control over our own lives and taking the personal responsibility that entails.

-- CAV

Updates

3-29-07: Corrected a typo.

Quick Roundup 167

Interesting Comments on Socialized Medicine

Friday's post on a conservative's "market-based" proposal to "reform" the medical sector has generated some good comments.

First of all, Galileo writes an excellent answer to a conservative who complained that my call for the abolition of such programs as Medicare is "unrealistic" (as if I don't know this won't fly any time soon).

This part of it sums up the whole problem very nicely: "We have had the conservative response to the welfare state for 70+ years now." This is a very good way to begin when countering the notion that arguing about fundamental principles is "impractical".

And second, Jim May points out a post by a blogger -- she calls herself "Jane Galt" of all things -- who is (or was) supposed to be for freedom in medicine, but folded like a cheap lawn chair in November. This sentence reveals a complete lack of understanding of the fundamental difference between capitalism and state controls: "What I don't hear a lot of people addressing is what sort of system it is feasible for us to get, given the interest groups and institutions we already have."

Perhaps Arnold Kling should keep this query in mind the next time he proposes Libertarian medical experiments in the name of providing superfluous (further) evidence that socialized medicine "doesn't work".

Quick! Tell him to log on to Conservapedia!

The rather threadbare Conservapedia entry on Hell looks like it would benefit from the Pope's input.

Hell is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanise the faithful, Pope Benedict XVI has said.

Then they can lock that entry for good since the Pope is infallible.

On a serious note, I would have to agree with Neil Boortz that Conservapedia is doing a nice job of making conservatives look foolish. However, unlike him, I offer no advice to the conservatives: just a word of thanks to founder Andrew Schlafly for helping show everyone the logical endpoint of the movement. (And Sam Harris recently explained indirectly why we shouldn't expect the conservatives to take Boortz's advice any time soon.)

And speaking of logical endpoints, the last line of that Boortz post reads like the punch line of an inside joke to this non-Libertarian. "This all sure makes me glad to be a Libertarian." Really? That reminds me of the following passage I once read, as excerpted by Peter Schwartz from Libertarian Robert Block:

[Libertarianism] allows for an amazing diversity.... We've seen priests, monogamists, family men as the fellow-Libertarians of the gays, the sado-masochists, the leather-freaks, and those into what they call "rational bestiality".... Only Libertarians could gather together the homosexual motorcycle gang, the acid-dropper fascinated by the price of silver, and the Puerto Rican nationalist immersed in the Austrian school of economics.

Gotta love that "acid dropper fascinated by the price of silver"! Perhaps if he'd read Peter Schwartz's Libertarianism: the Perversion of Liberty, he'd think twice before saying something like that. Or not.

What Modern Education Accomplishes

Lately, it seems that I have been constantly bringing up Ellsworth Toohey's admonition to not examine a folly too closely, but only to look at what it accomplishes.

Sadly, it seems the best way to understand much of what goes on in the world today. For instance:

[This proposal , by the mildly retarded] Ed [to nationalize the oil industry] is an exaggerated example of the stupidity we are up against in today's culture. Understanding capitalism requires an ability to think in higher abstractions and principles. With progressive education teaching people to think in the opposite manner, in isolated concretes that never integrate into principles, we're in big trouble. Stupidity and freedom do not mix. [bold added]

Indeed. Progressive education is how statists have managed to bottle this stuff up and sell it, in a manner of speaking. Now, even many alleged friends of capitalism cannot provide an adequate intellectual defense of it, as we have seen already. And, as Conservapedia shows, some are even trying to gain market share for their own version of stupidity.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a typo.

Conservatives Ape Left -- Again

Whether they're taking over the welfare state, censoring a major scientific debate, using government "encouragement" to reduce carbon emissions, or boarding the racial quota express, conservatives are looking more and more like their fellow altruists, the leftists, all the time. Today, we can chalk up another example: Conservapedia.

Recall that there is nothing conservatives like more than to complain about the "Mainstream Media" -- not that I am getting ready to deny the well-known biases of news media dominated by left-wing reporters and commentators.

But if conservatives are going to complain about "liberal bias" with the implication that they are champions of objectivity, projects like the new Conservapedia speak volumes about their motives. An article from the Houston Chronicle lists several excerpts from Wikipedia and Conservapedia head to head, including the following from their respective entries on dinosaurs.

• Wikipedia: Dinosaurs were vertebrate animals that dominated terrestrial ecosystems for over 160-million years, first appearing approximately 230-million years ago.
• Conservapedia: Of those Christians who reject evolution, the Young Earth Creationists believe, based primarily on Biblical sources, but also drawing on archaeological and fossil evidence, that dinosaurs were created on the 6th day of the Creation Week approximately 6,000 years ago; that they lived in the Garden of Eden in harmony with other animals, eating only plants; that pairs of various dinosaur baramins were taken onto Noah's Ark during the Great Flood and were preserved from drowning; that fossilized dinosaur bones originated during the mass killing of the Flood; and that some descendants of those dinosaurs taken aboard the Ark still roam the earth today.

No missing evidence or ideologically-motivated distortion there! Riiiiight.

-- CAV

Updates

3-28-07: Corrected a typo.

Call Security, Get Sued?

Recall that back in November, six Islamofascist agents provocateur deliberately impersonated terrorists in order to cause themselves to be thrown off a US Airways flight, only to start whining about "flying while Moslem" in preparation for a lawsuit-cum-media circus. Back then, I said the following.

It is not religious persecution for airline security personnel to make sure a Moslem isn't going to turn an airline flight into a huge bomb. It is common sense, reason applied to the limited evidence one has available at the moment. To begrudge a man of that is to declare moral bankruptcy.

It is both reason and evidence that these imams want you to ignore any time their religion can be brought up on even the remotest pretext. This is why Moslems behaved violently after the Pope criticized their faith -- for condoning violence. They were not really "offended". Whatever we infidels think is beneath contempt to them. They want to intimidate us to the point that we quit thinking whenever they want us to, so when they say "Jump!" we'll ask "How high?" if we dare say anything.

This act of unmitigated gall is no blow for civil rights. No. In this case, a real blow for the only rights that exist -- individual rights -- would be to stand up proudly for US Airways and its other passengers. Forgotten in this controversy are the property rights of US Airways to deny service to anyone they please, and the right to life and liberty of everyone who acted rationally in an effort to prevent another atrocity like those that occurred on September 11, 2001. [bold added]

Sadly, the Islamofascist Six may have come up with a clever way to do achieve their goal. According to an editorial in USA Today, they are attempting to drag individual passengers into their already frivolous and unjust lawsuit.

Their lawsuit, filed earlier this month, accused the airline and Metropolitan Airports Commission of anti-Muslim bias. That was expected. What's unique and especially troubling, though, is the effort to identify an unknown number of passengers and airline employees who reported suspicions so they might also be included as defendants. For example, the imams want to know the names of an elderly couple who turned around "to watch" and then made cellphone calls, presumably to authorities, as the men prayed.

This legal tactic seems designed to intimidate passengers willing to do exactly what authorities have requested -- say something about suspicious activity.

...

US Airways can afford to defend itself and the crew in court. Passengers who notified authorities don't have those resources. Several lawyers have promised to represent such passengers for free. The American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a moderate Muslim group, will raise funds for their defense. Rep. Steve Pearce, R-N.M., has introduced a bill to shield from legal liability those who report suspicious behavior.

It shouldn't have to come to that, especially if a judge has the wisdom to throw out the complaints against the "John Doe" passengers before they're identified. [bold added, links dropped]

I applaud USA Today for making this report, which should serve as a wake-up call to a country that seems to have hit the snooze button -- again -- since the religiously-motivated atrocities of September 2001.

However, this editorial does make a dangerous concession to the enemy: It brings up "ethnic profiling" only to call it "reprehensible". Although ethnic profiling for the purpose of arbitrary discrimination would certainly be morally reprehensible -- if anyone were ever actually guilty of it in this day and age -- it should be within the legal rights of US Airways to engage in it if it pleases, as an extension of its right to refuse service to anyone, which in turn stems from the inalienable right to property of its owners.

But the only reason ethnic profiling comes up at all is because the overwhelming majority of terrorists happen to be followers of a certain major religion, Islam. It is thus not unreasonable to take a passenger's religion (or apparent religion) into account when deciding whether to allow someone onto an airplane, as I said in November.

This editorial should have at the very least made the distinction between the profiling as a means of discrimination and as a means for screening passengers more efficiently with limited resources. Unfortunately, it does not, and in the process concedes the evil moral premise of the Islamofascist Six, even while correctly identifying its deadly results. Contrary to this premise, ethnic profiling should not be punishable by law.

This lawsuit, as emphasized by this deliberate harassment of some of the passengers, is a naked attempt by these imams to employ our nation's dangerously broken legal machinery to make dhimmis of all of us.

-- CAV

PS: One further point bears making. The only remotely valid reason to file a lawsuit over something someone says at an airport would be if what that person could reasonably be construed as slander (which clearly does not apply to the other passengers), or incitement (which might be worth exploring in the case of the imams). Nothing else -- even if passengers shouted epithets at this heap of human refuse -- should be a basis for touching so much as a hair on their heads.

It's a concept that seems increasingly foreign to the so-called civil rights movement: Freedom of speech.

PPS: Here's another disturbing thought. As if it is not bad enough that Steve Pearse sees the need to introduce legislation that would shield reports to airport security from liability, consider the precedent it sets for later governmental abuse. Will people who act as government informants for such non-crimes as violating environmental laws similarly be protected?

Just as fraud was already illegal, meaning there was no need for further legislation after Enron, so is free speech already in no need of further legal protection. This bill, an understandable but mistaken reaction to the problem posed by our legal system (and exploited by the Islamofascist Six), can ultimately introduce more problems than it solves. (Of course, this is not to say there aren't already such laws as I envision already on the books.)

Updates

Today: (1) Minor edits. (2) PS and PPS.
5-13-07: Corrected a typo.

Quick Roundup 166

Britain: Do Not Apologize for Slavery

Andrew Medworth argues against the notion that Great Britain should issue an official apology for slavery, the barbaric institution that it took the lead in abolishing two centuries ago Sunday.

[T]he proper emotion today is not pride: we played no part in abolishing slavery, and it is very difficult for any individual today to know how they would have behaved in a time when the prevailing morality was so very different. Nor should we feel sorrow or regret: we are not culpable for the offences of our forebears.

Instead, we should feel two things. The first is happiness: we should celebrate the fact that we live in a country which has abolished slavery, and in which people of all races can live together in equality before the law. The second is a steely determination to eliminate the remnants of this vicious practice, along with the fundamental philosophic ideas which give it strength and succour. Without the latter in particular, slavery will last forever.

It is, of course, the very philosophical ideas of which he speaks that are behind efforts on both sides of the Atlantic to redistribute wealth in the name of "reparations", thereby providing us with the uniquely modern spectacle of an attempt to reestablish slavery (albeit in a different form) -- on moral grounds!

Koran Cited in German Court

Moral relativism in the form of multiculturalism can be seen here directly resulting in the government of a free society failing catastrophically to protect individual rights. From Isaac Schrodinger's excerpt of the article in Spiegel Online:

The judge rejected the application for a speedy divorce by referring to a passage in the Koran that some have controversially interpreted to mean that a husband can beat his wife. It's a supposed right which is the subject of intense debate among Muslim scholars and clerics alike."The exercise of the right to castigate does not fulfill the hardship criteria as defined by Paragraph 1565 (of German federal law)," the daily Frankfurter Rundschau quoted the judge's letter as saying. It must be taken into account, the judge argued, that both man and wife have Moroccan backgrounds. [bold added]

It is bad enough that there exists in Islam an ideology so benighted that it is widely believed by its adherents to sanction the beating of women. It is worse that in multiculturalism, we have an ideology that will make escape from the former -- even by leaving the country of one's birth! -- impossible, if carried out consistently.

Home Brewing-Related Curiosity

As a home brewer, I found this wrapper from a Prohibition-era block of yeast interesting.


As the writeup indicates, providing supplies to brewers was one way some breweries stayed afloat during the "Great Experiment". (HT: Dismuke)

Make Microsoft Word Less Annoying

And speaking of companies whose products I try to avoid, Paul Hsieh pointed to an interesting article about how to make Microsoft Word more bearable to use. For example, here is how to correct one of its most irritating default behaviors -- turning email addresses and URLs into hyperlinks.

To stop Word from hyperlinking in the future, click Tools > AutoCorrect Options, then click the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Clear the checkbox for "Internet and network paths with hyperlinks." Then click the AutoFormat tab and clear the same checkbox. If you want to manually add a hyperlink, select the desired text, right-click it and choose Hyperlink.

Like some of the commenters, I use Open Office, LaTeX, or Matlab depending on what I'm doing, but I'll keep this article in mind for the next time I find myself having to use Word.

And if you found the article on Word interesting, you'll probably also like this site.

-- CAV

Blog Admin Notes

I just made some changes to the blog that I've been meaning to for quite some time. As usual, your feedback is more than welcome. The changes are as follows:

• "Cleaned up" the menu at the top of the side bar.
• Created a new FAQ. Highlights include a slight reordering and broad categorization of the questions, slight revisions throughout, a picture of the map that gave me my "pen surname", and several new questions at the end.
• Updated and reformatted my page of favorite posts. What is my favorite one? See the FAQ!
• Changed a couple of the ads on my sidebar. From the looks of it, it appears that the paperback version of Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan is out!
  

That sure was a lot of HTML-slinging! I'm calling it a day!

Oops. Forgot something administrivial....

A commenter recently complained of a page-loading oddity here, which I had also noticed a little. Mrs. du Toit explains that the problem is due to a recent change by the folks at sitemeter. The problem seems to have gone away, but if anyone sees the same thing, feel free to let me know.

-- CAV

What constitutes "good news"?

Over at RealClear Politics is an editorial that reports on the debate within the GOP on how to counter the Democrats' latest attempt to socialize medicine. Although it strikes an optimistic note -- and, I suppose that after observing the antics of Governors Romney and Schwartzenegger, we should be thankful that there is a debate at all on the GOP side -- what it really does is bring up the question, "What constitutes 'good news'?"

Three things stand out about the article.

First, author Kimberley Strassel notes that the initial skepticism among Republicans concerning health savings accounts when that idea was first introduced over a decade ago eventually gave way to broad acceptance.

Conservative health-care guru John Goodman remembers going to Washington in the early 1990s to get Republicans interested in individual health savings accounts, and "only about five guys would even meet with me," he recalls. Now, HSAs "are a religion" among the right, he notes, and Republicans used their last years in the majority to significantly expand access to these accounts. In the past 15 years, the GOP has also planted the roots of Medicare reform, looked at interstate trade in health insurance, and got behind competitive Medicare reforms in their states.

This sounds encouraging at first blush, and certainly, it is a sign that capitalism has gained somewhat broader public acceptance over the years, or politicians, who are notoriously timid about actually taking principled stands, wouldn't touch HSAs with a ten-foot pole. But is it not troubling that even this tiny first step towards a freeer medical sector has not gained more ground than it has, and that furthermore, GOP reform of the medical sector hasn't gone much further than half-hearted support for this measure?

Second, other reforms of the welfare state that most people regard as "free market" reforms have gained acceptance even among Democrats.

... When Republicans railed about welfare queens, they were viewed as the heartless party. When they turned the debate into one about the vicious cycle of dependency and poverty that welfare causes, they captured voters' imagination--they captured even Bill Clinton's imagination--and pushed through entitlement reform. Today, even the left agrees welfare-recipients should work.

The problem is, we still have welfare recipients, the government is "encouraging" them to work, and the moral premise behind welfare remains unchallenged. Indeed, the motivation for the reforms is not unequivocally the protection of property rights, but the moral improvement of the erstwhile recipients. In other words, even the welfare "reformers" take as a given that the government exists to take care of us. (And maybe the Democrats like the idea because they know it is not a threat to the welfare state.)

Third, in a move touted as a major advance (and which is Strassel's point of departure), a supposedly free-market alternative to "Hillarycare" is being proposed by Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn. It is interesting to read both of Strassel's descriptions of this plan.

... Coburn released a big-ideas blueprint for restructuring the entire health-care system--the tax code, Medicare, tort liability, insurance laws--along free-market lines. Dr. Coburn's plan builds on the White House's own bold proposal in January to revamp tax laws so as to put consumers back in control of their health-care decisions. Both plans are about fundamental, bottom-up health-care reforms, cast in the language of markets, consumers and individual control.

This will sound good enough to many fiscal conservatives, although not to me. The only way to "reform" Medicare (or any other welfare program) is simple: to abolish it. There is nothing "free market" about the government forcibly redistributing income.

But the kicker is Strassel's own alternative phrasing later in the article, which comes after she cites Mike Franc of the Heritage Foundation urging the Republicans to get outside their "intellectual comfort zone" when thinking about medical reform.

Those on the free-market side are starting to understand the need for a new language, especially if they are to coax more nervous elements of their party into embracing radical change. When President Bush unveiled his health-care tax overhaul in the State of the Union, he stressed that health-care decisions needed to be made by "patients and doctors," not government or insurance companies. Mr. Coburn's bill summary is littered with the words "choice," "empowerment," "competition," "flexibility," "control"--which is not only an honest assessment of what his proposal would provide, but one with which Americans can identify. [bold added]

That bit about health savings accounts being "like a religion" from earlier in the article is starting to sound very profound, if unintentionally so, right about now. Why? Because it is clear that if the Republicans are feeling the need to "re-frame" (i.e., euphemize) their side of the debate, they do not really understand how capitalism works or, therefore, why freeing the medical sector entirely from government interference would be a good thing. But then, if the did, they would present any proposal for "reform" of our "health care system" as part of a broader campaign for a fully free economy. Instead, they accept on faith that the trappings of a free market will somehow make the welfare state "work" better, while simultaneously "selling" these "reforms" to voters who actually might support moving to a freer economy.

And if I sound too paranoid, compare this to the following passage from C. Bradley Thomposn's seminal essay on "The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism":

How does a conservative welfare state work? And how does it differ from a liberal welfare state?

The neocons advocate a strong central government that provides welfare services to all people who need them while, at the same time, giving people choice about how they want those services delivered. That is what makes it “conservative,” they argue. That is how the neocons reconcile Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Hayek and Trotsky.

In practice, this means that the coercive force of the state is used to provide for all of the people's needs—from universal social security to health and child care to education -- but the people choose their own "private" social security accounts; they choose their own "private" health and child-care providers; and parents receive vouchers and choose which schools their children will attend. The choices, of course, are not the wide-open choices of a free market; rather, the people are permitted to choose from among a handful of pre-authorized providers. The neocons call this scheme a free-market reform of the welfare state. [bold added]

Which beings us back to our underlying question: Is a "free-market" scheme for "health care reform" necessarily good news? In the sense that proposing such a scheme reflects broader public acceptance of capitalism, it does. But given that the GOP is more interested in taking over the welfare state than doing away with it, and that this understanding of capitalism is muddled to the point that many on the right regard such statist schemes as carbon credits as "free-market", it is bad news.

What I fear we will get instead of true free market reform is a new, Lakoffian "language" with which the GOP can dupe voters into believing it is in the business of freeing the medical sector from government control, while in practice, the Republicans merely perform a few minor cosmetic changes to a fundamentally immoral and impractical system. This will not only fail to end the "health care" crisis, it will set capitalism up as the scapegoat for the next round.

This is not to say that it is inconceivable that Coburn's proposal is better than I think it is (To be fair, this is the first I've heard of it.), or that some worthwhile ideas for reform will surface over the next few years, but advocates of capitalism must be very clear that the ultimate goal of any economic reform is not a "reformed" welfare state, but a welfare state consigned to the ash bin of history. Otherwise, we risk allowing proponents of the welfare state to speak for capitalism.

No matter what concrete measures (if any) one advocates during the ongoing debate about the role of the government in the medical sector, one must always be explicit about why one advocates it, one's actual principles and goals, and the qualifications, if any, of one's support.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 165

Two British Submariners Die off Coast of Alaska

It has been nearly fifteen years since I left the submarine force, but whenever I hear about something like this, the memories come flooding back.

This is an inherently dangerous line of work. During a junior officer tour whose sea time was cut short by a trip to the shipyard for decommissioning, I got to see a small fire and a collision at sea, but fortunately, no deaths or serious injuries.

It takes a navy's best sailors in terms of intellect and character to man a submarine. I remember what good men we had back then, and I think of them any time something like this happens. Furthermore, submarine crews are not that large, which means that the loss will not just be professional for their shipmates, but personal as well. My deepest condolences go to the crew of the HMS Tireless and to their families.

Bubblehead posts more at the Ultraquiet No More group blog, and further news can also be found, as always, at The Sub Report.

Bush and Chavez, the Two Amigos

On the heels of my disappointment with President Bush's recent performance as "opening act" for Hugo Chavez in South America, the Ayn Rand Institute published a press release that summarized the spectacle and its deeper meaning quite nicely.

As President Bush ends his tour of Latin America, he has vowed to deliver "social justice" to poor Latin Americans.

"In announcing his commitment to achieving 'social justice' in Latin America," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, "President Bush is following in the footsteps, not of Thomas Jefferson, but of Hugo Chavez.

"'Social justice' is the notion that everyone deserves an equal share of the wealth that exists in a nation -- regardless of how productive he is. Justice, on this view, consists of seizing the wealth of the productive and giving it to the unproductive. This is the ideal preached and conscientiously put into practice by leftist dictators like Chavez.

"But it is precisely this type of envy-driven philosophy that is responsible for the wretched conditions in Latin America. It is no mystery why a nation that shackles and loots its most productive citizens should be weighed down by poverty and stagnation.

"President Bush should tell the people of Latin America to reject the immoral goal of 'social justice' and embrace the American principles of freedom and capitalism."

Interestingly enough, a few other recent news stories point to how pitifully close our nation is to following Chavez's footsteps.

First, The Economist paints a scary portrait of the Venezuelan economy already in serious trouble due to Chavez's meddling. (HT: Noumenal Self)

The economy is showing some signs of strain. The inflation rate, at 17% last year, was the highest in Latin America -- even though Venezuela's currency is overvalued. Despite the oil bonanza, the government has run a fiscal deficit in most of Mr Chavez's time in power: this year that deficit may reach 3% of GDP.

Aside from other foolishness planned by Chavez and outlined there, he has started tinkering with the currency.

First, Mr. Chavez said the authorities would remove three zeroes from the denomination of the currency, the bolivar. Then he said the new bolivar, worth 1,000 old bolivars, would be renamed the "bolivar fuerte," or strong bolivar.

Finally, at the behest of Mr. Chavez, the central bank said this week that it would reintroduce a 12.5-cent coin, a symbol of Venezuela's prosperity in the 1960s and 1970s before freewheeling oil booms ended in abrupt devaluations, after three decades out of circulation.

Mr. Chavez champions these ideas, which will take effect in January, as ways to combat inflation, which in recent weeks crept up to 20 percent, the highest in Latin America. Officials blame "hoarders" for shortages of basic goods and price increases for food on the black market. Mr. Chavez says the renaming and redenominating the currency will instill confidence in it.

A Hugo Faria put it, "Anyone who sees a 12 1/2-cent coin as a remedy for this country's problems isn't thinking too clearly." This is charitable almost to the point of injustice. I would say that anyone who thinks that magically declaring that tokens and pieces of paper are valuable isn't thinking clearly.

But that would upset the many people in America itself who also think that fiat currency is a good idea. Quick. What four-letter word appears only as a word for a color in this article on why we should dump the greenback? Hint: I would call it the only objective basis for "confidence" in any currency. The article is interesting, but the real story isn't that metal tokens wear out more slowly than pieces of paper. It's that our currency has no backing and buys considerably less all the time.

And if America and Venezuela are both dabbling in their own variants of anti-capitalist economics, does John McCain offer hope when he warns against the spread of socialism?

The Arizona senator said that "everyone should understand the connections" between Chavez, Morales and communist Cuban President Fidel Castro.

"They inspire each other. They assist each other. They get ideas from each other," McCain said. "It's very disturbing."

Cuban-Americans are a key voting bloc in electoral-rich Florida and typically cast their ballots for Republicans.

As president, McCain said he would work on political, diplomatic and economic fronts to counter the rise of socialism, including efforts to spread free trade. Yet the United States must also stress the advantages of capitalism and democracy to win "a war of ideas" in the region, he said. [bold added]

No, not when his track record on freedom of speech at home comes to mind, he does not. In this respect, he is also an amigo of Chavez.

This champion of creeping censorship (not to mention shrinking protection of property rights) in the guise of campaign finance "reform" has apparently already forgotten that any war of ideas involves the ability to exercise free speech among private citizens at home. McCain is right that we must fight a battle of ideas, but he either does not understand the meaning of the words he spoke or is engaging in the most cynical of pandering. I suspect the latter.

Spring Has Sprung

It has become my custom each year to mark the arrival of spring here by poking affectionate fun at the semitropical metropolis I call home. One year, it was my first mosquito sighting. The next, my first anthill. I may have even mentioned spotting my first gecko of the year in the trash.

This year, I knew spring had arrived when, as I was taking out the trash one morning a week or so ago, I walked into my first huge spider web of the year! I look forward to firing up the barbecue pit and doing some light reading any day now!

The wildflowers in our back yard are also beginning to bloom. One year, a succession of busy weekends caused me to neglect mowing our back yard for long enough that a stunning number and variety of wild flowers go the chance to bloom in the small, enclosed space, which I see every morning when I open the window for Jerome. I enjoyed it so much that I now intentionally allow the yard to grow wild during the first few weeks of spring.

I don't have pictures to post of that, but they wouldn't hold a candle to Amit Ghate's orchids, or to this shot of flower stalls I found via Isaac Schrodinger's blog anyway, so I direct your attention elsewhere. Enjoy!

-- CAV

PS: A commenter notes a problem with this page loading via Internet Explorer. If you use IE and notice the problem he describes (which is distinct from a problem some users have with how it displays comments), please drop me a line.

Updates

Today: Minor edits, added PS.

Right Data, Wrong Lesson

Clarence Page pens an interesting column in which he describes the enormous success of America's black immigrants, and yet at the same time, ignores some obvious implications. The interesting question is: Why?

Consider the following data. Each bullet is quoted directly from Page's column.

• 43.8 percent of African immigrants had earned a college degree, compared with 42.5 of Asian-Americans, 28.9 percent of immigrants from Europe, Russia and Canada, and 23.1 percent of the U.S. population as a whole. [These statistics are from a 2000 study. For comparison, the U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2005 for Americans over the age of 25, 28% overall held at least bachelor's degrees, 49% of Asian-Americans, but only 18% of blacks. Not using the age cutoff, the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported in 2004 an 11% figure for blacks earning four-year degrees or higher. --ed]
  
• About 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, ..., but somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of the black students were "West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples."
• Immigrants, who make up 13 percent of the nation's college-age black population, account for more than a fourth of black students at Ivy League and other selective universities, according to the study of 28 colleges and universities published recently in the American Journal of Education. The proportion of immigrants was higher at private institutions, 28.8 percent, than at public colleges, where they made up 23.1 percent of enrollment.

Impressive, no? This is even more so when we compare black immigrants to native-born black Americans.

I am inclined to think that, based on such data, two things stand out. (1) If the America Martin Luther King dreamed of, in which blacks "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character", is not already here, it is near at hand. (2) American blacks ought to do some serious soul-searching about why they still remain, in so many respects, at the bottom rung of the economic ladder.

But Mr. Page has no such inclinations. Here is what he thinks of all this.

Are elite schools padding their racial diversity numbers with black immigrants who do not have a history of American slavery in their families? This development calls into question whether affirmative action admission policies are fulfilling their original intent. [italics and bold added]

First, if the emphasis on American slavery seemed odd to you, you are not alone. Second, it is unseemly to whine about being "disadvantaged" (as Page later does, in effect) in the presence of people who have had to live in the desperate poverty of the Third World!

Aside from the bizarre xenophobia, is also interesting to note that Page regards the "original intent" of affirmative action as "reparations for slavery". This is a new one to me. I was always under the impression that affirmative action, whatever the flaws in its basic premise, was supposed to mitigate past and present discrimination against certain demographic groups, and not exclusively blacks.

Be that as it may, Page ends by trying to have things both ways.

[W]e need to revisit the question of diversity. Unlike our system of feel-good game-playing, we need to focus on the deeper question of how opportunities can be opened to everyone who was left behind by the civil rights revolution. We tend to look too often at every aspect of diversity except economic class. [bold added]

What constitutes being "left behind by the civil rights revolution"? Obviously, Page doesn't regard the fact that black men are increasingly being judged on merit as meaning that nobody has been left behind who hasn't stranded himself.

No, to Page, the civil rights revolution was not about freeing the black man from the last vestiges of slavery, but of making countless Americans who never owned slaves forfeit "reparations" to the free descendants of slaves. In other words, Page advocates a kind of slavery, or at least a new kind of Jim Crow, himself. Mighty white of you, Clarence.

With Page, the moral inversion of the Civil Rights Movement has reached its logical conclusion. Instead of seeking the same recognition of the rights of black men as of everyone else, he seeks favors for the descendants of American slaves at everyone else's expense, including that of black immigrants! Instead of looking at the evidence that blacks need no special consideration to gain entry into college, Page complains that black immigrants are muscling native-born blacks out of admission slots they are entitled to, presumably because they are black, and were slaves in America, and, perhaps, poor. Instead of urging black youths to get to work, he panders to the cult of victim-hood.

When a black man fails to celebrate a clear victory for his own race, it is a sure sign that he is not sincerely interested in advancing the welfare of his race, which is to say, ensuring that the rights of all men are protected equally.

-- CAV

More Bipartisan Foolishness

Members of both parties have introduced to Congress a bill that would ban "genetic discrimination". Don't look for our President to veto it, either. He called for such legislation recently in a speech before the National Institutes of Health.

The bill would prohibit employers from using genetic information about an employee's predispositions for certain medical conditions when making hiring, firing or job placement decisions. The bill's proponents paint fears about a world in which genetic risks for certain medical condition will lock people out of jobs. A world where your uncontrollable physical characteristics can keep you out of certain jobs sounds scary. But that is until you realize that we've always lived in that world. You won't find people the size of hobbits in the NBA, and you won't find people with below average IQs as Ivy League college professors (OK, OK, well, not many).

And what the bill's proponents do not do is get the picture of what the proper function of government is: namely, the protection of individual rights.

No one has the "right" to a job or service provided by someone else, to set the price another will get for providing a service, to force someone not to avail himself of the best information available when making a decision, or to force someone to do business with someone he does not wish to.

Unfortunately, this bill ignores exactly these things as it threatens the ability of every employer and every insurer to make rational decisions about whom he will do business with.

-- CAV

Practice What You Preach

Just as I find myself wondering, tongue in cheek, about what the animal "rights" activists think of the animal experiments that precipitated a massive pet food recall, saving countless pets' lives at the cost of those of a few laboratory animals, Peter Singer pops up out of nowhere to give his two cents' worth on ethics. (I was mildly surprised that he didn't advocate that pet owners start sampling pet feed before setting out meals from now on. Perhaps he thinks it too obvious to mention.)

Posing as a champion of reason in a short piece, Singer discusses choices made only in highly abnormal situations -- all of them involving being forced to kill people or watch others die -- and ends by pronouncing all human lives as intrinsically valuable, and unabashedly embracing the logical, absurd extreme that results when one ignores such vital questions as, "What is a value?" and "Of value to whom?"

Blowing up people with bombs is no better than clubbing them to death. And the death of one person is a lesser tragedy than the death of five, no matter how that death is brought about. So we should think for ourselves, not just listen to our intuitions.

Singer never elaborates upon whether there is an option to kill the person who forced the subjects to make such horrid choices in the first place. Or, to be less facetious (and simultaneously closer to real, actual life than the sophomoric "Moral Sense Tests" he cites), what if you could save the life of one stranger by killing five other strangers you reasonably thought were unjustly trying to kill him? If the one stranger were a countryman and the five Islamofascist terrorists? Before you accuse me of not giving Singer enough credit, consider the only reasonable inference we can draw from his sanctimonious mention of bombs. (It is also worth noting that he clearly isn't going to reach the Palestinians or the Iranians any time soon with that message and probably realizes this.)

And in the more metaphysically normal case of warfare, which Singer treats as being beneath serious consideration -- and this man is an ethics professor, of all things -- there is the whole matter of individual rights, the most fundamental of which is the right to live. Sometimes we are forced to choose to kill people when those very people threaten our rights as individuals. That happens when, by threatening or harming us, other people endanger our lives, making themselves, in the process, inimical to our lives and thus not valuable.

There is a hell of a lot more to the calculus of deciding to harm or kill others than making arbitrary choices or counting people like so many beans. And believe it or not, it can be moral to kill large numbers of people, some innocent. It's called fighting a war of self-defense with the goal of achieving victory. For starters, it might be worthwhile to consider what man is (a living being), what values are (the requirements for him to live and prosper), and why man needs ethics (because he must learn what he must do to survive). This is why, with my title, I reply to Peter Singer's arrogant one, to "Reason with yourself".

--CAV

PS: I haven't the time to discuss this at any length, but the similarities between this piece by Singer and the recent discussion of what moves people to alleviate suffering by one Paul Slovic are interesting.

For example, both authors examine the natural ways human beings react to difficult situations in the abstract/general versus the concrete/particular without considering man's nature beforehand. Instead, each takes some variant of altruism as a given, and concludes that man is "deficient" (Slovic) or too poorly evolved (Singer) to cope. (A commenter to that post brought up the further point that, in addition to the problems I pointed out, altruism is a poor motivator.)

Make the Commies Compete

Over at City Journal, Sol Stern discusses how Marxist radicals, including a former bomb-maker for the Weather Underground, are using their positions as teachers to indoctrinate students in the public school system of New York City. For just one example, did you know that New York City has a "social justice" high school?

New York schools chancellor Joel Klein often speaks eloquently about the harm that the education system's inability to dismiss incompetent teachers does to children. He's right about that, of course. All the more reason to wonder why Klein has been indifferent to the existence of a group of radical teachers within his own schools who advocate the use of public school classrooms to indoctrinate students in left-wing, anti-American ideology.

One place where this movement thrives is El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in Brooklyn, the city's first "social justice" high school. The school's lead math teacher, Jonathan Osler, is using El Puente as a base for a three-day conference in April on "Math Education and Social Justice." Osler offers this compelling rationale for the conference: "The systemic and structural oppression of low income [people] and people of color continues to worsen. The number of people in prison continues to grow, as does our unemployment rate. . . . These problems and many others are being addressed by community organizations and activists, and often find their way into Social Studies and English classes. However, in math classes around the country, perhaps the best places to study many of these issues, we continue to use curricula and models that lack any real-world -- let alone socially relevant -- contexts." [bold added]

The only thing more horrible than the disease -- and the posting is worth a full read for that alone -- is the suggested cure!

You might think that public boasting about indoctrinating fourth-graders with canned Marxist agitprop isn't the best way for a public school teacher to advance either his career or the radical cause. Nor would a former domestic terrorist make the best poster girl for social justice teaching. Surely someone responsible for safeguarding public education in New York City has stepped forward by now, to say that the social justice curriculum violates every accepted standard of ethical and professional responsibility for public school teachers!

But no: the city's Department of Education has so far turned a blind eye to these radical teachers -- who are not only subsidized by taxpayers, but also funded by members of the very capitalist class that the social justice literature demonizes: El Puente was founded with funding from uber-capitalist Bill Gates's education foundation, and the conference on math education and social justice has won a grant from Math for America, an organization headed by billionaire hedge-fund entrepreneur James Simons. If Chancellor Klein really wants to banish bad teachers from the schools, there's an easy way for him to start building a dossier of candidates. All he has to do is attend next month's math conference at El Puente Academy. [bold added]

It is certainly bad enough that public schools have become indoctrination camps staffed by an entrenched cadre of leftist faculty, but the only thing that could be worse is this suggestion: to start using political beliefs as a basis for firing faculty members! How can students learn about open debate when their own teachers have to worry that an opinion aired in class might not be the "best way to advance ... his career"? This is a terrible idea.

Stern is correct to imply that Americans should not be forced to fund the teaching of ideologies to which they are opposed (i.e., through their tax money), but the solution is not to involve the government in selecting teachers based on ideology. It is to get the government out of the education sector, where it doesn't belong anyway. Even if teachers such as Jonathan Osler could get jobs on the free market, whichever school hired him would be financed only by those willing to do so, unable to force children to attend, and unable to compete for free against other schools.

Only with a separation of school and state can we be sure that our government is neither forcing us to fund the dissemination of Marxist propaganda nor in the business to telling ordinary citizens which ideas they may or may not teach in the classroom. And besides, the competition of the free market would do much more to address Stern's worries about the overall quality of education than a government bureaucracy ever could.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Minor edits.

Bush Narrows Gap with Gore

Oh, the irony!

Way back in the 2000 election, which George Bush won by a razor-thin margin, I refused to vote for President because I saw little difference between the candidates. In particular, I was concerned that environmentalism was about to make a big political impact and that Gore would push such an agenda, while Bush would ineffectively pretend to oppose it. The proper thing to do, as I now realize, would have been to vote for Gore. Be that as it may, I was correct about what each man would do with respect to the environment.

Fast forward to the present. Just as Al Gore's chickens are coming home to roost, President Bush is doing his best to make sure the public can still see as little difference as possible between himself and the former Vice President (and, by extension, the moral difference between the two sides in this debate). How? By emulating some of the worst aspects of the green politicians -- with a big assist from his fellow Republicans.

Recall that recently, I asked, concerning the Delaware governor's desire to strip her State Climatologist of his title because his scientific opinion differed from her policies:

Setting aside whether there should even be such a thing as a "state climatologist", just what the hell is a "consultant" supposed to do? According to [Democratic State Representative] Brad Avakian, it is apparently to serve as a yes-man. Global warming is, after all, "so important" that it trumps any evidence or theory to the contrary.

Not to be outdone, the Bush Administration has just been called on doing essentially the same thing: attempting to silence a scientist whose opinion differs from its policies:

James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, took particular issue with the administration's rule that a government information officer listen in on his interviews with reporters and its refusal to allow him to be interviewed by National Public Radio.

"This is the United States," Hansen told the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee. "We do have freedom of speech here."

But Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) said it was reasonable for Hansen's employer to ask him not to state views publicly that contradicted administration policy. [bold added]

Oh, but Issa isn't done yet! Observe the gall.

"I am concerned that many scientists are increasingly engaging in political advocacy and that some issues of science have become increasingly partisan as some politicians sense that there is a political gain to be found on issues like stem cells, teaching evolution and climate change," Issa said.

Hansen said the Bush administration was not the first in U.S. history to practice information management over government scientists, but it has been the most vigorous. He deplored a "politicization of science." [bold added]

If your policy position is correct, then defend it, if not, change it. But in either case, to silence someone for simply doing his job to the best of his ability is inexcusable and damaging to one's credibility, not to mention, hypocritical. Bush could by now be contentedly watching Al Gore's credibility melt down while his remained intact -- except that he had to stoop to the same level as the global warming hysterics.

No, wait. It's worse. the GOP is busy smearing evolution and stem cell research by equating them with global warming hysteria.

In the meantime, observe what serious trouble we are in. The Left wishes to use the respectability of science to sell a political agenda that will destroy our economy, while the Right wants to destroy science itself.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a typo.

Quick Roundup 164

God's Dupes

Via HBL, I learned of the latest Sam Harris polemic against religion, "God's Dupes" in the Los Angeles Times. The following point was excellent.

The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum [between faith and rationality], one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists -- men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals -- who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally -- deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.

Having said this, I have to add that I look at Sam Harris much as I do many other cultural critics: His polemics are good, but when he has to make recommendations for positive alternatives, he falls way short.

Ann Coulter, for example, is good at cataloging the foolishness of the left, but is quite willing to throw away rule of law to further a theocratic agenda when the opportunity arises, as I recently noted. Likewise, Harris does a very good job of discussing aspects of religion that too many are willing to sweep under the rug, and yet he advocates his own brand of mysticism (a new-age, somewhat Buddhist concoction he calls "Universism") in the name of rationality.

First Note to Self

I became curious about the lyrics of the reggae song "Mr. Brown" this weekend and in the process found a rather promising-looking blog about Jamaican music and culture. I haven't had much time to peruse it, but I plan to, so I'm effectively bookmarking it by listing it here. Besides, I know that some of my readers share my love of Jamaican music, so why not pass it on?

Second Note to Self

Martin Lindeskog links to "FBI documents that link Robert F. Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe's death".

How We Used to Fight Wars

A commenter at Rule of Reason links to a page (Scroll down or search "Overlord".) that contains the profanity-laden text of General Patton's address to his troops before Operation Overlord and asks, "Can you imagine any general in Iraq today giving that speech like this ... ?"

Nope, and that's part of our problem.

Work Requirements

I agree with much of this list of "8 Things Intelligent People ... Need to Work Happily", especially items 4, 7, and 8.

God, #7 really struck a chord, and I'm very fortunate on that score, compared to most. I think I hate unnecessary meetings even more than unnecessary phone calls.

Do not hold a lot of arbitrary meetings that could have otherwise been handled through email or IM

This one is important. Like I said, geeks need to [be able to] focus to be happy.... Nothing is more of an interruption than someone walking into their space unexpectedly and saying “hey do you have a minute?” The answer is usually going to be a disgruntled “Sure.” The truth is geeks are fine with attending planned meetings (and will happily be there if the meeting is really a necessary one for them to attend in person), but are usually most happy communicating through email and IM. These forms of communication are most appealing to geeks because they do not interrupt you, and polite geeks will even respond with a quick “hold on a sec, I’m in the middle of something.” Email and IM are recorded, searchable records of conversations. They are efficient and to the point. This also makes geeks happy. Geeks can discuss anything through email and IM and will usually be more willing and thorough with their response. Face to face meetings are important, geeks know that, but I would guess that 90% of conversations and meetings held face to face, would be more efficient and end with happier people, if they were held in a recordable, written, virtual space. [bold in second paragraph added]

I'd summarize 4, 7, and 8 as follows: "If you want me to do mental work, don't distract me from it while I am trying to do it."

That is one of the dominant themes of the list. Another big one could be put something like, "If you're paying me to use my brain independently, then allow me to be independent." (HT: Paul Hsieh)

-- CAV

Ruling out Reason

In today's Houston Chronicle was an editorial by a Hungarian-born American physician who has noted, amid a thicket of nonsensical bureaucratic regulations, a disturbing trend among his countrymen. (An alternate link, which requires registration, is here.) After citing several eye-opening examples, he concludes:

When I first came to the United States more than 30 years ago from then-communist Hungary, I was struck by how Americans were willing to use individual judgment. They seemed to realize that rules were to be interpreted and not just followed with unquestioning servility. It was very different from the super-regimented, state-controlled thinking of my country and I enjoyed it tremendously. It was this attitude that persuaded me to leave the place where I grew up and make the United States my home. It would be a shame to have to accept that the days of the "can do" common-sense Yankee are over.

Of course daily life still requires the exercise of common sense. As a physician, I have to make sensible decisions dozens of times a day. I still have hope that we can reverse this trend and realize, again, that if people are expected to use common sense, they may turn out to have some, and by practice acquire even more.

We may still be able to realize that by holding a steel fork to the carotid artery of a flight attendant, a terrorist could do just as much damage as by holding a knife, and we could do away with this nonsense of plastic knives on airplanes. Or maybe the ladies at the hotel in San Diego were right when they suggested that I should have just gone to the steam room instead of the sauna? [bold added]

His observation is, unfortunately, very good and the remedy he suggests is sound. And the way he delivers it is perfect, for he warns us of how our collective willingness to not think for ourselves will narrow down the options we have in our daily lives if is left unchecked.

His commentary furthermore reminds me of the famous parable of the boiled frog, which I found summarized in this way:

They say that if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will leap out right away to escape the danger.

But, if you put a frog in a kettle that is filled with water that is cool and pleasant, and then you gradually heat the kettle until it starts boiling, the frog will not become aware of the threat until it is too late. The frog's survival instincts are geared towards detecting sudden changes.

In the context of political philosophy, I have typically encountered this parable as a warning against the kind of creeping tyranny made possible by the willingness of too many people to accept the gradual loss of their freedom over time.

In that sense, it is true, but recall that freedom is a necessary condition for man to flourish precisely because it enables men to think and act upon their best judgement without having to fear coercion from others. Thus, when men accept less freedom, they are necessarily in effect accepting restrictions on what they may think about. In other words, this column does not just describe the gradual way that free men can succumb to tyranny, it shows us exactly how it occurs! We are, as a people, slowly doing less and less thinking for ourselves, and becoming worse at it for lack of practice.

Do not mistake the calmness of the author's laying out of evidence, his prognosis, and his suggested course of action for a lack of urgency. Yes. He has told us that we may have caught it in time, but the good Dr. Hardi has still just diagnosed what I wish he had described as "cancer of the body politic".

"A republic, if you can keep it." Slavish devotion to bureaucratic regulations and worrying more about potential lawsuits than one's job are not the way to go. We continue to accept such nonsense at the expense not merely of our freedom, but of our very ability to think at all.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 163

Giving Teeth to the Term "Mille"

When I saw a news clip about a pizzeria in New York City selling a $1,000.00 pie a day or so ago, two different memories from younger days came to my mind, one of them being of the $15.00 hot dog I once ordered there just so I could say I paid fifteen bucks for a hot dog in New York.

The other memory was of the college semester I spent in Rome, when my classmates and I would frequently order pizza in small shops there by pointing to what we wanted and ordering a slice by specifying how much we were willing to pay. 1,000 lire (about 80 cents at the time) would buy a slice large enough for a decent snack, 2,000 was good for a quick, small meal. You'd simply point and say, "Mille" or "Due mila".

But the similarities end at that last zero. You have to order this pizza a day in advance. It has caviar and lobster as toppings. And wasabi. Read this article for the low-down. It even describes how to make it at home, but be warned: It costs aver 700 smackers just to make it!

Coverage of the Cancelled John Lewis Talk

[Update: In a comment, Michael Caution advises that the talk has been rescheduled for April 24. See his blog for further details.]

Diana Hsieh posts a very good roundup of news pertaining to the talk John Lewis was supposed to give at the school flirting with becoming known as "'Who is that other' George Mason University". Two articles in particular proved useful. The first, which appears in The Chronicle of Higher Education, will apparently expire soon, does a good job of summarizing John Lewis's position, including the following:

"I am opposed to religious law in all forms," Mr. Lewis wrote to The Chronicle. In his e-mail message, he described his speech as condemning "the imposition of Islamic law by the state."

"Such use of state power," he wrote, "harnesses Islam to the service of a totalitarian political ideology. My lecture calls for separation of church and state, and for the defense of that separation by military force if necessary. This is the only way to preserve freedom of individual thought and speech, for people of every philosophic and religious orientation." [bold added]

I fully agree with Dr. Lewis, but I had never formulated the nature of the conflict explicitly in terms of the military being used to defend separation of church and state.

The second article, at SCSUScholars, answers a question I had (and that, I believe someone emailed me with a few days ago): Which technicality did WITO-GMU use as a pretext for placing the demands of Moslem malcontents above fulfilling its obligation to host Dr. Lewis? I quote: "The Objectivist Club at GMU... had someone else to help book the room on campus after it learned of its oversight in letting the club's registration lapse -- not an uncommon occurrence on a university campus, I assure you -- but the faculty member who helped secure the room apparently backed out when it appears the issue got hot."

Three Awesome Posts

Mike over at The Primacy of Awesome ticks off the entire Republican field for the 2008 presidential race and finds all of them wanting. He also links (with appropriate, pithy comments) to two articles, one positive and one negative, that discuss to differing degrees the increasing popularity of Ayn Rand among younger readers.

I find that I have to say something about the second of the articles, which completely misrepresents Ayn Rand's philosophy in order to justify comparing it to Scientology.

Ethical egoism implicitly assumes that every human being will always act rationally in determining what is in their own best interest. Just where exactly in the history of the human race did they come up with that ridiculous idea?

Yeah. And the fact that this ethical egoist spends so much time here talking about why we need government to, say, stop criminals, isn't because he doesn't make this assumption. It's because I'm trying to cover up my belief that people -- especially criminals -- "always act rationally".

And don't even get me started on this bozo's discussion of how slave labor would have been more in Hitler's "self-interest" than mass murder. Anyone who has read me for any amount of time will know what I think of slavery and mass murder. In short, neither is in anyone's self-interest.

But if you want to make Objectivism sound like Scientology, perhaps you do need people to think that it is in man's "self-interest" to engage in irrational behavior ranging from petty crime to the slaughter of millions.

Government Arbitration of Prices

In a very long post, Dismuke, comments on how well a government functionary can determine market prices:

If the judges on the CRB were in a position to know what the exact market rate for copyright music ought be for every year through 2010 - well, I suspect that they might be spending their days doing something other than poring over mundane and boring legal minutiae because each of them would be richer than Bill Gates from playing the commodities market and having been right 100 percent of the time. [minor edits]

I found that to be a very nice common-sense rebuttal to the whole notion of the government determining "fair value".

-- CAV

Updates

3-18-07: Added update on John Lewis talk.

The Emergencies of Ethics

Yes. The title of this post is a play on that of Ayn Rand's essay, "The Ethics of Emergencies", which appears in her book, The Virtue of Selfishness. The word play is deliberate, because the article I am writing about remarkably takes exactly the opposite of Ayn Rand's philosophical approach as it addresses an interesting question.

In "Numbed by Numbers " (via Arts and Letters Daily), author Paul Slovic considers the fact that people are generally moved to pity (and aid) individuals who are unfortunate in the present, but less so groups, and less so over protracted periods of time. In attempting to explain why this might be so, he cites some interesting research, but because his approach is philosophically flawed, he draws exactly the opposite conclusion about what could be done to alleviate (or avert altogether) such calamities as the genocide in Darfur!

Very briefly, let us consider the essence of the conventional approach to the field of ethics. Most will claim that ethics is a set of arbitrary commands (e.g. meaningless social conventions or divine edicts) which may or may not happen to provide any practical guidance to an individual for furthering his own life. This is reflected in the fact that so many people face ethical dilemmas when what they regard as the moral conflicts with what they regard as the practical.

The reason for this common problem is that most ethical systems are formulated without regard to what man actually is or why he might need an ethical system to survive. Quite frequently, when man's nature is considered at all, it is man who is found wanting when his nature conflicts with the ethical system, rather than the validity of the ethical system coming into question. But then, when one accepts the arbitrary, one has placed it outside of rational consideration.

By contrast, Ayn Rand begins by asking what man is, and why he needs a code of morality. Using this approach, she sees right away that man, a rational animal possessed of free will, is a living being and as such must perform certain actions in order to survive. Because man does not have instincts, he must learn everything, including what these actions are.

And because reason allows man to keep track of countless individual concretes efficiently (as well as any important similarities) by means of concepts, it allows him to essentialize the countless similar existents he will face as he goes through life. In particular, man can evaluate various situations (and his actions) conceptually. The science of making such evaluations (and guiding them by considering the evidence for what he needs to live (and flourish) is ethics, or morality.

Bearing this very brief comparison in mind, it is interesting to consider Slovic's analysis of the limits of human compassion and what ought to be done about it.

Most people are caring and will exert great effort to rescue "the one" whose plight comes to their attention. But these same people often become numbly indifferent to the plight of "the one" who is "one of many" in a much greater problem. It's happening right now in regards to Darfur, where over 200,000 innocent civilians have been killed in the past four years and at least another 2.5 million have been driven from their homes. Why aren't these horrific statistics sparking us to action? Why do good people ignore mass murder and genocide?

The answer may lie in human psychology. Specifically, it is our inability to comprehend numbers and relate them to mass human tragedy that stifles our ability to act.

...

The psychological mechanism that may play a role in many, if not all, episodes in which mass murder is neglected involves what’s known as the "dance of affect and reason" in decision-making. Affect is our ability to sense immediately whether something is good or bad. But the problem of numbing arises when these positive and negative feelings combine with reasoned analysis to guide our judgments, decisions, and actions. Psychologists have found that the statistics of mass murder or genocide -- no matter how large the numbers—do not convey the true meaning of such atrocities. The numbers fail to trigger the affective emotion or feeling required to motivate action. In other words, we know that genocide in Darfur is real, but we do not "feel" that reality. In fact, not only do we fail to grasp the gravity of the statistics, but the numbers themselves may actually hinder the psychological processes required to prompt action.

When writer Annie Dillard was struggling to comprehend the mass human tragedies that the world ignores, she asked, "At what number do other individuals blur for me?" In other words, when does "compassion fatigue" set in? Our research suggests that the "blurring" of individuals may begin as early as the number two.

The best point here indirectly mirrors one brought up in discussions of epistemology in Objectivist circles all the time: Man's mind can not deal with limitless amounts of perceptual data. This phenomenon, because it was first observed in experiments that showed that crows could not distinguish numbers of groups above something like three, is often called the "crow epistemology". To a degree, this "blurring" certainly can be accounted for by this limitation of the human mind.

However, the crow epistemology cannot account for all of this "blurring", nor can it account for "compassion fatigue" over time. This is borne out by the fact that it is through such shorthand as numbers (e.g., in the form of statistics) that man can keep track of many instances of a given particular. Slovic grasps this implicitly when he asks, "Why aren't these horrific statistics sparking us to action?"

Now this is an interesting question, and in order to understand what is wrong with Slovic's explanation, the "dance of affect and reason", it is necessary to consider Ayn Rand's insight into the relationship between reason and emotion, which I once summarized (and applied) as follows:

According to Ayn Rand, emotions are instantaneous, subconsciously-made evaluations of what one is experiencing or thinking about at any given moment. Emotions are also experienced, much like percepts. However, what one feels about something will ultimately be based on one's philosophical premises. The concept of rationality doesn't apply to emotions as such, although it certainly does to the thought processes that led someone to adopt the premises underlying the emotion. This is a profound and very important insight ... Let's explore [the implications of] this a bit....

First, this insight can help us interpret the reactions of others. Did you shout with glee and pass candy around like a savage on September 11, 2001? Or did you cry because you saw fellow human beings jumping out of windows? These differing emotions reveal opposite judgments of that event and of the value of human life. (In many cases, one's own: which philosophy led to nineteen men immolating themselves that day?) Were you angry? At America as the "world aggressor" or at the terrorists? Same emotion, different underlying philosophical premises. ...

While I cannot read Slovic's mind, I think he would agree that whether one actually does something in response to news of suffering (be it in the form of a moving film clip or a report tallying a staggering number of unfortunates) would have to be motivated at least in some way by the person's emotional response. Using behavior as a gauge, then, it is fair to say that Slovic himself was moved by reports of genocide in Darfur sufficiently to ask why more people are not similarly moved, write about what he found, and advocate using the findings he reported.

To be fair, columns of numbers and graphs are never going to evoke an immediate emotional response, but this is because like words, numbers mean things. Not only do these numbers (highly abstract data) need to be tied to concrete reality in some way, the existents they describe must still be evaluated according to a person's philosophical premises before he will feel an emotional response, if he feels one at all. And furthermore, these premises will determine what that response (and its intensity) will be. (On this score, if anything is deficient, it is not human nature, but how effective our educational system has been in teaching people how the abstract and the concrete are connected in the first place.)

To take myself as an example, I was once moved by a report of genocide to become very angry, but my response was probably different in some ways than Slovic's would have been, given that he regards Mother Teresa as a moral ideal and I do not.

[W]hen one regards individuals as without rights, or as subordinate to the collective at best, and holds uniformity to be an ideal, one becomes blind to the fact that the "smallest minority", as Ayn Rand once put it is "the individual". Viewed in this light, every socialist dictatorship is guilty of "genocide" countless times over!

Genocide is wrong only because murder is wrong. And oppression of a minority is wrong only because violating the rights of its constituent individuals is wrong. There is no meaningful difference between a government that drives a minority into poverty and oppression and one that does the same thing wholesale to its entire populace. In this respect, leftist condemnations of genocide are missing the big picture at best and constitute dishonest distractions from essential issues at worst.

Robert Mugabe deserves to be deposed, tried as a criminal against humanity, and executed because he is a tyrant. Genocide is only the tip of this iceberg.

Note my outrage. Note further that it is directed in part against leftists, many of whom claim to act in the name of alleviating human suffering. And note why: Precisely as Slovic himself points out, every instance of mass human suffering is endured by countless individuals. As such, every tyranny is an atrocity of appalling proportions.

I will not elaborate further here on why I do not think that the purpose of my life is to alleviate the suffering of others. I will also not detail why, although I promote the protection of individual rights for purely egoistic reasons, I think doing so would do far more to mitigate atrocities such as those in Darfur and Zimbabwe (if not avert many of them altogether) than any amount of charitable donations made while doing nothing to end such regimes.

What I will do is note that human beings are not incapable of being moved to act by statistical data. That such data is not entirely accessible on the perceptual level would certainly make it less easy to use it stir someone who does not think deeply to action. And furthermore, for any data to cause someone to make a charitable donation even after feeling an emotion like pity, that person must hold appropriate philosophical premises.

And even in this last case, the common "problem" of the moral vs. the practical doubtless contributes. Man simply cannot live by consistently practicing self-sacrifice. Even if he holds that he exists to help others, he must still act to further his own life at some point. He will, sooner or later, if he is to remain alive, have to ignore someone else's problems and attend to his own. And then there are also the interesting questions of whether the emotions Slovic wants us to feel could be sustained over long periods of time and whether, if they could, they would result in mental illness.

There are any number of reasons why statistics do not move people to act to alleviate suffering, but using "reasoned analysis to guide our judgments" is actually not one of them, given what reason is, what statistics are for, and the relationship of reason to emotion (and of both of these to action).

Having said that, it was interesting to see Slovic take altruism as a given, then observe so many of us not living by it to his satisfaction, only to conclude that we have a "fundamental deficiency in our humanity", rather than ask whether it is altruism itself -- as Ayn Rand spent a lifetime arguing -- which is deficient as a guide for human action and which, if overcome, could at least thwart countless thugs and tyrants, thereby putting an end to much of human misery.

There are indeed many humanitarian emergencies in the world, but many are caused or worsened by the notion that man does not exist for his own sake and that it is therefore acceptable to enslave him (or worse) in the name of helping the collective. These are "emergencies of ethics" to the extent that they are caused by altruism.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Several minor edits.

5-16-07: Added a hypertext anchor.