Shiny Ideas

Book Review: The Ethics Of Voting

2012-01-10T16:24:00.002-05:00

I recently finished Jason Brennan's The Ethics of Voting, a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the subject. His basic thesis, which boils down to "ignorant voters shouldn't vote", has a rational appeal to it. Misinformed voters voting in large numbers tends to lead to bad outcomes, so the less often that occurs the better it'll be for everyone. But, at the same time, in making that case he relies on some arguments which I find to be troublesome. His is fundamentally a substantive account of the ends of voting, resting heavily on the notion of promoting "the common good". Given that I'm skeptical that such a creature exists I'm going to have to find a way to square that particular circle if I'm ultimately to endorse his conclusions.

Brennan makes things a little easier for me in this regard by stressing that his is a purely a theory of private behavior; he explicitly rejects the idea of using some sort of legal regime to restrict the franchise only to well-informed voters. And he does so for exactly the right reasons: it's not that the ill-informed have an inalienable right to vote, but rather that we can't expect any sort of real-world implementation to be administered with the requisite degree of virtue. Since he's not trying to enshrine substantive principles in law I have much less of a beef with him than I might otherwise.

What remains is our disagreement over "the common good", whether it exists and, if it does, whether it can be reliably identified. Brenna anticipated this objection and spends some time discussing exactly what he means by the phrase starting on p. 113. He ultimately reduces the common good to the "background conditions and institutions needed for each of us to pursue and achieve our conceptions of the the good"¹, quoting Linda Raeder's statement that

[T]he common good in a "great society" such as an advanced liberal society - one characterized by an extensive division of labor and knowledge and integrated by common economic, legal, and moral practices - consists on [sic] the fulfillment of the fundamental values implicitly held by all its members: the preservation of the social order as a whole, the abstract, enduring structure within which all individual and organizational activities must occur."²

I'm personally in agreement with Brennan and Raeder; that seems like a decent conception of "the common good". But it's also clear to me that the details of what constitutes the common good will vary (perhaps widely) from person to person. Is it necessary for voters to share a conception of the common good, or is it sufficient that voters merely vote for their conception of the common good? Brenna seems to be making the weaker claim, saying that "the common good" should be thought of "as a variable to be fill in by the correct theory of the ends of government"³.

This seems acceptable to me. The correctness of a vote is, to some extent, an empirical fact. If a voter claims a specific set of preferences we can assess (at least in theory) whether eir votes promote those preferences. Voters who vote contrary to their expressed preferences (probably) do so out of ignorance, which means that we can objectively say that ignorance is an undesirable quality in a voter without making any strong claims about the end of government itself. Circle squared, QED.

With that fundamental objection dealt with let's talk about some of the interesting bits of the book. Regular readers of this blog know that I've given up voting for 3 primary reasons:

Ignorance: I share Brennan's take on uninformed voting and doubt that I meet the threshold for casting an informed voting.
Uncertainty: I'm not entirely certain, at least in the context of an individual candidate, that we can say with any confidence what policies that candidate will actually pursue.
Moral censure: It seems to me that to participate willingly in a system is to ultimately endorse its outcome. Since I think representative democracy as it's currently practiced in the US (i.e. the two-party system) had serious, fundamental flaws I choose not to validate it by participating.

Brennan addresses items 1 and 2, but (surprisingly) doesn't touch on item 3 at all.

With regards to item 1 he points out that it's not necessary to have direct and immediate knowledge of all the issues at hand in order to vote well; one need only be able to "reliably discover who the trustworthy experts are and vote with expert opinion"⁴. All this requires, according to him, is "significant knowledge and some critical thinking ability"⁵, but I remain unpersuaded. Identifying the trustworthy experts in a particular field takes a lot of time and effort; doing so for a wide variety of fields (economics, social science, and history, to use his examples) is even more daunting. Let's consider history, for example: I'm still trying to figure what to make of Niall Ferguson. The War of the World seemed lucid enough to me, but knowledgeable people think he's totally off-base. I could take this third-party testimony to heart, maybe balance it with the third-party testimony of his supporters, but if I did that it's far from self-evident that I would actually know (in the sense of "justifiably believe") anything more than when I started. In light of this sort of consideration I think the bar for responsible voting might be higher that Brennan acknowledges.

As for uncertainty, Brennan cites Bryan Caplan⁶ in support of the thesis that "politicians generally attempt to give people what they ask for"⁷. I haven't read any of Caplan's work, so I can't say whether it supports that conclusion or not, but as a counter-example let me present one Barack Obama. His history prior to becoming POTUS could reasonably lead one to conclude that he'd respect civil liberties, wouldn't be a big drug warrior, and would be reticent about the conduct of war. While these extrapolations are reasonable they are also, of course, totally incorrect. Conversely, the current 2012 GOP field says lots of crazy-ass shit, so crazy that they can't possibly mean it... you hope. In either case you've got a situation where there's a mismatch between the policies which were/are being espoused and the policies which were/will be enacted. Perhaps this disconnect represents a relatively new development, but it still seems to be the case that predictions about what policies a given candidate will enact are uncertain enough that they fail to meet the criteria of "justified belief" laid out by Brennan.

As for my final reservation about voting, that participating endorses a fundamentally flawed system, Brennan is basically mute, though he sort of sidles up to the issue in his treatment of third parties and compromise voting. He waffles a little bit in this regard, noting that third parties basically never get elected, so even if their policies would lead to the best outcomes (were they to get elected) it might better promote the common good if a compromise candidate with a real chance of winning is selected instead⁸. A little later on, however, he also notes that this sort of behavior may promote the continual selection of compromise candidates and that the long-term common good might actual be better promoted by people voting their sincere preferences⁹. This seems like something that can be tested empirically, which means it should be right up Brennan's alley, but it may be the case that no one's bothered.

One final observation before I bugger off: I'm vaguely annoyed at his summation. He basically says "I've proven my point that ignorant voters shouldn't vote. You'll have to look elsewhere for suggestions on how to deal with that particular problem.". Yes, sure, fine... no one is going to hold his feet to the fire and make him talk. But he's not dumb and he's clearly done a lot of research to put the book together, so he probably could venture a helpful suggestion or two if he were move to do so. Absent that I'm going to take a stab at the problem based on some of the information he's presented.

Ultimately the problem is that the ratio of bad votes to good votes (using his definitions) is too high. In such a situation we have two, non-exclusive options: reduce the number of bad votes or increase the number of good votes. Based on the material Brenna has presented it seems like it's fairly difficult to increase the number of good votes. It takes lots of time and effort to be well-informed enough to vote and, perversely enough, the more likely you are to be a good voter the less likely you are to actually engage in politics¹⁰. Which makes me think that there's more traction to be had in reducing the number of bad votes, since getting people to stay home seems more effective than trying to make them smarter. This, in turns, leads us to ask what motivates bad voters to vote in the first place.

Interestingly enough, Brennan has a decent amount to say on that topic. One probable reason that people choose to vote at all is that its "cheap altruism"¹¹; it makes them feel good about doing something positive while imposing a negligible cost¹². Additionally, the "folk theory of voting ethics" ¹³ holds, contra Brennan, that one has a duty to vote but no duty to vote well. All of which suggests that part of the problem is the prevalence of democratic fundamentalism (to use Bryan Caplan's phrase) in the US; people treat democracy as an ends in itself and voting as some sort of civic sacrament. Democratic societies drill this view into children at an early age¹⁴, so its no wonder that they hold that view as adults. Wouldn't it be a fine bit of irony if the way to improve the democratic process was to stop taking it so seriously?

1 P. 114
2 Ibid.
3 P. 115
4 Pp. 104 - 105
5 P. 105
6 P. 180n21
7 P. 10
8 P. 130
9 P. 132
10 P. 176
11 P. 162
12 Which, if true, might be justification for the imposition of a very modest poll tax.
13 P. 3
14 P. 155

Capital Punishment Is Not Morally Equivalent To Murder

2011-12-15T10:10:00.003-05:00

In a post this morning Maryam Namazie quotes the following statement by Mansoor Hekmat regarding the legitimacy of capital punishment:

Capital punishment is the state’s terminology for murder. Individuals murder each other, but states sentence individuals to ‘capital punishment.’ The demand to end capital punishment and prohibit murder stems from opposition to intentional, deliberate and planned murder of one by the other. That a state or ruling political force is responsible does not make the slightest difference to the fact that we are dealing with intentional murder.

I believe that this view is mistaken in that it doesn't consider the distinction between private and state actors.

Barring exceptional circumstances (i.e. self-defense) a private citizen never has the right to kill a fellow citizen. Such an act is "murder" and is a moral wrong. However, citizens in a legitimately constituted government generally grant that government a monopoly on the use of force. Depending on the exact characteristics of the government's charter this grant may extend so far as to permit the execution of citizens. Therein lies the distinction between murder and capital punishment; in the former case the private citizen acts without my authorization while, in the latter case, the state acts with my authorization. Thus the two are not morally equivalent.

For the record: I believe this is a meaningful distinction but also a largely theoretical one; in the real world the necessary preconditions for the application of capital punishment are never satisfied.

To All Y'all Who Think Libertarians Are Crazy

2011-12-14T22:18:00.002-05:00

At least we don't support "indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive". Liberty of the person is the most fundamental right there is; healthcare and jobs and family and whatever else mean jack shit when the President can throw you in a dark hole forever just because he doesn't like the look of you. Maybe now people will start taking this shit seriously?

The Limits of Goodness As Effectiveness

2011-12-11T14:34:00.002-05:00

The recent advent of Free Thought Blogs has brought the writings of Daniel Fincke (proprietor of Camels With Hammers) to my attention. I find him to be particularly interesting because he believes that philosophy is important and is actively grappling with the metaphysical implications of atheism, topics which are generally ignored by many of the luminaries in the atheist movement. More intriguing still, he's a recovering relativist who claims to have identified a source of objective moral value which is compatible with the premises of atheism/methodological naturalism. Given the undeniable nihilistic streak in my own writing I'm attracted to such assertions like a moth to a flame.

At this point I've been reading Fincke's back archive for awhile. Dude's got graphomania; he's written a tremendous amount of material on a wide array of subjects so it's hard to know exactly where to start. After tracing my way back through various conversations it seems that "On The Intrinsic Connection Between Being And Goodness" provides a definitive statement of the basis for his theory of value and, as such, represents a good starting point for evaluating what he has to say. So let's start there are see what happens. Fincke leads off with this assertion:

Existing is, in the first place, the most foundational good. It is the good in which all other goods can even occur. All actual good things are existent things and we can only enjoy them if they exist and if we exist.

True enough. But it seems to me that the following statement is equally true:

Existing is, in the first place, the most foundational !good. It is the !good in which all other !goods can even occur. All actual !good things are existent things and we can only suffer them if they exist and if we exist.

All the goods in the world may stem from existence but, assuming I'm not missing something subtle, all the evils¹ do as well, which would seem to imply that existence is a value-neutral proposition. This brings to mind Nishida Kitaro's philosophy as described in The Nothingness Beyond God: existence is the basho in which both good and !good take place and is thus logically prior to either. However, it is by no means apparent that this realization is fatal to Fincke's theory of value, so let's continue, shall we?

A little later on Fincke says

Every ”form” is a way to exist and, therefore, if what I said at the beginning is correct, a possible way to be good. Now a given being may or may not completely fulfill its formal possibility for existing excellently according to its kind. Every being, essentially, might more or less fully realize the potential which its nature gives it. It may become a more or less excellent instance of its kind. The more that a thing fulfills its potential, the more it actualizes its nature, and the more it becomes that thing.

....

The more a thing does the characteristic things of its kind, the more it becomes in actuality, and not just potentially, a thing of that kind. The more excellently you do those characteristic things which are fit for your kind of being, the more closely, ideally, and powerfully you embody its formal ideal. And, in some significant sense, this makes you more that sort of thing.

I've a great many objections to the above which I'll get to in a moment but first let me say that I do, to some extent, agree with the core of Fincke's argument. Part of me says that the purpose of life, to the extent that it's meaningful to talk about such an animal at all, is to become a self-actualized being. Then my inner nihilist retorts that I'm merely trying to comfort myself by ignoring the fundamental absurdity of existence and that the pursuit of self-actualization is nothing more than a way to district myself while I wait to die. But, as Austin Powers would say, that's my hang-up and not directly relevant to the task at hand.

As for my objections, I'd like to start by examining some of the phrases he uses and then move on to what I see as some logical problems with his theory of value. Fincke believes that goodness is equivalent to effectiveness, and slightly further on uses the example of a heart to illustrate that point: A heart is designed² to pump blood; the more effective it is at doing so the better it expresses its fundamental nature as a heart. I'll totally buy that; a heart which doesn't pump blood is a !good heart. But the example of a heart is clear cut; a heart has an unambiguous function defined by its physical form and location within the circulatory system of the human body. How are we to interpret "the characteristic things of its kind" in the context of a human being?

It seems to me that there are a couple of ways to go on this front. One approach is purely materialistic: we can extend Fincke's analysis of the heart to the entire human body and ask "What is the purpose of the collection of systems which we call 'a human being'?". I actually think that's a pretty easy question to answer: humans, like all other life forms, are designed for the propagation of the species. To assess the "goodness" of a human being we need only find some way to measure its reproductive fitness. This approach, of course, totally ignores a large swath of human activity; I can already hear the peanut gallery yelling "But what about art?". If'n you believe in natural selection (as Fincke does) then abstract reasoning and all that goes with it (art, music, literature, math, etc.) is either an adaptive trait or a spandrel i.e. it either supports the organisms primary purpose (reproduction) or is incidental to it. In neither case does this change the fact that the primary purpose of the organism, from a purely materialistic perspective, is reproduction. There's really no room for anything we recognize as a moral system under this interpretation.

Fincke obviously doesn't share my conclusion, but it seems to flow naturally from "goodness is effectiveness" and his example about the heart by way of an extended series of simple steps:

A heart is good if it pumps blood.
A cardiovascular system is good if it conveys blood about in an appropriate manner.
A cardiopulmonary system is good if it conveys oxygen and blood about in an appropriate manner.
...
A human is good according to its reproductive fitness.

I can keep aggregating physical systems until I get a complete human being; at what point should I start worrying about art?

Let's set aside the materialistic approach for a second and concede, for the sake of argument, that humans are more than just reproducing machines and that the byproducts of abstract thought should received equal or greater billing. Given the vast diversity of human activities what can be considered "characteristic" of the species as a whole is rather nebulous. Fincke seems to implicitly recognize this difficulty, saying

The more we actualize our potentials the more we fully realize our human nature by more closely approaching an ideal of human perfection and existing more fully as human.

In light of this comment it would seem that an (the?) important characteristic of the human specifies is the "fulfillment of potential". Which raises an interesting question: Can we objectively determine a thing's/person's potential ahead of time, or is it necessarily a post-hoc judgement? This question seems strikingly important if we're looking to develop a comprehensive meta-ethical framework. How do I determine what is best for myself? Is such self-knowledge even possible? Moreover, how am I to treat my fellow human beings? If I cannot know ahead of time how my actions will likely affect their flourishing it becomes impossible for me to know that I'm behaving ethically.

But perhaps I'm setting the bar too high at this juncture. An objective source of moral value, even one that isn't available prospectively, would be awesome (I don't want to be a sociopath either). So how do we objectively assess the goodness/value of something like a musical performance after the fact?

So, we fulfill a potential to do something not only by doing the formal motions involved in doing that thing but, more importantly, by doing that thing in ideal ways. We actualize ourselves as musicians not just by plucking on strings or blowing into horns but by effectively expressing musical skills and by effectively creating instances of music which excellently do whatever music characteristically does.

<sigh> ... "effectively creating instances of music which excellently do whatever music characteristically does". Tell me, objectively, who's a better musician, Mozart or John Cage? Especially given that the latter's most famous piece is a conscious exercise in not playing anything at all.

That's enough for the moment on definitional issues, let's move on (ever so briefly, because I have a plane to catch) to a problem inherent in the definition of goodness as effectiveness. What if I'm congenitally-inclined (i.e. it's characteristic of my kind) to be a rapist? Am I expressing the good by being a superlative one? Or, to be slightly more abstract, is it the case that all forms of being are equally valid and what really matters is how excellently we embody them?

In conclusion, it seems to me that there are a few fundamental problems with the system of value which Fincke is proposing:

Being != Goodness: Fincke claims that existence is intrinsically good by virtue of the fact that all goods are dependent on existence. But the same can be said for all !goods, which indicates to me that existence itself is a morally neutral proposition.
Determining the characteristic function of an entity seems to be a subjective exercise, at least when dealing with complex organisms like human beings.
It's difficult to see how his objective evaluations of physical systems (like the heart) can be extended to immaterial/aesthetic experiences such as music.
The implications of "goodness as effectiveness" ("be the best rapist you can be") seem questionable from a moral standpoint.

I'm not the least bit convinced that I'm right on any of the above. As I noted earlier, Fincke has written a tremendous amount of material and it's entirely possible that he's addressed my objections somewhere. Mr. Fincke, if you happen to be out there I'd love to hear what you have to say regarding what I've written above.

1 Where "evil" is to be read purely metaphorically.
2 Again, in the metaphorical sense of the word "designed".

For The Record

2011-11-15T18:46:00.002-05:00

I may think that the OWS protestors are on shaky ground from a theoretical standpoint, but this morning's raids on various and sundry "Occupy" encampments are something else entirely. To paraphrase that guy: I may not agree with what they're saying, but they damn well have a right to say it. And the possibility that crackdowns were part of a coordinated effort is just frickin' scary.

An Experiment In HTML Typesetting, Part I

2011-11-13T09:11:00.002-05:00

Observation: Typesetting in HTML is painful.

HTML is not TeX; it's cumbersome to do anything more than generate blocks of (relatively) uniform text. Those of you who read my martial arts blog are aware that I've been developing, in conjunction with another blogger by the name of Scav, notation for recording martial arts forms/techniques. One of our secondary goals has been to restrict the notation is so that it's capable of being rendered using HTML. That has, so far, been mostly successful; I've been able to typeset some fairly complicated material using HTML. That process, however, has been a labor of love... there's a lot of hand-tweaking necessary to make things look good. I, personally, would benefit from some sort of lightweight, meta-HTML framework which allowed me to focus more on transcription and less on abusing CSS until it cries "uncle". Additionally, there's a lot to be said for separating meaning from representation; it would be great if the same underlying source could be used to produce both bottom-to-top and left-to-right variants. Right now the two are tightly coupled; I take a .csv file and run it through a small script that does some simple substitution and outputs the result as an HTML table. Not fancy and, as I said, I usually have to do a lot of tweaking afterwards.

So... having made that observeration, where to now? The first thing I want to do is see if I can come up with a generic input format that allows me to produce transcriptions quickly without worrying so much about the nuts and bolts of how its going to be displayed in HTML.

Reviewing the material I've produced to date I find that it typically has the following structure:

Some introductory commentary
A list of blocks/kicks/strikes
A list of targets
One or more blocks consisting of the following:
1. A heading
2. Some commentary
3. A notation block
4. Some numbered notes.

What format to use to encapsulate the above? XML is a natural candidate, but recall that I want to be able to produce transcriptions quickly. XML is a pain the butt to type by hand and is also "chatty"; the ratio of markup to actual information can be pretty high relative to alternatives (such as my .csv files). Right now I'm leaning towards a bastard amalgan of XML and CSV; make use of XML for describing the gross structure, but keep the notation blocks in CSV.

There's also the question of simplifying the typesetting of the notation itself. I've a computer science background, so when I think about separating meaning from representation the first thing that comes to mind are abstract syntax trees. What I'm really looking for is a system that will take a concise, easily-typed input file and turn it into an AST which can then be fed to rendering engine which will produce the desired HTML. This, in turn, implies the existence of a parser and a well-defined, though perhaps simple, language for describing the desired notation.

So I'm going to go off into a corner now and see what I can come up with; updates as events warrant.

Ya Gotta Wonder What Intuit Was Thinking

2011-11-03T14:12:00.003-04:00

Update: What precipitated this whole post was my failure to find any way to get a portfolio summary out of Quicken Essentials. After reading the article I linked to below I went and downloaded the trial of iBank, exported a QIF from Quicken 2007, and imported it into iBank. Not only did the import go smoothly but, imagine that, they have a canned report called "Portfolio Summary"! So now I'm going to give iBank a try; I suspect that I'll be asking for my money back from Inuit before too awful long.

I recently retired my 2003-vintage, PowerPC-based iMac for one of the sparkly, new, Intel-based ones. Which also meant upgrading various bits of software including, of necessity, Quicken. Big mistake...

Intuit's latest offering for Mac, Quicken Essentials, is a braindead piece of crap. I thought I could deal with the lack of investment-tracking support, but they've gone and removed a bunch of other, subtle stuff as well. The product as it currently stands is only slightly better than a toy.

Now, here's the puzzling thing: It's not like Intuit isn't capable of producing good personal finance software for OS X; I've been happily using Quickbooks 2007 for a number of years now. They've just decided, for no discernable reason, to limit Mac users to this dumbed-down version of their software. If you want decent features they suggest that you should buy the Windows version instead. Hey, Intuit... I'm not going to switch platforms just for your lousy software. If it gets unbearable I'll just switch to iBank instead of sending you any more of my money.

Look, The OWS People Have A Point, But...

2011-10-18T18:28:00.005-04:00

Update: Matt Zwolinski does a better job of explaining the same point.

As previously noted, I tend to vacillate between sympathizing with the OWS protests and just being tired unto death of the entire bloody thing. I feel compelled, however, to respond to Jason Thibeault's assertion that science lends all necessary clarity to the OWS protesters' position. Science (or stats, really) does amply demonstrate that there's a whopping great income disparity between the 99% and the 1%, but I don't think that's at issue here. I can't (nor, really, would I want to) speak for "the right-wing media", but my own perception of "vagueness" on the part of the OWS protesters stems not from any question about the existence of massive income inequality but rather from their fuzziness in identifying what went wrong and/or what they'd like to see happen to fix the problem.

Call me callous, but I start to tune out whenever anyone says "economic injustice". Vast income disparities are not sufficient, in and of themselves, to indicate that a system is unjust; "just" societies that exhibit such disparities have been successfully defended by smart folks on both the left (Rawls) and the right (Nozick). One need also demonstrate that the disparity stems from violations of the law be they isolated or systemic. It's at this point that the OWS movement starts to exhibit an insufficient level of specificity (or "vagueness", if you prefer).

Like I said above, I do sympathize with OWS; various and sundry Wall Street financial types are probably getting away with lots of things. The problem is that blanket assertions that banksters are getting away with murder are pretty much useless by themselves; good, long-term solutions will require us to identify the structural factors that enabled criminal behavior. That, in turn, requires relatively precise identification of the crimes involved.

Which, of course, assumes that criminal behavior within the financial community was a leading cause of the current economic cluster fuck. If you go and read up on the causes of the current financial crisis, however, you quickly find out the following:

There are lots of them.
Some of them stem from private sector activites and some from public sector policies.
It's hard to tell how much any single cause contributed to the crash.
There's not a whole lot of blatantly criminal behavior.

If anything it looks like a lot of the hardships that people are facing these days are ultimately the result of regulatory failure. Which sucks¹, but "regulator failure" != "injustice". And, also, "regulators" != "banksters". Which kinda makes it look like Wall Street, while not a wholly innocent scapegoat, is receiving more opprobrium than it deserves.

1 And brings to mind the quote that "the people get the government they deserve".

Might As Well Just Give Them Bats And Let Them Hash It Out Directly

2011-10-11T13:49:00.007-04:00

I find myself wearied... wearied wearied wearied... by all the back and forth between the various representatives of the 99% and the 1%. Predictably, the former want the rich to pay more taxes while the latter, being rich themselves, obviously want to keep their money. In a lot of ways this an echo over the perennial battle over the minimum wage; one side (probably well-correlated with the 99%) wants to raise it and the other wants it to stay as it is (or lower it or do away with it entirely). The two sides deploy their proxies, fight for political dominance, and eventually hash out some sort of temporary armistice that lasts only long enough for the most recent battle to get lost down the memory hole. And then the whole damn thing starts up again.

The problem, it seems to me, is that each side's default starting position misses the point. It does no good to automatically assume that the rich are overtaxed (or undertaxed); the inevitable outcome of such a conflict is that the various groups end up paying taxes in direct proportion to their political power. That's hardly the basis for a fair system of taxation. People who are genuinely interested in solving the problem ought instead to ask "What does a fair system look like?" or, more directly, "How can we know when someone is (over/under)-taxed?".

Now admittedly that's a difficult question, but from where I'm standing it seems you ought to have at least a pencil sketch of an answer before you open your mouth. I'm continually gobsmacked (yes, gobsmacked) by people who give the appearance of never having thought about the question at all, and only slightly less annoyed by people who cite some idiosyncratic interpretation of the ability-to-pay theory which falls apart under the most casual scrutiny (you run into that a lot in Seattle). Even if we accept the broad premise that the 1% aren't currently pulling their weight under any reasonable theory, how do we know where the proper balance lies? Should they pay 40%? 50%? If they could live comfortable lives while rendering up 90% of their income should we require them to do so?

These are questions which can be answered; people will disagree, of course, but its not like we're trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But the fact that nobody seems to be asking them in the first place inclines me to ignore the entire fucking discussion.

Is It Racism, Or Is It Something Else?

2011-10-06T09:25:00.005-04:00

Crommunist just put up an interesting post over at Free Thought Blogs about conducting research into the cognitive bases of racism. In general I think such research is a worthy endeavor; knowing that particular bits of our brains are prone to making to making certain types of categorizations is probably conducive to reducing racism in the long run. However, I think there's a huge methodological hurdle that must be considered when evaluating the import of such research: There's no empirical test for the presence of racism.

That sounds like excuse-making, I know... bear with me for a few paragraphs. What got me thinking along these lines is the following bit from Crommunist's post:

I lay the blame firmly at the feet of our stupid mammal brains. We forge unwarranted connections between variables, weaving false causation from whole cloth. When we see women kept out of the boardrooms, for example, despite the line in our Human Resources policy manual that specifically says we won’t do that, our brains helpfully fill in the blanks for us – obviously women aren’t there because women aren’t supposed to be. I mean, once you remove the most obvious barrier, that’s the same as fixing things, right? If those lazy broads can’t even figure out how to walk in the door we so magnanimously opened for them, we can shift the blame right back to them, can’t we?

I agree with Crommunist on this to a large degree; my gut tells me that discrimination (on the basis of gender rather than race in this case) is a (perhaps major) contributing factor to the lack of women in the boardroom. But if we're going to claim to be "doing science" we need more than just gut feeling; the proposition in question must be testable and, more importantly, falsifiable. Before we can say "Aha! Sexism!" we must identify some set of facts that would lead us to say "Aha! Not sexism!".

I suspect that many people, upon reviewing Crommunist's example above, would say "But of course it must be sexism; what other explanation could there be for the gender imbalance?". To which I reply "I don't know, but the mere presence of an imbalance proves nothing one way or the other". Consider, as a counter-example, the NBA. African-Americans are overrepresented; they make up 76% of the players but only 12% of the US population. Clearly there is a racial bias in hiring within the NBA; there is a marked tendency to prefer African-American players over... say... Asians. It does not, however, follow from there that this is evidence of racism at work.

Racism is not merely differential treatment by race, nor is sexism merely differential treatment by sex; said treatment must also be unjustified. To continue the NBA example: Asians tend to be shorter, on average, than African-Americans. Since there's a premium on height in basketball this fact could account for the observed difference. Or, it could be the case that NBA coaches secretly hate Asians and are using height as a convenient subtext to avoid hiring them. Again, my gut tells me that one explanation is more plausible than the other, but I'm not sure how to subject that observation to scientific scrutiny.

Which brings me back to Crommunist's post and eir discussion of the suit/jumpsuit research. What does the default condition look like in this case? That is to say, what sort of outcome would we expect in the absence of some racist subsystem somewhere in our brain? One possible scenario is that ambiguous faces would split 50/50 regardless of clothing, reflecting an utterly unbiased categorization system. But it might also be the case that the brain takes into account the fact that blacks are more likely to have low-status jobs than whites when categorizing ambiguous faces, in which case we should expect the type of bias exhibited in the research. How do we determine the baseline against which the effects of racism are to be compared?

I think that's the heart of the matter; from where I'm sitting it doesn't look like its possible to establish such a baseline. Racism manifests itself indirectly in the physical world; racist thoughts and motivations may lead to specific actions, but its a category error to label an action as "racist". Methodological naturalism, on the other hand, deals only with what can be observed; it can verify that a particular set of circumstances occurred, but is unable to speak to the motivations which lie behind them. Since racism is ultimately about motivation this would seem to remove it from the domain of scientific observation. Which means that research such as that cited by Crommunist is interesting, but ultimately of less import than it seems at first blush.

Random Thought On Perry's Press Conference

2011-09-20T12:23:00.001-04:00

At least he knows how to pronounce "nuclear".

I Think It's A Little More Complicated Than That

2011-09-14T14:50:00.008-04:00

Update: Roderick Long also has a good take on this. Unfortunately, his three-step answer is no more suited to the context of a contemporary debate than the objections I outlined below. I beginning to think that libertarians should respond with "You got fifteen minutes?" when they get these kinds of question.

(via Digby) I'm in agreement that people who laugh at the thought of other people dying a probably assholes. That said, the question directed to Ron Paul at the last GOP debate is harder to answer than my friends on the left make it out to be.

Consider that this was not the case of an unemployed individual (such as Kyle Willis) dying of some simple malady because they couldn't afford insurance. Rather, the hypothetical proposed by Wolf Blitzer involved a healthy individual who could afford, but chose not to buy, health insurance. While his specific question focused on healthcare at its heart it's really a question of when society should intervene to save people from themselves.

The position which seems to be implicit in criticisms of the audience's behavior is that of course we should pay for the gentleman. As Greg Laden says he's in that position because he "made a mistake in not getting proper insurance coverage"; it's unconscionable that someone someone should die on account of such an easily-remedied mistake.

I'm sympathetic to this view; it speaks well of our species as a whole that we generally try to keep our fellows from dying. Where I disagree with Greg (and probably the bulk of humanity) is in the use of the word "mistake" to qualify the gentleman's actions. "Mistake", at least as it is used here in the context of a discussion of moral dessert, seems to imply a misunderstanding or lack of knowledge that leads the actor in question to draw an erroneous conclusion. In such a situation its easy to give the actor a mulligan when it comes to the consequences of eir actions, especially when the actor is acting in good faith and/or did eir best to become appropriately knowledgeable. If an actor's actions lead to a consequence which could not have reasonably been foreseen there's a decent (though not airtight) case to be made that they have some sort of claim of aid from their fellows.

In the hypothetical currently under discussion, however, this sense of "mistake" is totally absent. There's no suggestion that the actor in question had bad information of failed to form an accurate picture of the consequences of his actions¹. He simply rolled the dice and lost, which makes his moral claim to assistance highly suspect.

We can, as a society, still choose to help the gentleman out of his predicament, but to do so opens up a big can of worms. If you do it for this gentleman you must do it for others in the same situation as well (on what ground can you discriminate?), at which point you've got a classic example of the free rider problem on your hands². Free riding, apart from being a morally dubious practice, has a lot of corrosive, knock-on effects if left unchecked.

There's also the question of personal autonomy; to rescue this gentleman is to deny that he's a competent steward of his own life. Once we've rendered this judgement he effectively becomes a ward of the state, at which point we may be morally obliged to intervene in other aspects of his life as well. It would take far more space and time than I have here to fully explore all the ramifications of this intervention, so instead I'll just offer one stark example which springs immediately to mind: his kids. If we've determined that he's not capable of making decisions for himself, what does that say about his ability to look after children? It seems to me that, if we're being consistent, we're going to have to assume some portion of his parental responsibilities as well.

You may say that I'm being unduly alarmist and that all these problems can be solved by providing him with health insurance whether he likes it or not. But recall what I said in the beginning that Blitzer's question was only nominally about healthcare. What it's really about is how far we trust individuals to make decisions for themselves. If it's not healthcare then it's something else: smoking, drinking too much, eating transfats, driving without a seatbelt. We're uncomfortable letting people experience the consequences of their actions when we deem those consequences to be too severe. Instead we instead limit their choices and deny them their full personhood, a move which is designed primarily to relieve our own discomfort. Thank you, but no.

As an aside I feel a little bit bad for Ron Paul. Sure, he gave a inane response, but there was no way in hell he could provide a nuanced answer in the context of a GOP debate (try explaining "supererogatory act" to a Tea Partier).

1 My wife, an ER doc, suggests that people are uniquely bad at assessing risk to themselves in the context of medical decision making. This may be true, and is certainly relevant to the larger discussion if it is, but isn't part of the factual background implicit in Blitzer's question.
2 Yes yes, I know you could require everyone to buy insurance ahead of time; again, not part of Blitzer's hypothetical.

Michael Lind's Anti-Libertarian Hatchet Job

2011-09-03T22:56:00.005-04:00

Michael Lind's latest article in Salon, Why Libertarians Apologize For Autocracy, is a masterpiece of smear-by-insinuation. With a title like that you'd think that it'd be full of choice examples of prominent libertarians touting the virtues of autocratic rule. What you get instead are a bunch of quotes which suggest, at their worst, that some libertarian voices from the past were insufficiently critical of various autocratic regimes.

Let's start with one that he attributes to Ludwig von Mises, since it's the most damning of the lot:

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.

I was going to grant Lind partial credit on this one; that statement does seem like a full-throated endorsement of Fascism. But then I looked up the full quote:

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.¹

Hello, quote mining much? Mises saw the Fascists as a necessary evil in the fight against Bolshevism and The Third International². Sure, I guess that technically counts as an apology for autocracy, but it's not like Mises was endorsing their methods. Far from it:

What distinguishes liberal from Fascist political tactics is not a difference of opinion in regard to the necessity of using armed force to resist armed attackers, but a difference in the fundamental estimation of the role of violence in a struggle for power. The great danger threatening domestic policy from the side of Fascism lies in its complete faith in the decisive power of violence. In order to assure success, one must be imbued with the will to victory and always proceed violently. This is its highest principle... The suppression of all opposition by sheer violence is a most unsuitable way to win adherents to one's cause. Resort to naked force—that is, without justification in terms of intellectual arguments accepted by public opinion—merely gains new friends for those whom one is thereby trying to combat. In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.³

Not quite so damning in context, is it?

The rest of Lind's examples are laughable; he's just playing "7 Degrees of Augusto Pinoche":

Milton Friedman: He gave a speech, in Chile, and failed to denounce all the bad things which had happened under Pinochet's watch.
Friedrich Hayek: OMG, he spent time in Chile! He even had the nerve to hold a meeting there!
Jose Piñera: He was part of Pinoche's cabinet!

It's all innuendos and guilt by association. With the exception of Hayek's expressed preference for a liberal dictatorship (which I'll get to in a second) none of the evidence which Lind proffers amounts to an apologia for autocracy. The bit about Jose Piñera is particularly egregious, a prime example of poisoning the well: Piñera was part of Pinochet's cabinet and now he works for Cato thus, by the transitive property of badness, libertarians eat babies. I mean really, c'mon...

I suspect that Lind's real beef with libertarians is that they're not cheering loud enough for democracy. Consider his complaint against Patri Friedman:

The Cato Institute’s problem with democracy is not limited to its appointment of a former functionary of a mass murderer to direct its retirement policy program. Cato Unbound recently hosted a debate over whether libertarianism is compatible with democracy. Milton Friedman’s grandson Patri concluded that it is not:

Democracy Is Not The Answer

Democracy is the current industry standard political system, but unfortunately it is ill-suited for a libertarian state. It has substantial systemic flaws, which are well-covered elsewhere,[2] and it poses major problems specifically for libertarians:

Most people are not by nature libertarians. David Nolan reports that surveys show at most 16% of people have libertarian beliefs. Nolan, the man who founded the Libertarian Party back in 1971, now calls for libertarians to give up on the strategy of electing candidates! …

Democracy is rigged against libertarians. Candidates bid for electoral victory partly by selling future political favors to raise funds and votes for their campaigns. Libertarians (and other honest candidates) who will not abuse their office can't sell favors, thus have fewer resources to campaign with, and so have a huge intrinsic disadvantage in an election.

Patri mistrusts democracy... so what? He's in esteemed company; none other than John Stuart Mill warned against the tyranny of the majority. And, if you want a more contemporary reference, I give you Isaiah Berlin:

Democracy may disarm a given oligarchy, a given privileged individual or set of individuals, but it can still crush individuals as mercilessly as any previous ruler. An equal right to oppress - or interfere - is not equivalent to liberty. Nor does universal consent to loss of liberty somehow miraculously preserve it merely by being universal, or by being consent.⁴

You going to tell me that Berlin is one of those autocracy-lusting libertarians too?

History is witness to the fact that democracy isn't a panacea. Glenn Greenwald, also writing for Salon, has spent an enormous amount of time documenting the various and sundry atrocities committed by both the Bush and Obama administrations. If your primary concern is the protection of individual liberties from encroachment by the state then it's rational (and wise) to be skeptical of democracy.

So really, I have to ask, what's Lind's problem? He accuses all libertarians of being apologists for autocracy but has a hard time coming up with any direct evidence to that effect. The best he can do is dredge up a few examples where prominent personalities haven't been sufficiently condemnatory for his taste. And the he goes on to say that libertarianism is incompatible with democracy when all he's really done is demonstrate that libertarians are as wary of democratic governments as they are of any other type.

A charitable interpretation of the above is that Lind has simply fallen prey to a false dichotomy: on one hand there's democracy (which is good, virtuous, and noble) and on the other hand there's not-democracy (which apparently involves regular human sacrifice). Thus if you're not in favor of democracy you must therefore be in favor of fascism/totalitarianism/authoritarianism/etc. This is, to some degree, understandable; alternative forms of government such as minarchism don't get a lot of exposure these days.

Of course the fact that he's grasping at straws to prove his point makes me think that he's merely looking for evidence to support an existing conclusion. Hater.

1 Liberalism, p. 51
2 Ibid., p. 48.
3 Ibid., p. 50.
4 Liberty, p. 209.

Free Will Was Overrated Anyway

2011-08-30T16:28:00.000-04:00

I recently finished Isaiah Berlin's essay on historical inevitability (collected in Liberty); definitely a thought-provoking piece that's worth reading. However, I'm having a hard time squaring his unrestrained endorsement of the concept of free will with statements he makes elsewhere. Specifically:

Is is salutary to be reminded of the narrowness of the field within which we can begin to claim to be free; and some would claim that such knowledge is still increasing, and the field still contracting.

Where the frontier between freedom and causal laws is to be determined is a crucial practical issue; knowledge of it is a powerful and indispensable antidote to ignorance and irrationality, and offers us new types of explanation - historical, psychological, sociological, biological - which previous generations have lacked. (p. 125)

Given the above he had to recognize that his support of free will rested on a god of the gaps type argument, hoping that science would not further narrow the scope of action to the point of insignificance. Coincidentally, while I was working my way through the essay I ran across a recent article in The Atlantic discussing the biological causes of criminal acts, demonstrating that science has continued to advance in its ability to explain behavior since the original publication of Berlin's essay in 1954. You have to wonder whether he would continue to defend free will in the face of the growing mountain of evidence to the contrary?

Nevertheless, he hit the nail on the head in characterizing how determinism pulls the rug out from under most theories of morality:

What we cannot alter, or cannot alter as much as we had supposed, cannot be used as evidence for or against us as free moral agents; it can cause us to feel pride, shame, regret, interest, but not remorse; it can be admired, envied, deplored, enjoyed, feared, wondered at, but not (save in some quasi-aesthetic sense) praised or condemned; our tendency to indignation is curbed, we desist from passing judgement. (p. 125)

However, I think it goes much deeper than that. If we're nothing more than meat puppets does it even make sense to speak of "agency"? I assert that I'm self-aware, but who/what is making that assertion? The concept of "I", of an autonomous individual, seems to me to rest on the idea that there's some sort of independent pilot which resides in my head and steers the ship. But what if PZ is right and the thing which claims to be me is nothing but a thin layer of frosting over a bunch of disparate systems. If there is no "I" as that concept is traditionally understood, but merely a collection of biological circuits which happens to be able to pass the Turing test, that would seem to be an even bigger blow to theories of morality than the a lack of free will. Absent an "I" who can assert rights? An integrated collection of biological machines can flap its jaw and make the appropriate noises, but why should we care if someone steals its stuff or punches it in the nose?

The traditional answer has been something along the lines of "self-awareness", but that just brings us back to square one. Why is self-awareness special when it may be nothing more than a parlor trick to keep us motivated and thus more effective at spreading our genes? I dunno... you tell me.

Anyhow, I'll leave you now to contemplate the absurdity of automatons who worry about whether or not they're automatons.

Ahhhhhh... Boom!

2011-08-19T09:19:00.002-04:00

That, ladies and gentlemen, was the sound of my skull disintegrating into a billion tiny shard after reading Amanda Marcotte's recent post on seasteading. Specifically:

Who wants to start laying bets now that if they do pull this off, and pirates attack them---and if I were a pirate, I'd go a long fucking way to ransack a floating island specifically built for soft-handed dorks with too much money whose time spent at video game consoles has deluded them into thinking they're badass---they turn to the U.S. government for protection?

Oh... the irony. To criticize the seasteading dorks¹ on the ground that they won't be able to protect themselves, a criticism which only makes sense if you believe that the primary function of government is the protection of people and property. That's the essence of the libertarian argument, a position which Amanda otherwise roundly rejects.

1 I happen to think that their hearts are in the right place... mostly... but that they ridiculously underestimate the logistical challenges of putting their ideas into practice.

A Critique Of Certainty And Social Justice

2011-08-17T10:29:00.003-04:00

Real quick-like, because I have to places to be in 10 minutes...

Kristen J over at Feministe kindly requests critiques of her stance vis-a-vis certainty and social justice. Conveniently, not too long ago I wrote a post on the implications of atheism and skepticism for social justice (among other things). Since I now have to jet in 6 minutes I'll briefly summarize the argument:

Skepticism of the type expressed by Kristen, since it rejects the notion that there's some objective, normative reality "out there" to which we can all refer, is incompatible with teleologic theories of social justice . Kristen may believe one thing and I may believe another, but both of our views are equally legitimate from an epistemic standpoint. So how do we decide who's views are to have force of law? The only avenue which seems at all fruitful is to reject substantive notions of justice in favor of purely procedural ones. However, based on the tone of her post, I suspect that Kristen would find pure procedural theories to be thing gruel indeed.

The Cultural Contradictions Of Daniel Bell

2011-08-04T18:44:00.002-04:00

I just finished reading 20th Anniversary Edition of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism; I'm not quite sure what to make of it. On one hand it reads like a standard conservative tract, bemoaning the loss of tradition and warning of the attendant downfall of society. And yet, if we value a theory by its predictive power, it appears that Daniel Bell was on to something since he foresaw many of the social shifts which have occurred since the book's publication. Finally, though he clearly believes that something should be done about the state of affairs we find ourselves in, he is unable to offer much in the way of concrete suggestions.

Bell seems to acknowlege that there's something about the tone of the work which invokes images of old men grumbling about kids these days. In the foreward to the 1978 edition he discusses how he's been called as a "neo-conservative", but defends himself by saying that this is a facile categorization and that his critiques "transcend the received categories of liberalism"¹. I'll buy that; I don't know what it meant to be "neo-conservative" in 1978, but he certainly wouldn't merit the title now. When writing of things which are empirically verifiable his views are generally well-reasoned, grounded in history and, as he claims, not easily reducible to "left" or "right".

At the same time, however, he longs for the high culture of the traditional canon and doesn't bother to hide his disdain for Modernism, Post-Modernism, and the cultural anarchy which followed. Sure, there was (and is) a lot of unadulturated intellectual garbage associated with the postmodern era; one need look no further than Sokal's infamous prank to know that something is rotten in Denmark. But it doesn't necessarily follow from there that the blurring of boundaries and disregard of traditional forms is A Bad Thing; part of the joy of contemporary culture is watching people do interesting things with this new liberty. Bell may not have cared much for Burgess, Vonnegut, or Kesey² but to state, at this remove, that those writers had nothing of interest to say seems indefensible.

The good news is that this particular prejudice (or, to be charitable, "reflexive blind spot") doesn't detract much from the work as a whole. The bulk of its value can be found in the theory of "cultural contradictions" that Bell puts forward to explain how society in the West came to be in the state it was in circa 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism might have been written of as another Just So Story except for the fact that it made a number of predictions which subsequently turned out to be true. Bell foresaw the coming insecurity of the middle class³ and the rise of interest-group politics⁴ which, as I alluded to above, suggests that he was on to something. His predictions have long since passed their "due by" date, so the book's utility as a guide to the future is limited, but the fact that he got some of them right tends to validate his underlying theory.

The Cultural Contraditions of Capitalism shines as an explanation of the origin of some of the ills of modern society but fails to offer a coherent prescription for how they might be addressed. Bells sees the root of all evil in the dissolution of behavioral boundaries and calls, in the Afterword to the 1996 edition, for a return to boundaries set by a sense of the numinous:

For me, religion is not the sphere of God or of the gods. It is the sense, a necessary one, of what is beyond us and cannot be transgressed. ... One of the charges I made against capitalism and modernism is that in their insatiable bursting of all bonds, there was "nothing sacred". The failure of capitalism and now postmodernism to establish the boundaries of transgression - which is what a doctrine of "natural law" would provide - indicate that the cultural contradictions of the two modes remain.

Setting aside obvious problems with the statement above (what if you think "the sacred" is a complete fabrication?) there remains the problem of squaring Bell's recommendation with his stated commitment to political liberalism. He quotes, with seeming approbation, Isaiah Berlin:

The notion that there must exist final objective answers to normative questions, truth that can be demonstrated or directly intuited, that it is in principle possible to discover a harmonious patern in which all values are reconciled, and that it is towards this unique goal that we must make; that we can uncover some central principle that shapes this vision a principle which, once found, will govern our lives - this ancient and almost universal belief, on which so much traditional thought and action and philosphical doctrine rests, sems to me invalid, and at time to have led (and still to lead) to absurdities in theory and barbarous consequences in practice. (p. 279)

To me that looks an awful lot like the motivating spirit of postmodernism itself, albeit dressed up in slightly nobler clothes. If Truth is unknowable, and that the only things which can be known with any certainty are brute, material facts, where does that leave us? Bell would have us live our lives bound by an arbitrary truth intuited through some sense of the sacred, which seems an odd thing to say for someone who otherwise behaves like a rationalist. I might go so far as to say that its an act of intellectual cowardice; Bell surely knows that The Void is there and is just trying to find some way to avoid looking into it. Much better to acknowlege that we're making it up as well go along and then try to find a means (natural law or something else) to live with that reality.

1 P. xi
2 P. 138. Though I'm with him in thinking that Thomas Pynchon might be an elaborate joke that got carried away.
3 P. 189 - 190
4 P. 197 - 198
5 P. xi

Bwahahahahah

2011-06-29T17:53:00.001-04:00

Submitted without further comment: News Corp sells MySpace for $35M mostly in stock.

One Last Bit Of Nozick

2011-06-28T17:26:00.001-04:00

Last post on Anarchy, etc., I promise. I wanted to close with Nozick's description of Utopia which, for whatever reason, I found strangely moving:

The conclusion to draw is that there will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others. (p. 312)

That seems a worthy vision with which it is hard to argue. I wanted to write it down so that, whenever I catch someone saying that libertarians are heartless monsters, I can point to it and ask what, exactly, they find objectionable about that vision.

I Was Going To Write About That God-Awful Karen Zacharias Column

2011-06-28T15:49:00.001-04:00

... but Jill beat me to it.

A Conversation With A Christian

2011-06-28T15:39:00.001-04:00

I'm a godless heather who lives in Seattle and works with computers, so I rarely come into contact with anyone who's recognizably Christian, much less someone with an evangelical bent. However, I recently took a new job doing software sales and got paired up with a sales guy who is exactly that. So far it's been an interesting experience given that I've never had the opportunity to converse with such a person at length about religious topics. I recently had the chance to chat with him, at length, about Leviticus, free will, and the purpose of ritual; I imagine y'all will probably find the conversation interesting. If I end up having more of the same this may become an occasional series.

The backstory is that we were in Mexico City and I was describing some of the more extreme practices associated with Semana Santa to which I'd been exposed on a previous visit. He's of the opinion that such folks have gotten it totally wrong, that they're missing the point of The Crucifixion. Gotta give him points for that; it's a moderately insightful answer which shows that he's actually thinking about religion instead of reflexively reciting dogma.

Anyhow, his observation gave me the opportunity to talk about fingers and moons; he hadn't ever heard that one before, but thought it was apropos. And that led, in turn, to talking about the Christian Dominionist contingent on Capitol Hill and their unwavering support of Israel¹. That's where things got really interesting. Dude knows his Bible backwards and forwards (at least from a rote memorization standpoint... more on that later); whatever church he belongs to they clearly take "Bible study" seriously. He started talking about the Book of Revelations being an allegory about the desired future state of The Church and how it has to be read in conjunction with Daniel and Numbers (I believe those were the books he mentioned).

He wound up that particular portion of the dialogue by saying something to the effect that the single, consistent theme of The Bible is love and salvation. At which point I said "Well, what about Leviticus?", thinking "It's all well and good to say that The Bible preaches a message of love, but you've got this random-ass atavism hanging out that you've got to explain". I'm not sure what kind of reply I expected; as noted above I haven't talked theology with an evangelical before. I did not, however, expect the reply that I got, namely a half-hour exegesis on how Mosaic sacrificial ritual foreshadowed The Crucifixion.

What caught my attention early in that portion of the conversation was his statement that Leviticus (and, by extension, The Bible) has to be understood in historical context. Per my friend Leviticus exists because the Hebrews forgot their religion while enslaved in Egypt. That's certainly not an unreasonable hypothesis; a similar process of forgetting among the conversos/Marranos and their descendants has been well-documented. Except The Bible says that the Yahweh cult was a post-Exodus innovation; whatever religion they had prior to Exodus bore no relation to the practices laid out in the Pentateuch. Consider the following:

And the Lord said to Moses, 'Write down all these instructions, for they represents the terms of my covenant with you and with Israel.' (Exodus 34:27)

That makes it sound like a totally new deal rather than a rehash of some pre-existing covenant, yes? How do you reconcile the above statement with the notion that Leviticus is a reminder of previous practice?

Which brings me to the topic of my friend's views vis-a-vis the truth of The Bible. He doesn't believe that its inerrant nor, thankfully, does he believe that it's an authoritative document to which all of humanity must conform its behavior. He has also said some things which makes it sound like he's iffy on (or, perhaps, indifferent to) its historicity as a whole. He told me that he was conversant with its contents prior to his conversion to Christianity; what pushed him over into conversion was some sort of personal experience of the numinous. His take, as far as I've been able to suss out, is that The Bible is a good story with a positive message of love and hangs together well (provided your apologetics are sufficiently elaborate). That, combined with his own conversion experience, is enough to convince him that Christianity Is True.²

Which brings me to the meat of this story, a fundamental realization I've had as a resulting of talking to him: He's not interested in having a logical, rigorously consistent belief system. For all the emphasis that his church puts on learning The Bible he's still fundamentally feeling (rather than thinking) his way to his truth. For example, I asked him if the Romans/Jews/whomever could have not crucified Jesus. He said it had to happen but that each individual person in that particular drama chose whether or not to go along. To me that's not a satisfactory answer; the fact that God dictated the outcome of the actions of N people is only slightly better, from a free will point of view, than if ey'd dictated each persons' actions individually. I was going to point this out to him, but as I listened to him speak I realized that he simply wouldn't care about that kind of abstract result.

I literally cannot argue with him (most of the time, anyway) because our personal epistemic systems are so far removed from each other. I think that maybe, if I can find Biblically-supported examples where the contradictions are glaring enough, I might be able to gain a toehold. The crucifixion example seemed to give him at least a moment's pause, so something along those lines may yet at least get him to stop and think. If given the chance I'm going to ask him why, if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, does he behave like a stern-but-loving father? Wouldn't an entity possessing such characteristics be utterly alien to us? I wonder how much my friend knows about Gnosticism...

A larger point here is that, as mentioned above, my friend's faith is largely benign. It may lead him to believe counter-factual things (what are his views on global warming?), but apart from that he's bothering no one. What do you do when you encounter someone who's similarly feeling their way to the truth but is not so benign? Like the Christian Dominionists I mentioned earlier... they write laws and they (literally) can't be reasoned with. It seems to me that if you find yourself arguing directly with someone's theology you've already lost.

A better tactic, which I think cuts through a lot of the bullcrap about "framing", is to think about epistemology directly. Are there a) places where there's enough agreement about basic facts that you can have a productive dialogue or b) means by which the distance between agreed upon facts can be closed? Absent either one of those and you're wasting your time and breath.

1 And really, how often do you get to use the phrase "immanentize the eschaton" in casual conversation?
2 Though he's also made statements to the effect that Mormons and Jehova's Witnesses aren't "really Christian". Knowing his criteria for making this determination would be enlightening.

Does It Count As Voluntary If The Bus Driver Was Drunk?

2011-06-24T19:51:00.002-04:00

More on Anarchy, State, And Utopia, this time in regards to discussion of marriage and voluntary exchange. Nozick proposes the following rule for determing whether a person's actions are voluntary:

Whether a person's actions are voluntary depends on what it is that limits his alternatives. If facts of nature do so, the actions are voluntary. (I may voluntarily walk to someplace I would prefer to fly to unaided.) Other people's actions place limits on one's available opportunities. Whether this makes one's resulting action non-voluntary depends upon whether these others had the right to act as they did. (p. 262)

Which seems way, way off to me; either he's decided to offer his own, idiosyncratic definition of "voluntary" or he's just completely missed the boat on this one. It seems to me that the question of whether an act is voluntary (or coerced) turns not on how one arrived at a particular choice but rather on the set of anticipated outcomes the choice might generate.

Nozick illustrates his definition by way of a marriage scenario. Rather than writing out the entire passage, which is somewhat lengthy, I'll direct you to p. 263 in the book and summarize as follows:

There are 26 men arranged in descending order of desirability from A to Z.
There are 26 women (A' through Z') similarily arranged.
A marries A' by mutual consent, leaving B to marry B', C to marry C', and so on.
At the end of things Z and Z' are left with the choice to marry (or not). Nozick asserts that this decision is voluntary.

I agree that the decision is voluntary, but perhaps for different reasons than Nozick. Let's consider 2 counter examples:

Example 1: Suppose that A through Y and A' through Y' all get on a bus to go sightseeing in the Swiss Alps. Unbeknownst to them the driver is roaring drunk and drives the lot of them off a very high cliff, killing everyone aboard. Z/Z' are left to marry or not as they see fit, a decision which would almost certainly be considered "voluntary" according to the common understanding of the word.
Example 2: Same scenario as Example 1, but the driver of the bus is stone cold sober. Instead, an avalanche sweeps the bus off the road and over the aforementioned cliff. Z/Z' are faced with exactly the same range of choices as in Example 1, though this time their choices have been limited by a "fact of nature" rather than an illegitmate act (drunk driving).

The above illustrate why I think it's wrong to focus solely on the set of available alternatives when considering whether an act is voluntary or coerced; the anticipated outcomes of the decision are clearly relevant as well. I believe Examples 1 and 2 to be pretty much a slam-dunk; it seems absurd to think that the determination of whether Z/Z' are marrying voluntarily should turn on whether the other 25 couples were killed by an avalanche or a drunken driver. And what happens if Z/Z' don't know the exact cause of death? How can facts which they do not know be at all relevant to the question of whether they are acting of their own volition?

The fundamental flaw with Nozick's definition of voluntary action is that it's a path function; what matters is not the spectrum of possible outcomes, but only how one arrived at the choice. This seems to run counter to the whole concept of volition; choosing is an inherently forward looking process wherein you (as a rational actor) balance the anticipated costs and benefits of each available course of action and select the one which most appeals to you. How you arrive at a particular choice matters only to the extent that it shapes the anticipated outcomes available to you.

Of course, the real question is what constitutes "coercion" under this formulation? Consider Nozick's example of someone who must work at some menial task or face starvation. Does ey choose of eir own free will to take the job? And how does this differ from the situation where someone forces em to work at gunpoint? Those are tough questions for which I don't claim to have anything approaching a complete answer. My gut says that in both situations (starvation and gunpoint) the person so affected is acting with the same amount of volition (which we needn't specify); what differs are the external circumstances driving the person to that choice. So perhaps we should focus on these immediate (rather than historic) extrinsic factors and leave the concept of free will (if such a beast truly even exists) to someone else.

Marketing Fail

2011-06-21T18:23:00.005-04:00

I'm telling ya', you subscribe to Reason and all of a sudden the crazies come out of the woodwork. Backwoods Home Magazine somehow thinks that I might be interested in their wares... have they noticed that I rent a house in Seattle? I want to homestead like I want another hole in my head.

Wilt Chamberlain and the Lockean Proviso

2011-06-13T11:10:00.000-04:00

As mentioned previously I'm currently working my way (slowly) through Nozick's Anarchy, State, And Utopia. It's definitely interesting, especially the bits he has to say about Rawls, and the fact that he takes great exception to Rawls' social determinism raises my hopes that I'm not a complete idiot.

Anyhow, I noticed an interesting conflict between Nozick's "Wilt Chamberlain" example and some of the things he says later on about the Lockean Proviso. Specifically, he states the following in regards to people giving Mr. Chamberlain money to watch him play basketball:

If D₁ was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D₂, transferring parts of their shares they were given under D₁ (what was it for if not to do something with?), isn't D₂ also just? If the people were entitled to dispose of the resources to which they were entitled (under D₁), didn't this include their being entitled to give it to, or exchange it with, Wilt Chamberlain? (p. 161)

And yet, later on, he has the following to say in relation to trying to corner the market in a particular resource:

But still, we can imagine, at least, that something like this occurs: someone makes simultaneous secret to separate owners of a substance, each of whom sells assuming he can easily purchase more from the other owners; or some natural catastrophe destroys all of the supply of something except that in one person's possession. The total supply could not be permissibly appropriated by one person at the beginning. His later acquisition of it all does not show that the original appropriation violated the proviso (even by a reverse argument similar to the one above that tried to zip back from Z to A). Rather, it is the combination of the original appropriation plus all the later transfers and actions that violates the Lockean proviso. (p. 180)

These situations look nearly identical to me. In the market-cornering example, as in the Chamberlain example, there is an initial distribution D1, which is presumed to be just, which is subsequently transformed into D₂ through a series of voluntary exchanges, each of which is just when taken in isolation. How is it, then, that Nozick can claim that the resulting distribution is unjust?

I believe that the problem here is that Nozick pays scant attention to the emergent properties of systems. He certainly acknowledges that such creatures exist; the violation of the Lockean Proviso in the market-cornering example is a clear example of such a thing. Similarly, his discussion of threshold conditions earlier in the book makes it clear that there are some behaviors which are tolerable in individual instances but unacceptable once they become prevalent.

If we restate the short-form principle of transfer (p. 160) to explicitly take into account the Lockean Proviso we arrive at something like the following:

From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen, provided that the aggregate of these choices does not violate the Lockean Proviso.

Nozick seems to think that this is a non-issue, stating that "the free operation of a market system will not actually run afoul of the Lockean proviso" (p. 182). Apart from this being an unsupported assertion it seems to me that it leaves the door open for clever counterarguments to the Wilt Chamberlain scenario above.

Firstly, the Lockean Proviso ("enough and as good left in common for others") turns explicitly on the definitions of "enough", "as good", and "left in common". I suspect that Nozick could debate Rawls and Sen on the meaning of "enough" and "as good" until the cows come home and not reach a mutually-agreeable conclusion. Moreover, its not entirely clear what the phrase "left in common" means in contemporary society: I might be able to appropriate enough through my own labor if I lived in the wilds of Montana, but there's nothing left to appropriate in downtown Los Angeles. Does this imply that I have to move to Montana or, instead, does it imply that the distribution of goods in downtown Los Angeles violate the Lockean Proviso?

A suitably motivated individual might construct a counterargument based solely on this ambiguity, but there's another issue as well: the Lockean Proviso is axiomatic and, thus, arbitrary. If Nozick is going to attach an arbitrary condition (in this case the Lockean Proviso) to the principle of transfer must he not also grant that courtesy to others? I'm unwilling to assert that there aren't other, plausible limiting conditions which might be attached to the principle of transfer which would invalidate the transfer of money to Wilt Chamberlain.

Hey, Amanda, Look...

2011-06-02T18:59:00.003-04:00

I'm tired of people saying that there aren't any genuine libertarians out there. Look, for the love of god and all that's holy, Reason just put out an entire special issue dedicated to prison reform. Hardly typical fare for golf-pants wearing, Pearl Jam listening, Republican weenies. What the hell do they (and I, for that matter) have to do to get you to acknowledge that there are people who consistently support civil liberties across the board?

See also my general desden for Rand Paul's recent statements.

Rand Paul Double-Take

2011-06-01T19:11:00.003-04:00

Someone help me out here. How does a guy who says

We don't want our records to be sifted through by a government without judicial review... They don't want to vote on this because they know the American people agree with us.

then go on to say

I'm not for profiling people on the color of their skin, or on their religion, but I would take into account where they've been traveling and perhaps, you might have to indirectly take into account whether or not they've been going to radical political speeches by religious leaders. It wouldn't be that they are Islamic. But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that's really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison.

Not only does that not seem like a coherent stance to take from a theoretical standpoint, but it doesn't seem like good politics either. The people to whom Rand Paul is pandering in the second quote must surely also disagree with his position vis-a-vis the Patriot Act.

You gotta wonder what's actually driving Sen. Paul; sometimes he takes libertarian positions and sometimes he doesn't, but its not all all clear what motivates him to go one way or the other. Even the hypothesis that he's racist, which seems to get trotted out from time to time, doesn't have much explanatory power in this instance. He's against the Patriot Act even though it certainly inconveniences non-Caucasians more than it does Caucasians while, at the same time, suggesting measures that would entangle all those sovereign citizen/militia types. Honestly, the best answer at this point is that he's just not thinking about things very hard.

Sigh: Death Of The Constitution Edition

2011-05-18T17:20:00.002-04:00

This sucks. Ed may be guilty of hyperbole in this case, but just barely.

Another Dummy, This Time With Blender

2011-05-06T14:53:00.002-04:00

A couple weeks ago I put up a post about creating a simple, rigged dummy in POV-ray. Though it worked more or less I was ultimately unsatisfied with the result. The process of posing the figure was error-prone and time-consuming, and ultimately it just didn't look quite right. So I decided to revisit the idea of building a dummy using Blender since it's designed for just this sort of exercise.

Blender's a great tool, but it has to have the steepest learning curve of just about any program I've ever used. The 2.5 redesign is a vast improvement over v2.4, making the program merely difficult where it used to be absolutely inscrutable. The downside is that the 2.5 documentation is still woefully incomplete, making it a challenge to use some of the more advanced features. So now, a couple of weeks later, and after much reading and experimentation, I've been able to put together a rigged dummy:

It took a lot longer than in POV-ray due, in large part, to my general unfamiliarity with Blender. But I also took a lot of time modeling the hands, something I didn't even attempt with POV-ray, because I'm going to need reasonably realistic hand geometry for some of the things which I intend to do with the dummy. As far as actually posing the dummy Blender is light-years ahead of POV-ray. Posing naturally constrains limb lengths (a process which I had to fake in POV-ray using vtransform and Rotate_Around_Trans) thus producing a much better-looking result. And you get immediate, OpenGL-rendered feedback rather than having to go through a render cycle. Blender is truly more suited for model-and-pose work than POV-ray, provided that you're willing to put in the (considerable) time to learn how to use it.

If you'll recall from my previous post I started off with POV-ray because I wanted to be able to quickly render multiple camera angles from the command line. Blender, it turns out, can do the same thing using its ability to store multiple "scenes" in a single file. Here's what I did to get the four-shot composite above:

Create a Blender file containing four scenes, one for each of the four shots that I want to produce.
Give each scene a unique camera and light source positioned as desired.
Create one dummy model and one floor grid (grid texture provided by an image, btw) and link them to all four scenes.
Render each scene on the command line as follows: blender -b <Blender file> -S "<scene name>" -o <output file name> -F <format> -x 1 -f 1


Composite using montage.



It's A Floor Wax And A Dessert Topping!
2011-05-02T13:06:00.002-04:00

I just finished Why Deliberative Democracy? and I have to say that it was a terribly unsatisfying read. Gutmann and Thompson are clearly smart people who know their subject matter well, but they presented the material as if driven by a desire to obfuscate, rather than elucidate, their views on the topic at hand. If someone asked me at this point to explain of what, exactly, deliberative democracy consists I'd be hard-pressed to provide a coherent answer.



Part of the problem is that Gutmann and Thompson seem to have made something of a fetish out of provisionality. They actively reject the notion that their is some immutable set of principles to which deliberative democracy may uniquely lay claim:



Deliberative democracy does not seek a foundational principle or set of principles that, in advance of actual political activity, determines whether a procedure or law is justified. Instead, it adopts a dynamics conception of political justification, in which change over time is and essential feature of justifiable principles. The principles of deliberative democracy are distinctive in two significant respects: they are morally provisional (subject to change through further moral argument); and they are politically provisional (subject to change through further political argument).¹



Which is fine and dandy, except for the fact that they make assertions to the contrary in about a zillion other places throughout the book. For example:



An implication of taking the problem of incomplete understanding seriously is that the results of the deliberative process should be regarded as provisional. Some results are rightly regarded as more settled than others. We do not have to reargue the question of slavery every generation.²



Well... why not? What is particularly special about slavery, or the history of the deliberation thereof, that makes it unnecessary to reconsider it in the future? This strongly suggests that deliberative democracy (as conceived by Gutmann and Thompson) contains some mechanism by which certain arguments may be foreclosed.



The authors would not doubt reply that reconsideration of the issue of slavery is precluded by virtue of their notions of reciprocity and mutual justification. I can certainly accept that argument, but believe that it undermines another of their assertions, that their conception of deliberative democracy is a second-order theory. Consider their statement on the topic of first-/second-order theories:




To begin to show why deliberative democracy is different from other theories, and how it can more readily accommodate moral conflict, we need to distinguish between first- and second-order theories of democracy. First-order theories seek to resolve moral disagreement by rejecting alternative theories or principles with which they conflict. . . 



Second-order theories deal with moral disagreement by accommodating first-order theories that conflict with one another.³




By this definition deliberative democracy is not a second-order theory. The principle of basic liberty⁴ is incompatible with various forms of communitarianism, while the principle of basic opportunity⁵ runs afoul of certain flavors of libertarianism. Gutmann/Thompson's conception of deliberative democracy must then reject these first-order theories, undermining its claim to be a second-order theory. Of course, they've got a rejoinder to this as well:



Is there any reason to define democracy so narrowly that it excludes substantive principles? The reason cannot be because the content of basic liberty or basic opportunity is reasonably contestable.⁶



Fail. Robert Nozick spent a great deal of time carefully laying out the case that basic opportunity is incompatible with liberty. He may not be right, but to hold that his ideas aren't worthy of rebuttal is to prematurely close the discussion.



Alternatively, we can argue that basic liberty and fair opportunity are themselves provisional, thus allowing (at least theoretical) compatibility with communitarianism/libertarianism and rescuing deliberative democracy as a second-order theory. But at that point needn't we also reopen the discussion of slavery on the ground that reciprocity and mutual justification are also up for debate? In which case deliberative democracy is vulnerable to the same criticism that the authors make of procedural theories, that it can lead to decisions which violate substantive moral principles.⁷



Ultimately Gutmann and Thompson fail by trying to produce a theory that is both substantive and second-order. Maybe it can actually be done, but they haven't managed to reconcile the accommodation of all first-order theories with the inclusion of substantive principles. It's not even obvious to me why they're so intent on calling deliberative democracy a "second-order theory"; why not just admit that they've developed a first-order theory that accommodates a wide variety of perspectives within a democratic, deliberative framework? Surely there's no shame in that?





1 P. 132

2 P. 12

3 P. 126

4 P. 137

5 Ibid

6 P. 136

7 P. 132



Booze On Parade: The Johnny Walker Collection
2011-04-30T23:05:00.004-04:00



Someone who has a much higher opinion of me than I do got me a Johnnie Walker sampler for Christmas last year. It's been sitting in my liquor cabinet since then, waiting for a moment when I could give it the focused attention it deserves. This evening I've found myself with a quiet evening ahead of me, just the thing for a vertical scotch tasting. So let's proceed with the unwrapping, shall we?





The collection consists of one each of:



Red Label
Black Label
Gold Label
Blue Label



I've had much previous experience with the Red and Black; they're both good, and neither are terribly expensive. What I'm really looking forward to are the Gold and the Blue; I've not had either before on account of them being terribly pricey. Also, how often do you get to do a vertical whiskey tasting? The last time I got to do one was when I visited the Jim Beam distillery; that was a tremendous amount of fun. On with the show!





Left to right, top to bottom, that's Red, Black, Gold, and Blue. Visually there isn't much difference between the four. The Blue is, perhaps, a bit lighter in color, but the Red, Black, and Gold are all indistinguishable. There's not much difference in the way of bouquet either. All of them smell, as expected, like whiskey. I get smoke and maybe a hint of vanilla from the Red, and the Blue seems less assertive than the rest, but apart from that there doesn't seem to be much difference.



I have to say that Johnnie Walker makes a pretty good product. Though undistinguished from a flavor perspective the Red is warm and fairly smooth; not bad for coming in at under $40 for a 1.75L. The Black definitely has more character; there's a noticeable note of smoke and a hint of honey. The first thing I notice about the Gold is the mouth feel; it's richer and thicker than either the Red or the Black. Sweeter too... it bears an ever-so-faint resemblance to a good icewine. And, lastly, the pièce de résistance... it's lovely and refined, exhibiting the same sweetness and mouthfeel as the gold.



Now... here's the question... would I pay $150 for 750mL of Blue? Compared back-to-back its definitely smoother and more refined than the Red but, sadly, isn't all that interesting. I imagine that some people place a premium on the refinement of a spirit, in which case some additional cost is warranted; the Blue is definitely one of the smoothest scotches I've had the pleasure of sampling. However, and this may be a personal idiosyncrasy, I strongly prefer character to refinement... I want my booze to taste like something. For example, Laphroaig makes Quarter Cask, a great, smokey scotch that, while not nearly as genteel as Johnnie Walker Blue, is also a third of the price. Same thing with Macallan, or The Balvenie... they've got lots of interesting things in their portfolio which won't break the bank. So yes, if someone gives me a bottle of Blue I'll by no means turn up my nose, but there are better ways to get the most bang for your scotch buck.



Nozick's Experience Machines And The Need For Human Validation
2011-04-29T14:08:00.004-04:00

I recently started working my way through Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which turns out to be just an awesome book in general. IIRC I added it to my list because it was supposed to have some material on what constitutes an appropriate level of taxation, but it turns out that it has way more than that. Nozick essentially picks up where Locke left off and builds a case for the night watchman state from first principles. Knowing now that this book exists I'm inclined to consider it obligatory reading for anyone claiming to be a libertarian.



Anyhow... the book contains an interesting digression on "experience machines" and our subjective interpretation of the worth thereof which arises in the context of whether its acceptable to treat animals differently than people. Nozick's take is that most people will reject the notion of plugging into such machines and passively ingesting synthesized experiences because being actively engaged has merit in-and-of-itself:



What does matter to us in addition to our experiences? First, we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them. In the case of certain experiences, it is only because first we want to do the actions that we want the experiences of doing them or thinking we've done them.¹



Ultimately he connects this with the desire to engage reality on a fundamental level:



There is no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated. Many persons desire to leave themselves open to such contact and to a plumbing of deeper significance.²



It suddenly occurs to me that such an admission has some interesting consequences: If there is a "deeper reality" then of what does it consist and does its existence have any implications for the development of (libertarian or other) philosophy? But let's leave that aside and focus on his argument that people would, in general, reject plugging into an experience machines on the ground that there's no engagement with what's "really real" (for lack of a better word).



I'll agree up front that it's a contributory factor; people really seem to be stuck on things only being "real" if they happen in meatspace³. But I think that there's more to it than that and propose a modification of Nozick's scenario for the purposes of exploration. 



Let's imagine, for a moment, that I'm hooked up to one of these experience machines but, rather than it being a solitary pursuit, I'm "in there" with someone else. Probably my wife because really, who else would want to spend a year in a vat with me? Further suppose that we're doing something something stimulating like taking a year-long, simulated cruise around the world. Provided that the simulation is good enough that sounds to me like a tempting proposition: I'd get to experience new cultures, see new sights, try new foods, etc., all in the company of my lovely wifey. Complaining at that point that its "not real" starts to look a little bit like naked prejudice.



And now the M. Night Shyamalan-worthy twist: Suppose that it turns out that I'm not in there with my wife at all but merely a Turing-tested, 100% indistinguishable replica. That changes things a bit, doesn't it? Some people might merely find the experience less valuable while those with a more uncharitable bent call me a deluded loser. Which of them is right, if either, isn't important; the point is that our perception of the experience changes depending on whether I'm talking to a real person or a machine.



The difference, I believe, stems from a human desire for external validation. Most people want not only to experience things, but to have other people validate those experiences as worthy and interesting. Which, at a deeper level, has to do with the social construction of meaning; actions are only meaningful if there are other people around to reflect on them⁴. 



This brings to mind the phenomena of vacation photos. I used to walk past the original Starbuck's on my way to work and every day there'd be some lot of vacationers taking pictures of themselves outside. This engendered the following realizations:



The ancient Indians were on to something; there are a finite number of forms which repeat themselves endlessly.
The pictures were not being taken solely on mnemonic or aesthetic grounds.



After you see your umpteenth tourist having their picture taken while pointing at the Starbuck's sign you realize that one purpose of these snapshots is to document the experience so that it can be shared later with others. The act of sharing vacation snaps serves, among other things, to allow others to reflect on your experience. 



To me this seems a central reason why many people would reject experience machines, but Nozick never even hints at it. Interestingly enough, it may provide fodder to answer the challenge which he raises at the end of the section: 



Without elaborating on the implications of this, which I believe connect surprisingly with issues about free will and causal accounts of knowledge, we need merely note the intricacy of the question of what matters for people other then [sic] their experiences. Until one finds a satisfactory answer, and determines that this answer does not also apply to animals, one cannot reasonably claim that only the felt experiences of animals limit what we may do to them⁵.



Do animals find it necessary that their actions are apprehended by and reflected on by others? My guess is that the vast bulk of them do not. If that is true it is a clear example of something that matters for people differing markedly from what matters to the rest of the animal kingdom, though its not at all clear whether than difference justified treating animals differently than people from a moral standpoint.





1 p. 43

2 ibid.

3 For the record I heartily disagree; there are clearly a wide range of phenomena whose reality/validity don't (or, at least, logically shouldn't) depend on where they happen. All else being equal a novel is a novel regardless of whether its written by someone laboring in the physical world or a brain in a vat hooked up to some virtual simulation; I can think of no logical reason to privilege one manifestation of a bundle of ideas over another.

4 Grand, sweeping generalization, I know. There maybe be some actions which are meaningful absent other people. And some people, hermits and the like, certainly seem to find meaning expecting little or no interaction with others. This is merely to say that for most people, most of the time, the anticipated presence of an audience is an important part of the overall equation.

5 p. 45



Sweet Jebus: Unauthorized Access Edition
2011-04-29T13:03:00.002-04:00

(via The Volokh Conspiracy) You've got to wonder what kind of crack was the 9th Circuit smoking:



Nosal’s argument that the government’s “Orwellian” interpretation would improperly criminalize certain actions depending only on the vagaries and whims of the employer is foreclosed by Brekka, which held unequivocally that under § 1030 the employer determines whether an employee is authorized. Therefore, as long as the employee has knowledge of the employer’s limitations on that authorization, the employee “exceeds authorized access” when the employee violates those limitations. It is as simple as that.



How 2/3rds of the panel could buy that is beyond me. I mean, really, the implications of the decision are staggering. Surely Judges Trott and O'Scannlain must have appreciated that it makes criminals out of damn near everyone who works for a company of any size. Have they read a standard, corporate AUP recently? They're best summed up by a Rev. Lovejoy quote: "Technically, we're not allowed to go to the bathroom". And if you do, it's now a Federal offense.



I really love Orin's signoff on the subject:



And if you have to go to the Ninth Circuit, remember, don’t consent to anything and tell the cops you need to speak with a lawyer.



Also, random thought: Since this interpretation of the CFAA clearly benefits employers does that mean that the 9th Circuit has a pro-business agenda?



Connecting Some Dots, Drawing Some Parallels
2011-04-25T12:39:00.003-04:00

I just read PZ's most recent post on the NCSE and was particularly struck by the following passage:




I really feel that the NCSE has lost its way on this issue. I want to support the NCSE, but it has become increasingly hard to do. I have heard these arguments over and over again that they have to coddle religious believers because they need them to support science. They don't. ...
 


It's funny. The organization has such a finely tuned political sense and diplomatic strategy to promote science to the whole of the United States, and have managed to profoundly alienate that segment of our society that is most dedicated to promoting science. That's quite an accomplishment. Maybe we should stop supporting them because they're that incompetent at the political side of their mission.




That's a damn near perfect echo of Glenn Greenwald's recent lament regarding "loyal partisan voters". But notice the difference here: Greenwald has no solutions to offer while PZ immediately identifies a corrective course of action. 



Which lends credence, I believe, to my contention that our political duopoly is the root cause of Greenwald's unhappiness. The best leverage that the average joe has over any organization is simply withdrawal of eir support. We can do that in the case of the NCSE since there are plenty of other groups out there supporting science education. However, the vast majority of Democrats are, for reasons which I've previously discussed, unable/unwilling to withdraw their support from the Democratic party. Until such time as there's a viable alternative to both the Democrats and the Republicans we're just screwed.



Thursday Afternoon Diversion: A POV-ray Dummy
2011-04-14T16:02:00.002-04:00

I recently found myself in need of a basic human dummy for a project that I've got going on over at Analytic Martial Arts. My requirements were/are pretty minimal:



Create a stick-figure mock-up of the human body.
Pose the body as needed.
Efficiently create top, front, side, and three-quarters snapshots of the model.
Composite the four snapshots together in a 2x2 grid.



I initially thought to use Blender, since it's designed specifically for creating models and such, but ran into a couple of issues which complicated matters. I'm more interested in body geometry than aesthetics and, as a consequence, often know specifically where I want particular points to be positioned in 3-space. Blender, being a mesh-based modeler, doesn't provide me with a convenient way (that I'm aware of) to say "I want a cylinder of radius blah, with ends positioned here and here". Additionally, I couldn't figure out a way to render multiple camera-angles from the command line. Given that Blender has an embedded Python interpreter it's undoubtedly possible, but the answer wasn't obvious.



Since Blender wasn't going to cut it I decided to fall back to POV-ray. Moray seems to be the preferred modeler for POV-ray these days, and was an improvement over Blender, but didn't quite cut it either. The modeling process in Moray involves creating unit objects (a 1x1x1 cube, a sphere of radius 1, etc.) centered at the origin and then applying standard transforms to them. Provided that I wanted to do some non-trivial math I could come up with the appropriate transforms to get the objects positioned the way I wanted, but that would basically defeat the purpose of using a modeler in the first place. 



What I really needed was an interface which would let me place primitive objects directly ("I want a sphere of radius blah w/ center x,y,z") and then view/modify them via the GUI. One of the many front-ends available for POV-ray may very well do that, but as I've yet to identify one I ended up going back to basics and using a text editor to build my POV-ray files by hand.



POV-ray doesn't have built-in support for modeling (armatures, skins, etc.) like Blender does, but it turned out to be straightforward to build a dummy that would suit my needs. Limbs are cylinders with vitruvian proportions, joints are spheres, and the location of each joint in 3-space is represented via a named vector. Defining hand- and foot-looking objects in terms of these vectors was a little bit of a challenge; I ended up creating them as cylinders with one end at <0,0,0> and then using the Point_At_Trans macro to orient them properly. Using multiple camera definitions in conjunction with m4 allows me to batch render different views which can then be stitched together using montage.



The result ain't pretty, but its good enough for MA demonstrations: 





The POV source file is here; making it do anything other than stand is left as an exercise for the reader.



This Is Obama's Fault
2011-04-14T12:46:00.002-04:00

(via Dispatches) Bradley Manning's appaling treatment while in custody can be laid firmly at Obama's feet. He's not being held back by the House, or the Senate, or any of the other excuses which are usually provided for his behavior. If he wanted to he could change the situation by executive fiat. That he doesn't lays to rest to the claim that Obama cares about principles when it comes to civil liberties. 



How anyone can support him when he's acting like a totalitarian autocrat is completely beyond me. Maybe rank and file Democrats don't care enough about principle either.



Sigh (Glenn Greenwald Edition)
2011-04-05T16:16:00.003-04:00

Glenn's a smart guy; he does some of the best (and probably most influential) writing about civil liberties available today. So I'm a little disheartened by his post today in Salon regarding the "loyal partisan voter", because I think he's mis-diagnosing the problem. What he seems to be saying is that there's a substantial Democratic contingent that's blindly loyal to the party:



In light of that fact, ask yourself this:  if you were a Democratic Party official, wouldn't you also ignore -- and, when desirable, step on -- the people who you know will support you no matter what you do to them? That's what a rational, calculating, self-interested, unprincipled Democratic politician should do:  accommodate those factions which need accommodating (because their support is in question), while ignoring or scorning the ones whose support is not in question, either because they will never vote for them (the hard-core right) or will dutifully canvass, raise money, and vote for them no matter what (the Democratic base).  Anyone who pledges unconditional, absolute fealty to a politician -- especially 18 months before an election -- is guaranteeing their own irrelevance. [Emphasis mine]



Maybe there's a contingent that has sworn fealty to Obama, but I really doubt that explains the behavior of the majority of people who vote Democratic. My gut is that they're just choosing the lesser of two evils. Consider the options currently available to progressive-leaning voters:



Vote for the Democrat
Vote for the Republican
Vote for some third party
Don't vote at all.



You can, like me, choose to abstain from the entire process on the grounds that it's a bloody farce, but I would guess that most progressive-ish types feel some duty to vote. An idealistic progressive might vote for a third party but, as can be seen from the pitiful percentage regularly garnered in elections by third parties, these individuals make up a small percentage of the overall electorate. Essentially the choice facing your average progressive is Republican vs. Democrat, in which case they will rationally vote Democrat because the party does occasionally throw them a bone (DADT repeal, for example).



In short it is not, contrary to what Glenn seems to be saying, necessary to invoke blind loyalty to describe the voting habits of the Democratic base. As for a potential solution to this impasse... Glenn Glenn Glenn, I kept waiting for you to say "two party system", but you never got there. Which is sad, because you could broach the subject of our fucked up political duopoly and people would actually listen to you. The solution is for people to have a viable alternative to both the Republicans and the Democrats.



I mean, really... what other choice is there? If progressives are going to vote the Democrats are the only game in town; voting for the Republicans is essentially cutting of your nose to spite your face. Democratic politicians know that, which means they calibrate their behavior to be slightly-less-bad than that of the Republicans. Until such time as a viable third party appears, be it by magic or reform of the electoral system, we've no choice but to hold our noses. No loyalty needed.



A Quick Note About The Difficulties Of Informed Voting
2011-03-30T11:25:00.003-04:00

(via Bleeding Heart Libertarians) Jason Brennan has a short piece in the Globe & Mail about being a rational voter. I completely agree with the main point he's making i.e. if you're going to vote you should do so in an informed manner. However, I see two practical hurdles to this approach:



It's impossible to be well-informed about all policy areas. As Brennan says:


For instance, many parties promise to create more jobs. Even if a voter agrees with this goal, this does not tell her how to vote. The parties propose different policies in order to try to reduce unemployment. To be well informed, a voter must know how to evaluate these policy proposals. To do that, she needs know some economics, sociology and political science.


It's reasonable to believe that a voter might possess the knowledge necessary to evaluate proposals in a few policy areas, but being able to meaningfully evaluate the bulk of policies proposed by any particular party/candidate is nigh impossible.
There's a moderate correlation, at best, between promises made during a campaign and actions taken once in office.



Given the former it seems that the "informed voter" is little more than a hypothetical construct; such a beast doesn't exist in real life. The latter would indicate that a well-informed voter wouldn't have any assurance that the responsible policies for which ey voted would actually be implemented.



Scientific Thinking Is Unnatural
2011-03-09T14:42:00.005-05:00

Dr. Orzel is right in his assertion that everyone is capable of figuring things out, but it seems to me that's only half of what constitutes "scientific thinking". What do we make of people who are capable of cooking without a recipe, or doing a crossword puzzle, or repairing a car, but still believe in angels or UFOs or that the Earth was poofed into existence 6000 years ago? These people have all the cognitive machinery which Dr. Orzel outlines in his post while, at the same time, believing things which are clearly unscientific.



My contention is that "thinking scientifically" involves not only the practical application of knowledge but also the rejection of non-scientific concepts. The Romans and Egyptians engaged in some tremendous feats of practical (and not so practical) engineering, but they also left their intellectual descendants with encumbering, pre-scientific baggage such as Galenic medicine. It wasn't until the Enlightenment started rejecting received wisdom, supernatural explanations, and religious dogma (which were often one in the same) that we really started to make progress in terms of the development of modern science.



The human brain is a truly amazing piece of machinery, but in some ways it's ill-suited for science. It's vulnerable to epistemic entrenchment, has all sorts of cognitive biases, and is susceptible to an endless list of logical fallacies. Recognizing and compensating for these shortcomings requires, in the very least, the cultivation of a consistently skeptical mindset. In that regard scientific thinking is a learned, rather than innate, behavior.



So Dr. Orzel's analogies are fine as far as they go, but they don't address one of the major requirements of scientific thinking i.e. the willingness to change your opinion in the face of new information. Finding a better bearnaise recipe doesn't mean that you have to reevaluate your relationship to the universe; discovering that humans are hairy apes of no special merit on a ball of rock hurtling through empty space, on the other hand, may require you to do so. Scientific thinking requires that you accept the latter, however unpleasant it may be, because of the weight of evidence. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I say that scientific thinking is unnatural, because the bulk of humanity simply refuses to do so.



Friday Random Ten
2011-03-04T17:48:00.002-05:00

Because I haven't done one of these in a long time:



Silence Is Their Drug - Sponge
Nothing As It Seems - Pearl Jam
Oceans - Pearl Jam
Trip Along - Tripping Daisy
Dumb - Nirvana
Final Dream - Toto
Graze - Live
Cheatin' - Gin Blossoms
Under The Mountain (LP Version) - David Byrne
Don't Talk - 10,000 Maniacs



Alright... nothing too embarrassing there apart from the Toto. That I can explain... Final Dream is from the Dune Soundtrack. Which makes me a dork, but at least I'm not a Totophile.



Thankfully, I feel like the David Byrne piece restores my damaged credibility. It's from the Catherine Wheel score (a piece by Twyla Tharp, not to be confused with the band by the same name), which you should definitely pick up if you like Byrne's other work.



ROFL Of The Day
2011-03-04T16:17:00.001-05:00

"BYU dry humping" (via Jesus' General).



Silver Fork Makes A Mean Burger
2011-03-03T17:49:00.005-05:00

My better half and I were looking for someplace new to eat yesterday, so we stopped off for lunch at Silver Fork, a somewhat generic-looking diner in Seattle's Mt. Baker neighborhood. I'm generally skeptical about "extreme food" and the piling of gratuitous crap on top of hamburgers (foie gras? Really?), but at the same time I have to admit that such creations can be beautiful when done correctly. One of my all-time fast food favorites is The Hat's pastramiburger, a really good burger made better by the addition of pastrami, so after looking at the menu I figured I'd give the Soul Burger, a hamburger patty topped with bacon and a hotlink, its day in court. To make things even better, when I ordered the waitress asked "You want an egg on that?". Sure, why not?



Good choice. You can gauge the quality of a burger by the first bite... there's a balance between the meat and condiments that makes you say "yeah, that's a damn fine burger". Silver Fork's offering passed that test with flying colors: the patty was hot and juicy and contrasted well with the chill, crisp veg. The hot link was an interesting touch as well. They use a good quality sausage, not the kind that drips orange oil all over the place, which lent a nice spicyness to the burger. The bacon and egg, while not detracting from the burger, were mostly superfluous. 



The only flaw in the execution, one which is shared by a number of burger joints, is that the bun didn't really hold up under pressure. If you're going to be putting lots of toppings, especially messy ones like a fried egg, on your burger you'll want a more durable vehicle than the standard white bun. What you really need is a larger roll which can absorb a little moisture and still hold together... maybe a toasted sourdough bun? Anyway, that's just nitpicking on my part. I have to say that the Soul Burger it a strong contender for the best burger I've had in Seattle. It's definitely on par with the offerings from places like Burgermaster or Frisko Freeze.



Atheists Need A Good Wrenching
2011-03-01T16:06:00.002-05:00

(via Evolutionblog) Jean Kazez argues, contra Russell Blackford, that technical arguments regarding the moral implications of atheism are best kept in within the philosophy department:



Suppose Russell gets lots of fame and acclaim, and starts promoting the error theory all over the place.  So he starts influencing people to think that atheists must believe the sentence above is false, or at least not true.  I wouldn't hesitate to say I thought that was a bad idea.  It wouldn't be my place to address him in the second person and tell him what to talk about, but I'd be perfectly entitled to my opinion that spreading this view is unwise.



And it would be a perfectly cogent and respectable opinion.  This sort of meta-ethics would likely increase public distrust of atheism and discourage people from accepting atheism. I'd also make another sort of argument--that meta-ethics can't be discussed coherently in the public square.  It's a highly technical area of philosophy, where philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and logic intersect. There is simply no way that the ordinary person, with little or no education in philosophy, can get a grip on the pertinent issues.




I agree with her to a certain extent; there's no sense in indiscriminately broadcasting the implications of error theory. Though this has less to do, I think, with the technical nature of the argument per se and more to do with the fact that the details would get mangled in the process. It's entirely too easy to imagine Blackford's "sophisticated moral relativist" being reduced to an amoral creature who eats baby back ribs for lunch.



That said, to confine such discussions to philosophy seminars does a disservice to the atheist community. As I've written about on multiple occasions, many atheists seem to be ignorant of (or unconcerned with) the difficulties that arise when you make humanity the arbiter of morality. For example, I noticed atheist luminary PZ Meyers saying the following not so long ago:



Morality derives from empathy and a sense of communal obligation with our fellow human beings, not with an arbitrary and whimsical supernatural authority.



To which I respond:



Why empathy? It's an evolved response deserving of no particular epistemic privilege. I might just as reasonably suggest a morality based on disgust.
All humans? What about ones who disagree with that premise? Or want to do me harm? Humans that I don't know, that might be a thousand miles away? Surely we should extend the courtesy to all sentient being, yes? What's so special about sentience anyway?



And so on... you get the idea. PZ's statement is uncontroversial provided that you agree to certain core principles. But atheists, gnu and otherwise, are frequently in the position where they have to defend themselves against people who do not share these principles and it strikes me that they don't realize how tenuous their position actually is. They need to go through Blackford's "psychological wrench" and understand what they're actually arguing before they can articulately defend their position. And the only way that's going to happen is if people like Kazez and Blackform spend some time talking gory details with the atheist community at large.



Not So Fast, John Holbo!
2011-02-27T16:48:00.010-05:00

I wanted to respond to some of the (alleged) contradictions which John Holbo identifies in his post on unions and "fair play". First off is this nugget:



Athletes are ruining sports! (So be it!) If that is an ethically acceptable outcome, then so is the following: Capitalism is ruining society! (So be it.) Wall Street is hurting the economy more than it is helping. (So be it!) I doubt very much that Joyner would be willing to accept that capitalism is ethically obligatory even if it ruins society, by Joyner’s lights, and by those of the vast majority of members of the society in question (let’s say). But if he does not credit the absolute right of capitalists to ruin society, by the aggregate exercise of their individual economic rights, why should he think athletes have an absolute right to ruin sports?



Er... well... no. Athletes, being individual actors, are capable of directly ruining a sport, though whether they are, in fact, doing so is a matter of interpretation. "Capitalism" and "Wall Street", on the other hand, are abstract concepts embodied in the actions of millions of people; it's nonsensical to assert that either of them are "ruining society". What you can meaningfully say, though this is again open to interpretation, is that the aggregate actions of millions of people living under a capitalist regime (or some select thousands working in finance) are ruining society. However, you must also demonstrate that the ruination result directly form the collective exercise of economic rights and not, as frequently seems to be the case, because of fraud/graft/cronyism/etc. The intuition that "So be it!" is an inappropriate or absurd response fails because its difficult to imagine what such a situation would actually entail.



Holbo also argues that libertarians, if they support certain positions vis-a-vis the management of corporate organization, they must necessarily take those same positions with respect to society at large:



The problem is that the likes of McArdle cannot make arguments of this form without undermining her own libertarian-conservative philosophy. Specifically, she hereby undermines her capacity to object, in principle, to competing positions that she wants to object to, in principle. She is basically making what we might call a ‘basic structure’ argument about organizations. That’s a Rawlsian term, and that’s the trouble. If it is permissible to manage a company with an eye to the patterns of distribution and activity that comprise its corporate structure – broadly speaking – why isn’t it permissible to do so with regard to society, politics, so forth? If management can look at the assembly-line and say, ‘too many humans, not enough robots’, why shouldn’t political management (pointy-headed technocrats, maybe; but, ultimately, voters) look at society and say: ‘too many millionaires, not enough members of the middle-class’? If you think the latter judgment should be blocked, in principle, by a philosophy of freedom that does not permit aiming at ‘patterned distributions’ (Nozickian term), how can you countenance a philosophy of management that can aim at efficient management – i.e. strategic disruption of the basic structure, for the sake of better basic structure – since that may, after all, come at the cost of individual rights. If workers can be fired and replaced by robots, for the sake of the good of the basic social structure (of the business), why can’t millionaires be replaced by members of the middle class (themselves, just with less money), for the sake of the good of the basic structure (of the society)? What is, in principle, wrong with the latter sort of move, if the former is not merely permissible but possibly obligatory?



McArdle might be making a "basic structure" argument, but one which is specific to the management of corporate entities (be they public or private). A manager in a private corporation in chartered (in theory at least) to run the corporation for the benefit of its owners. We can quibble about what, exactly, this entails, but I would argue that running things efficiently/correctly (i.e. making pie the right way) falls within the scope of eir duties. This argument can be extended, I think, to public corporations (and corporation-like bodies) without doing it too much violence; managers in such entities have reasonably well-defined goals which they are supposed to accomplish and should attempt to reach these goals in an efficient manager subject to the constraints of the entity's charter. 



It does not follow from there, however, that if you support such activities at the level of individual corporations/firms you must necessarily support those same activities at a macro scale. The questions I would raise when confronted with such a suggestion are as follows:



What are you trying to accomplish?
By what means are you seeking to accomplish it?
Who would carry out these activities?
Are such activities part of that entity's charter?



To Holbo's conundrum regarding corporate management vs. public management I would answer as follows: "Establishing the appropriate person/robot ratio is a task which proceeds naturally from the managers' charter to run the company for the benefit (interpreted here as 'maximization of ROI') of the owners. However, there appears to be no one who has, as part of their remit, the task of establishing and maintaining a middle-class/millionaire ratio". This is, of course, where libertarians typically diverge from progressives when it comes to social policy: progressives think that government has (or should have) the power to make such determinations, libertarians do not. 



Holbo, wise man that he is, anticipates this objection:



ou could say the workers can be fired because they don’t ultimately own the business. The owners do. The stockholders. But this is not very helpful, for purposes of arguing against ‘social management’, with an eye for basic structure in politics. Because, after all, society is either not owned by anyone, in which case the argument is a dud, or it is owned by everyone, in which case it backfires. The voters are the ultimate stockholders, or no one is. So, to repeat: if it would be ok for stockholders in a company to vote to fire some humans and replace them with robots, it ought to be ok for stockholders in a company that happens to be a society to vote to fire some millionaires and replace them with members of the middle-class, if that would help get the society back on track of realizing its normative goals of being a good society.



He's right in asserting that voters are analogous to stockholders. But, like stockholders, they rule not by fiat but rather have a set of rules by which they have collectively bound themselves. For example, voters may grant the Federal Government whatever power they desire, but it may be necessary to amend the Constitution to do so. So yes, society could fire the millionaires provided that they follow the proper procedure; libertarians simply disagree with progressives over what those procedures may be.



Flight of the Wisconsin/Indiana Variety
2011-02-22T14:37:00.002-05:00

I'm generally neutral on the protests et. al. that are going down in Wisconsin right now; I don't feel that I know enough about what's going on to have an informed opinion. But fleeing the statehouse to prevent quorum (which seems to have happened in Indiana as well) strikes me as bad sportsmanship on the part of the Democrats. How is this any different than the various and sundry stalling tactics (threatened filibusters, anonymous holds, etc.) that Republicans have been using to block the Democratic majority in the Senate? If anything this is worse, because lack of a quorum prevents any business from getting done, yes?



Where have the good slackers gone?
2011-02-19T11:18:00.004-05:00

There's an appallingly bad article in yesterday's WSJ bemoaning the fact that all twenty-something men are perpetual post-adolescents. Somehow they've managed the interesting phenomenon of delayed marriage, already thoroughly discussed in books like Red Families/Blue Families, and spin it into yet another piece asking (literally) "Where have the good men gone?".



Really, the entire article is one long exercise in begging the question. It claims that men ("guys"... blech) are delaying adulthood, but then narrowly defines adulthood as follows:



High-school diploma
Financially independent
Wife
Kids



Given that the cohort the article describes typically has college degrees and well-paying jobs it really starts to sound like a well-meaning aunt asking "When are you going to settle down and find yourself a nice girl?".



Hello, missing the point much? You shouldn't be complaining about delayed adulthood, you should be asking why we consider having a wife and kids to be a definitive marker thereof. Even the complaints about pot-smoking, Playstation-playing ne'er-do-wells ring hollow given the accompanying article profiling 20-something start-up founders. Which, strangely enough, is titled "Two Cheers for the Maligned Slacker Dude", leading me to conclude that "slacker" no longer means "someone bereft of ambition" but now means whatever the NYT wants it to mean. Which, in this case, seems to be "unattached hipster entrepreneur".



Women and Wikipedia
2011-02-07T18:23:00.005-05:00

I've some thoughts on the ongoing discussion of the underrepresentation of women in Wikipedia's contributor community. Doing a depth-first traversal let's start with Justin Cassell, who suggests that Wikipedia's vigorous culture of debate is partly responsible for the relative paucity of female contributors:



However, it is still the case in American society that debate, contention, and vigorous defense of one’s position is often still seen as a male stance, and women’s use of these speech styles can call forth negative evaluations. Women may be negatively judged for speaking their mind in clear ways and defending their position. A woman who wishes to collaboratively construct knowledge and share it with others might not choose to do so as part of a forum where engaging in debate and deleting others’ words is key. 



Cassell's fundamental argument, that debate is a "masculine" trait, seems unarguable. But if that is indeed the underlying reason there are few female contributors it makes the topic as a whole somewhat less interesting; the gender imbalance at Wikipedia ceases to be a Wikipedia-specific phenomenon (and thus worthy of a "Room For Debate" forum) and becomes instead a symptom of more general social conditions. However, I'm not entirely convinced by Cassell's argument since Wikipedia users need not reveal their sex/gender¹. Women who wish to speak their mind may decline to provide this information (or pretend to be men), thus avoiding censure. What would be really useful is a breakdown by gender of the "reasons for not contributing" table on p. 10 of the summary of the inciting survey, since that would speak directly to the reasons that women aren't contributing to Wikipedia.



Jumping up one level, Ta-Nehisi Coates responds to Cassell as follows: 



It seems to me that is not just a Wikipedia problem,  but a societal problem likely extending out from families and schools. Defending your words strikes me as a really good thing. Dissuading women from doing that strikes me as just the opposite. 



Again, if you think Cassell's thesis is correct then characterizing this as a "Wikipedia problem" misses the point. As Mr. Coates seems to recognize, Wikipedia is effectively inheriting this problem from the greater social context in which it is embedded. It follows from there that, providing Cassell is correct, the best way to resolve the issue is to fix society as a whole; focusing on Wikipedia is putting the cart before the horse. Also, I find it hard to swallow Mr. Coates' idea that trolling is a contributing factor:




That said, I'm not convinced that there's nothing that can be done. For whatever reason, I think Internet sites that allow trolling and aimless idiocy to run roughshod have a disproportionate effect on women. (Terri Oda hints at exactly that here.)  I don't know if that's because trolls and idiots are more likely to say something sexist or what. But I don't think the problem is aggressive argumentation, so much as its weak people saying these behind a cloak of anonymity which they'd never say publicly.



In World of Warcraft, I almost never talk in the public channels as they seem to be a haven for racists. When Matt was here, and before I was actually blogging, I was often tempted to comment. But it seemed that whenever a social science post came through, no matter how well written, in comments, it eventually came down to black people having smaller brains. Or some such. Enforcing strong standards in comments is a kind of general value that, I think, has specific impact on women and others.




Mr. Coates, I do not think that word means what you think it means. The discussion on Wikipedia's talk pages are about as far from what you find in the public WoW channels as you can get. I mean, really... take a look at the talk page for "Feminism"; the participants may disagree, but they're engaging in long-form discussion while avoiding ad homonym attacks. That looks like neither "trolling" nor "aimless idiocy" to me; if anything Wikipedia's talk pages are frequently accused of being overly bureaucratic.



Which brings me, finally, to Amanda's response to Ta-Nehisi:



And that’s exactly it; even the idea of going on to Wikipedia and trying to edit stuff and getting into fights with dudes makes me too weary to even think about it.  I spend enough of my life dealing with pompous men who didn’t get the memo that their penises don’t automatically make them smarter or more mature than any random woman.  I don’t even have to go onto Wikipedia to tell you that it’s probably like that, on steroids, since, as Justine Cassell notes, on Wikipedia you can actually delete people’s actual words.



Yea verily... who wants to spend their time with that? Note, however, that Amanda doesn't cite anything like "fear of censure" or a desire to avoid vigorous debate, which blows a big whole in Cassell's argument. Rather, she just doesn't want deal with the bullshit of having her edits constantly reverted because it takes all the fun out of contributing. I'd argue that what she (and other women) are experiencing is not an expression of misogyny per se², but rather is a function of the entrenched user base defending their position against new users. New and occasional contributors of all stripes frequently have their edits reverted³:



Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appeared to have flattened off around early 2007.[36] In 2006, about 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia; by 2010 that average was roughly 1,000.[37] A team at the Palo Alto Research Center speculated that this is due to the increasing exclusiveness of the project.[38] New or occasional editors have significantly higher rates of their edits reverted (removed) than an elite group of regular editors, colloquially known as the "cabal." This could make it more difficult for the project to recruit and retain new contributors, over the long term resulting in stagnation in article creation.



Given all of the above my overall take is Cassell's explanation is simplistic at best and flat-out wrong at worse; there's no direct evidence that women are being scared off by the need to express their opinion. Nor is there much evidence in support of the proposition, advanced by Ta-Nehisi and Amanda, that trolling is keeping women away, since the Wikipedia talk pages are, if anything, civil to the point of ossification. If any single cause is predominant its likely to be something along the lines of what Amanda expressed, namely frustration over bureaucratic edit wars. And that, in turn, is less about misogyny and more about insiders manning the ramparts against newcomers. Which is an important result because Wikipedia process is only Wikipedia's problem; its independent of the greater social context and, as such, is amenable to remediation by Wikipedia itself.





1 Actually, users needn't register at all, which complicates the exercise of gathering user demographic information. The survey overview doesn't provide information on the actual survey methodology, so there's no basis by which to gauge whether the survey accurately captures the demographics of the community. Given the difficulty of reliably identifying contributors I'd take the "15%" with a grain of salt.

2 Though if y'all have evidence to the contrary please feel free to share.

3 This assertion is empirically testable; we can simply ask whether the reversion rate for "new and occasional editors" is correlated with the editor's gender.



Thank You, Superbowl Halftime Show...
2011-02-07T11:18:00.001-05:00
For reminding me that there was once a time when the Black Eyed Peas didn't suck.


Scalia Is A Double-Edged Sword
2011-01-04T16:58:00.002-05:00

I recently praised Justice Scalia for his vigorous defense of free speech, but now I must criticize him for his less-than-consistent interpretation of the 14th Amendment. Via tristero comes the revelation that Scalia believes that it provides no protection against discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation.



Scalia, the father of "original public meaning" originalism, has somehow convinced himself that the following doesn't cover women:



No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.



His rationale?



You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that



Which seems to be a pretty clear example of intentionalism, a doctrine which Scalia allegedly rejects... except when its inconvenient. Boo hiss. 



I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means
2011-01-04T13:16:00.002-05:00

Seems like its Economics Tuesday here at Shiny Ideas. Next up is this statement from Amanda Marcotte: 



I would also like to take this time to point out that the libertarian argument that markets correct themselves without interference from the government is neatly disproved by the very existence of Power Balance bands, and alternative medicine in general.  The notion that consumers are generally rational and that bad products will be shoved off the market without assistance from regulation is farcical to begin with, but these wristbands were selling like hotcakes.



Eh... no. Amanda is making a (common) mistake regarding the meaning of the word "rational" as it applies to economic decisions. Per Wikipedia:



The "rationality" described by rational choice theory is different from the colloquial and most philosophical uses of the word. For most people, "rationality" means "sane," "in a thoughtful clear-headed manner," or knowing and doing what's healthy in the long term. Rational choice theory uses a specific and narrower definition of "rationality" simply to mean that an individual acts as if balancing costs against benefits to arrive at action that maximizes personal advantage.[4] For example, this may involve kissing someone, cheating on a test, using cocaine, or murdering someone. In rational choice theory, all decisions, crazy or sane, are postulated as mimicking such a "rational" process.



Rational choice theory has little or nothing to do with whether people are behaving "rationally" in the colloquial sense of the word. And, honestly, libertarianism doesn't say much of anything directly about either rational choice theory or the efficient markets hypothesis (which Amanda also seems to be implicating via her use of the phrase "markets correct themselves"). What libertarianism does do, however, is recognize that people have different conceptions of "the good" which, of necessity, means it is broadly tolerant of people doing things which may appear foolish/irrational provided that they don't impinge on the liberties of other. This includes spending money on quack remedies.



The alternative view, which Amanda is implicitly endorsing, is that people are too dumb to be allowed to spend their money freely¹. Instead government must become the gatekeeper and arbiter of what we can and cannot do, can and cannot buy. Which is a horrendously bad idea for the following reasons:



It denies the fundamental autonomy of our fellow human beings. People must be given the liberty to make choices, even ones which we (subjectively) judge to be ill-advised.
Giving such arbitrary license to the government leads, in its worst extremes, to stupid, pointless shit like the War on Drugs.
Increased regulation of advertising, in this case at least, is a band-aid. The inability of the general public to evaluate dubious medical claims is ultimately a failure of science education, so the most effective solution is to improve science education.



Finally, I want to address the following:



Of course, the next gambit in the argument is that people who make stupid choices Have It Coming.  Of course, this presumes---irrationally---that there’s an objective standard of justice in the universe and that bad things only happen to people who are stupid or mean. 



I call bullshit; that's a strawman. Libertarians recognize that bad shit often happens to people for no reason at all. Our contention is that, for reasons such as those given above, trying to protect people from all the bad shit that might befall them is worse, in the long run, than allowing people to fend for themselves. The idea that libertarianism is the refuge of scoundrels and charlatans is demonstrably false.





1 I'm actually inclined to agree with her as a matter of personal opinion, but that doesn't mean that my opinion makes good public policy.



Out With The Old, In With The New! Or Not...
2011-01-04T12:18:00.003-05:00

James Galbraith (and 
Digby and ql) thinks that we should lower the retirement age so that the youngsters can find jobs:



In the United States, the financial crisis has left the country with 11 million fewer jobs than Americans need now. No matter how aggressive the policy, we are not going to find 11 million new jobs soon. So common sense suggests we should make some decisions about who should have the first crack: older people, who have already worked three or four decades at hard jobs? Or younger people, many just out of school, with fresh skills and ambitions? 



Urg, this seems to be one of those zombie concepts that just refuses to die. Galbraith's analysis is based on the assumption that there's a fixed amount of work to be done and that if the old folk just step aside those positions will suddenly be available to the new generation. Allow me to quote Mr. Krugman:



Economists call it the "lump of labor fallacy." It's the idea that there is a fixed amount of work to be done in the world, so any increase in the amount each worker can produce reduces the number of available jobs. (A famous example: those dire warnings in the 1950's that automation would lead to mass unemployment.) As the derisive name suggests, it's an idea economists view with contempt, yet the fallacy makes a comeback whenever the economy is sluggish.



Clearly, reality is more complicated. The young people have to be in the right place and have the right skill set, there are all sorts of knock-on effects to changing the retirement age, and so on. I'm really surprised that Digby is falling for that; she's usually such a sharp thinker.



Denial-Of-Service Attacks As Civil Disobedience, Part III
2010-12-30T11:36:00.003-05:00

Last week's Economist, which I'm only now getting around to reading, has a brief and interesting article on DoS attacks and civil disobedience. Of particular note is the following passage: 




But in a free society the moral footing for peaceful lawbreaking must be an individual’s readiness to take the consequences, argue in court and fight for a change in the law. Demonstrators therefore deserve protection only if they are identifiable. Some countries (like Germany) even prohibit protesters from wearing masks.


....


Protesters in cyberspace, by contrast, are usually anonymous and untraceable. The furtive, nameless nature of DDOS attacks disqualifies them from protection; their anonymous perpetrators look like cowardly hooligans, not heroes.




The author has a valid point which I failed to take into consideration in my previous defense of DoS attacks. An act of civil disobedience derives its moral authority from the perpetrator's willingness to suffer legal sanction in order to further eir cause. Seminal examples, such as Gandhi's violation of the British salt tax or Rosa Parks' refusal to yield her seat, involved public, head-on confrontation with the powers that be. DoS attacks are, by contrast, relatively anonymous and thus pose little personal risk to the perpetrators, which seems a strong argument in opposition to the notion that they are a valid form of civil disobedience.



Can a DoS attack ever be a legitimate form of civil disobedience? If I put up a web page saying "I'm DoS'ing X in support of Y" I'm no longer anonymous and am thus vulnerable, in theory at least, to prosecution for my actions. This would seem to clear the hurdle set up in the previous paragraph.



Now, what if I join a DDoS, and all 10000 of us put up web pages? Again, in theory each of us could be prosecuted for our actions, though as a matter of pure logistics its unlikely that the government would ever bring 10000 prosecutions, which means that the risk to any particular individual is small. One could argue that, because each participant is exposed to only nominal personal risk, a DDoS isn't a legitimate form of civil disobedience.



Here, however, we have a real-world example against which to test that assertion. Suppose that I, and 9999 of my closest friends, participate in an illegal gathering; maybe we block an intersection in protest against something or another. Clearly the police can't arrest all 10000 of us, so the individual risk to myself is small, but at the same time such mass actions are typically seen as a legitimate form of civil disobedience. Which indicates to me that, in meatspace at least, nominal exposure to prosecution is sufficient to surpass the threshold of legitimacy. 
I can see no reason to hold online protests to a higher standard, in which case DoS attacks can be considered legitimate provided that the actors identify themselves in a meaningful fashion.



Denial-Of-Service Attacks As Civil Disobedience, Part II
2010-12-13T17:34:00.002-05:00

Prokofy, in a comment
on my previous post, takes
exception to my characterization of Denial-Of-Service (DoS) attacks as civil
disobedience, saying:




DdOS attacks are a form of coercion and a crime.



They aren't civil disobedience, and to claim they are is a whitewash.




At first blush I think that's a reasonable position to take, though one with
which I obviously disagree, so I wanted to examine eir (and my) reasoning on the
subject in more detail.



Prokofy seems to be making several related assertions regarding DoS attacks:

They are a crime.
They are coercive.
They are not, by virtue of 1 and 2, civil disobedience.


So let's just start at the top of the list and work our way down, shall we?



DoS attacks have
been successfully prosecuted in the US, though I wasn't able to find direct
citations of the associated statutes. Prokofy is correct that, at least in some
circumstances, DoS attacks are a crime.



How about eir assertion that they're "coercive"? That question is a little more
interesting, since DoS attacks do seem to meet the dictionary definition of
"coerce":




to compel by force, intimidation, or authority, esp. without regard for
individual desire or volition: They coerced him into signing the
document.
to bring about through the use of force or other forms of compulsion; exact:
to
coerce obedience.
to dominate or control, esp. by exploiting fear, anxiety, etc.: The state is
based on successfully coercing the individual. 




However, coercion is a fairly complicated concept, the nuances of which aren't
easily contained in a dictionary definition. A coercive act typically requires
an explicit, conditional
threat; telling someone you'll DoS them is coercive, but actually carrying
through with the threat may fail to meet this condition¹. More
generally, DoS attacks lack certain hallmarks that have typically defined
coercive activity. Coercion has historically required an imbalance wherein the
actor has more power than the target, but DoS attacks are often performed by 
(relatively) powerless individuals against institutions backed by significant
economic/legal/political resources. The nature of the threat itself is also
different. Classically, coercion has involved private violence, expropriation of
property, blackmail, etc., acts which the general public agrees are morally
odious. It is questionable whether DoS attacks, which can cause indirect
economic and/or reputational damages, are subject to the same opprobrium. 
Given all of that I'm comfortable categorizing DoS attacks as "mildly
coercive" on the grounds that they do involve threats of force to change
the target's behavior but don't rise to the
same level of damage that we typically associate with the word.




Now on to Prokofy's final point, that acts which are criminal and coercive in
nature cannot rightly be classified as "civil disobedience". Civil disobedience
is criminal by
definition:



Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws,
demands, and commands of a government, or of an occupying international power.



It's not "disobedience" unless you're breaking a law. Far from being a
disqualifier, an action cannot be classified as civil disobedience
unless it is criminal to some degree.




Can civil disobedience be coercive? Again, that's a really interesting, and
somewhat slippery, question. In Defining Civil Disobedience, from Civil
Disobedience in Focus, Brian Smart sketches out the following taxonomy
of the types
of civil disobedience:



Threatening by

Coercion of Force of Violence

Coercion of Force of Nonviolence
Coercion of Persuasion (with or without violence)


Non-Threatening with

Violence
Nonviolent Force
Persuasion





Note that Smart makes a distinction between threats and action, which goes back
to the question of whether a DoS is even coercive. He also makes a distinction
between violence and non-violence, suggesting that the former is a less valid as
a form of civil disobedience than the latter. I believe that it's fair to say,
given the taxonomy above, 
that a DoS is both non-violent and non-threatening for purposes of this
discussion.



What is not yet clear to me, however,
is whether a DoS constitutes nonviolent force or persuasion. Smart says the
following in that regard:



Coercion of force is illustrated by my giving up my wallet at the point of a
gun: while the threat poses two theoretical alternatives only one action is
humanly possible: 'I am not left room for effectual reflection and judgment
about what I do.' I illustrate the coercion of persuasion by a director threatening to resign if
his board votes against a takeover, and where the director is regarded as
valuable but not indispensable. The threat presents the board with two
practicable alternatives, leaving it room for effectual reflection and
judgment: it may incline but it does not necessitate.



If the distinction between force and persuasion revolves around the scope of
action given to the target then a DoS attack strikes me as more persuasive than
forceful, since the target generally remains at liberty to reflect on their
future course of actions. However, in the preceding paragraph he writes:



For Morreall civil disobedience can include violence since violence is a form of
force and force can certainly be used in civil disobedience as in the case of
sit-ins, lying down in the road, and mass tax refusals.



In my previous post I argued that DoS attacks are closely analogous to sit-ins,
which suggests that they include an element of force in their execution
as determined by Smart's criteria. Per Smart, non-threatening, non-violent force
is accepted as a valid form of civil disobedience by a couple of major names in
the field including Rawls and Honderich.



So it would seem that there's a pretty solid argument to be made that DoS
attacks are a legitimate form of civil disobedience. Against this view Prokofy
offers
the following:



5. "What they do isn't a crime, it's just a misdemeanor, or it's just a prank or
it's just noble civil disobedience." Geeks tend to downplay what they do, so
that their entire tribe doesn't become suspect (which it should become, in my
view, when they refuse to ever condemn these miscreants).  The Guardian and the
Wire State's Secretary of State Evgeny Morozov -- who is actively cheering the
coordination of the attacks on sites by retweeting and commenting on the Anon
ops accounts and giving them PR advice -- are now claiming that their takedown
of the Amazon and other payment sites are just a form of "civil disobedience".
Geek techno-determinist Doug "Program or Be Programmed" Rushkoff calls it a
"glitch". Anything to diminish and dumb down what in fact is a crime and is
disabling and destruction of property.



Which doesn't add much in the way of substantive rebuttal. I should note that
ey's writing about the actions of Anonymous² as a
whole and not just the DDoS conducted via the Low Orbit Ion Cannon. The
defense above is limited strictly to DoS attacks³; I make no
claims about the moral standing of Anonymous' behavior as a whole.





1 Though, I suppose, there's always an
implicit threat that it could get worse if the target doesn't change their
behavior.


2 Which ey appears to be incorrectly conflating w/ the entire 4chan user
base.

3 Specifically SYN-floods and other methods which overwhelm through sheer
volume. My analysis probably doesn't hold for DoS attacks which exploit bugs to
disable or modify the behavior of services.



Denial-Of-Service Attacks As Civil Disobedience
2010-12-10T14:25:00.001-05:00

Update: See also posts 2 and 3 on this topic.




(via Glenn
Greenwald) An editorial in The
Guardian draws a parallel between denial-of-service
(DOS) attacks and civil disobediance:



The hacktivists of Anonymous may be accused of many things - such as immaturity
or being run by a herd instinct. But theirs is the cyber equivalent of
non-violent action or civil disobedience. It disrupts rather than damages. In
challenging the credit card companies and the web hosts in this way, they are
reminding these businesses that their brand reputation relies not only on how
the state department sees them, but also on how they maintain their independence
in the eyes of their users.




Absolutely, and well said. I can't say that I've ever made the connection before, but Bruce
Schneier's take seems correct: DOS attacks are the digital equivalent of
blocking access to a building¹.
That's an interesting idea that bears further consideration, if for no other
reason that it requires people to think about "hacking" in a more 
sophisticated fashion.



As a side note, I'm regularly and vigorously annoyed by the bulk
of "cybercrime" articles I come across; it seems like most writers thereof 
have educated themselves on the subject via repeated viewings of
The Net and Golden Eye.
So its heartening to see
non-technical outlets making nuanced distinctions between the activities of
Anonymous and generic hacking. 





1 For non-technical folk playing along at home: The most popular DOS attack
these days involves sending gigabytes of spurious connection requests to the
servers which host a particular service, thus preventing legitimate users from
making use of that service. Think of it as filling up a building's lobby so that
no-one else can get in, more like a sit-in then just blocking the entrace. In
any case it's a very apt analogy, one of the rare examples of a meatspace
concept porting well to the online world.



An Erlang Flow File Parser
2010-12-08T15:16:00.000-05:00

You may recall that, a long time ago, I wrote that FlowScan is
looking a little long in the tooth. One of the major problems
with the package is that it uses a single thread to process flow files serially;
on modern servers this means that you have multiple cores sitting idle during
during processing. When I was thinking about this problem it occurred to me that
writing a FlowScan replacement in Erlang might solve at least part of this
problem, since Erlang automagically parallelizes many of its operations across
multiple cores.



I'm nowhere near having a full-blown replacement for flowscan yet, but I've
finally got around to implementing a set of Erlang modules which solves part of
the problem: parsing flow files. Given the interest that my posts on
Erlang and flow file processing have generated (relative to the rest of the crap
I write) I figured I'd commit the code to the web for posterity.




One of the first challenges I had to deal with in putting these modules together
was how to actually structure the code. Parsing any particular file generated by
flow-capture turns out to be pretty easy (especially in Erlang), but this is
complicated by the fact that there are two different flow file formats, each of
which can encapsulate any one of several NetFlow export formats. Were I
programming in an object oriented language this problem could be easily solved through
the application of the factory pattern in conjunction with appropriate base
and derived classes. Alas, Erlang doesn't have classes or inheritance, so that
idea was a non-starter.



As I've noted before there's a relative dearth of information
related to Erlang best-practices, so I ended up having to do a fair amount of
experimentation before I arrived at an approach that was satisfactory. I started
with a single, monolithic file, but it got very large very quickly and made it
difficult to come up with concise, meaningful names by which to distinguish
functions for different format/export versions. This led me to break the code up
into format-agnostic and format-specific modules using Erlang's package
mechanism¹, and then repeat that trick again when it came time to
handle different NetFlow export formats. The result is a layout that
should look familiar to Perl programmers: a module "X.erl" combined with a
subdirectory "X" containing all of X.erl's sub-modules.



The other code structure problem that I encountered was in deciding where to put
the v3 I/O routines. I initially placed them in v3.erl, but that led to 
an awkward circular dependency between v3.erl and v5.erl: the former would
delegate record parsing to the latter, which would then call the former to read
the data off of disk. That was eventually resolved by moving I/O functions into
their own module, io.erl, eliminating the dependency.




So, that's the brief story of my struggle with code structure. I ended up with
the following:



src

buffer.erl:
An improved version of the buffer module I originally wrote about here
that contains the additional method length/1.
flow_file.erl:
Format-agnostic functions. This does processing which is common to all format
versions, delegating format-specific operations to the appropriate submodule.

flow_file.hrl:
Header file containing public declarations (records and such) needed to work
with the flow_file module. This recursively
includes all of the header files for submodules as appropriate.
flow_file

flow_file.erl:
Defines a data type for passing around information about a flow file in a
generic fashion. Sorry about the name, couldn't think of anything more
appropriate.
utils.erl:
Generic utility functions that aren't strictly related to parsing flow files.
v3.erl:
Handles the specifics of parsing v3 format flow files. Delegates to the
appropriate submodule when it comes time to read records in a specific NetFlow
export format.
v3.hrl:
Public definitions associated w/ v3 format files.

v3

io.erl:
Handles all filesystem I/O specific to v3 format files.
v5.erl:
Parses NetFlow export v5 records.
v5.hrl:
Public definitions supporting processing of NetFlow export v5 records.



test


buffer_test.erl:
Test code for the buffer module.
flow_file_test.erl:
Test code for the flow_file module.




Note that this code only handles format v3 and NetFlow export v5; those are the
most widely used versions and what I was interested in working with. It'd be
trivial to expand to support other NetFlow versions; the only real work that the
v5 code does is defining an appropriate record type for the flow and then
populating that record by decomposing a chunk of binary data read from the file.



None of this is rocket science from a code-complexity standpoint, especially
since Erlang's
bit syntax makes the
processing of binary data relatively painless. Parsing the
dynamic header of v3 format files is somewhat involved, but is simplicty itself
in comparision with the C implementation of the same process from flow-tool's

ftio.c. The only other moderately tricky bit is handling compressed
flow files. Erlang provides a zlib wrapper, but doesn't
provide a mechanism for directly streaming compressed data off of disk. So I had to
do a little work in io.erl (which is where the buffer module gets used) to read
and decompress compressed flow files in chunks. The alternative would be to
slurp in and decompress the entire file at once, a non-starter since flow files
are often hundreds of megabytes in size.



And there you have it; I've copiously documented the source files, so the rest
should be easy enough to figure out. For my next trick I'm probably going to
focus on profiling the code to make the process of reading and processing the
files more efficient.





1 Packages are an experimental feature, but seem to work pretty
well for the most part. I had some problems with the use of nested includes 
and edoc doesn't do a great job with
resolving references for (sub)packages, but those are minor issues which might
very well be attributable to me doing it wrong.



Sigh... Again
2010-12-07T14:08:00.002-05:00

Just wanted to note that, between the Al-Aulaqi decision and all the crap that has befallen WikiLeaks, I'm not feeling positive about the state of civil liberties right now.



Atheism, Skepticism, And The Pursuit Of Abstract Nouns
2010-11-23T15:31:00.002-05:00

I was slightly surprised to find out that Amanda Marcotte spoke at
Skepticon 3. 
I admittedly know next to nothing about her personal inclinations, but
she's never struck me as a hardcore skeptic (which I presume you have to be to
go to such a conference) in the same vein as PZ Myers or
Christopher Hitchens, mostly because she occasionally takes positions
which seem to me to be at odds with a skeptical
mindset. On further thought, however, it looks to me like a lot of the most
visible proponent of skepticism, PZ and Hitchens included, do the same thing.



There is, I think, a fundamental tension within the contemporary skeptical
community. Amanda writes:



One thing in general I like about skeptic gatherings is just that---people are
super laid back and take the claim that this is about open discourse very
seriously.  Instead of bunching up and freaking out when presented with
challenging ideas, they really do go the extra mile to ask questions and think
about the idea instead of dismissing it out of hand or seeking reasons to shoot
it down without thinking about it.  Not that defensiveness never happens---I
heard lots of stories from activists dedicated to bringing more attention to the
issues of racial diversity, feminism, and LGBT rights, and so I'm not being a
Pollyanna about it---but I would say that overall, the tone of discourse
compares favorably to other organizing conferences I've been to that are focused
more on feminism or liberal politics.



Skeptics, or at least that slice of them represented at the conference, tend to
be a progressive bunch. At the same time
they're... well... skeptics, which means that they're inclined
to seek evidence for their beliefs. This latter tendency wreaks havoc with
strains of progressive thought which take, as a given, the independent existence
of certain abstract concepts. For example, what is the appropriate skeptical response when 
 when someone says that a particular
policy should be supported for reasons of "equality
and justice"? Is there sufficient evidence to demonstrate the existence of
either beast?



This isn't an entirely fresh observation on my part; the debate about the existence of moral
facts is as old as the hills. But such controversy as exists in that regard
stems almost entirely from basic, intergroup disagreements about
epistemology. What makes skeptics interesting in this regard is that they are
defined, as a group, by a commitment to a particular
method of validating knowledge. So, rather than getting bogged down in
questions about what it means to "know" something, they have a well-understood
set of rules that can be applied to determine the truth of propositions.



What does contemporary skepticism have to say about abstract nouns like
"justice" and "equality"?
Rather than try to dope that out from first principles I'm going to proceed via
analogy, which is where the atheism comes in. The bulk of skeptics have rejected the "god
hypothesis" i.e. there's insufficient evidence to support the existence of
god therefore proceed as if there's no such entity. It appears to me that, as a
general rule, skeptical critiques of the existence of god are equally valid when
applied to abstract nouns: "Justice" can't be observed, "equality" can't be
measured, and so on. There's simply 
no evidence that these abstract nouns enjoy an independent existence "out there"
somewhere¹.
I realize that's not a terribly earth-shattering observation, but 
it does have some
practical consequences in the context of a group of people given to questioning
assumptions. 



I'm going to pick on Amanda a little now, not because I think she's
especially guilty, but simply because she provides a timely example. When she
says that we should be furthering the cause of gay marriage as a matter of
justice and equality² the appropriate skeptical response is as follows:



How are you defining those terms?
Why are those definitions superior to any others?
What is so special about those definitions that they should be entrenched
by force of law?



Those are hard questions to answer coherently, but as a matter of intellectual
honesty doing so cannot be avoided. My general take on them is as follows:




Definitions can be (among other things) ends-based or means-based. 
If, however, you reject the independent existence of abstract concepts then
ends-based definitions suddenly become highly suspect. You can define a set of
end conditions as "just", but at the same time you must acknowledge that the
conditions you have selected are essentially arbitrary since there is no
external referent by which they can be judged. A skeptic will prefer
means-based definition wherever possible to avoid this complication. 


The best you can hope to accomplish here is to demonstrate that your selected
definition is in greater agreement with your interrogator's principles than 
other definitions.


This is actually a variant on question 2. In this case you need to show that
your particular definition agrees with the interrogator's conception of
legitimate legislation.




As a personal aside I became a libertarian as a byproduct of going through this
general exercise for myself. One of the defining factors of libertarian
philosophy is that it is concerned only with means, not ends; any end is
legitimate provided it is arrived at via legitimate means. Moreover, the core
principles/axioms by which legitimacy is established (self-ownership, informed
consent, fidelity of contract) are accepted (at least in theory) by a wide swath
of the modern world. As such libertarianism strikes me as the philosophy which is
most compatible with a skeptical/atheistic mindset. Alternatives to
libertarianism, when they have any sort of coherent philosophical basis at all, seem to require
metaphysical commitments which I cannot accept.





1 To hold otherwise is essentially to endorse a form of Platonism, which seems
inconsistent with the rejection of the god hypothesis.

2 A statement I happen to agree with, but I get there by a much different route
than Amanda.



Converting an Integer IP to ASCII in Erlang
2010-11-19T18:28:00.003-05:00

As far as I can tell the base Erlang distribution doesn't have a function to convert an integer IP to an ASCII dotted quad. It has inet_parse:ntoa, but that function expects a 4-part tuple, not an integer. Surprisingly, Google is also remarkably quiet on the subject. So here, for posterity, is what I came up with:


inet_ntoa(IntIP) ->
    string:join(
        lists:map(
            fun(X) -> integer_to_list(X) end,
            binary_to_list(<<IntIP:32>>)
        ),
        "."
    ).



Sigh...
2010-11-19T13:43:00.002-05:00

(via Religion Clause) The Public Religion Research Institute has released a post-election survey which contains the following gem:



A majority (58%) of Americans believe God has granted America a special role in human history.



That's a depressingly-large percentage, and it's not just confined to the crazy wing of the Republican party:



Members of the Tea Party (76%) and Republicans (75%) are much more likely to believe that God has a granted the U.S. a special role in human history than independents (54%) or Democrats (49%).



The belief that your particular country is favored by some set of deities is the crassest tribalism. Hitchens is right... how do you run a country when people have batshit-insane baseline assumptions like that? It's enough to make me want to flee to the EU. 



Welcome Facebookers
2010-11-14T10:59:00.002-05:00

Sitemeter tells me that someone posted a link on Facebook to an old post I wrote back in 2006 on Atheism and moral relativism. I've done a lot more thinking and writing on the subject since then which you should check out:



Who Has Moral Obligations?
A Weakness In The Defense of Atheistic Morality
Bases For Human Rights
Maybe I Spoke Too Soon



What's The Intent of Social Security?
2010-11-14T10:14:00.004-05:00

Apropos of this soundbite over at Eschaton:



I really don't think the Catfood Commission gives two shits about raising the retirement age 40 years from now. What they're really after is means testing Social Security. If that happens, 40 years from now Social Security will be little more than a welfare program for the elderly.



Wasn't that always the general intent?



Seriously though, I feel like the discussion of Social Security is a little incoherent. Is Social Security a form of enforced retirement savings, or is it a form of social insurance? The history of Social Security strongly suggests that it's the latter, a stance echoed by previous posts at Eschaton. 



If Social Security is an entitlement, part of the social safety net, then it makes sense to me that it should be means-tested. People who already have sufficient means don't need additional support nor do they, under the idea that making Social Security contributions is part of the general social contract, have any sort of moral claim to unpaid funds.



The alternative interpretation is that means-testing Social Security benefits is unacceptable because individuals have a moral claim to their contributions. If that's the case then Social Security is little more than a scheme to force people to save for retirement. In which case I'd like my taxes back; I'm quite capable of saving for my own retirement thankyouverymuch.



Government Cheese Pimps
2010-11-09T15:21:00.003-05:00

Amanda is correct in noting the absurdity of the government sponsoring anti-obesity initiatives while, at the same time, heavily promoting cheese products through outfits such as Dairy Management Inc.. I've got to disagree, however, with her root-cause analysis:



That’s right.  The government runs an agency whose entire purpose is to move Americans away from ingrained cultural tendencies not to suck down rubbery-tasting cheese by the gallon, and instead get us to coat everything we eat with cheese.  They do this for the sole purpose of improving profits for companies that are, bit by bit, destroying the health of Americans.



Eh... no, not quite. As Amanda notes in the following paragraph, Dairy Management Inc. exists to promote the interests of dairy producers. This effort is not driven by the desire to boost Domino's profits, but rather is just the latest in a long string of interventions designed to prop up the dairy industry. In her defense she points out a little later on that reducing subsidies on dairy would certainly help in this situation.



Self Identify And Perceived Identity
2010-11-05T15:37:00.001-04:00

We're diversely meta here at Shiny Ideas, and nothing says "meta" quite like
discussions of identity. So when I saw this post on perceived identity over at Feministe I
felt compelled to add my $0.02. Stipulating that the entire incident is absurd
and unfortunate I'd like to examine some of Chally's reasoning a little more
closely.



Ey offers the following:



Well, let's try some logic: Ms Betterridge is a Wiradjuri person. Ergo, how she
looks is what an Indigenous person looks like.



I don't think it's quite that simple; let's turn eir statement into a syllogism:



Ms. Betterridge is a Wiradjuri.
All Wiradjuri look like an Indigenous person.
Therefore, Ms. Betterridge looks like an Indigenous person.¹



Assertion 2 is semantically valid², but it sounds odd to me.
"Indigenous person" refers to what, exactly? I'd proffer that, in this case, 
its a composite category that referrs to an expected appearance (or range of
appearances) for a person. What isn't immediately apparent, however, how we go
about determining the truth of the statement "looks
like an Indigenous person".
Chally is on the right track when ey says



[T]hat's the crux of
it: who gets to be the arbiter of whether someone is manifesting an identity
"properly"?



That's the heart of the matter, no question there. But then ey goes on to say



Something that comes through pretty strongly in this narrative is
that if someone does not look like they are of a particular background,
according to the observer's perceptions, their claim to that background is not
as legitimate as that of one who does fit the observer's criteria.




That, I think, mischaracterizes the issue. The actions of Epic Promotions/Let's
Launch do not necessarily reflect a belief on anyone's part that Ms. Betterridge
is not entitled to claim Wiradjuri/Indigenous identity on account of her
appearance. Here's what the original
article in the Sydney Morning Herald says regarding the job for
which Ms. Betterridge applied:



Tarran Betterridge, 24, a Canberra university student, applied for the post
through an ACT company, Epic Promotions, which had been asked to find five
people of ''indigenous heritage'' to staff a stall at Westfield in Canberra
handing out flyers for GenerationOne.



Epic Promotions/Let's Launch were hiring people to staff a booth at a mall
advertising GenerationOne's Aboriginal employment initiative. In this context it
seems that a more likely explanation for their behavior is that, rather than
seeking to deny Ms. Betterridge's identity claim , they were instead trying to
predict how 
a third party would categorize Ms. Betterridge's identity on casual
observation. Put more bluntly, they were judging whether having Ms. Betterridge
staff the booth would attract GenerationOne's target audience.



Based on the materials available on GenerationOne's
website its highly likely that their intended audience, in this context at
least, was Indigenous job seekers. Whether having Ms. Betterridge on staff would
attract or repel this audience is an emprical question and, as I know bugger-all about Australian racial
identify/politics, I'm not even going to hazard a guess as to the actual
effect. But thinking about that sort of interaction leads to some interesting
questions.



Chally is right in identifying this as fundamentally an issue about the
manifestation of identity. There is no single, objective description of what an
Indigenous person looks like to which we can refer; the category of people who
"look like an Indigenous person" is socially constructed and thus varies with
context. The $64k question is whose construction is going to be given the
heaviest weight? Chally appears to believe that the category should be
construed broadly:



Indigenous Australians, as determined by Indigenous
Australians themselves, look all sorts of ways. To deny those identities based
on skin colour or hair type or other physical features is an act of cultural
imperialism.



Anyone can be of Indigenous descent, so the group of people for whom the
predicate "looks like an Indigenous person" is true is essentially unbounded. I
believe that Chally is technically correct in this regard; as
Ms. Betterridge clearly demonstrates there are Indigenous people who fail to
meet any of the common stereotypes regarding the appearance of Indigenous
individuals. What is not clear, however, is whether Indigenous people as a group
would universally agree with that scheme.




Pan-Aboriginal identity is a relatively recent phenomena arising from European
colonization; there's little evidence to support the contention that Indigenous
people regarded themselves as a homogenous group prior to that
point³. Additionally, unfortunate as it may be, Indigenous heritage
is still tightly coupled with notions of "blackness". Yolanda Walker, of the
Secritariat for National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care, writes:




Racism is an external factor that has hit Aboriginal families hard. It has
caused great disadvantage in employment, housing, health, education and
training, and this in turn puts an incredible strain on Aboriginal family life.
An example is employment; if a father cannot provide for his family because of
the lack of job opportunities for Aboriginal people, there is a lot of stress
and anger within the family which affects each family member.



Our families are proud people, and our children grow up knowing that 'Black is
beautiful' and learning to be 'Black and proud'. The home, the nurturing place
of learning, teaches us a lot about ourselves, but unfortunately does not always
prepare our children for the roller-coaster ride ahead of them. Our kids face
racial problems from day one at school, and have to cope with growing up at home
with such strong cultural values and being so proud of who they are and then
going out and mixing with the wider society to be confronted with bigots who
have few clues about the sensitivities of our people.





Blackness is seen as a marker of Indigenous identity not only by whites, by but
Indigenous people as well. Which means that, even in an urbane city like
Canberra, people may very well evaluate group identity on the basis of skin
tone.



This leaves Epic Promotions/Let's Launch in something of a bind. Ms.
Betterridge has straight hair and pale skin, which means that there's a
non-trivial possibility that she would not be recognized as an Indigenous person
by GenerationOne's target audience. Do they do the socially-responsible thing
and hire her anyway, knowing that they may alienate a part of their audience as
a result, or do they make a safe choice and hire an Indigenous person who looks
stereotypically "black"?



Honestly, I think this is largely the case of a bunch of low-level recruiters
trying to do their job to the best of their ability. They're not getting paid to
work for social justice, they're getting paid to effectively staff booths at
malls. It's a little annoying to see someone like Tim Gartrell to come down off
the mountain and condemn their methods when it's clear that they've been
ensnared by a quirk of Australian identity politics.






1 I suspect that Chally had the following syllogism in mind when ey made
that statement:


Ms. Betterridge is a Wiradjuri.
All Wiradjuri are Indigenous persons.
Therefore, Ms. Betterridge is an Indigenous person.


This is unarguably correct; the problem is that "Indigenous
person" means different things in both cases. In the case of the "is a"
predicate "Indigenous person" refers to an unambiguous (for present purposes)
legal definition whereas in the case of the "looks like a" predicate it refers
to a much more nebulous category whose very definition is currently under
discussion.


2 As opposed to being nonsensical e.g. "All Wiradjuri are banana".


3 Cultural
Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific, pp. 191 - 192.



Wherein I get PWNED
2010-11-03T17:43:00.000-04:00

I hate getting pwned, especially when it comes to political philosophy. I'd like
to think, at least, that I can out-argue the average schmo. So I'm particularly
annoyed that I had no good response to a proposition put forth by one of my
colleagues at work today. 



Our office is normally apolitical, in large part due to the fact that there's a
fairly wide range of views amongst the staff and we prefer not to be unduly
distracted by heated discussion.
However, it being the morning after, we made an exception and were talking about
the state of things in Washington state. The income
tax measure failed, as did the two
measures
intended to eliminate the state monopoly on liquor sales, which I maintained was
a logically inconsistent result¹. I suggested that, in regards to the
liquor control measures, people were voting emotionally rather than considering
the anticipated impacts of the bill.




As a rejoinder my colleague said, in essence, that it was perfectly acceptable
for people to make such decisions based on emotion rather than dispassionate
analysis². Which completely derailed me; I obviously disagree with that statement,
but I was unable to articulate why dispassionate analysis was better.



I suppose I could have made a consequentialist
argument that rational analysis is more likely to produce an internally
consistent 
body of legislation, but I generally prefer not offer ends-based rationales if
at all avoidable³. So is there a deontological argument to be made that "voting
your gut" is a bad thing? Let's look at the theory, shall we?



Most of the criticisms of direct democracy, of which the initiative/referendum
process is one
expression, tend to center around the idea of voter
competence. People on the pro- side argue that individual citizens
are just as competent as elected legislatures, whereas those on the opposing
side highlight evidence to the contrary⁴. Implicit in this argument
is the concept that both voters and elected representatives should govern
rationally but, as Gutmann and Thompson note, aggregative democratic practices
don't take voter rationality as a given⁵. At best we can say that
most people talk about direct democracy as if rationality is important.



There's nothing in the theory underlying the referendum process that
prohibits irrational decisions so, if we're going to argue against the use of
emotion, we've no recourse but to look at outcomes. However, we can do so in a very
generic fashion that doesn't involve nitpicking over specifics. We can
simply ask whether there's any cause to believe that emotional decision making
results, on average, in better outcomes than rational decision making? I feel
safe in saying "no" and asserting that 




Policies which conform to empirical fact are better, on average, than those
that don't.
Policies that are chosen primarily on the basis of emotion are unlikely to
conform to empirical fact.



Technical I suppose that both of those are empiric statements in
their own right, and thus testable/falseafiable, but they seem so obvious to me
that I'm inclined to treat them as axiomatic.





1 There's lots of different ways to slice that one; I could easily be
wrong.

2 Long form, slightly paraphrased:


Him: The measures would have increased the number of liquor outlets.

Me: How do voters determine the appropriate number of outlets?

Him: It's ok for them to vote their gut on that one.

3 Seems that I'm not alone in this regard: "Do we damn both representative and
direct democracy on the basis that each produces outcomes that many find
repugnant? Clearly, an assessment of either process in terms of its results is
something of an analysitc cul-de-sac". Demanding
Choices: Opinion, Voting, and Direct Democracy, p. 10.

4 ibid., pp. 11 - 14.

5 Why
Deliberative Democracy?, pp. 13 - 14.




Antonin Scalia, Defender of Free Speech?
2010-11-02T16:55:00.001-04:00

Surprising as it may be I'm starting to warm to Justice Scalia. Per the NYT
here's an interesting snippet from this morning's oral arguments in Schwarzenegger v.
Entertainment Merchants Association: 



"What's a deviant violent video game?" asked Justice Antonin Scalia, who was the
law's most vocal opponent on Tuesday. "As opposed to what? A normal violent
video game?" 




Good question... how do you propose to regulate something that you can't even
meaningfully define? In a similar vein, when
I was rereading the transcript of oral arguments in Citizens
United, I noticed this exchange between him and then Solicitor General Kagan:




GENERAL KAGAN: It is still true that BCRA 203, which is the only statute
involved in this case, 
does not apply to books or anything other than 
broadcast; 441b does, on its face, apply to other media. And we took what the
Court -- what the Court's -- the Court's own reaction to some of those other
 hypotheticals very seriously. We went back, we considered the matter
carefully, and the government's
 view is that although 441b does cover full-length books, that there would
be quite good as-applied challenge to any attempt to apply 441b in that
context.


And I should say that the FEC has never
 applied 441b in that context. So for 60 years a book has never been at
issue.


JUSTICE SCALIA: What happened to the overbreadth doctrine? I
mean, I thought our doctrine in the Fourth Amendment is if you write it too
broadly, we are not going to pare it back to the point where it's 
constitutional. If it's overbroad, it's invalid. What has happened to
that.
¹



You know, if you'd asked me about Scalia's stance vis-a-vis free speech
I'd have assumed that he was a lukewarm advocate at best. But here he is, in
both cases, arguing against sweeping, badly-written laws that criminalize
legitimate speech. Good for him; maybe he's not the devil after all. His
approach is certainly preferable to Kagan's "Well, we'd never to that" or
Breyer's
suggestion that we use "common sense".



As an interesting side note, for people who argue that Alito is a Scalia clone, it
looks like the two of them got into during arguments:




"What Justice Scalia wants to know," Justice Alito said, "is what James Madision
thought about video games."



"No," Justice Scalia responded, "I want to know what James Madison thought about
violence." 






1
http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/08-205%5BReargued%5D.pdf,
p. 65, lines 2 - 21.



The 17th Amendment as a Design Problem
2010-11-02T12:32:00.002-04:00

I've been mostly indifferent to recent back-and-forth regarding the utility/propriety of the 17th Amendment; neither method of election, direct or indirect, seems obviously superior to me. Todd Zywicki, however, makes an interesting argument in favor of repeal that I've never considered before:



The bottom line question is what system of selection of political officers will best further the goals of the Constitution.  I happen to think that the original framework was a pretty good balance of creating a republican government that would tame agency costs by political actors, preserve individual liberty, and frustrate special interest rent-seeking.  Non-democratic appointment of judges with shared authority between the President and the Senate, direct election of House members, state election of Senators, and the elaborate state-based architecture of the Electoral College* strikes me as an ingenious and well-balanced system.



There's certainly merit in that position. I think there's also an argument from fairness to be made here: Under the current system state governments don't have a direct voice at the Federal level. If state governments are legitimate stakeholders in the running of the country then giving them such a voice via the Senate, while preserving the People's control of the House, is more fair that providing the People with two vehicles for representing their views while shutting out the states.



Good Article On Voting Your Conscience
2010-11-01T13:25:00.002-04:00

There's a lovely and cogent article by Daniel over at Crooked Timber about voting your conscience as an alternative to holding your nose and picking the Democrat. Read it.



Money Isn't Everything (A Defense Of "Citizens United")
2010-10-29T14:00:00.001-04:00

Here's a firm
counterexample to the idea that you can simply buy victory in an election:




There's Meg Whitman down by 10 in the Field poll (all the polls, really, but the
Field is to CA what Selzer is to IA.)



....




There's Linda McMahon, 42 million spent, and who hasn't convinced men and
(especially) women that dead wrestlers and steroid abuse are the experience we
need to move America forward.



....



Nate Silver gives her a 0.1% chance of winning. Way to show folks how to manage
money, Linda. Why not just give each CT voter $25?



And then there's Rick Scott, down three in the Mason-Dixon poll and behind on
the 538 forecast as of this writing (that one is still too close to call.) That
poll position cost Scott and his wealthy wife $60 million. 





This is a big reason why Citizens
United doesn't get my knickers in a twist; it's simply not the case
that pouring unlimited amounts of money into a race guarentees success. Hell...
looking at how Meg Whitman is performing its not even the case that it gets you
a close race. Which, thankfully, is as it should be; the alternative rests on
the assumption 
that people vote for whomever buys the most airtime rather than engaging
in a reflective assessment of the candidates' positions.



I often wonder if the people who are getting upset at the outcome of
Citizens United have read the transcript
of oral arguments? I found the
government's position in the case to be absolutely odious: 




Robust debate about candidates for elective
office First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. Yet that is precisely the
dialogue that the government has prohibited if practiced by unions or
corporations, any union or any corporation.


The government claims it may do so based upon the Austin decision that corporate
speech is by its nature corrosive and distorting because it might not reflected
actual public support for the views expressed by the corporation. The government
admits that that radical concept of requiring public support for the speech
before you can speak would even authorize it to criminalize books and
signs.¹




That's bloody-fucking-awful... the idea that you can criminalize a book or a
poster merely because it's put out by a corporation. Granting the Federal
Government the power of prior restraint is far worse, IMHO, than allowing people
to (fruitlessly) spend buckets of money supporting a candidate or cause.





1 P. 3, lines 11-24.



Fuck You Markos, Redux
2010-10-25T13:50:00.000-04:00

I've become convinced that Markos is part
of the problem, not part of the solution:




Note, the Texas Greens have been trying for years to get that 5% and automatic
ballot access and have failed. Texas Democrats, incompetent lots that they are,
failed to field a candidate in the Comptroller's race, so the GOP literally paid
to get the Green candidate on the ballot. So now, if that Green candidate breaks
5 percent, Democrats will have to contend with spoilers in 2012.



....



Blame the Democrats for putting themselves in this position, but if you are a
Texas voter, don't compound the mistake by voting Green in the Comptroller's
race.



As for those who will feel compelled to defend the Greens -- I'll take them more
seriously when they can get their ass on the ballot without cashing the GOP's
checks.




One of the biggest problems with democracy as its practiced in the US is the
entrenched Republican/Democrat duopoly. They both suck, but if
you're going to vote you've no choice but to hold your nose and pick the least
bad candidate. I don't particularly care whether the Republicans purchased a spot
for the Greens; broadened access for alternative viewpoints is objectively good,
period. Maybe if they have a little competition the Democrats in Texas
will find cause to stop sucking so much. 



The above, taken in combination with his recent
advice to Jack Conway vis-a-vis farm subsidies, makes a pretty good
case that Markos has abandoned the moral high ground. His focus is not better
policy or promoting democracy, but rather ensuring that Democrats obtain (and
retain) power by hook or by crook. 




I'm Not Sure Bacon Counts As A Hate Crime
2010-10-22T12:29:00.002-04:00

(via Dispatches) Let me stipulate up front that leaving a message in bacon
on the grounds of a mosque is



Juvenile
Vandalism
Almost certainly motivated by animus towards Muslims as a group.




However, I'm extremely leery of categorizing such an act as a "hate crime" since the "baconing" (if you will) of a mosque:



Borders on political speech.
Lacks essential elements necessary to merit the designation.



I'm not suggesting that the act, as described in
the Sun News article, is bona fide political speech, but rather
that its close enough to the real thing that we should be wary of setting a
chilling precedent. 
If I were to wrap a Koran in bacon and hang it in an art
gallery you'd be hard-pressed to argue that it was anything other than a
legitimate excercise of free speech. Similarly, were I to picket a mosque with a
sign reading "Pork is yummy" in foot-high, bacon-based letters you might
call me an idiot and 
question the utility of my actions, but it'd be a stretch
to categorize such activity as a hate crime. 




Now suppose I steal onto the mosque grounds in the middle of the night and leave
that same message, in bacon, in the courtyard. I'm trespassing, and committing
an act of vandalism, but am I committing a hate crime? There are parallels here
with other forms of anti-religious protest such as the desecration of communion wafers. If I 
leave broken crackers strewn through the nave of my local Catholic church on
account of disagreements with Rome should that also be considered a hate crime?



The question of what is, and is not, a "hate crime" brings to mind a quote from David Neiwert on this topic which I've written about before:



Hate crimes are message crimes: They are intended to harm not just the
immediate victim, but all people of that same class within the community. Their
message is also irrevocable: they are "get out of town, nigger/Jew/queer"
crimes.




I've thought about this definition a lot in the 3 years since I wrote that post
and
have come to the conclusion that David is essentially correct. I have no trouble
supporting the idea that feeling
secure from private violence is a fundamental civil right; other rights mean
nothing if their free excercise is restrained by the threat of
bodily harm. However, I also think that this principle should be narrowly
construed, which puts me at odds with the general trend in progressive thought.
That it is motivated by animus towards a particular group is insufficient to
make an act a hate crime; such an act must also deprive the targeted group of
the feeling that they are safe from private violence. Put more plainly the act
must, implicitly or explicitly, threaten future violence against the targeted group.



This formulation neatly sidesteps the problem of determining the intent of the
perpetrator. Intent is impossible to prove directly; to do so we'd need a record
of the perpetrator's thoughts at the time the crime was committed. Instead, under current
law we look for extrinsic behaviors which may serve as proxies for
the perpetrator's mental state¹ at the time the crime was committed.
Which leads, inevitably, to ridiculous logical contortions of the kind we've seen recently here in Seattle:




King County prosecutors will not file hate crime charges against a Seattle
police detective accused caught on camera striking a Latino man while
threatening to "beat the Mexican piss" out of him.



....



"Detective Cobane did not maliciously and intentionally target (the man) due to
his ethnicity," Satterberg said in statement issued Wednesday afternoon.
"Instead, Detective Cobane and his fellow officers lawfully detained (the man)
...
because they had a reasonable belief that the men were involved in two armed
robberies. ...



"Detective Cobane used patently offensive language referencing the suspect's
ethnicity. However, using such language is not in and of itself a crime. The
threat or assault must be directed specifically towards a person because of the
person's race. Detective Cobane's command to stay still was directed at (the
man) due to (his) actions and his lack of compliance, not his ethnicity."
²



It certainly looks like a hate crime, but how do you prove beyond
a reasonable doubt that Satterberg's interpretation is incorrect? You can't, for
the reasons outlined above.




However, if we take the view that hate crimes are essentially acts of
intimidation directed towards a particular group, its no longer necessary to
determine Detective Cobane's precise motivation. A reasonable person would
conclude, based solely on observation of external phenomena, that Detective
Cobane is prone to express his dislike of Mexicans through violence. Mexicans in the area
should rightly fear for their safety³ knowing that he's around, thus
Detective Cobane's actions represent a hate crime, QED.
Moreover, Detective Cobane could reasonably be
expected to understand that his actions would be interpreted in this fashion and
thus has the notice he needs to restrain his actions.



Which brings us back to the baconing. I maintain that a reasonable person would
not believe that it represents a credible threat of future violence to the
Muslim community in the area⁴. They might find it irritating, or
offensive, or an abuse of bacon, but none of these things, by themselves, are
sufficient to make it a hate crime.





1 Which just pushes the problem off one level if you ask me... how do you prove
that a visible behavior is an accurate proxy for someone's mental
state?

2 Shorter Prosecutor Satterberg: Detective Cobane was just using the first epithet
that came to his mind to express his anger as he beat the snot out of the
victim. Nothing to see here... move along.

3 Doubly-so because he's a police officer. Not only might he be a perpetrator of
violence against them, but he may very well also be less inclined to protect
them from violence perpetrated by third parties.

4 You might inquire as to whether I'm in a position to fairly render such a
judgement
evaluating in this case; that's a fair enough criticism and you're welcome to
disagree with my assessment. Such determinations are
rightly the domain of judges and juries rather than individual bloggers.




Solved: java.io.IOException: Content-Length header is not provided by the namenode
2010-10-18T19:32:00.005-04:00

Seems like a non-trivial number of people have been having problems with communication between their primary and secondary name nodes under various releases of Hadoop 0.20. I found a solution today and, since getsatisfaction.com (stupidly, IMHO) makes you register to post comments, figured I'd post it here instead.



This problem first manifested itself when we migrated from Cloudera release CDH3b2 to CDH3b3. During the DFS image transfer process the secondary name node was issuing the following request:



http://<name node>:50070/getimage?putimage=1&port=50090&machine=0.0.0.0&token=-19:280794060:0:1287441076000:1287440760971



To which the name node responded with



WARN org.mortbay.log: /getimage: java.io.IOException: GetImage failed. java.io.IOException: Content-Length header is not provided by the namenode when trying to fetch http://0.0.0.0:50090/getimage?getimage=1



Note that the name name was trying to contact 0.0.0.0, presumably based on the "machine=0.0.0.0" parameter posted by the secondary name node. After tracing through a bunch of source code it turns out that in release 0.20.2 the "machine=" is (eventually) derived from the value of dfs.secondary.http.address. Editing hdfs-site.xml to explicitly point dfs.secondary.http.address to the secondary name node rather than accepting the default value of "0.0.0.0:50090" resolved the issue for me.



For Once I Agree With Amanda
2010-10-14T15:15:00.002-04:00

While I might quibble with some of the specifics, Amanda totally gets the context of the Cranick house fire. 



The Implications Of Jesuses, Tap-Dancing Or Otherwise
2010-10-14T12:18:00.007-04:00

PZ's post regarding the fundamental
unprovability of the existence of God brought to mind a vignette from a
couple of years ago. I was walking to work and was stopped by a couple of
young-ish people (high-schoolers perhaps) who asked me if I believed in God.
When I replied that I didn't they followed up with a question about what
evidence I'd need to change my mind, to which I answered something along the
lines of "documented evidence of the supernatural" would be a good first step. PZ's assertions
notwithstanding I still think there's merit to that answer.



Let's stop and consider the example of a tap-dancing Jesus. What are we to make
of it if the aforementioned fellow suddenly poofs into existence, does a little
soft shoe, maybe performs assorted
miracles, and then disappears into thin air? Our first step, certainly,
would be to eliminate the many natural phenomena which might serve to explain
our observations. But after we've determined that it wasn't done with smoke and
mirrors and that we're not experiencing a mass hallucination, what then? 



Michio Kaku provides a
helpful framework which can be used to think about this sort of thing. He has
identified three
classes of probability regarding technology, the most improbable of which,
"Class III", contains phenomena like perpetual motion and precognition whose
existence would violate established laws of physics.
If the hypothetical Jesus
were to perform one of these Class III feats it should, in the very least, give
us pause. The question is what sort of pause, exactly, should it give us?



I'm with PZ in that the existence of a Class III Jesus (not to be confused with
a level 80 Jesus)
wouldn't, in general, prove the existence of any particular god and would
deal a fatal blow to many theologies. At the same time we'd have found ourselves in
the presence of a chap who does things which are inconsistent with our
fundamental understading of how the universe works; what to make of that? As PZ
points out "god" is a hopeless muddled and malleable concept; venture down that
road and you'll end up in a hopeless semantic quagmire. But its facile to say
that the existence of such a fellow should be dismissed as epistemologically
meaningless; were he to turn up tomorrow the metaphysical implications thereof
would be absolutely staggering. 



So, while it may be true that there's no possible evidence for the
existence of "god", it is possible to prove the existence of beings with abilities that are "god-like".



God Dammit People, Stop And Understand The Context
2010-10-11T16:22:00.002-04:00

There are big problems with Dante
Atkin's analysis of the now-infamous Cranick house fire:



Now, many free-market supremacists in the conservative movement have argued that
Mr. Cranick deserved to watch in tears as his house burned to the ground because
he had not paid the measly $75 to the local Fire Department for service outside
the city limits. But if the genuine issue were about making sure that adequate
fees were rendered for services provided in the true spirit of the free market,
there would have been at least two solutions to the problem: the South Fulton
Fire Department could have accepted Mr. Cranick's fee at the time of the fire,
or, barring that, the Fire Department could have put out the fire and then
billed Mr. Cranick for the costs.




No and no. Accepting Mr. Cranick's $75 of the fire would have established a
precedent that they must abide by at a later date; it
would be unjust for them to accept Mr. Cranick's money and then
subsequently refuse to extend the same offer to another homeowner. Such a predecent would
inevitably result in some non-trivial portion of the fire department's customers 
paying the fee after the fact, effectively eliminating
the risk-pooling aspect of requiring the fee from everyone up front. The
original
article
to which Mr. Atkins links says the following in this regard:



Cranick's fellow
residents in the rural stretches of Obion County had no fire protection until
the county established the $75 fee in 1990. As Williamson explained: "The South
Fulton fire department is being treated as though it has done something wrong,
rather than having gone out of its way to make services available to people who
did not have them before."



Mr. Atkin's insistence that Cranick be allowed to pay after the fact logically
leads to the collapse of the South Fulton fire department. From a public policy
perspective this is a worse outcome than allowing Mr. Cranick's house to burn
down.



Nor could the fire department expect to be able to bill the Cranicks after the
fact. As Orin
Kerr points out:




Daniel Foster finds it objectionable that the Fire Department didn't agree to
individually contract with the Cranicks to provide the service when Mrs. Cranick
said over the phone that they would pay for the service "whatever the cost". But
I don't know how the city is supposed to contract individually with the Cranicks
while their house is burning down. Is the city supposed to treat Mrs. Cranick's
statement that she would be willing to pay as the acceptance of a contract, at
whatever the cost ends up being? At whatever the city wants to charge? And what
if the Cranicks don't have the money to pay the actual cost of the firefighters
coming out and putting out the fire? 



The Cranicks would have been contracting under
duress on account of their house being on fire and such, so there is a good
chance that such a contract would have been unenforceable.



The treatment that this episode has been getting from people like Mr. Atkins is
either fundamentally ignorant or just one more example of reflexive
libertarian-bashing. Here we have a rural area that, up until the introduction
of a fee-supported fire department, had nothing at all. That might be a problem
in-and-of-itself, but Mr. Atkins isn't criticizing the difficulty of sustaining
a fire department. Rather he's specifically criticizing the behavior of the
fire department in regards to Mr. Cranick's situation, behavior which, as
demonstrated above, is consistent with the public policy objective of providing
sustainable fire service to an underserved community.



Constitutional Idolatry Vs. Constitutional Fidelity
2010-10-06T17:32:00.001-04:00

Lexington is half-right in eir recent column about constitution
worship within the Tea Party movement. There is indeed a trend towards
deification of the Founders among this segment of society, a fact which I noted
in passing in my post on Glenn Beck's Common Sense.
It is, however, a mistake to assume that everyone calling for strict
adherance¹
to the Constitution is motivated by "constitutional idolatry" or dreams of
"a return to prelapsarian innocence"; there are good arguments to be made for
hewing as closely as possible to the principles laid out in the Constitution
which have nothing to do with either.



There are a lot of ways to approach this particular issue, perhaps the
simplest of which is to ask "Does the Constitution constrain the actions of the
Federal government?". Presumably Lexington would answer that question in the
affirmative, in which case my follow-up would be "Under what authority may the
Federal government ignore those constraints?". I
would argue that there is no such authority, whereas ey seems to have something
else in mind. Consider this quote from the end of the article:



None of this is to say that the modern state is not bloated or over-mighty.
There is assuredly a case to be made for reducing its size and ambitions and
giving greater responsibilities to individuals. But this is a case that needs to
be made and remade from first principles in every political generation, not just
by consulting a text put on paper in a bygone age.



Absolutely! Every generation, every person, should seek to construct a coherent
ideology for themselves from first principles. While they're thus occupied,
however, something has to keep the government from overstepping the bounds which
are currently in place. And, once the political generation has made up its mind,
the various representatives thereof have to get together and reconcile the
conflicts that will inevitably arise between different conceptions of the pursuit
of happiness. The Founders, in their wisdom, provided the amendment process as a
procedural framework for this type of reconciliation.



Which brings me to my second point: 
characterizing the Constitution as a "text put on paper in a bygone age" is, to
put it charitably, incorrect. It, as Lexington is well aware, had been amended multiple times since
its institution, fixing some of the problems (such as a greatly restricted
franchise) which the Founders introduced with the original version. In this sense
it is a document of relatively recent vintage; the contention that we're
perpetually constrained by the archaic beliefs of the Founders is balderdash.



Close reading of eir article reveals a quote which suggests that we have a
disagreement over the basic purpose of a constitution:



More to the point is that the constitution provides few answers to the hard
questions thrown up by modern politics. Should gays marry? No answer there.



That's a feature, not a bug. Political questions will have multiple solutions;
the purpose of a constitution is not to select one solution in particular but
rather to define the boundaries of the permitted solution space. "Should gays
marry?" is a normative question which, in my opinion, the government has no
business answering. The appropriate question to ask is "To what degree is the
government permitted to regulate gay marriage?"; that's a question which the
Constitution is competent to answer.



As I said before, Lexington is half-right: the Constitution, by itself, doesn't
provide the answers to all political questions. But it does provide an agreed
upon framework by which each political generation may work out the messy details
for itself. 
For this reason some (perhaps small) fraction of the individuals whom Lexington has
tarred as constitutional idolators see fidelity to the Constitution as a matter
of pure procedural
justice. The Constitution represents the "rules of the game"; for an
individual or institution to decide that ey are not bound by its constraints is
not only an act of hubris but also incorrect as a matter of procedure.



Which brings us to the question of alternatives; what principle would Lexington
propose as a substitute for constitutional fidelity?
 Surely any legitimate political order must include some
fundamental set of rules by which the actions of government are constrained. If
such an order is to maintain its legitimacy the government's actions must be
well and truly bound by these rules at all times, not just when its
convenient.



And that, I think, is the moral of the story: government has to play by the
rules even when its inconvenient. It may very well be the case that the
Constitution "gets in the way" of otherwise salutary activities such as the
provision of universal healthcare and that, as a consequence, we're willing 
to ignore such violations of the government's mandate. If we do so, however,
we have no cause to complain when the government oversteps its bounds
in a fashion which we find objectionable.





1 The phrase "strict adherence" makes my skin crawl, but seems apropos in the
current context.



The "Civil Liberties Stuff"
2010-10-02T19:14:00.004-04:00

I, too, get depressed by the civil liberties stuff. This is serious shit; all the wholesome goodness that we enjoy by virtue of living in the US is (or, rather, was) predicated on the fact that we don't have to worry about the Federal government offing us in our sleep. You know, that whole bit about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? You can't really pursue your happiness if Uncle Sam just killed you.



Which is why I wonder sometimes why people spend so much time worrying about HAMP or TARP; who gives a rat's ass about either of those when the President has said that he can assassinate you whenever he wants? Atrios and Markos and all the rest of the first tier, progressive bloggers should be shouting "Stop!" from the rooftops; Glenn Greenwald can't do it on his own.



I know... they'd probably say something like "Yes, but pragmatically speaking there are more immediate worries". Yeah... most people have nothing to worry about, I'm sure, regardless of who's in office. Of course that's because most people are sheep who don't threaten the status quo. Obama's not going to start rounding up people, but he shouldn't have the power to do so even in theory. And what happens when the administration changes and there's another attack? Remember "either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists"? The next time there's an attack there will be that much more pressure to sit down, shut up, and cheer harder.



Glenn's right... when you stop to think about it Obama is a tyrant. A benevolent despot, to be sure, but one who has asserted, in writing, unlimited power via the invocation of the state secrets privilege.



When it's come to that there's hardly any point in worrying about goddamn SUPERTRAINS!!!!.



Who Has Moral Obligations?
2010-09-28T12:41:00.001-04:00

One of the problems with which I continually wrestle is how to build a
durable, non-theistic system of ethics. There are a lot of questions which
theistic systems have an easy time answering but which are really quite hard if
you don't have god to point to (see here,
for example). Most recently my
attention has been captured by a corollary to the perennial question "Why
behave ethically?". If we accept, for the sake of argument, that there is a
good, non-theistic answer to this question, one which quickly follows on its
heels is "Who should behave ethically?".



The religious side, as a general rule, doesn't have any problem here. The usual
story is that humanity is exceptional, has a soul, is made in the image of god,
etc... that's why humans should be moral. The non-theistic view, on the other
hand, generally emphasizes that humanity is just one branch on a whopping-great
phylogenetic
tree. And yet I suspect that there are very few atheists who will claim that
other apes, much less whales or cows, have an obligation to behave in an ethical
manner. What is so special about humanity that we alone, out of all the myriad
species on this planet, should behave ethically?



It's surprisingly difficult to find anything on this subject. There's a lot of
material addressing the question "Why should
an atheist be moral?", but most of it is descriptive rather than
prescriptive in nature, focused on analyzing the motivations for "moral"
behavior in atheists. Some germane quotes:





The sources of
atheist morality:


Why should an Atheist be moral, without a god to make him to do so? You may as
well ask why he should use his head for something besides a mobile hat rack.
Morality is a built-in condition of humanity; the moral tendency exists in just
about everyone, barring psychopaths.



...



And that, luckily enough, leads us to the foundational principle of morality:
empathy. Psychopaths lack empathy with their fellow human beings, and cannot be
truly said to have a moral impulse.





Is
Atheism Consistent With Morality?:


I, for one, see no reason to believe there are such things. Nor do I think they
are an especially useful fiction; the vast majority of people would, I think,
behave exactly the same as they do now even if they believed there were no such
things as moral facts--they would continue to be guided, as they are now, by
their deepest cares and concerns.




Pro &
Con: Atheists Can Be Moral, Too:


They are as likely, however, to be guided by sentiment, or instinct, in addition
to reason. To answer moral questions, questions about ends and not means, a
non-believer will consult "his own heart," Bertrand Russell observed. These
questions "belong to a realm...of emotion and feeling and desire...a realm which
is not that of reason though it should be in no degree contrary to it."
Faithlessness can make moral choices harder; it demands an active inner life as
well as a capacity for empathy and engagement with the world.





The above statements are undeniably true, and explain why atheists commonly
exhibit behaviors recognized as "good" or "moral", but they don't speak to the
concept of ethical obligation. Again, why do we expect ethical behavior from a
human but not a cow?




Two of the quotes invoke the concept of "empathy", the ability to identify with
the experiences of other entities¹, but empathy isn't a uniquely
human trait. Many (all?) apes exhibit
empathy, as do dogs
and mice.
As befits an evolved behavior it shows a wide range of
expression/variation across these different species. Humans can perhaps be
classified, on average, as "extremely empathetic" (if such a designation is
meaningful at all), but its clear that we're sitting at one end of a spectrum of
behavior shared by a number of other species.



Consider, if you will, the practice
of premeditated killing among chimpanzees; can these animals be said to be
behaving unethically? Assuming that the consensus answer is "no" we're left with
the task of defending that answer in some non-arbitrary fashion. At the same
time we have to reconcile the (likely conflicting) verdict we'd render for the
psychopath from the first quote, someone congenitally lacking in empathy, for
similar behavior. The seeming difficulty of doing so suggests that empathy, by
itself at least, isn't enough to explain why we perceive humans, and humans
alone, as having ethical obligations.



This is more than just idle philosophizing; understanding who has an obligation
to behave ethically, and under what circumstances, is an absolute necessity for
any non-theistic system of ethics. Most of the attempts I've seen at answering
this question boil down to "follow your conscience", which works fine if you're
the only person on the planet but not so well if there are other people 
about. There needs to be some arbitration mechanism for when individual
consciences come into conflict, but non-theistic systems don't ever seem to pan
out in that regard.





1 To a first approximation; under the hood "empathy" is a somewhat complicated
concept.




Sigh...
2010-09-25T11:52:00.002-04:00

(via The Volokh Conspiracy) Apparently the Federal government is now asserting that it can kill American citizens anywhere, anytime, without judicial review. Two thoughts:



One: This is what happens when you make war on an abstract noun; the "battlefield" is unbounded and anyone can be declared a combatant.



Two: The Obama Administration no longer deserves our respect. They're just as bad as the Bush Administration, if not moreso. It doesn't matter what they've done to improve health insurance if they can't even respect basic civil liberties.



Some Thoughts On One Justification For The Estate Tax
2010-09-11T13:08:00.007-04:00

Weekend Edition had a segment on the estate tax this morning which included an interesting comment by Abigail Disney, grand-daughter of Walt. When asked why she supported the estate tax the had the following to say:



It's absolutely an accident of my birth. And that's sort of the point — that there shouldn't be dynasties built around the simple good luck of being born related to somebody very wealthy.



I found myself wondering what, specifically, she meant by that, since certain interpretations of the above appears to have some fairly radical consequences. Presumably she's not against dynasties per se as the existence of publicly notable families, by itself, doesn't seem morally odious. Rather, her comments seem to be more in line with the views of the luck egalitarians i.e. she has no moral claim to money earned by her ancestors. So stipulated, but there must be more to it than that, since the imposition of an estate tax doesn't follow directly from her lack of moral standing.



Reading between the lines a little she probably feels that wealth-based dynasties needlessly perpetuate social and economic inequalities in our society. Their existence represents a net loss to society as a whole and, consequently, government is justified in impeding their formation through the imposition of swingeing estate taxes. That's an arguable conclusion, to say the least, but its not what got me thinking after listening to the broadcast. Instead I started thinking about the effectiveness of the estate tax as a social leveler and what other interventions might be justified using a similar rationale.



I'm not the least bit convinced that the estate tax represents an effective mechanism reducing societal inequality. The tax doesn't kick in until the gross estate exceeds $3.5 million... that's a whopping great amount of money. Barring an exceedingly large number of inheritors to the estate each one will still be firmly in the "haves" category post-tax. Their wealth may be significantly reduced, but they're still rich relative to the vast bulk of the American populace, so the imposition of the estate tax doesn't materially effect inequality in this regard.



Now, it could be the case that the government effectively re-distributes the proceeds of taxation, thus reducing overall social inequality, but don't hold your breath. Discussions about the budgetary impact of the estate tax (see, for example, here and here) talk about using the revenues thus generated to defray the general expenses of the Federal government rather than directing it specifically to inequality-reducing social programs or anything of that nature. In the end Congress still has to decide to spend the money on worth causes; good luck with that. On cursory review it looks like the estate tax really wouldn't do all that much to address Abigail's concerns; even with the tax in place the rich will stay rich and the poor stay poor.



Now, what about the major premise underlying the estate tax, that the imposition of a grossly disproportionate¹ estate tax is justified on the grounds that it provides an (ostensible) net benefit to society? One of the problems with the estate tax as a leveling mechanism is that it simply happens too late; between the time they amass their fortune and the time they shuffle off this mortal coil the worlds' rich grandparents/parents/etc. have ample opportunity to spread their largess to younger relations. From a societal perspective its makes negligible difference if Uncle Sam takes 45% of some rich uncle's estate if he's already paid for the college education of 10 nieces and nephews; those people are permanently better off than the bulk of their peers as a result of that expenditure².



Following this logic, if we really want to ameliorate the inequalities caused by the accumulation of wealth then you have to stop that wealth from being accumulated in the first place. Question: Would Abigail support a wealth tax? Miss Disney's reasoning is equally applicable in this situation; her very birth into the Disney family is a matter of luck. Moreover, such a tax would, for the reasons outlined above, be more effective at achieving the goal of reducing social inequality. There's still the question of property rights, but once you've gone down the road of supporting an estate tax that doesn't seem to be all that big a deal. A will reflects, after all, a choice made by a living person; that they're dead when its executed makes little difference. If you can take a chunk of their wealth once they're dead there seems no reason why you can't take a similar chunk while they're alive.



I suspect a wealth tax, at least of the magnitude necessary to materially reduce social inequality, would be politically infeasible. But from a purely philosophical standpoint it seems just as justified (if not more so) as the estate tax. If we find the concept of a wealth tax to be unpalatable then that suggests we should re-examine our support for the estate tax as well. 




1 Relative to the amount of government resources consumed in the estate transfer process.

2 This is a specific example of a more general observation that, in the US at least, there is a strong correlation (as high as 0.5 if this paper is to be believed) between parental and child income levels. Or, to quote Everlast: "You know where it ends / Yo, it usually depends on where you start".



More Erlang: Building A File Poller
2010-09-04T16:21:00.002-04:00

Suppose you want to monitor a directory and receive notification whenever its
contents change? This problem crops up from time to time in various contexts;
frequently the directory in question serves as a staging area which holds files
prior to processing. When a file is added to this staging area the program
doing the processing needs to learn about it in some fashion so that it can be
added to the work queue. There are a bunch of ways you might go about
implementing such a system, but at heart they generally use one of two mechanisms:



Asynchronous event notification: The modification of the directory causes
an appropriate message to be propagated to interested parties.
Synchronous polling: Some process polls the directory at a pre-determined
interval and reports any changes to interested parties.



The former method is more efficient but generally requires assistance from the
underlying storage system (i.e. inotify). As far as I've been 
able to determine¹ Erlang lacks support for such a mechanism, so 
we'll have to use the second approach. Because this is Erlang our goal is to
take a basic polling loop and package it up into a separate process that can
emit events to some parent.




So let's start with a basic polling loop, omitting function arguments for the
moment:


loop() ->
    if 
        sumpin_changed() ->
            send_a_message();
        true -> 
            ok
    end;
    loop().



This would be a horrible CPU hog since it polls continuously, so let's improve
the loop by having it sleep between iterations:


loop() ->
    timer:sleep(<some number of milliseconds>),
    if 
        sumpin_changed() ->
            send_a_message();
        true -> 
            ok
    end;
    loop().




We'll also want some way to terminate the polling loop cleanly. In Erlang this
is typically accomplished by sending the process a message telling it to exit. 
In order for the process to catch this message we'll have to introduce a 
"receive" block in the main loop, which leads to a complication. How do we
sleep while simultaneously waiting for an exit message? The Erlang gods have
foreseen this particular problem and provided us with a variant of the basic
receive block which includes a built-in timeout:


loop() ->
    receive
        exit -> ok;
    after 
        <some number of milliseconds> ->
            if 
                sumpin_changed() ->
                    send_a_message();
                true -> 
                    ok
            end,
            loop()
    end.




That's good enough for now; we'll go back and fill in the details later. Let's
move on to detecting new files. This function will need to know what
directory to monitor and, for added flexibility, we'll provide it with a
regex² telling it what file name pattern to look for:


get_new_files(Directory, Regex) ->
 Files = get_list_of_files(Directory),
 FilteredFiles = filter_list_of_files(Files, Regex),
 detect_changes(Filtered_Files)
end.



So how do we implement this? list_dir,
from the file module, will return a list of all the
files in a given directory. re:run can be used as the
basis of a predicate for lists:filter to extract only those files which
match the provided regular expression.



get_new_files(Directory, Regex) ->
    {ok, Files} = list_dir(Directory),
    FilteredFiles = lists:filter(
        fun(X) -> 
            re:run(X,Regex,[{capture,none}]) == match end,
        Files
    ),
    detect_changes(FilteredFiles),
end.



Now let's stop and think about the best way to detect changes. We could keep a
list of files that we've seen before, but such a list may grow infinitely long
as time progresses. A less resource-intensive method, which should work well in
practice, is to compare the file's mtime attribute (obtained via 
file:read_file_info) to the time the last polling cycle
completed.



This means that we now have a piece of state, the last poll time, to
keep track of. Questions to answer:




How is this state initialized?
How is it updated?
How is it passed from iteration to iteration?



To initialize the state we'll want to create an init() function which
passes an appropriate initial value to loop(). But what value to
pass? In Erlang dates and times are usually passed around as

{{YYYY,MM,DD},{HH,MM,SS}} tuples, which makes comparisons a little bit
of a pain. To simplify this process we'll convert dates/times to Gregorian
seconds³, in which case the last poll time should be initialized to
0.



We want to update the state in such a fashion as to minimize the possibility
that some file will slip through the cracks. There's no way to completely avoid
a race condition between reading the contents of the directory and getting a new
poll time since updates to the directory occur outside of the Erlang process. So
what we'll want to do instead is calculate the new poll time immediately after
the call to list_dir. Putting this all together with state passing
leads to the following:


init(PID, Directory, Regex, PollInterval) -> 
 loop(PID, Directory, Regex, PollInterval, 0).

loop(PID, Directory, Regex, PollInterval, LastPollTime) ->
    receive
        exit -> ok
    after 
        PollInterval ->
            {NewFiles, NewPollTime} = 
                get_new_files(Directory, Regex, LastPollTime),
            if 
                length(NewFiles) > 0 ->
                    PID ! { new_files, NewFiles };
                true -> ok
            end,
            loop(PID, Directory, Regex, PollInterval, NewPollTime)
    end.

get_new_files(Directory, Regex, LastPollTime) ->
    {ok, Files} = list_dir(Directory),
 NewPollTime = calendar:datetime_to_gregorian_seconds(
        { date(), time() }
    ),
    FilteredFiles = lists:map(
        fun(X) -> filename:join([Directory,X]) end,
        lists:filter(
            fun(Y) -> 
                re:run(Y,Regex,[{capture,none}]) == match end,
            Files
        )
    ),
    NewFiles = lists:filter (
        fun(Filename) ->
            {ok, FileInfo} = read_file_info(Filename),
            calendar:datetime_to_gregorian_seconds(
                FileInfo#file_info.mtime 
            ) > LastPollTime
        end,
        FilteredFiles
    ),
    { New_Files, NewPollTime }.



There are a few more changes needed to bring the code up to snuff (see the 
full source for details), but that's the gist of it. Now let's
test it our, shall we?


$ erl
Erlang R13B04 (erts-5.7.5) [source] [64-bit] [smp:2:2] [rq:2] [async-threads:0]
[hipe] [kernel-poll:false]
Eshell V5.7.5  (abort with ^G)
1> c(file_poller).
{ok,file_poller}
2> PollerPid = file_poller:init(".",".+\.test",5000).
<0.42.0>
3> lists:keysearch(messages, 1, process_info(self())).⁴
{value,{messages,[]}}
4> os:cmd("touch 1.test").
[]
5> lists:keysearch(messages, 1, process_info(self())).
{value,{messages,[{new_files,["./1.test"]}]}}
6> os:cmd("touch 2.test 3.test").
[]
7> lists:keysearch(messages, 1, process_info(self())).
{value,{messages,[{new_files,["./1.test"]},
                  {new_files,["./3.test","./2.test"]}]}}
8> PollerPid ! exit.
exit
9> os:cmd("touch 4.test").
[]
10> lists:keysearch(messages, 1, process_info(self())).
{value,{messages,[{new_files,["./1.test"]},
                  {new_files,["./3.test","./2.test"]}]}}



I hook up the Erlang shell to a file_poller process and then create
some zero-byte files via touch. Following each invocation of

touch the file poller process kindly sends me a message letting me know
that there are new files. The process terminated once I sent it the atom
exit; no message is generated for the creation of 4.test.





1 One of the challenges of working with Erlang is that, while releases come with
decent documentation on a module-by-module basis, such documentation
requires you to already have a pretty good idea of what you're looking for. It's
less helpful if you need to figure out whether some
esoteric bit of functionality is available in the standard library. When I want
 to know how to do something in Java or Ruby I can just go ask Google, but that
approach works less well for Erlang because the community of practitioners is
much smaller.

2 The filelib module provides the wildcard function which
does something akin to this, but is limited to bare-bones, command-line type
regexes.


3 Erlang, being Scandinavian, is an egalitarian language designed to run on a
wide variety of platforms. Consequently there's no built-in support (again,
AFAIK) for Unix timestamps.

4 process_info
is another handy function that could be better publicized. 
I was looking for a way to peek at a processes' messages when I noticed that pman did just that.
process_info is what turned up after digging through the pman
source.



Now C'mon, That's Just Plain Ignorant
2010-08-23T17:17:00.002-04:00

Sweet jebus:



The only thing I disagree with is the notion that there is an idealistic libertarianism that exists outside of the ugly view that humans exist in service of money or social hierarchies.  As far as I can tell, that’s the whole point of libertarianism.



Argh... that's about the absolute inverse of anything that can remotely be called "libertarianism". Here's the lede from the SEP:



Libertarianism, in the strict sense, is the moral view that agents initially fully own themselves and have certain moral powers to acquire property rights in external things. In a looser sense, libertarianism is any view that approximates the strict view. 



Societies are constituted by individuals and exist solely to serve them; individuals most emphatically do not exist to serve social hierarchies. And I don't care who happens to be calling themselves a "libertarian" these days; words have meanings and no amount of self-identification on the part of third parties will change that. If Amanda wants to play that game then Phyllis Schlafly and Sarah Palin are feminists and feminism is nothing more than a ploy to keep women chained to the stove.



Random Technology Speculation
2010-08-21T11:41:00.002-04:00

Random question: Now that Dell has bought 3PAR what storage vendor is Cisco going to buy to complete its UCS offerings?



Mises' Liberalism
2010-08-18T12:04:00.001-04:00

I just finished Ludwig von Mises' Liberalism; it wasn't
quite what I was expecting. It's not clear to me why he's
beloved of libertarians and reviled to various degrees by progressives; both
camps should find things to agree (and disagree) with in his particular
philosophy. Though he's often mentioned in the same breath as
Hayek, both of them being of the Austrian school and the latter a student of the
former, I found Liberalism to be much less compelling than
The Road To Serfdom. Liberalism quite plainly 
shows its age at times which, while Mises' has a lot of good ideas, makes it
hard to swallow the work as a whole.




The starting point of Mises philosophy is that the goal of "social
policy" is to increase the absolute material well-being of all members of 
society:



Liberalism is a doctrine directed entirely towards the conduct of men in this
world. In the last analysis, it has nothing else in view than the advancement of
their outward, material welfare and does not concern itself directly with their
inner, spritual and metaphysical needs. It does not promise men happiness and
contentment, but only the most abundant possible satisfaction of all those
desires that can be satisfied by the things of the outer world.¹



After reviewing the five possible systems of organization based around the
division of labor he concludes that capitalism represents the best means by
which humanity's aggregate material welfare may be increased. It is easy to see
why Mises appeals a to certain class of fiscal (and social) conservatives since
he, as a consequence of the philosophy sketched above, advocates a free market
system with zero government regulation/intervention.




However, I find the appeal he holds for many libertarians to be somewhat
mystifying. The policies which he advocates (unregulated markets, private
ownership of the means of production, etc.) 
strongly coincide with those held by most libertarians,
but he arrives at them via some very non-libertarian assumptions. 
Anticipating Rawls by several decades he says the following in the introductory
paragrpah of the section entitled "Private Property and Ethics":



In seeking to demonstrate the social function and necessity of private ownership
of the means of production and of the concomitant inequality in the distrubtion
of income and wealth, we are at the same time providing proof of the moral
justification for private property and for the capitalist social order based 
upon it.²



Mises' dedication to private property is purely instrumental; private property 
and the inequalities in wealth that it generates are justified because they 
benefit society as a whole. He then goes on to say



Everything that serves to preserve the social order is moral; everything that is
detrimental to it is immoral. Accordingly, when we reach the conclusion that an
institution is beneficial to society, one can no longer object that it is
immoral. The may possibly be a difference of opinion about whether a particular
institution is socially beneficial or harmful. But once it has been judged
beneficial, one can no longer contend that, for some inexplicable reason, it
must be condemned as immoral.³




Perhaps in other works he has added qualifiers to such sentiments, but in
Liberalism they are presented without caveat. Though likely 
unintentional on Mises' part the above nevertheless sounds somewhat 
authoritarian in its absolutism. More important for this analysis, however, is
that Mises' formulation places the good of society over the rights of the 
individual, essentially inverting the standard libertarian ethos.



Which is somewhat ironic considering the critiques that he levels at the
etatists. He rails against them⁴ for treating the state as an end in
itself, but it seems to me that he commits the same error with respect to
society as a whole. "Society" is no more real an entity than "the state"; it
has no independent interests of its own. Like government it is simply a 
phenomena arising from the collective choices of individuals. Mises' reasoning
is ultimately flawed because it derives the rights of individuals on the basis
of what is good for society without ever demonstrating how society comes to have
a legitimate claim for perpetuation in the first place.




In the same vein progressives should not reject Mises' work out of hand. His
primary goal is to increase the material well-being of society as a whole,
a cause that progressives should be able to embrace with ease.
Consider some of the ideas that Mises endorses:


Self-determination for any collection of individuals large enough to form an
administrative unit.
Absolute freedom of movement for all individuals.
Complete formal equality under the law for all individuals.
Peace


That last one is a biggie since its a theme to which he returns over and over
again throughout the book. He contends that states should give up empire
building, give up colonialism, and instead embrace the cause of universal peace
as completely as possible. That stance places him firmly in the progressive
camp. Admittedly there are a few problematic bits about the white man's burden,
but even in that case he advocates turning administration of the colonies over 
to the League of Nations with an end towards granting them full autonomy as
quickly as possible.



The conflict with contemporary progressives comes, I believe, from his 
contention that unbridled capitalism is
the best system for achieving this end. As Mises points out that is largely an
empiric question; presumably he would accept another form of social
organization if progressives could demonstrate that it was more efficient in
accomplishing the same goal. As I noted above this is not, in essence, that 
dissimilar from the position taken by John Rawls, so it's 
hard to argue that Mises philosophy is inherently inimical to the interests of
progressive.




All of which leads me to wonder how many of the people, in both the pro- and
anti-Mises camps, have actually read anything that he's written and how many are
just repeating received wisdom.




1 P. xix

2 P. 14

3 P. 15

4 Pp. 17 - 19



The Utility And Propriety Of Sardonic Responses
2010-08-15T11:32:00.008-04:00

Quoth Amanda in reaction to a kerfuffle over at Penny Arcade:



3) That said, the guys at Penny Arcade responded in officially the worst possible way to respond.  As Melissa correctly notes, they attacked strawmen, and this time they really did make light of rape.  Jokes where you condemn rape in a sardonic tone really do imply that rape isn’t a big deal.  In the time it took them to write the response, there were probably like 10 rapes in the U.S. alone.  The cartoon implied that rape is less common than it is, that rape culture isn’t real, and that the whole subject is beneath you.  This was tone deaf, sexist, and stupid. 



That's a tremendously uncharitable interpretation, more or less the worst-possible reading of the cartoon, especially when you consider the nature of the accusation to which they were responding. Helpfully, Amanda characterizes the critique of the original comic as follows:



2) Someone at Shakesville takes offense.  I found the blog post an annoying rationalization for disliking humor in general, which the blogger admits she does.  I find the “but rape is real!” argument against jokes of this nature to be a disingenuous one.  Slavery is also real, as is murder and general violence.  But there’s no way that the blogger would have gotten mad about jokes in those veins, but a joke about a form of torture that is supposed to sound over the top and mystical got her into offended mode. 



Milli A (from Shakesville) is arguing in bad faith that the folks at Penny Arcade are endorsing/trivializing rape, a fact of which said folks are apparently aware. Thus the contentious comic should be read as a response to an argument in bad faith addressed primarily to Milli A (and anyone else who might share eir opinion). The question, then, is whether Amanda's critique is valid in this light.



I tend to think not. Here's my reading of the meaning of each panel:


It is irrational to interpret the previous comic as an endorsement of rape given its overall tone and contact. People who say otherwise are arguing in bad faith; they know it, we know it.
Because you're arguing in bad faith we're not going to seriously engage your argument but respond with a sarcastic semi-rebuttal instead.
Yes, we're assholes.




Their intent is not to "condemn rape in a sardonic tone". Rather, they're engaging in much the same critique as Amanda herself, calling bullshit on a bullshit argument. They're most certainly not setting up a strawman; by Amanda's own reckoning their representation of Milli A's position is accurate.



There is, of course, the secondary issue of whether their response was appropriate. There might have been a more productive way to go about rebutting the accusation, right? Once again I give you Amanda:



Well, Amanda, you might be asking, what were these guys supposed to do?  That’s a good question.  In all honesty, I think they should have ignored it and the whole thing would have blown over.  I realize that’s really hard to do sometimes.  And sometimes addressing concerns is a better idea.  It really depends on the situation.  But in this case, the critic comes right out and says she objects in a very general way to comedy.  When you’re facing someone who condemns the entire genre you work in, I don’t really think there’s a possibility of communication there.  It’s like trying to argue the finer points of a rap song to someone who says hip hop isn’t music.  Explaining the joke isn’t going to work, either.  Trying to make jokes about the joke will fail you as well---remember, your critic has made it clear that she finds comedy distasteful. 



Their critic has also made it clear that ey thinks they are endorsing rape, a fairly serious accusation by any measure, and Amanda's advice to them is "Sit down, shut up, and hope it blows over?". Umm... no. Even if Milli A might not be moved by the power of their argument they can still sway observers to the conversation. Moreover, these same observers might interpret silence on the part of Penny Arcade as a tacit admission of guilt, so a reply is probably merited.



Was it appropriate to be "sardonic"? Yup... my rulebook says that you're not required or expected to engage earnestly with someone who is arguing in bad faith. The application of sarcasm, while no doubt satisfying in its own right, also does a public service by highlighting that someone is engaging in dishonest rhetoric. As Amanda points out this dishonest rhetoric does a grave disservice to rape survivors by casting them as "a group of women too delicate to even understand context and meaning".



This Is Très Cool (Unbridled Joy Remix)
2010-08-14T14:09:00.004-04:00

About a month-and-a-half ago or so someone pointed me to Grooveshark and all I have to say is... wow. Its like Pandora but without all the annoying limitations... you can play any band, any song, any album immediately. And it's free; you don't even need to create a login. I believe they're ad-supported, but I don't even see the ads on account of NoScript.



I'm having a field-day with the site. Their catalog is copious... I've been able to stump it exactly once (I couldn't find B.Y.K.) and I've searched for some pretty obscure stuff. Right now I'm listening to the Stigmata soundtrack (yeah, they've got soundtracks too), an album I've been meaning to pick up since about forever. And the quality is fine, some kind of streaming MP3... I haven't bothered to dig into the page source to identify the exact technology.



Needless to say, it's pretty cool to have all this music at your fingertips. They've got a "Show Similar" feature which works pretty frickin' well¹... you can spend all day bouncing from band to band. Definitely a good way to discover bands you might like but haven't yet heard of. I haven't messed with their "smart playlist" functionality yet; don't know how well that works.



On that topic... the "Popular" playlist is an education. I think that the only artist on today's list listened to in any substantial amount is Eminem. Eh... I suppose there's no accounting for taste (mine or the crowds).





On second thought... "pretty cool" really doesn't do the feeling justice. It is an unmitigated joy to be able to waste my time wading through oodles and oodles of music without any commitment. The only investment I have to make is my time, which means that I can assuage my musical curiosity in any way I see fit without worrying about the cost. 



This wasn't going to turn into a philosophical post but... damn... thank you Internet. From here on out anytime someone complains that the tubes are good for nothing but porn and Lolcats I'm going to point them to GrooveShark. Having instantaneous access to an essentially unlimited catalog of music free of charge (modulo ads) is a qualitatively new and different experience. It's the moral equivalent of having the complete Library of Congress delivered to my latop. And it is awesome.




1 Usually. For some reason they think that Britney Spears is similar to My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. This is either an astute piece of musical analysis or breakage; I'm inclined to favor the latter.



Phrase of the Day
2010-08-07T13:42:00.001-04:00
"Appalling zoonormative thanophobia"


Libertarians Eat Babies, And Other Myths
2010-07-31T00:11:00.002-04:00

I generally like Progressives on the grounds that they've more respect for the truth than the other guys. But as a group they seem have the persistent, unfounded belief that libertarians are the spawn of the devil. Maybe I need to take up a new calling, become an evangelist of sorts, and try to convince these otherwise decent folks that there's merit to certain libertarian propositions.



Like limiting the power of the government, for instance. As far as civil liberties go there's no functional difference between this administration and the last. Republicans violated civil liberties when they were in power and now Democrats are doing the same, which suggests to me that such abuses are not a function of party affiliation. Rather, recent history seems to bear out the observation that power corrupts regardless of whose hands its in. If we can't trust those who hold the reigns of power not to abuse it then the rational response is to limit the amount of power they have in the first place.



Or how about stronger property rights... progressives seem to think that "property rights" are some sort of stalking horse for the further enrichment of the wealthy. Balderdash... the wealthy, by virtue of their wealth, have direct access to the levers of power; they don't really have to worry about having their property expropriated. The people who get fucked by a lack of property rights are the disempowered, the disenfranchised, the marginalized... all the classes of people whom progressives want to help. Neither Susette Kelo nor Linda Dorman are banksters; they, and individuals like them, are most at risk of having their money and/or property unjustly seized by the government.



And, finally: there is no libertarian church and Rand Paul is not its libertarian messiah. He speaks for himself; he doesn't speak for me.



The Law As Ritual Magic
2010-07-24T17:09:00.004-04:00

I read things like this and wonder whether there's some segment of society that views "the law" as something akin to a religious/magic practice. This fascination with the admiralty flag, for example, only makes sense if you view the flag as some sort of a ritual prop. If you've got the wrong flag then, obviously, the magic ain't going to work.



It'd be one thing if this were confined to the "OMG CAPITAL LETTERS enslave us to the banksters!!!!" crowd, but I've seen this from people who should know better. My wife recently had to transact some business with the State of Alaska; one of the documents she had to provide was a "certified true copy" of her birth certificate. So she went to our local notary, who looked up the appropriate endorsement in eir notary book and certified the copy accordingly.



Not good enough; the State of Alaska wasn't happy. It seems like people must screw up the endorsement all the time because they sent back the birth certificate, attached to which was a strip of paper stating the following:




Seems like the actual wording of this particular endorsement varies somewhat from state to state; you'd think that Alaska wouldn't be so persnickety. Perhaps this can be chalked up to bureaucratic pedantry, but the conception of the law as ritual magic represents a plausible, alternative explanation. The second paragraph sure sounds a awful lot like ritual instructions¹.





1 Funny enough the first thing that sprang to my mind was Aleister Crowley's frog crucifiction.



Punchline Of The Day
2010-07-24T12:38:00.002-04:00

Stewart Baker, commenting on the Washington Post's "Top Secret America" series:




For purposes of both coverage and advertising, then, the series may be an Washington Post exercise in market segmentation.  Which would make this series the journalistic equivalent of a dog marking its territory.



Of course, that’s not especially pleasant for the companies and agencies in the database, since they’re playing the role of hydrant.  With one difference: ordinarily a dog doesn’t expect the hydrant to buy him more water.




Cognitive Dissonance, Democracy, And Informed Consent
2010-07-20T00:12:00.002-04:00

Quoth Ed in response to Joe Keohane's piece in the Boston Globe about Brendan Nyhan's recently published study on the
persistence of political misperceptions:




All of this is true, of course. But what is the alternative? If cognitive dissonance theory undermines the validity of democracy as a means of governance, surely it undermines the alternatives as well. A dictator is probably even more likely to suffer from this problem -- his ego alone would not allow an admission of being wrong -- than the average voter.



The human brain is all we have to work with, I'm afraid. Its weaknesses and disturbing tendencies certainly do undermine our ability to rule ourselves in a coherent and rational manner, but even more do they undermine our claim to rule others.




Ed's correct to some degree, but two thoughts come to mind in response. First, the persistent findings of voter irrationality do more violence to representative democracy than to some other forms of government. Democratic governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed as granted through the act of voting; an unstated corollary is that, ideally at least, voting should be a rational activity. On the other hand tyranny, to take Ed's example, makes no claims to rationality or informed consent; the tyrant generally establishes power purely through force or threat thereof. As far as theoretical grounding goes tyranny actually comes out ahead since it doesn't assume that voters are rational.



The other thought is that, in practice, irrationality doesn't make that big a difference. Voters in the US are generally called upon to pick the Republican or the Democrat, either one of which will generally support some policies that are sound and some policies which are unsound. Rational evaluation of candidates is of limited value when there are only ever two parties to choose from. This suggests to me that, if we recognize that voters are ignorant, we should seek to design our electoral system in such a fashion as to minimize the impact of that irrationality.



One tack we could take is to try to reduce the sources of misinformation which cause people to take up irrational positions in the first place. What motivates oh... say... Glenn Beck to just make up shit left and right? And what causes people to trust Glenn Beck in the first place even after it's amply demonstrated that he's wrong more often than he's right? I don't have much in the way of answers to either of those questions, but my gut tells me that demonization of the kind in which Glenn Beck engages is most effective in a polarized environment. Polarization, in turn, stems in large part from there being only two practical choices at any given time.



An alternate tack is to isolate the voter from needing to have informed opinions on specific issues. Economists can't agree amongst themselves as to whether we should trim the budget or engage in deficit spending, so it seems foolish to build a system that expect voters to evaluate the issue. They're much more qualified to express support for the broad principles that turn up in party platforms and such.



In either case it would be beneficial to move away from the personality-centered, two party system that we currently have to a party-centered system with proportional representation. This would allow more diversity of opinion, (hopefully) reducing polarization and the crazy that comes with it. At the same time, by focusing on parties rather that individuals, it allows voters to think more about principles rather than any one person's specific promises or policies.



On a more cynical note, however, all of the above discussion assumes that its possible to rationally evaluate candidates (or parties) in the first place. But when the "good guys" renege on campaign promises and are basically indistinguishable from the "bad guys" its questionable whether democracy is meaningful at all anymore. Sure, we can throw the bums out in four years, but it seems like our only choice is to replace them with another set of bums who will make a lot of promises which come to naught.



Why I Don't Root For Either Team Anymore
2010-07-06T22:28:00.002-04:00

You know, I generally like the crowd that hangs out at Daily Kos. Though I may frequently disagree with them they at least strike me as honest people who are interested in doing good and not just bending the political process over the back of a Buick.



And then I see shit like this:



Putting aside the merits of such subsidy programs (much of that money goes to massive agribusiness conglomerates), fact is that it's a political loser in this heavily agricultural state. Conway can certainly use every advantage he can get.



Fuck you and your realpolitik Markos... you're part of the problem. Here's a novel concept: two candidates from different sides of the aisle could agree that farm subsidies are a bad idea. My god! Genuine bi-fucking-partisanship right there! Instead you want Conway to keep his mouth shut for partisan advantage. How is that any different from the goddamn obstructionist ass-clowns in the Senate who are too afraid of upsetting their base to actually vote for anything useful?



To Cite Is To Endorse, or, Rhetoric As A Bludgeoning Device
2010-07-06T12:32:00.013-04:00

Ed over at Dispatches has a good take on people bitching and moaning about Kagan citing a socialist in her undergrad thesis. As he puts it:



[Q]uoting a socialist scholar in a paper about the history of socialism does not make one a socialist.



That's so self-evident to me that it's damn near axiomatic; presumably Ed has a similar take. No rational person could believe otherwise, so Pam is clearly arguing in bad faith, right?



Well... maybe not. As I was reading his post the thought occurred to me that maybe Ed's observation isn't self-evident to Pam and her ilk. We (meaning Ed, myself, and likeminded individuals) understand that a thesis is an exercise in inquiry that requires casting a wide net. All manner of facts and opinions may be relevant to the question at hand; the sources thereof are evaluated on the basis of veracity, not ideology. Thus, in this case, Kagan may cite a pro-Nazi socialist because he has something relevant to say and not, as Pam would have it, because she's a secret Nazi sympathizer.



Now let's posit an alternate model where the thesis is not so much an inquiry as a vehicle for the exposition of a pre-determined conclusion¹. If you're trying to make a particular point you're going to bolster your case solely by reference to ideological allies; there's no cause to give voice to the loyal opposition, much less anyone with strongly dissenting views. It follows logically from there that a citation is equivalent to an endorsement; why mention someone unless you agree with them?



Is this what's actually happening in practice? Consider, for example, Glenn Beck's Common Sense. The book contains no direct citations, IIRC, and the list of additional readings is exceedingly narrow; Beck shows no interest in exploring views which don't directly coincide with his own. I don't feel like I'm going out on a limb to say that the Kagan's thesis and Beck's book are intended for distinctly different purposes.



Ultimately this is a roundabout way of explaining Pam's reaction²: there's some non-trivial slice of the blogosphere/punditocracy/whatever, represented by people like Geller and Beck, for whom the practice of citation means something different than it does to academics like Kagan. I don't believe their interpretation is at all reasonable, but then again with that crew it's hard to tell how much they believe what they're saying and how much is just pretext.





1 Hardly an original observation, I know, but certainly relevant here.

2 Assuming, of course, that she's not just feigning outrage to score points. Unfortunately that's a fundamentally un-testable proposition.



Arrggghh Redux
2010-06-13T12:21:00.003-04:00

On further reflection that what annoyed me most about PZ's post was the following line:



That women feel compelled to get their genitals sculpted to fit some inappropriate ideal is criminal (the rest of the article at that link talks about how society discards porn stars). 



People change to conform to society's requirements all the time; calling some changes "criminal" while accepting others without question is utterly arbitrary. 



I bet you that PZ finds it necessary to be civil to the idiots he has to work with at the university; is he "compelled" to do so by society, and is the resulting state of affairs "criminal"? What's the difference between a porn star getting her labia trimmed and PZ failing to call out some douchenozzle colleague? I'd argue that the long-term societal costs of enabling idiocy far outweigh the social costs of lookism; the latter only thrives because we tolerate idiocy in the first place.



Really I think there's a subtle form of bigotry at play here; the only way that PZ's complaint stands up is if we see the porn star's choice as somehow less valid. We don't believe that anyone would rationally choose to have labiaplasty, therefore the porn star is acting irrationally under the unbearable weight of societal compulsion. However, everyone agrees on the necessity of getting along with colleagues, so putting up with the doofus in the office is a necessary compromise. In order to avoid cognitive dissonance we deny the porn star's ability to make decisions for herself while telling ourselves that we're just being civil. Not cool.



Arrgggghhhhh: Principle of Consent Edition
2010-06-13T11:20:00.002-04:00

Quoth PZ:



Labiaplasty is simply another form of female genital mutilation, so I find that repellent. That women feel compelled to get their genitals sculpted to fit some inappropriate ideal is criminal (the rest of the article at that link talks about how society discards porn stars)



Ummm... no. Labiaplasty is female genital surgery. It's done by a doctor... in an operating room... with the consent of the patient. It is most emphatically not the same thing as FGM. To conflate the two a) trivializes the suffering of women who have undergone the latter and b) denies the autonomy of women who choose to have the former.



So Maybe I'm Not Crazy After All
2010-06-12T11:44:00.002-04:00

As time progresses my views on various issues have become increasingly idiosyncratic, a fact which occasionally give me pause. For example, after long reflection I've come to the conclusion that there's no moral justification for reproduction. This position seems completely justifiable to me, but is wildly divergent from the general consensus that kids are a good thing. We can't both be right, so am I especially principled or just getting crazy in my old age?



Turns out that if I'm crazy then at least I'm in decent company. Peter Singer, a man who has some idiosyncratic ideas of his own, recently wrote an opinion piece in the NYT considering that thesis. The piece is thoughtful for the most part, but I can't say that I care much for his conclusion:




... Let’s assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all. And assume, too — here we have to get fictitious, as philosophers often do — that if we choose to bring about the world with no sentient beings at all, everyone will agree to do that. No one’s rights will be violated — at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence?



I do think it would be wrong to choose the non-sentient universe. In my judgment, for most people, life is worth living. Even if that is not yet the case, I am enough of an optimist to believe that, should humans survive for another century or two, we will learn from our past mistakes and bring about a world in which there is far less suffering than there is now.




That's a remarkably squishy answer; I would expect him to do a little better than that. Though, perhaps, the pages of the NYT aren't the place for a rigorous defense of the position. In particular Singer treats the question of whether non-existent people have rights as something of a throw-away, though I think that it's critically important for understanding the discussion at hand. 



The question is fundamentally nonsensical; there is no such thing as a "non-existent person". I hold to a functional definition of personhood which, incidentally, was/is strongly influenced by Singer's defense of infanticide. Non-existent entities don't meet the functional criteria for personhood, therefore they are not persons. If you accept that rights accrue only to persons¹ it follows from there that these hypothetical, not yet born individuals have none.



Given this result I've arrived at a conclusion which is similar to, though slightly more absolutist, than that of David Benatar as discussed in the article: you cannot harm someone who doesn't exist, but you're inevitably bound to fail to fulfill your obligations to any children which you do have. Thus the correct thing to do is not to breed. QED.



That's a hard conclusion to stomach; people like having kids and the desire to perpetuate the specifies is deeply engrained in every culture. Which is why I suspect Singer gives a squishy answer; to come out and say "having kids is wrong" in a major newspaper is just asking for a whupping. It would no doubt lead to people asking for him to be fired and so on, so it's probably a statement best avoided.





1 Which is certainly open for debate; a lot of people would assert that certain classes of entities (animals, for instance) have rights even though they don't meet the functional requirements for personhood. In this specific case, however, it's hard to think of a justification for assigning positive rights to non-existent entities.



The Flipside Of Group Identity
2010-06-06T14:30:00.006-04:00

Michael Chabon's opinion piece in yesterday's NYT reminded me of an argument I got into when I was part of the froshling orientation program at my alma mater. One of the ideas that we were supposed to discuss with/inculcate in the incoming class was the notion that it was insufficient to merely tolerate a diversity of views. Rather, members of the student body should actively seek to include specifically identified groups whenever there was including to be done. This struck me as a bad idea which caused more problems than it solved, since it rested on the
assumption that these groups could be treated as monolithic units that spoke
with a single voice. I argued against this practice on the grounds that it was
nothing more than group stereotyping dressed up in progressive garb. Needless to
say I didn't get many takers for that position; my peers didn't share my
enthusiasm for theoretical arguments. 



So it was reassuring to hear the same argument coming out of Mr. Chabon's mouth, specifically this bit about Jewish group identity being a two-edged sword:




For we Jews are not, it turns out, entirely comfortable living with the
consequences of this myth, as becomes clear from the squirming and
throat-clearing that take place among us whenever some non-Jew pipes up with his
own observations about how clever and smart we are in our yiddishe kops. These
include people like the political scientist Charles Murray, author of an
influential essay titled "Jewish Genius," or Kevin B. MacDonald, a psychology
professor at California State University at Long Beach who argues that Jews
essentially undertook a centuries-long program of self-breeding, selecting for
traits of intelligence, guile and skill at calculation, as a kind of
evolutionary adaptation to the buffetings of history and exile.




Such claims, in mouths of gentiles, are a disturbing echo of the charges of the
pogrom-stokers, the genocidalists, the Father Coughlins, who come to sharpen
their knives against the same grindstone of generalization on which we Jews have
long polished the magnifying lenses of our self-regard. The man who praises you
for your history of accomplishment may someday seek therein the grounds for your
destruction.
 



Absolutely; making categorical assertions in the form "group X is Y" can lead to
a world of hurt in the long run even if those assertions are generally regarded
as positive. To make such assertions is to engage in a form of essentiallism which, as Michael explains, can come back to bite you in the ass.



This leads to a larger thought about group identity (and its associated
politics) which has been kicking around in the back of my head for awhile. It
is wholly appropriate for historically marginalized groups (or others working
on their behalf) to agitate for an end to discrimination, the protection of their civil rights, and so on, but in doing so they risk running afoul of the hazard which Chabon highlighted. It seems to me that such movements rarely confine themselves to asking for those rights to which they are entitled by virtue of their status as persons. Rather they tend to assert (perhaps as an incidental byproduct of necessary group solidatiry) a collective identity above and beyond that which is strictly necessary to secure such rights. And therein lies the problem; it seems to me any substantive assertion of group identity creates a legitimate basis for discrimination against the group as a whole.



For example, one trope that I've often heard applied to various groups at
various times is that they are "family-oriented". Who can object to that? It's
right up there with baseball and apple pie. But such seemingly innocuous
statements have a pernicious effect for several reasons:



They set a bad precedent: If members of the group so identified
allow such positive attributions to stand unattested it validates treating the
group as a unit rather than as the varigated collection of individuals it
probably is.
"Positive" is in the eye of the beholder: If we establish that a group has
some trait, even a positive one, that trait may then legitimately be utilized
when making judgements about the group as a whole¹.
 


So how does this apply in the case of our "family-oriented" group? Let's say
that I genuinely dislike people who exibit a family-centric orientation (it's patriarchal, heteronormative, collectivistic... whatever); am I not then perfectly justified in discounting this group as a whole? Or, even worse, what if I'm just looking for a pretext to provide cover for a nefarious agenda? Can't I just say "Look,
I'm sure they're great people and all, but... you know... they're
family-oriented" even though my real objection might not stand up to scrutiny.



You can see how that might play out; positive sterotyping can boomerang back
on you. Moreover, "positive" is open to interpretation; one person's welcomed
attribute might be anathema to another.



Anyhow, that's a thought I've been wanting to get down on paper for awhile now.
Thank you for your patience.





1 This assumes, of course, that the reason we find group-based discrimination to
be objectionable is because it generally relies on unfounded stereotypes. Of
course it's also the case that some people object
to discrimination of all types, even if such discrimination is fact-based.



Apropos of nothing...
2010-06-06T01:38:00.001-04:00
Hyperbole and a Half is awesome.


Or, Maybe, The Base Is Pissed Off
2010-05-31T13:43:00.002-04:00

Maybe Obama is losing his star power, or the Whitehouse bubble is blunting his political instincts. Or maybe, just maybe, we've noticed that he's turned out to be almost as big a douche as W. At this rate I'm going to vote for Bill 'N Opus in 2012.



Public Accommodations: A Ridiculous, Non-Hypothetical Example
2010-05-29T14:42:00.010-04:00

This morning I was thinking about public accommodations law and trying to come up with a generally-supportable example of when it would be acceptable for a business owner to discriminate against a patron. All of the examples I was able to brainstorm seemed too far-fetched, so my thanks to David Bernstein for providing a ludicrous, 100% real example:



Here’s the story, from a VC post from 2006: 



    There is a German restaurant called the Alpine Village Inn, in Torrance California. A group of four neo-Nazis went there to eat, each wearing a lapel pin with a swastika on it. The management asked them to take off the lapel pins. They refused. The management asked them to leave. They refused. The management called the police, who arrested them.



    Then, remarkably, the Southern California ACLU gets involved, and sues the restaurant for calling the police on the Nazis! This much I’ve confirmed from media accounts. According to the commenter who first alerted me to this story, “the defendants’ insurer eventually settled following unsuccessful pretrial challenges to the complaint, believing they could not prevail under California law!”






Ridiculous and, hopefully, the tail end of the distribution, but the point is nonetheless valid. What do we make of the management's actions? Was it acting within it's rights when it asked the gentlemen to remove their swastikas? I don't know that I've ever met anyone who would question the propriety of management's behavior in this instance. They no doubt exist, but as I've no idea what their argument might be I'm going to leave the question hanging. The "yes" position, on the other hand, is ripe for further discussion.



If we assert that the restaurant management was within their rights in this instance then we must accept that there are some circumstances in which it is acceptable to discriminate against individuals in the context of public accommodations. The question then becomes "Where do we draw the line?".



One potential boundary is a person's immutable characteristics, the theory being that such discrimination is especially pernicious because these traits are accidents of history and do not reflect on the person as a person. However, if we bind behavior solely by a prohibition against discrimination on the basis immutable characteristics, we end up with a system which probably wouldn't satisfy contemporary ethical intuitions. Sex will be a protected category¹, but what of gender, or sexual orientation? Are they fungible enough that they fail to pass the test for immutability? And this definition completely fails to encompass some categories, most notably religion, which have been deemed worthy of protection.



Moreover, immutability taken on its own is too simplistic; there are some aspects of a person's being, such as historic facts regarding past behavior/associations, which will never change yet may rightfully be said to reflect on the person. We might balk at the notion that someone would be treated differently because they used to belong to a union or a certain political party, but what if they used to belong to NAMBLA? Is it ok to discriminate in that case? The distinction between belonging to a particular race and being a past NAMBLA member is clear; the former state is thrust upon the person and the latter is chosen. Our ethical intuition tells us that, while there might be cases where it's legitimate to discriminate of the basis of a person's choices, its never acceptable to discriminate on the basis of traits which aren't chosen.



Which brings me back to religion... why is it protected? People convert all the time, become "spiritual but not religious", decided to have no religion at all, and so on; they choose which religion, if any, they may practice. So why protect it? I had this discussion with someone not so long ago and the answer was because "religion is special", by which I believe they meant that religious habits are so deeply ingrained that they might as well be immutable. Perhaps, but then should we protect other deeply ingrained behaviors? If we extend special protection to religion why not extend the same protection to non-religious philosophies? The only thing which distinguishes the two is their stance regarding the supernatural, something which hardly seems relevant when we're discussing civil rights.



And thus we're back to our Nazis. We admit an exception for religion which, if we were being consistent, leads us also to admit an exception for philosophic. From there its just a short jump to political philosophy, at which point the Nazis have a case. And yet we probably still think that the restaurant management behaved correctly.



Which brings me, somewhat circuitously, to my point: The division into "protected" and "non-protected" classes in public accommodations is entirely arbitrary. This, IMHO, is horrendous for a number of reasons:



Governments at all levels have a really shitty track record when it comes to making fine distinctions.
The process of deciding who deserves protection and who doesn't is, itself, an act of discrimination. It's far too susceptible to the biases and bigotries of a particular person/place/time to serve as an adequate basis for civil rights law.
A corollary to the above is that the groups which are most likely to be protected are groups which already have access to the levers of power. Thus those groups who may really need/merit protection are the least likely to actually get it.



Ultimately there seems to be no rational basis for deciding who is worthy of protection. I'd much rather get rid of the law, and rely on the morality of my fellows, than give the government yet another tool to misuse.





1 Though my wife, a physician, argues that biological sex is defined by organs rather than DNA and, as such, can be changed to some degree.



As long as I'm on the subject...
2010-05-29T14:17:00.001-04:00
Conor Friedersdorf is saying the same thing, but better and at length.


Rand Paul Is Not The Libertarian Jesus, And Other Observations
2010-05-23T12:31:00.005-04:00

I had thought, after reading Amanda Marcotte's take on Rand Paul, that I would write a response like I usually do. Just go through her points one-by-one and explain why I disagree. But, frankly, I'm just tired of that, especially in the context of discussions of libertarianism. So I'm just going to rant for awhile instead.



Let me preface this by saying that, while I've found a lot of reasons to disagree with Amanda in the past, I still think she's one of the better bloggers out there. She has interesting things to say (one of the reasons why I read Pandagon regularly) and is obviously both smart and articulate. Which is why I find her out-of-hand rejection of libertarianism depressing.



There seems to be a certain segment of the progressive movement, of which Amanda is a representative member, that engages in a reflexive rejection of anything bearing the "libertarian" label. The problem here is that when these people say "libertarianism" they never stop to define what, exactly, they mean by the phrase. Which brings me to the title of this post.



Rand Paul is not the libertarian Jesus.



He's not even the libertarian pope. Rand Paul may be a libertarian, or even a Libertarian. He might, as some people claim, be a racist. Or he might have made the tactical error of trying to talk about an abstruse area of Constitutional doctrine during a 15-minute segment of the Rachel Maddow Show. All of which is irrelevant... Rand Paul doesn't speak for me. Nor, do I imagine, does he speak for a lot of other people who self-identify as libertarian. He's no more representative of all libertarians than... I dunno... Ward Churchill is representative of all progressives.



Have I made myself clear? If you're going to talk about libertarianism it behooves you to explain what you mean rather than just using this week's victim of foot-in-mouth disease as an exemplar. Now, since I intend to keep ranting for awhile, I'm going to define what it means to me.



Libertarianism starts from the principle of self-ownership. I alone have a natural right to decide what I will do with my life and person. If I choose to do so I can agree to give up some of this autonomy in exchange for the benefits of belonging to a group, and so on. Which is all very abstract; how does that play out in the here and now?



David Bernstein discussed the practical implications fairly well in his recent post on libertarianism and civil rights. Two important ideas which can be extracted from that discussion are:


One of the most important roles of government is to protect its citizens from private violence.
There are bounds to government power.


I would hope that the former, at least, is uncontroversial; it's hard to imagine a counter-argument. I think that most progressives would agree with the latter as well, at least as a statement of general principle; it's when we start to define those bounds that we run into disagreements. As I was chewing this post over in my head I realized that those disagreements are really just an echo of the more fundamental conflict between teleology and deontology.



I, as a libertarian, take a deontological view of ethics; the best way to preserve individual autonomy is to make the rules ahead of time and then apply them consistently. It's for this reason that, though I have a lot of quibbles with the details, I really like John Rawl's work on the concept of "justice". The progressive view seems to be more teleologically-oriented; I'll let Amanda speak her piece on the subject:


Liberals need to loudly and repeatedly lay claim to our broad, justice-oriented view of freedom.  Freedom is the right to move about freely, instead of constantly run up against restrictions put upon you because of the color of your skin or the fact that you have to use a wheelchair to get around.  Freedom is the right to take a job you wish without being run out of it because your coworkers will harass you to death because they don’t want to work with a woman.  Freedom is being able to live where you want, instead of running against a wall of people that aren’t willing to sell or rent a home to a person like you.  Freedom is something that belongs to all people, not just to those who have the money and social power to enforce their will on others.  The government’s job is to protect freedom, and that means that it is the government’s job to restrict those who would use libertarianism as an excuse to deprive their neighbors of the right to live their lives freely, and to pursue happiness in a land of genuine equality.


To which I have two rejoinders:


Please define "justice".
How do you ensure all of these freedoms without trampling on other peoples' freedoms in the process?


It's not at all clear to me that the progressive view of "justice", to the extent that such a create exists at all, is internally coherent. And, while progressives clearly value some of the same freedoms as libertarians, they tend to mediate conflicting claims in an ad-hoc, intuitive fashion. Looked at in this manner its no wonder that progressives and libertarians are often at odds.



At this point I think I've described "libertarianism" well enough for the purposes of this discussion. Shall we move on to the substance of Amanda's post? 



So, first, to the charge that libertarianism is "childish" or "juvenile": The Salon article to which Amanda links is guilty of the same stereotyping that I just got done talking about. Rand Paul isn't the libertarian gold standard. Most of the libertarians I know aren't particularly concerned with OSHA or getting rid of the Department of Education. There are far more important things to worry, like preventing bone-headed Senators from locking us all up. And Richard Epstein, Salon's "brilliant libertarian"? He might be support the CRA, but he wrote a book arguing that private employers should be allowed to discriminate when hiring. So, Salon, you still want his opinion?



Now, onto this lovely statement:


[T]he folks who write for Reason and work for the Cato Institute aren’t really representative of libertarianism as it actually exists in most of the U.S. Because self-identified libertarians are a tiny minority doesn’t mean that libertarian thought doesn’t enjoy widespread popularity amongst conservative Republicans.  Indeed, libertarianism is the primary intellectual justification in this country for resistance to most social justice movements. 


Ok... so when you're saying "libertarians" you're actively excluding Reason and Cato, two institutions which can credibly speak (to some degree) for libertarians as a whole. Rather, you're using it to refer to goobers who are picking-and-choosing libertarian ideas to provide intellectual cover for their agendas. Fine, but at least allow me the courtesy of the same: The folks who write for Pandagon aren't really representative of progressivism as it actually exists in most of the U.S. Because self-identified Pandagonians are a tiny minority doesn't mean that Pandagonian though doesn't enjoy widespread popularity among Bolivarian Socialists. Indeed, Pandagonianism is the primary intellectual justification in Venezuela for resistance to democracy.



Look, the above is incredibly silly, but it has exactly as much justification as the charge that Amanda is leveling at libertarians in general. Amanda and Salon are indulging in guilt by association; a bunch of idjits (who, according to Amanda, don't even self-identify as libertarians) citing libertarian principles to justify their base motivations in no way calls those principles themselves into question. It's the same damn line of reasoning that leads to Hitler/Atheism and Hitler/Darwin analogies; it's just dumb. Which goes back to my original observation about the need for specificity: I'd love it if Amanda (or anyone else for that matter) wrote an article titled "Republicans Are Cherry-Picking Libertarian Ideas To Provide Intellectual Cover For Their Nefarious Plots And Tarring Libertarians In The Process".



I'm mostly done here, but I wanted to hit on the Commerce Clause real quick before I got. Yeah, Amanda, some people have all of a sudden become real interested in the minutia of the Commerce Clause. Which is totally beside the fucking point... you hear about Gonzales v. Raich? You know, the one where the Commerce Clause was used to justify rules preventing someone from growing medical marijuana in their own backyard? How's that for "interstate commerce"? Some progressives might say that access to medicine is a fundamental concern of social justice, so maybe they should give a rat's ass about the commerce clause too?



In conclusion:


Rand Paul Is Not Libertarian Jesus.
Replicans Spouting Libertarian Principles Are Not Libertarians.
Unchecked Government Power Is Bad For Social Justice.


The End.