The Media Bias Canard

Casting about for material this morning, I ran across two different articles on how the leftist media treat Republican and Democratic politicians differently. Nothing new there, but it struck me as odd for some reason to read John Hawkins ticking off "Six Things the Mainstream Media Would Say about Obama if He Were a Republican." (In the other piece, Ann Althouse merely comments on a conspicuously absent media feeding frenzy -- but in doing so, she did cause me to think again about the Hawkins piece.)

Most relevant to my point is the following, which comes from the opening of the Hawkins article:

Conservatives spend most of their time correcting smears and trying to explain to the public what they really believe. Liberals, on the other hand, can count on the press to hide their unpopular beliefs and put the best spin possible on everything they do.

Okay. Sure. Leftist media are in the tank for Obama and would trash him if he were a Republican. Why is this such a big deal just now? I can't help but wonder whether the weak field of GOP hopefuls is raising the defensive hackles of some in the GOP. To see why, let's question a couple of the implicit premises in that statement. In doing so, note that I am not suggesting we question whether the media are biased.

The first premise is that Republicans (a) have a substantially different message from the Democrats and (b) that this media smearing and focus on personalities is keeping said message from being heard. We can see that this premise is wrong on both counts by considering what some Republicans hold as a triumph of one of their own over the media: Then-RNC Chairman Haley Barbour's public wager against media "charges" the the Clinton-era Republicans in Congress were actually going to cut back a major entitlement program. To quote Barbour: "In November 1995, the U.S. House and Senate passed a balanced budget bill. It increases total federal spending on Medicare by more than 50 percent from 1995 to 2002."

The money to pay for such programs was coming (or would have to come) from somewhere. Whether the route was to be taxation or inflation and the time was to be then or later, the Republican message was loud and clear: "We favor redistribution of wealth, just like the Democrats." The only difference between Barbour and the Democrats is that Barbour probably made himself sound like he favored the government not bankrupting the country in the short term. Maybe sound fiscal policy is something Barbour and others in the GOP feel an attraction to, but it can't be founded on the premise that it's okay for the government to redistribute property.

If you don't believe me, ask yourself, "Sound? For whom?" How it is "sound" for any voter to be subject to the government taking his money? That's just the beginning of a long line of moral and economic questions we ought to be asking about entitlement programs, but aren't. This is, in part, because the GOP does not oppose them or take a principled stand for limited government, but it does blow lots of hot air about balanced budgets. Or at least, about budget "cuts."

The second premise is that such biased coverage is responsible for Republican difficulties at the ballot box. Perhaps if voters didn't actually care about important issues that have been properly framed, that might be the case, but history is replete with examples that show otherwise. One that comes to mind is the landslide victory of the corrupt Edwin Edwards in the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial race against white supremacist David Duke, who ran as a Republican, but was, rightly, repudiated by his own party. In that campaign, there was a clear difference between the two candidates, neither of whom the public was particularly fond of. In a campaign in which people who otherwise wouldn't have been Edwards supporters rallied under the slogan, "Vote for the Crook. It's Important," Edwards won in a landslide.

While the above example is of a Democratic victory, the elections of Ronald Reagan, the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, and the most recent congressional election all show that Republicans can win elections in which voters see a clear contrast (whether or not it actually exists) between Democrats and Republicans and understand (correctly or not) that it is in their interests to vote for the Republicans. The fact that none of these elections caused a turning of the tide in the growth of our government demonstrates that the GOP was not really a party of limited government or at least that too many of them doubted that voters really wanted limited government. See Haley Barbour, above.

If Republicans would stop aping Democrats all the time, they would be clearly different enough from the Democrats to win elections, especially at times when the consequences of big government policies are clearly in favor of proponents of limited government. Or they'd lose in elections where constituencies want handouts, and perhaps be in a better position to run later, after saying, "See. I warned about this." As a voter who regards politicians as generally spineless, I don't expect the second outcome to be very common. Instead, what will have to happen is for voters like myself, who see the dangers inherent in the welfare state, to keep up the pressure on such irresolute officials as John Boehner.

Part of that pressure should include turning a deaf ear to conservative whining about media bias. It's the public who cast votes, and the public can communicate its way around the media, if journalists want to continue making themselves irrelevant.

-- CAV

Innovation in Education

A successful businessman is offering students fellowships -- to drop out of school.

Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, will pay each of the 24 winners of his Thiel Fellowship $100,000 not to attend college for two years and to develop business ideas instead.

...

The fellowship seeks to help winners develop their ideas more quickly than they would at a traditional university. Its broader aim goes beyond helping the 24 winners, by raising big questions about the state of higher education.

Mr. Thiel ignited controversy when he told TechCrunch in April that he sees higher education as the next bubble, comparable to previously overvalued markets in technology and housing.

Both cost and demand for a college education have grown significantly in the years since Mr. Thiel was a student. He sees that rise as irrational.

Students today are taking on more debt, and recently tightened bankruptcy laws make it more difficult to shake that debt, he argues, and those factors make higher education a risky investment. "If you get this wrong, it's actually a mistake that's hard to undo for the rest of your life," he said.

Thiel makes excellent points, but none so perspicacious as the following:

Mr. Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford in the 1980s and later completed law school there, but he now wishes he had given more thought to the educational decisions he made and their implications.

"Instead, it was just this default activity," he said. [bold added]

I have seen the notion that there is an "education bubble" bandied about quite a bit lately, and have written about several aspects of it myself a few times already, but I have seen few with such a good grasp of the problem on as many levels at once as Thiel. I am not sure how much Thiel appreciates the role of government in making non-stop schooling a default activity for young adults; nevertheless it is a profound observation that it has become a default, and that this is not a good thing.

While dropping out of college or grad school clearly isn't the right thing for everyone to do, I am glad to see Thiel making it easier for the most talented students to stop for a moment and think about whether attending school (at present or, perhaps, at all) truly is the best way for them to get ahead.

-- CAV

--- In Other News ---

Mrs. Van Horn and I watched Agora yesterday. What a movie!

As Christianity gains steam in Roman Egypt toward the end of the fourth century A.D., a young slave (Max Minghella) weighs his desire for freedom against his growing love for his mistress (Rachel Weisz), an atheist as well as a professor of philosophy. Alejandro Amenábar (The Others) directs this epic drama based on the life of Hypatia of Alexandria, a noted Greek scholar and mathematician. Rupert Evans co-stars. [format edit, link added]

Although it is accurate, the above description of the film from Netflix still does a comical job of failing to capture how well Amenábar makes intellectual inquiry come alive, develops his characters, and uses symbolism. The final scenes brought us to tears.

From a somewhat rambling essay on Marxism comes an amusing partial refutation of the labor theory of value: "Clearly Marx never taught a child to cook. You start with raw materials worth something, you spend hours on cooking (and putting out small fires), and the result is, more often than not, a mess that has to be thrown away."

After reading this long article about the poor business model and complete lack of innovation at the tottering U.S. Postal Service, I'd love to be in a position to tell them, "Your check is in the mail," as it were. This government-imposed monopoly needs to go.

5-28-11 Hodgepodge

Controls Breed Uncertainty

In an article titled, "Economic Stagnation Explained, at 30,000 Feet," Stephen Carter provides a highly instructive snapshot of where the average businessman is today, in terms of his ability to plan and in terms of his understanding of our depressed economy:

Demand for his product is up. But he still won't hire.

"Why not?"

"Because I don't know how much it will cost," he explains. "How can I hire new workers today, when I don't know how much they will cost me tomorrow?"

[The businessman is] referring not to wages, but to regulation: He has no way of telling what new rules will go into effect when. His business, although it covers several states, operates on low margins. He can't afford to take the chance of losing what little profit there is to the next round of regulatory changes. And so he's hiring nobody until he has some certainty about cost.

It is interesting to note that this businessman does not have a principled understanding of (or opposition to) government regulation of the economy or a clear idea of what the proper role for government is: He dreams an impossible dream of a government that, "act[s] like my assistant, not my boss."

Weekend Reading

"This irrational, self-defeating scheme of 'security' entails an eternal and ubiquitous state of emergency -- a setting which only empowers government to impose 'extraordinary measures' to curb and quash our rights and liberties, without end or limit." -- Richard Salsman, in "Kill the Un-American Patriot Act" at Forbes

"Terms like 'inflation' or 'devaluation' can seem irrelevant to Americans busy with work and family, but watching those seemingly esoteric concepts play out in Belarus should serve as a terrifying warning -- as panicked citizens empty their bank accounts to buy air conditioners, sugar, stereo equipment, anything of actual value instead of the increasingly worthless pieces of paper in which they've put their life savings." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Could a Currency Collapse Happen Here?" at SmartMoney

"I'm not against anything -- medication or whatever -- that objectively helps. What I am against is the idea of biological determinism, i.e., the view that biology is destiny, that genetics and brain physiology determine everything about a person." -- Michael Hurd, in "Drugs vs. Therapy: Which One Works?" at DrHurd.com

The Phase-Out That Isn't?

As someone who has been under the distinct impression that I would be unable to buy real (i.e., incandescent) light bulbs after some point during the next couple of years, it comes as a mild relief that, perhaps this isn't exactly the case. That relief is more than made up for, in day and this age -- when the government runs more and more of the economy and there seems to be a "czar" for everything -- by the fact that I am hardly alone in finding the idea that there is such a ban completely plausible. Also, some states have laws on the books to phase out incandescent bulbs, and I cannot help but wonder whether federal efficiency standards won't amount to a phase-out, anyway.

Bent Objects

Curious about the origin of an amusing picture of a candle lighting itself on both ends I received in the mail, I came across an entire blog, Bent Objects, full of similar artwork, by Terry Border. After a little digging, I am still unsure whether that candle is his, but I got a good laugh out of this "Postcard from a Cat Box." (And, I guess, while I'm there, I'll note that I sometimes refer to my cat as, "my little Zen gardener.")

On a more serious note, Border and a favorite comic writer of mine are being ripped off by content thieves. Border sums up the situation quite nicely:

I've heard a couple of comments that blame the submitters to their sites, and not Cheezburger themselves. Well, who put together the way their sites work? They can try to wash their hands of wrong-doing, but it's their system, and they know the end result will be lots of anonymous images thrown into the furnace of their giant money making machine.

And the man behind The Oatmeal describes his interaction with the admin of the same outfit. It's worth a read.

-- CAV

Weird Al Interview

Reader Snedcat drew my attention to a good interview of Weird Al Yankovic at The Onion A/V Club (which, apparently, interviews him with some regularity). This followed his earlier recommendation of a Tom Lehrer interview I blogged some time ago, and from which I quoted Yankovic. I was a fan of Weird Al back in college, but hadn't listened to anything of his in quite some time. The interview piqued my curiosity, causing me to read about him in Wikipedia (which turned out, to my mild surprise, to be inspiring), and to learn that he's still going strong, churning out parodies twenty years later.

Regarding the interview, I found great value in the answer -- really about creative work and fitting such work in with family life -- he gave to a question about a brilliant Lady Gaga parody. (Later on in the interview, in the video titled, "Weird Al Yankovic Melts Down on Web Soup," is a cringe-inducingly good imitation of a poor performance that, in its own way, shows that what Yankovic makes look easy isn't.)

AVC: What's your writing process like when you're working on a new record? Does an idea like "Perform This Way" pop into your head randomly, or do you keep regular working hours?

AY: It's not like I punch a clock when writing songs. I sort of wait to get inspired, and that could happen at any point. It's hard to force creativity and humor.

My 8-year-old daughter doesn't understand when I'm sitting alone in a room ostensibly not doing something, and she'll want to play. I have to be like, "Nope, Daddy's working." Even though I'm staring into space like a zombie, I'm hard at work.

When I'm writing parodies, I immerse myself in pop culture. I listen to nothing but the top 40 station in the car and bombard myself with stimuli that may help the process. I have no way of knowing when an idea will come. Well, actually, I have plenty of ideas, just not that many good ones. [minor format edits, emphasis added]

Regarding the parody, there are lessons in working with others and standing up for oneself within the story behind its eventual commercial release on June 21...

Although Yankovic could legally produce his parodies without getting permission from the original artists, he has a longstanding policy of getting them on board before releasing the parodies, in order to foster their good will. In this case, however, Weird Al initially got yanked around:

As of this posting, I still don't know specifically what kind of problem [Lady Gaga] has with the song (obviously I take a few jabs at her, but y'know, it's satire -- that's how it's supposed to work). And I'm especially confused as to why she waited until I actually recorded the song (at her insistence!) before saying no. It's not like there were any surprises in the finished song that she couldn't have foreseen by, you know, READING THE LYRICS.

...

My parodies have always fallen under what the courts call "fair use," and this one was no different, legally allowing me to record and release it without permission. But it has always been my personal policy to get the consent of the original artist before including my parodies on any album, so of course I will respect Gaga's wishes. However, given the circumstances, I have no problem with allowing people to hear it online, because I also have a personal policy not to completely waste my stinking time.

(Read more to get an idea of what a hardship recording the song was to Yankovic.) Eventually, word of the negative publicity this generated among Yankovic's many fans got around to the artist herself, who eventually approved the parody:

Gaga's manager has now admitted that he never forwarded my parody to Gaga -- she had no idea at all. Even though we assumed that Gaga herself was the one making the decision (because, well, that's what we were TOLD), he apparently made the decision completely on his own.

He's sorry.

And Gaga loves the song.

It's good to hear that worked out well, and I look forward to eventually seeing the video, as well as catching up on many years of Weird Al parodies.

-- CAV

More than Institutions, Too

From time to time, and in different contexts, I have heard others, mainly conservatives, attribute the existence of personal and economic freedom in the West to its superior institutions. The latest to put forth this view is Amity Shlaes, who prescribes the wholesale grafting of western institutions onto Middle Eastern societies as a way to foster the development of freedom there in the wake of the latest round of popular unrest there.

So, how to apply Russia's lessons to the emergent Arab democracies? The easy part is to recognize that states need institutions to avoid a Russia-style free-for-all. Schools, property rights and courts are the most important. Stephen Sestanovich, a Russia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, e-mailed me a related thought: In his view, Russia's big problem was the voters' equation of democracy with disorder. Arabs watching the chaos unfolding in Libya and Yemen would be forgiven for coming to a similar conclusion. "Whether these nations end up with their own kind of Putinism will depend on whether they can also create new institutions that work," Sestanovich wrote.

The next step is more uncomfortable. Those necessary institutions normally take years, even centuries, to build. Middle East democracy doesn't have that much time. The most efficient way to build institutions is to import international -- yes, Western -- traditions. A U.S. scholarship program for Middle Eastern high school or college students would give them much to take home and build a country with. To recommend Western institutions to Middle Eastern nations runs against the grain even more than recommending them to Eastern Europe. It sounds colonial. [minor format edits]

I do not dispute the importance of the government protecting property rights, nor will I argue that good education is vital to a free society (although I think the government shouldn't attempt to provide it). I will even concede that strong, functional institutions can promote or protect freedom. Institutions cannot cause freedom, however, and they are not enough to promote or protect freedom on their own.

To that point, I will note two major problems with Shlaes's advice: (1) If institutions are all we need to prevent something like Russian-style crony "capitalism" from taking root, how does she explain the fact that, over time the government of the United States has "squeezed or seized" whole sectors of our economy (like medicine) and companies (like GM)? (2) What does Shlaes mean by the last word in the phrase, "institutions that work?" The facts that we already know this advice will not work, and that we need some criterion to establish what we even mean by, "work" tells us something: The conservative idea that freedom will happen in a society, if only good institutions are established, is just as naive as the idea that freedom will inexorably follow from free elections.

What is missing in places like Russia and the Middle East -- and is withering away in America -- is a broad cultural acceptance of the idea that each of us must be left alone to attend to his own business, meaning that we must be free to speak our minds, profit from our efforts, and trade with others by mutual consent and to mutual benefit. The primary danger to these freedoms comes from other men initiating physical force (e.g., by theft, harm, or threat of harm), whether those men are acting as individuals, members of crime syndicates, or government officials. To the degree that there is cultural acceptance of the government performing tasks (like central planning or wealth redistribution) that entail it initiating force against private citizens, a society will head towards a "Russia-style free-for-all" at a speed reflective of the broadness and degree of such acceptance.

A people that does not itself understand, appreciate, and demand freedom will not get it. They will not vote for it, and they will subvert or tolerate corrupt institutions. Conversely, as Americans did after we won our freedom, a people that truly understands and values freedom will find a way to create institutions that will help perpetuate it. Americans did not need to have, for example, its system of checks and balances imposed from without.

-- CAV

----- In Other News -----

Via The Endeavour is a good quote about theoretical models:

[A] man who uses an imaginary map, thinking it is a true one, is like to be worse off than someone with no map at all; for he will fail to inquire whenever he can, to observe every detail on his way, and to search continuously with all his senses and all his intelligence for indications of where he should go.

Always check your "maps" against reality.

An occasional reader informs me that she has decided to post occasional short book reviews online at her blog, Nolan Book Reviews. Her last review is of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and she's currently working her way through Wilbur Smith's Hungry as the Sea.

It's as if Erin of Unclutterer has read my mind... Not only am I home-bound on Memorial Day this year, but her last two suggestions for "Three Easy Projects for a Monday" happen to be things I need to do, anyway.

Is Love Limitless?

Dear Uncle Gus,

What is your opinion of the statement that conditional love is not love at all?

Signed,

Condi Philia


Dear Condi,

I think that the statement is wrong, and usually reflects confusion on the part of the person making it.

In order to see what I mean, we should first consider what love is. For that, we'll turn to the dictionary: "love -- a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person." A later definition notes that love can also denote, a "strong predilection, enthusiasm, or liking for anything." While the love for another person will be much deeper and richer than that for, say, a song or a city or a car, I submit that in each case, when a person "loves," he is doing essentially the same thing: acknowledging (explicitly or implicitly, as well as on an emotional level) that a person or thing greatly enhances the quality of his life. The fact that love for another human being can be much deeper, broader, and more intense does not make the basic act of loving differ in any essential way. It can, as we shall see, add to confusion when the thought of questioning one's love for another person arises.

It is interesting and important that the notion of unconditional love always applies to other people: As far as I can tell, even the most ardent proponent of the idea that you should love other people unconditionally would admit that only a fool would love some other object unconditionally. This is no accident, and it stems from a particular code of morality, the discipline that governs how we should guide our actions in life. Specifically, most codes of morality are essentially altruistic, holding that it is immoral (or amoral) to profit from one's own actions, which should be directed instead towards the welfare of others.

Considered from this vantage point, love as it is almost universally experienced -- as a strongly personal and selfish emotion -- runs counter to altruism. If your resources are limited, will you help a complete stranger or someone you love? Love will motivate someone to act against such a code of morality. Proponents of altruism have two choices: (1) Ask whether altruism is a proper code of morality; or (2) cause people to evade or become confused about the issue in some way. Guess which one they usually pick: We're talking about people who feel very strongly that man, ultimately impotent, needs help from others to survive.

How might an altruist make sure people are following his moral code against their natural inclination to (gasp!) like people or things that enhance their lives and act on that feeling? It can't be directly, because the inherent opposition between altruism and the need for a rational living being to expend his efforts in support of his own life quickly becomes apparent. (e.g., A man told to give his income over to the support of bums over his own family will, rightly, say, "Go to hell!") It has to be indirect, such as through guilt or prestige (e.g., Your family doesn't really need an HD television set. Give part of your money to the homeless. You'll be richer in God's eyes.), or by redefining what "love" means and hoping nobody catches on. (e.g., "It is a mark of spiritual magnanimity to love all others as yourself. You'll feel closer to God, and that's what's really important.") What never seems to come up is the question,"Why do I love myself, some other people, and some other things?" If it did, related questions would pop up, like: "Why do I hate the guy who mugged me last year?" Or, "What is it about my wife that makes me want to spend time with her, rather than any woman I happen to bump into?" Or, "Why would someone's laziness or misfortune disqualify my family from receiving a gift I promised them?" All of these things show, in different ways, the absurdity of pretending that your feelings for your spouse, or your favorite city, or your favorite car, are not caused by (1) factors that distinguish them from other women, other towns, or other cars; and (2) the fact that those differences matter to you, selfishly, in terms of your happiness.

The things we just considered are attributes of the people and objects you love, and, when considered within the larger context of your life, they are the conditions under which you love those people and things. If your wife, say, becomes a criminal (or you learn that she is unfaithful), she is not, in a vital way, the person you came to love. If your favorite city becomes a crime-infested hellhole, the city you love is gone. If your favorite car gets destroyed in an accident, it's not your favorite car any longer. When a thing exists, it has a specific identity. When we love something, we love something with specific attributes. If something ceases to exist or changes in an important enough way, we cease to love it.

It is in the case of people that we run into a legitimate source of confusion, in part because a person's character is an attribute, and that attribute can be extremely hard to judge. In addition, the power of emotions can lend to confusion. If a woman's son commits a murder, the mother may well ignore what that says about his character and profess and feel undeserved love for him. Can we really label what this woman feels for her son love -- or at least love for her son as he actually is? Many people, wrongly, would, and would hold this up as an example of unconditional love. (I would say that, depending on circumstances, it is an example of something else, such as mourning or denial.)

Or, to take a completely different example, consider a couple in a relationship. Both say they're in love, but suppose they are young and relatively inexperienced, and "love" each other for fairly superficial reasons. He "loves" her because she's gorgeous and she "loves" him because he's rich. If she becomes less attractive through no fault of her own, or he loses his wealth through no fault of his own, and the relationship ends as a result, was this an example of someone having a childish, "conditional" love? Or was it even an example of love at all?

All that said, I think that the idea that conditional love is not love at all is in part a consequence of the dominance of altruism as a moral code in our culture (as witness Christian praise for unconditional love), and in part confusion over what love actually is (both in terms of its selfish nature and in terms of what some people wrongly call "love").

Thank you for that thought-provoking question.

-- CAV

If you'd like to ask a question, type it into the box labeled, "Ask Uncle Gus," at the upper right of this blog's main page, or at the top of the question-and-answer list hosted by FormSpring.

Updates

5-26-11: Corrected a typo.

Two on Doomsdays

Two religious writers offer worthwhile insights on the puzzling phenomenon of people who, even this day and age and with much of recorded history at their disposal, nevertheless fall for apocalyptic prophesies. One of these writers, Dennis Prager, rightly notes that there is little substantive difference between the latest "Rapture" prediction and many doomsday scenarios promoted by leftists -- although their secular versions do succeed in being harmful, due to their camouflage:

There is one major difference between leftist and religious doomsday scenarios. The religious readily acknowledge that their doomsday scenario is built entirely on faith. The left, on the other hand, claims that its doomsday scenarios are entirely built on science.

That there is little truth to the left-wing claim is not as important as the fact that these doomsday scenarios have undermined the status of science. How many scientists have been compromised by their joining the research-money and fame bandwagons of left-wing apocalyptic predictions? And how has this affected the public's perceptions of science and scientists when it comes to contentious issues?

I would add that the entire way the left frames what to do about each of its apocalyptic scenarios causes further harm in several ways: By (1) taking all consideration of individual rights off the table, (2) causing many on the right to be overly dismissive of legitimate scientific points raised in the political debates the left manufactures, and (3) making it seem as if government is the solution to everything. (The second problem is caused by people on the right accepting the false premise that the science being right necessarily means that the government has to act. Since they have no concept of how to argue for individual rights, they argue (correctly or not) against the science.)

So prophets of doom and their followers are more common than many would care to admit. Why? "Crunchy" conservative Rod Dreher, writing at RealClear Religion, offers the following interesting insight:

To be drunk on Apocalypse is a fearful thing. There is no problem that the Apocalypse -- religious or secular -- cannot solve. I roll my eyes at the crude Armageddonists, whose number I left behind as a teenager, but the radical prospect of rebirth through total catastrophe still tempts me in less culturally embarrassing ways. I read secular prophets with more mainstream credibility -- peak-oil catastrophists, economic Cassandras, and global-warming gloomers -- and that familiar decadent feeling returns: the perverse pleasure in the prospect of catastrophe, because, to paraphrase the poet C.V. Cavafy, the End is a kind of solution.

I get the definite impression that there is a feeling of powerlessness at work among those who seem eager to buy into predictions of catastrophe -- or even to gloat over them. Many such people are thoroughly selfless: They worry about the state of "the world" more so than -- or perhaps to the exclusion of -- their own happiness. They focus much more on spreading their message to others than on satisfying themselves that it is true. They regard the agent of corrective change as super-human (God or the state -- or perhaps both). Buyers of religiously-inspired doomsday myths openly rely on what others say over the verdict of their own minds; but I feel safe betting that most who accept allegedly scientific doomsday scenarios don't really understand the scientific case (when there is one) for their pet scenario. The last two points -- external locus of control and the failure to use one's reasoning mind properly -- go a long way in explaining this phenomenon: Someone who doesn't learn how to properly use a tool (e.g., his mind) will have no real confidence in it, nor will he see how to apply it in a bad situation. To such a person, razing everything to the ground and starting over, in a fashion, will sound like a relief and looks like it will at least offer his stunted mind some purchase.

What's worse is that, outside something like a supervolcanic eruption or an asteroid strike, there are few things that could quickly wipe out human civilization, but many man-made catastrophes that can pose an existential threat within a time horizon of decades nevertheless. The cultists of doom make things harder for the real Cassandras, who attempt to warn against such folly, and can offer practicable solutions to head off disaster.

-- CAV

--- In Other News ---

Here's a story of bravery and triumph I didn't catch the first time around: "She signed, 'I am addressing everybody who is deaf in Ukraine. Our president is Victor Yushchenko. Do not trust the results of the central election committee. They are all lies. ... And I am very ashamed to translate such lies to you. Maybe you will see me again."

Via HBL, here's an encouraging story about tea partiers paying attention to how those they support govern.

Is it time for an "emotional Turing test" in animal research? My off-the-cuff take is that a faculty of reason isn't necessary for many emotions to exist in an animal. Regardless of whether animals have emotions (or I am correct), the case for a being having individual rights would depend on that being possessing a faculty of reason, as Ayn Rand so ably argued -- and not on a capacity for feeling pain, emotional or otherwise.

Contra "Nothing to Hide"

At the Chronicle Review is an article that does a pretty good job of demolishing the asinine, "I've got nothing to hide," argument, which most commonly arises in discussions of whether we should expand government surveillance powers in the name of "security." The final paragraph, below, is a good summary, but I recommend reading the whole article.

When the nothing-to-hide argument is unpacked, and its underlying assumptions examined and challenged, we can see how it shifts the debate to its terms, then draws power from its unfair advantage. The nothing-to-hide argument speaks to some problems but not to others. It represents a singular and narrow way of conceiving of privacy, and it wins by excluding consideration of the other problems often raised with government security measures. When engaged directly, the nothing-to-hide argument can ensnare, for it forces the debate to focus on its narrow understanding of privacy. But when confronted with the plurality of privacy problems implicated by government data collection and use beyond surveillance and disclosure, the nothing-to-hide argument, in the end, has nothing to say.

Of particular note is how the article starts off by showing how easily refuted the argument is when stated in black-and-white terms (e.g., "... 'So do you have curtains?' or 'Can I see your credit-card bills for the last year?'"), and yet how easily otherwise conscientious people can still find themselves unable to answer its more subtle forms. I do disagree with Daniel Solove's contention that privacy is "too complex" an issue to essentialize, but I don't think this misconception knocks him off track, at least as far as the scope of his article goes.

I find it interesting that the argument is, as stated, an "argument from intimidation," but that the damage doesn't end simply when someone correctly points out that a desire for privacy is not equivalent to nefarious intent. This is because the faulty premise of the explicit argument itself relies on assumptions that won't necessarily be uncovered or contested by someone who does succeed in seeing through the explicit "argument" for what it is. As Solove shows, it sometimes isn't enough to shrug off such an argument as ridiculous: It can be helpful to ask why someone sees the argument as tenable (or thinks you will), and examine those premises as well.

-- CAV

5-21-11 Hodgepodge

The Colbert Intort?

Via HBL, I recently got wind of a high-profile prank gone awry.

Comedy Central funnyman Stephen Colbert, like most of his friends and allies on the left, thinks that last year's Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC is, literally, ridiculous. To make his case that the ruling invites "unlimited corporate money" to dominate politics, Mr. Colbert decided to set up a political action committee (PAC) of his own. So far, though, the joke's been on him.

Steve Simpson and Paul Sherman of the Institute for Justice are dubious about "[w]hether Mr. Colbert understands that he has made the Supreme Court's point," so I'm glad they made that part of it clear for everyone else.

Weekend Reading

"Finally, a U.S. public debt ceiling is wholly improper because it permits Washington's spendthrifts and prodigals to periodically devote a few months to loudly and undeservedly proclaiming themselves paragons of fiscal rectitude, when in truth they are complicit cohorts of the bipartisan gang that sunk the nation into so much debt in the first place, those whose morals aren't elevated enough to preclude them from cheating their own grandmothers, let alone the vast, faceless U.S. creditors populating the rest of the world, if they could, by a nefarious expediency, get away with it." -- Richard Salsman, in "Don't Raise the Debt Ceiling, Raze It" at Forbes

"[B]ecause it isn't flashy like insider trading or high-turnover like selling options, this fundamental truth tends to be forgotten." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "The Golden Rule of Investing Still Works" at SmartMoney

"Don't let procrastination and indecision turn into regret. Forever is a very, very long time." -- Michael Hurd, in "Confronting Death is Difficult" at DrHurd.com

"The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Let's get the Naval Academy to act to fully support and defend it -- not defy it." -- Talbot Manvel, in "Naval Academy Puts Tradition ahead of Constitution" at The Baltimore Sun

"A person might wish to support a cause anonymously to avoid possible legal, political, or criminal retribution. ... Yet Colorado's campaign laws can require financial supporters of ballot campaigns to report their personal addresses as well as the addresses of their employers." -- Ari Armstrong, in "Public's 'Right to Know' Can Clash with Right to Free Speech" at The Colorado Springs Gazette

My Two Cents

I become a bigger fan of Michael Hurd by the week, as evidenced by the fact that I probably end up commenting on his columns the most, even with all the other good material I find out there. Regarding the painful dilemma he discusses this week, I experienced both sides of it when I was younger, and found that reading his column helped me greatly in understanding why I and others acted as we did under those difficult circumstances. Also, by considering his column from a different perspective, I see that procrastination itself can indicate the need to introspect.

One more: The Manvel piece reminds me of my Sundays at Naval Officer Candidate School over twenty years ago. We officer candidates were given the "choice" of attending a Catholic or a Protestant religious service on Sunday. There was, however, no option that I knew of for atheists like myself to not attend a religious service of some kind.

Zombie Language

Following a link after answering a comment yesterday, I came across the following account and question, regarding the finding of a parrot which turned out to be the last "speaker" of a language.

Humboldt managed to record phonetically 40 words spoken by the parrot, and in 1997 artist Rachel Berwick painstakingly taught two Amazon parrots to speak them. Can a language be said to survive if no one knows its meaning?

I suspect that Ayn Rand would say not:

If a wind blows the sand on a desert island into configurations spelling out "A is A," this does not make the wind a superior metaphysician. The wind did not achieve any conformity to reality; it did not produce any truth, but merely shapes in the sand. Similarly, if a parrot is trained to squawk "2 + 2 = 4," this does not make it a mathematician. The parrot's consciousness did not attain thereby any contact with reality or any relation to it, positive or negative; the parrot did not recognize or contradict any fact; what it created was not truth or falsehood, but merely sounds. Sounds that are not the vehicle of conceptual awareness have no cognitive status.

The commenter had reminded me that Ayn Rand had said something like this before, and the historical oddity finally caused me to look it up.

-- CAV

Lyrebirds

There's nothing like a quick trip to Futility Closet to lift the spirits of a blogger who finds himself a little under the weather this morning. The below video of an Australian lyrebird shows off both its beautiful plumage and its astounding abilities as a mimic.

The post includes another such video and relays an account of someone who found birds imitating two popular songs from the 1930s that a farmer had taught to a pet lyrebird -- thirty years later and over a hundred miles away.

-- CAV

Kill the Buddha

There is much I disagree with in each of the posts from Armed and Dangerous that I link below -- a few big ones are Buddhism, the author's implicit determinism, his understanding of the nature of emotions, and the idea that any scientific theory can be blown out of the water at the drop of a hat. Nevertheless, I find the kind of mental exercise Eric Raymond talks about intriguing. Disturbed by his realization that scientific fraud arouses within him similar emotions that sacrilege would in a religious person, Raymond discovers a premise that he needs to examine: "I am not like a religious person."

He then gives himself permission to "kill" the premise by playing a sort of devil's advocate. As he puts it, "[I]magine the world as it would be if the most cherished belief in your thoughts at this moment were false. Then reason about the consequences." What Raymond does in the case of the premise that he differs from religious people results in him seeing, at least in part, how he resembles them (roughly, in having a value-orientation) and how he nevertheless differs from them (roughly, in terms of his epistemology).

On this particular issue, I personally would not need to "kill the Buddha" to understand why things like scientific fraud or pseudoscience arouse intensely negative emotions on my part, or things like great scientific accomplishments cause me to feel awe or reverence. For one thing, I suspect that I have thought about the nature of emotions and of what religion offers to man more than Raymond. Nevertheless, I can see how a tactic like this can help untangle one' thinking about issues one isn't clear about.

-- CAV

Stossel on Fracking

John Stossel writes about the latest left-wing smear campaign which, not too surprisingly, is aimed squarely at America's ability to produce energy cheaply:

[W]hat's the explanation for the most dramatic part of the movie [Gasland]: tap water so laden with gas that people can set it on fire?

It turns out that has little to do with fracking. In many parts of America, there is enough methane in the ground to leak into people's well water. The best fire scene in the movie was shot in Colorado, where the filmmaker is in the kitchen of a man who lights his faucet. But Colorado investigators went to that man's house, checked out his well and found that fracking had nothing to do with his water catching fire. His well-digger had drilled into a naturally occurring methane pocket.

Stossel later notes something about fracking that many members of the general public will likely be confused about:

[H]ydraulic fracturing is a wonderful thing. It's not new. Companies have done it for 60 years, but now they've found ways to get even more gas out of the ground. That's the reason gas is getting cheaper and panicky politicians no longer rant about America "running out of fuel."

Natural gas is not risk-free, but no energy source is.

Read the whole thing. Stossel notes early on that, unlike many other left wing hack jobs, this movie has a more "convincing" feel to it. He also suggests a better remedy to the kinds of problems Gasland claims to be occurring, and it isn't the government regulating how we acquire our fuel.

-- CAV

----- In Other News -----

Ars Technica features an interesting post about how social influences lessen the wisdom of crowds -- at least in terms of an "average" of their answers being correct: "[W]hen someone sees that the rest of the crowd is giving an answer close to their own, it gives them greater confidence that their answer is likely to be right. " This could result in, "the range that the social panels produce [being] centered on the wrong value, and [possibly] so distant from the correct one that it's excluded entirely."

In "Federal Food Police against Business and Science," Steven Malanga notes, among other things, that, "lowering sodium consumption not only doesn't benefit most people, it may actually increase risk of heart attacks for some." Forcing us to abide by advice -- bad or not -- is the opposite of the purpose of a proper government. It is particularly galling that, on top of the fact that we are not being left free to judge such advice ourselves, it is as if the long history of reversals and declining certainty in much of the research used to justify government guidelines and regulations has no weight with the people making them. It's bad enough to be forced to follow someone else's advice, but when that advice is bad, and following bad advice can be worse than having no advice at all...

Drat! I keep forgetting to switch over to a Hellenic keyboard mapping! Thanks for reminding me, Google: I'll try to remember to do that next time. (If this confuses you, see image at the (possibly upper) right.)

Better than Flashy

Why is the Drudge Report, a no-frills web page of photos and headlines linked to news stories, one of the biggest news traffic generators on the web? In large part, it's because Matt Drudge hasn't let things like fads or flashy technology distract him from his purpose:

"Matt Drudge is an American original," Mr. Breitbart said. "He does not rig search optimization, he does not care about the next big Web innovation, he just has the best nose for news there is. He gives people everything, every single thing, they want to know in a single stop."

A big part of the reason he is such an effective aggregator for both audiences and news sites is that he actually acts like one. Behemoth aggregators like Yahoo News and The Huffington Post have become more like fun houses that are easy to get into and tough to get out of. Most of the time, the summary of an article is all people want, and surfers don't bother to click on the link. But on The Drudge Report, there is just a delicious but bare-bones headline, there for the clicking. It's the opposite of sticky, which means his links actually kick up significant traffic for other sites.[minor format edits, emphasis added]

I appreciate the no-frills design of the Drudge Report. It respects why I am there, by making it easy for me to find the news I need, allowing me to decide whether to learn more, and not attempting to do my thinking for me. It's a news site -- not an advertisement, a game, or a wannabe social network.

There is a calm confidence in the stark black-and-white page that says, "Here is today's news." There is no neurotic pleading for attention or repeat business. There are no pop-ups or intrusive multimedia nonsense. Links lead away from its page and directly to the story, rather than popping open a new window for fear I might spend a second or two away from the site, and then forget about it forever. Drudge knows I'll be back, because he knows what I'm looking for and he knows he helps me find it better than anyone else out there. The web page is an example of form following function, and, now that I think of it, it is a welcome relief from the ridiculous excesses of current web page design. Drudge knows what he wants to do, which means he knows his audience and the best way to reach it. A definite purpose informs how he runs his site.

There's a lesson in that for anyone who cares to learn it. Thank you, Mr. Drudge!

-- CAV

Disillusionment

A book review at Salon reminds me of a word whose dictionary meaning I suspect would change over time if the notion that objective knowledge about philosophical questions were possible gained culture-wide acceptance:

disillusion vt: to free from or deprive of illusion, belief, idealism, etc.; disenchant.

The overall negative connotation of this word has always puzzled me a little bit, on several levels. On the mundane level: Why would one want to be deceived about anything? On the philosophical level: If one's beliefs are wrong, why would one want to cling to them? (Even when I was religious as a youth, I was convinced that theological questions were open to rational inquiry. When I learned otherwise, and became aware that I would have to choose between reason and faith, I rejected faith. An obnoxious and particularly dogmatic creationist acquaintance unwittingly made that much easier for me to do.) On the sense-of-life level, too, the word has long bothered me: It implies, although in a less vulgar way than is common today, the modernist view that reality is fundamentally malevolent, as if anything good is illusory. I have always rejected the idea that disillusionment could apply to life (or reality) in general. Disappointment, however great or small, reflects but a correction to one's grasp of the way things are. The sooner and more thorough the correction, the better. In that sense, disillusionment is a good thing.

That said, I'll shift to the book review, which is interesting in itself, being about a book in which two members of an American diplomatic family became disillusioned with Germany's new Nazi government shortly before World War II. Here's an excerpt:

Her father had a leveler head -- perhaps too level. His great weakness, according to Larson, was that he saw the world "as the product of historical forces and the decisions of more or less rational people." Although born and educated in the South, he resembled the quintessential Midwesterner: industrious, conscientious, principled and self-effacing but also a bit dull. It did not help that he harbored what Larson calls a "rudimental anti-Semitism" and once told the German foreign minister, "We have had difficulty now and then in the United States with Jews who had gotten too much of a hold on certain departments of intellectual and business life." Like many, many Americans at that time, Dodd expected Hitler's reign to be short-lived and regarded reports of Nazi persecution and harassment as exaggerations or isolated incidents.

Their first year in Berlin stripped both Dodds of such comforting illusions. (Dodd's wife and grown son were also with them, but William and Martha left the most extensive written accounts of their German years.) Martha, whose circle included both members and critics of the regime, finally got the message when she and a dissident friend paid a visit to the author Hans Fallada, who had supposedly come to some sort of accommodation with the Nazis. "I saw the stamp of naked fear on a writer's face for the first time," she recalled, although considering some of what she had witnessed before that, she could well be faulted for not taking the terrorizing of non-writers more seriously. ...

Judging by the review, the book is not clear on why, as Laura Miller put it, it took the Dodds "so long to wise up," but a couple of possibilities leap out at me. First, the family did not have a firm grasp of the philosophical foundations of freedom or of how antithetical Nazism was to freedom, or, for that matter, of the role of philosophical principles in influencing human action. Second, and particularly in William Dodd's case, his cultural background acclimated him to a greater degree of bigotry than one should ordinarily be comfortable with. Both could cause someone to think along the lines of, "Oh, nobody really means something like that."

Finally disillusioned himself, William Dodd tried to disillusion his country about Nazi Germany, but to little avail. His country, though, would soon become disillusioned, anyway.

-- CAV

----- In Other News -----

Speaking of disillusionment, Jack Kelly warns us that Pakistan is not our friend. Or is he reminding us? Look to philosophy to explain why we are getting ready to hand that country another $3 billion in aid, rather than its own head on a platter.

Harry Binswanger has made public his eyewitness account of John Hospers's selling-out of Ayn Rand.

Recent polling data show that over a third of New Yorkers under thirty plan to leave the Big Apple to escape high taxes. Unsurprisingly, a poll in the sidebar shows Houston, TX, leading all other choices (after "None of the Above") for the question, "What [sic] big city would you most like to live?"

5-14-11 Weekend Reading

Brought to you, in part by an 8:00 a.m. appointment and my mis-setting an alarm, is the following abbreviated weekend post...

***

"Fortunately, it’s not too late for the rest of America to learn from Massachusetts. Instead of adopting that failed system at the national level, Americans should demand that Congress 'defund' and repeal ObamaCare -- and adopt genuine free-market health care reforms like those advocated by Tea Party physician-activist Dr. Milton Wolf and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey." -- Paul Hsieh, in Massachusetts: The Canary in the Coal Mine for ObamaCare at PajamasMedia

"Selling to the sleeping point, when property applied, is a great way of acknowledging our feelings without turning our portfolios over to them entirely." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Find Your Stock Market 'Sleeping Point'" at SmartMoney

"They quietly conclude, 'Well, I guess it's working -- how could a doctor be wrong? It's more possible than you think." -- Michael Hurd, in "Let the Buyer Beware" at DrHurd.com

"Pocahontas is the tale of a heroine, a child who exhibited moral courage and independence, a child who went against everything she'd been taught all her life in favor of the convictions of her own mind, thus proving that one's race does not have to determine one's culture or destiny." -- Charlotte Cushman, in "The Unknown Story of Pocahontas" at American Thinker

"If Standard Oil is the textbook example of the kind of company antitrust laws are supposed to punish, what does that say about antitrust laws?" -- , Alex Epstein in "Vindicating Standard Oil, 100 Years Later" at The Daily Caller

-- CAV

Laugh and Learn

It's great to have Blogger back. In my six and a half years of blogging, that's the longest outage I've ever seen. That's not a complaint: I've experienced less reliability from vital services, such as electricity, than that, before. I thank the staff at Blogger for straightening things out and my readers for their patience.

On with an abbreviated version of what I'd been thinking about posting this morning...

Generally, I devote Friday posts to things I enjoy, and today is no exception, although it will look a lot like a "regular" post. What I am enjoying about the below passage, as well as the article it comes from, is the fact that it has helped me understand a question I've been grappling with for some time. One aspect of the problem concerns the phenomenon of rationalism, which I blogged on briefly earlier in the week as I considered Noam Chomsky's views on the Islamist atrocities of 2001 as an example of the phenomenon.

To cut to the chase: The following two paragraphs, taken from an article titled, "The Monomania of an Anti-American Prophet," describe very well both the thought process/defense mechanism/method of self-delusion employed by rationalists and an appropriate reaction to its output by someone not afflicted:

And what is [Chomsky's] main thesis? As the catalogue above indicates, it is this. In every historical episode in which the Americans have projected state power, the overall death toll must be laid at Washington’s door; and, moreover, should be treated as an intended (or at least predictable) consequence of American leaders who are either full-blown murderers or so recklessly indifferent to human life as to be morally indistinguishable from them. Chomsky's entire career as a commentator on foreign affairs consists of building this catalogue in his mind -- a catalogue that he rattles off with an idiot savant's precision at the drop of a hat, and to which, apparently, Osama bin Laden's death now has been added. Nowhere is there any indication that this list-maker pays much attention to the opposite side of the ledger -- the millions upon millions of lives saved, either from death or slavery at the hands of totalitarian forces, in the fight against the Soviet Union and the more modern Islamist threat.

Nor does he seem to pay any regard to the freedom won in these struggles -- freedom that allows people like him, and crackpot conspiracy theorists as well, to shout bloody murder at their government without any fear that SEAL Team 6 will invade the MIT campus and carry his body away. [minor format edits, bold added]

This, I submit, is a textbook description of a rationalist "in the wild," as it were. (If you disagree with me, I'd be very interested in hearing from you.) I had a good laugh once I read the second paragraph: How many times have I heard some elaborate theory, backed with hoards of data -- with holes in it so large one could drive a truck through them?

I am not that familiar with Chomsky, but I would hardly be surprised to learn that he could even "answer" Jonathan Kay's observation that he is free to spout nonsense about his own country. (A few token dissidents like himself allow evil American officials to pretend that freedom of speech exists, perhaps?) As I noted in my earlier post, Chomsky has had about a decade to cherry-pick "facts" to support his conceit that the United States is the epitome of evil, and, as Kay indicates, he has an impressive (to people untrained or poorly-trained in rational thought, anyway), systematized "explanation" for everything.

But there's just one problem: Ordinary people can see right through what Chomsky says, as the second paragraph shows. (The commonality of rationalists in academia gives rise in this way to popular stereotypes of college professors as having all kinds of esoteric knowledge, but no common sense.)

But while ordinary people can see through rationalistic conclusions at first glance, many -- like Chomsky's acolytes -- can fall for them, or at least find themselves unable to answer them if they start spending time thinking about them. There are multiple reasons for this. Here are just a few... If a rationalist is involved in a specialized area, laymen will not necessarily have the training to properly evaluate what he says about his area, or whether it really fits his argument. Young people, without much life experience, can be so snowed under by the blizzard of "facts" the rationalist marshals in "support" of his argument, that they become too overwhelmed to mount a reply. (See the earlier post for why I'm using scare quotes here.) A philosophical reason is that people can accept a wrong premise in the rationalist's argument, due to sloppiness or lack of proper academic training, and try to answer the rationalist on his own arbitrary terms.

I find this very interesting, and it has implications for cultural activism above and beyond the problems that having to overcome one's own rationalism can have for understanding a proper philosophy -- or anything else, for that matter. How does one properly communicate an idea that deserves wider attention? How does one best answer a rationalistic argument that sounds impressive to many who, although they aren't professional intellectuals, are basically rational? How does one spot rationalism quickly, or distinguish it from conscious deception? These are the kinds of questions considering good examples of rationalism can help answer.

-- CAV

A Pragmatist among Pragmatists

If this editorial in the Wall Street Journal is any indication, Mitt Romney isn't going to get away so easily with his posturing against ObamaCare, and hasn't a leg to stand on as a presidential candidate. That's the good news, but it may be more than made up for by the bad.

The Romney camp blames [the government-run medical care mess in Massachusetts] on a failure of execution, not of design. But by this cause-and-effect standard, Mr. Romney could push someone out of an airplane and blame the ground for killing him. Once government takes on the direct or implicit liability of paying for health care for everyone, the only way to afford it is through raw political control of all medical decisions.

Mr. Romney's refusal to appreciate this, then and now, reveals a troubling failure of political understanding and principle. The raucous national debate over health care isn't about this or that technocratic detail, but about basic differences over the role of government. In the current debate over Medicare, Paul Ryan wants to reduce costs by encouraging private competition while Mr. Obama wants the cost-cutting done by a body of unelected experts like the one emerging in Massachusetts.

Pay careful heed to the last sentence, including the full context about who Paul Ryan is and what he's about. Ryan, who imagines that such programs as Social Security and Medicaid can be "reformed," also is no capitalist. (Otherwise, he'd be clear that the best way to "encourage" competition is for the government to stop manipulating the economy altogether, and would speak of phasing out instead of reforming entitlement programs.)

Many conservatives will pay homage to principles one moment, only the next moment to say, in effect, that we should go only so far in applying them, or that always applying them is childish or ridiculous, and ultimately, that they should be "chucked" whenever they become inconvenient. The result of this is that many conservative commentators will catch or call out a nearly pure pragmatist like Mitt Romney, but miss a less obvious one like Paul Ryan or even enable him to pass himself off as a capitalist. We can thus expect conservative appreciation of the need for principles to go only so far, and the value of conservative commentary to be severely compromised, to put things very mildly.

Whether a candidate is pro-capitalist is not a matter of degree, or a matter of not being as blatantly unprincipled as Mitt Romney. That judgement requires an uncompromising application of objective principles, and an appreciation of the need to apply them at all times.

-- CAV

Romney's "Legless Reptile" Oil

GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has decided to address the biggest complaint of his detractors by meeting the issue of RomneyCare head-on. Based on the way it appears he'll attempt to do so, I hope he fails to remove that albatross from his neck, but succeeds in bringing clarity to the issue in spite of himself.

Romney is expected to propose tax breaks for consumers buying coverage on the open market; a requirement that insurers cover patients with preexisting conditions; and provisions giving states more power in the health coverage arena.

Why not make possible tax breaks for everyone by dramatically reducing spending? What better way for an open market to flourish than by getting the government out of the marketplace, both as a player and as a rule-maker? (A good place to start would be to argue that we should not force insurers to take unreasonable risks, as Yaron Brook and Don Watkins's series, "The Road to Socialized Medicine Is Paved With Preexisting Conditions," makes clear.) And how are fifty rights-violating socialized medicine plans somehow better than one?

There is not one bit of difference between Obama's snake oil and Romney's besides the packaging. Fortunately, Romney's past mistake forces him to stick his neck out. This may prove to be a valuable opportunity for advocates of freedom in medicine.

-- CAV

----- In Other News -----

Picking up after yourself is, like paying taxes and obeying the law, for the "little people," if we take the behavior of Maria Shriver and her daughter as an indication of how leftists think. Please note that while I regard a common leftist attitude about taxation as hypocritical, I do not condone the government robbing private citizens for any reason.

This idea about how to end Gerrymandering is interesting from a mathematical point of view, but a more freedom-valuing electorate might render it unnecessary. A lack of general support for central planning and redistributive policies would eventually get rid of the kinds of favors politicians could hand out to bribe voters. But I could be wrong about this making the practice die out. In such a case, I'd prefer some other means besides institutionalizing political parties as a check.

Baja Arizona? The whole idea of people from the increasingly totalitarian left working to secede from a government unit is beyond absurd to me.

John Cook questions, "whether we really know that a statistical procedure works well if it isn’t well understood," [bold added] and moves to the more specific. I'll generalize, and say that it's better to have reached a wrong conclusion through fundamentally sound means than to have reached a "right" one through fundamentally bad reasoning. In the former case, one remains able to discover and correct an error. In the latter, one not only doesn't fully appreciate one's own conclusion (hence, isn't really right), but remains at the tender mercy of chance if the bad reasoning is his typical mode of functioning.

His Greatest (Piece of) Work

If man is a being of self-made soul and we can colloquially describe Noam Chomsky as a "piece of work," what does that make Noam Chomsky's soul?

Christopher Hitchens writes an amusing evisceration of Noam Chomsky over at Slate. I don't think quoting the final paragraph will spoil things, so here it is:

In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.

That sums up what Chomsky "knows." The real question is: "How does he 'know' it?" Reading Hitchens's piece, you will see a method that I suspect Ayn Rand would have called "rationalism" (not to be confused with reason). Chomsky had decided long before the atrocities of 2001 that the United States was the embodiment of evil in the world, and his whole thought process ever since has involved concocting narratives to fit with that premise. In such a process, facts are fundamentally irrelevant, with the inconvenient ones explained away or ignored outright and some of the more congenial ones possibly having their day in the sun should they "support" (i.e., fit in with) the narrative. Just look at the relative weights Chomsky assigns to: bin Laden claiming credit for the atrocities -- versus the names the U. S. military uses for some of its weaponry.

At one point, something Hitchens relates brought back memories of a bitter argument I heard about many years ago, that I found very puzzling at the time. Here's the memory trigger:

With the paranoid anti-war "left," you never quite know where the emphasis is going to fall next. At the Telluride Film Festival in 2002, I found myself debating Michael Moore, who, a whole year after the attacks, maintained that Bin Laden was "innocent until proved guilty" (and hadn't been proven guilty).

Hitchens goes on to note that, at least as far as proof of guilt is concerned, Moore was contradicting himself, but it's the "innocent until proved guilty" bit that interests me here.

Moore reminded me of a big argument some people I knew were having way back in the mid nineties about the guilt or innocence of O. J. Simpson in the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. The argument took place either before or during the trial. On one side of the argument were people who had concluded that, to the best of their knowledge, Simpson had committed the murders. On the other side were people who seemed to me at the time to be confused about the difference between the legal concept of guilt and an individual's personal assessment of the facts of the case. (The possible use of retaliatory government force is involved in the former case, and so it is better to err on the side of caution, even if that means sometimes letting the guilty walk free. On the other hand, an individual can always change his mind if he is wrong, and has little or no ability to harm someone he has misjudged.)

To someone like Michael Moore, the necessarily far more stringent legal requirement to prove guilt are a convenient way to attack the certainty (or at least summarily dismiss the judgement) of an opponent. To someone involved in a "thought" process like Noam Chomsky's, the fiction being entertained is that other people aren't entitled to their own judgement unless their weighing of the evidence is made to someone else's satisfaction (publicly, perhaps?). (The joke is that, if someone actually tried this, such an individual would raise all kinds of absurd objections to every step of the process.) This fiction enables such a person to ignore the fact that lots of people are weighing the available evidence and reaching a different conclusion.

Needless to say, the truth is not determined by popular vote. However, to say, "Most people are wrong about this man's guilt because of x, y, and z," is a far cry from bellowing, "He's innocent until proved guilty," in the face of mountains of evidence whose dots practically anyone could connect -- as with the case of Osama bin Laden.

It's still possible that the people I am remembering were merely confused: I didn't participate in the argument because I found it odd and don't remember it terribly well anymore. But I recall one other thing: The "innocent until proved guilty" people seemed almost rabid to me (as opposed to, say, being indignant about a grave injustice, or fearful that one was about to be committed). That impression could be off, too -- or the "rabidity" could have reflected the angry emotional response of an individual trying desperately to cling to to the illusion of objectivity, but experiencing cognitive dissonance in the face of the differing judgement of other reasonable adults.

-- CAV

Government CBA

I read a lengthy but absorbing article by Victor Davis Hanson -- "Thoughts on a Surreal Depression" -- that I can only describe as a whirlwind tour of some of the more bizarre manifestations of the effects of central planning on daily life in the depressed part of California he calls home.

One effect in particular caught my eye, though. I've noted many times, as have countless conservative commentators by now, that there's a pernicious positive feedback loop taking place between the nanny state and the culture wherein government handouts of loot encourage dependency on more of the same. The same thing happens regarding improper government regulations and individuals who choose to profit from them (rather than by relying on their own creativity and initiative), and so end up supporting regulations they should oppose. Hanson gives us another positive feedback loop in his essay:

[W]e in California have become the most and least free of peoples -- the law-biding stifled by red tape, the non-law-biding considered exempt from accountability on the basis of simple cost-to-benefit logic. A speeder on the freeway will pay a $300 ticket for going 75mph and justifies the legions of highway patrol officers now on the road; going after an unlicensed peddler or rural dumper is a money-losing proposition for government.

Set aside for the moment the propriety of the government committing acts of petty highway robbery, or of meddling in the affairs of anyone who wants to sell anything: This perverse cost-benefit analysis goes a long way towards explaining, from the government's perspective, a phenomenon that has been called "anarcho-tyranny." This example also points us to the ultimate cause, however: People who merely reflexively obey the law, but do not understand the value of a legal system as a protector of individual rights. The kind of indignation one needs for a revolution at the ballot box won't come from such people.

Until people learn to become incensed about the government using, for example, arbitrarily low speed limits as an excuse to randomly take money from some drivers, that practice will continue to look like a worthwhile expenditure of manpower to law enforcement. And until we demand that the law cease being about prescribing behavior, and become once again a means of protecting individuals from each other, we will live in the increasingly bizarre world Hanson describes (at least until the inane system collapses under its own weight). The law will nominally regulate practically everything, but since it's impossible to control everything everyone does, enforcement will be selective, and it will be directed towards those who offer the least resistance and the most loot. Culturally, this will further erode respect for the law, all other things being equal.

-- CAV

----- In Other News -----

Michael Walsh attempts to draw a parallel between the United States' recent killing of Osama bin Laden and the British defeat of "Mahdi" Muhammad Ahmad ibn as-Sayyid Abd Allah in the nineteenth century. A major difference between the two is how each disposed of the refuse. "[General Horatio] Kitchener destroyed the Mahdi's ornate tomb, exhumed the body, cut off the head, threw the bones into the Nile and ... for a time kept the skull as a souvenir."

My disgust at treating the carcass of Osama bin Laden with anything remotely resembling respect aside, Myrhaf sees a silver lining: "The disposal of that corpse would become a battleground in itself, and we would surely lose that battle." Maybe so, at this point. But that's the sort of battle that we will eventually have to fight and win. Just as we can't go on pretending we're not at war, we can't go on pretending that there is a genteel way to fight a war.

If you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal or can get around its paywall, there was an outstanding editorial there last week by Donald Boudreaux titled, "If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools." I am told that the WSJ allows direct links that work from high-traffic sites.

The Internet Genie Redux: I'm writing a paper and want to make a few Matlab graphs for one of the figures. I have VMWare, an Internet connection, and a twelve year old installation CD for Matlab 5.3. This weekend, I found on the Internet a version of Red Hat Linux old enough to run that version of Matlab -- and yet new enough to be supported by VMWare 6.5. The result is ugly, but I got it to work well enough for my purpose. I also saved five hundred smackers and got a good chuckle out of succeeding at the challenge.

5-7-11 Hodgepodge

Insecurity Masked as Self-Involvement

At some point, I made a note to stop by Ifat Glassman's blog and look around. I finally did so last week and found several thought-provoking posts pertaining to psychology. One post described and discussed a phenomenon I realized only after reading the post that I'd seen before. On top of that, she offers the following example of how to use what she learns from her observations:

I know from myself that if I ever go into a thinking mode of "how does this subject relate to my knowledge" vs. "what are the facts of this subject and how do they relate to my goals" that I am pursuing the subject for the wrong reason and that my vanity is involved rather than selfish, healthy pursuit of my goals.

The above excerpt came from a post at Ifat Glassman's Thoughts, but more recent material appears at Psychology of Selfishness.

Weekend Reading

"The killing of bin Laden doesn't end this injustice, and in fact Obama's pro-Muslim handling of the corpse and post-mortem photos perpetuates it." -- Richard Salsman, in "Obama, Osama And Operation Infinite Sacrifice" at Forbes

"From college kids scalping leveraged exchange-traded funds to high-frequency firms trading E-minis, we're all liquidity providers now, making where you get your market data (even if it's simply your broker's own website) even more important." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "My 3 Favorite Views of the Markets" at SmartMoney

"If you take a look at the timeline of history, you’ll see that the human race tends to move forward in spite of the pack, not because of it." -- Michael Hurd, in "It Doesn't Matter What Others Think" at DrHurd.com

"Rand was asked [such] questions in her own lifetime. Her answers might surprise you." -- Onkar Ghate, in "Atlas Shrugged: With America on the brink, should you 'go Galt' and strike?" at The Christian Science Monitor

"If you were to judge by the rhetoric, you might think that Paul Ryan's plan for reducing the federal deficit slashed the government's budget by 90%, and funded the killing of kittens to boot." -- Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, in "It's Time To Kill The 'Robin Hood' Myth" at Forbes

What about Free Will?

A famous scientist wants to banish evil and thinks he can achieve his goal by teaching empathy as a skill.

But rather than labelling them as evil, [Simon] Baron-Cohen says they should be seen as sick, or "disabled", and we should seek to understand why they have such an empathy deficiency and help them replace it.

Baron-Cohen shies away from saying that psychopaths can be "cured" of extreme behaviour, but he argues strongly against locking them up and saying there is nothing society can do.

"I try to keep an open mind. I would never want to say a person is beyond help," he explains. "Empathy is a skill like any other human skill -- and if you get a chance to practise, you can get better at it."

I think we can and should teach children, for example, to be more empathetic, but can't help wondering what Baron-Cohen would call someone who would choose, nevertheless, not to practice that skill.

Google didn't kill it, but, ...

... this site did. The "Bacon Number" of any actor or actress -- and the connection -- are available to anyone with a keyboard and time to kill.

-- CAV