Cerebrate's Contemplations

And Another Thing On Social Justice

And while I'm at it, on the topics of Christianity and social justice, someone want to explain to me exactly how you can reconcile coercive redistribution of income and/or property with "Thou shalt not covet" and "Thou shalt not steal"?

Granted, I'm no theologian, but while I can find plenty of endorsement for the notion of charity and giving of one's own, I appear to have missed the spiritual mandate for playing Robin Hood, either directly or by proxy via the government.  Enlighten me.

Either It Is Or It Isn't

This Slacktivist post (seen via a share on Google Reader) is really damned irritating, not least because it puts me in the awkward position of defending Glen Beck, of all people, which is moderately invidious for a social libertarian, but principally because of the delightful way in which it illustrates the mealy-mouthed two-facedness found so often in the political mind.

Specifically, (read the post first), at the point at which he switches the topic under discussion from "social justice" to "justice" by arguing from the literal meaning of the words, and that therefore all justice is social justice, and therefore, that any attack on social justice is eo ipso an attack on justice:

Justice is, by definition, social. Justice, by definition, is something that exists only between and among individuals and groups of individuals and groups of groups. One might argue that "social justice" is redundant, but one cannot oppose "social justice" without opposing justice itself.

Well, bullshit.

Quick poll: Is there anyone out there who follows politics who isn't aware that "social justice" doesn't refer to "justice" in its classical sense - i.e., the proper resolution of criminal and equity matters - but is rather, and especially in a political context, a code-word/dogwhistle for "distributive justice", i.e. "income redistribution" via social engineering and a mish-mash of other "progressive" ideas, i.e., socialism rebranded to appeal to people who like to think of themselves as just?  Even Wikipedia goes that far (third paragraph).

Now, of course, as those of you who read the original post will now point out, he does dismiss this notion with his argument from literalism:

I'm guessing that Beck would argue that he's not opposing justice per se, only "social justice" -- which he sees as a "code word" for Nazicommunism or something. But this is nonsense. Not just the slander that every Christian from the original disciples on down is a Nazicommunist, but the very idea that it's possible to speak of "justice" as distinct from "social justice."

And this is where I have the problem.  See, you can't have it both ways.  Our friends on the left - including the author, yes - make a big deal out of "dogwhistle politics" and "code words" being used on the right: "state's rights", for example, always means an appeal to "racist, and probably neo-Confederate sentiment", and "pro-life" likewise "keep the womens barefoot and pregnant", and on and on and on.  Now, sure, you can argue that, but if you do argue that, it is the worst and most arrant kind of mealy-mouthed hypocrisy to fall back on literalism when someone calls you out on a Magic Phrase That Does Not Mean What You Claim It Does, Or So They Believe.  Contrariwise, if you want to have a reasonable expectation that you'll be taken at your word and not suspected of double-talking, it would behove you to refrain from making claims that your opponents are lying in plain sight.

In short: you lie vilely.  So do they, probably, but that doesn't make it any better.

We Must Not Protect The Children

Read another pro-surveillance article this morning, this time at twittown, regarding the problems of anonymity, social network, and how it enables sexual predators and other Bad People (tm), and that therefore, inevitably, We Must Demand Government Regulation to Save the Children.

(Of course, it goes out of its way to excuse the parents, who you might think should bear some responsibility for keeping an eye out for their children's safety, being in loco parentis on account of being the bloody parents, belike.  But, yeah, I know we've as much chance of selling personal responsibility these days as we have of selling ice on Pluto.)

I might also add that the problem with wrapping children in a universal fluffy cotton blanket of protection, and even more so with wrapping everyone in it via government regulation, is that it produces a bunch of squalling perpetual adolescents like the Millennial Generation who completely lose their grip on reality any time it's even suggested that they might have to live with the consequences of a bad decision they made.  Not that there's much chance of selling that one, either, given the well-established pro-neonatization trend we're stuck with.

But then we get here:

If we weren’t so obsessed with our illusions of privacy, if we weren’t so protective of our boring, meaningless online activities, if we weren’t so paranoid that the moment we link anything to the government, Big Brother is going to force us into an Orwellian world of Doublethink and constant government monitoring and oppression, we could pass those laws. Those laws, and other laws like those, have been proposed – but we, the voters, won’t approve them, because our so-called "privacy" is more important to us than the lives of these children, and the countless others like them.

Well, yeah.  If that's paranoia, color me paranoid.  It's not like there's any connection between your "boring, meaningless online activities" and the rest of your actual life.  It's not like there are people on the right slavering at the thought of crawling into your bedroom for God or into the rest of your activities for the Security State.  It's not like there are people on the left slavering at the thought of pawing through your politically incorrect habits, bad lifestyle, and hatred of nature.  It's not like there are people all over the political spectrum wanting to stick their noses into your heads and call out your ideological deviance.  It's not like we recognize the chilling effect of surveillance on free speech with whistleblower and source protection laws; and, for that matter, it's not like the chilling effect of surveillance on any behavior outside the most straitjacketed conception of the norm has been documented.  It's not like identity cards are one of the first tools totalitarian regimes resort to.  It's not like there are people out there (with stalkers, abusive exes, etc., just to name the most obvious) with very good reasons to hide their identity on-line that anyone with an ounce of decency would respect.  It's not like, say, people haven't lost jobs, lost homes, or otherwise suffered because their private, legal, consensual activities were publicly outed to every goddamned bigoted meddlesome jerk in the vicinity.

It's not, in short, like ALL OF THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE, EVEN IF A FEW IGNORANT AND/OR MALICIOUS JERKASSES IGNORE THIS.

Even if you could practically do everything you'd need to do to remove the already minuscule - despite what our fear-ridden, sensationalism-saturated, entirely-unable-to-make-rational-probability-calculations society tells us daily - risk, on an individual level, of something like this happening, well, then, why don't you roll the difference between living and just being alive in some flabby, mushy, eunuchoid, Demolition Man-esque parody of a healthy society into your utility calculus, consider if that's what you really want for your children, and then - if you still come down in favor of this sort of thing - stick it where the sun don't shine without a great deal of proctological assistance.

And if that makes me one of those stereotypical "dead-baby libertarians", well then, I can live with that.

A Statist By Any Other Name

(Proximately inspired by a post and the inspired controversy concerning what, exactly, is a Nazi.  Ah, history hurts, don't'ch'know?)

You know, it really doesn't matter what you call them.

Fascists. Communists. Socialists. Plain old Dictators or Autocrats. Third-Way-ers. Social Conservatives.  Corporatists.  Liberals. Progressives. Even Moderates.

Just as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, a jackboot by any other name still stomps as hard.  A busybody's a busybody, a thug's a thug, a statist's a statist, a collectivist's a collectivist, a Utopian's a Utopian, a hubris-ridden technocrat's a hubris-ridden technocrat; and, to sum it up, there ain't no label you can hang on a self-designatedly-superior power-tripping asshole to make him any less of one.

Frankly, damn the taxonomy of it.  Sorting out the details of exactly which and why and how these bastards want to own you slice by slice is somewhat interesting academically, but in real terms, doesn't really matter all that much.

Either you do respect the life, liberty and property of your fellow sophonts, or you don't.

Either you do believe you should get to control other people, or you don't.

Either, in short, you are a slaver, thief, and parasite, or you're not.

All else is sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The World Is A Mess, And I Just Need To Rule It

Sometimes, when you read some farrago of ignorance like the comments on this article concerning the effects of the Chilean earthquake on the Earth's rotation, or contemplate the apparent 25% of parents who believe vaccinations cause autism (and the 12% who refuse them on this basis) out of a mixture of bad science, meaningless celebrity endorsements, and total inability to compute probabilities, it is hard to stick to one's principles.

Yes, I admit it.  I'm a bad libertarian.  Sometimes I have felt the urge to join the liberals, what sometimes seems to be most of the conservatives, and all the rest of the plurality of slaving bastards out there in declaring that, well, these morons don't deserve their autonomy/agency/free will.  It's time to become all meddlesome.  "Stay between the lines.  Don't think for yourself¹, and if you do, keep your mouth shut, and never, ever put it into practice.  Do what your betters tell you.  Believe what you're told is right by the right people.  Obedience is virtue.  Mindlessness is pretty good, too, if best covered up by an obsession with trivia."

(Of course, in those moments, I am still fundamentally intellectually arrogant enough to cast myself as the Wise Technocrat doing the ordering of the world - hence my choice of the Dr. Horrible quotation as the title of this piece - rather than one of the great mass of people subsuming their selfhood in the Collective Will, as Guided By and Made Manifest In the Great Leader, the Anointed Expert, the Policy Wonk, the Word of God, Our Elected Representatives Who Art In Congress, and/or President Hope'n'Change, and thus being made blessedly free of the burden of independent thought and self-responsibility.

I blame a quaint attachment to self-determination.  Or false consciousness.  No, wait, the Illusion of Self-Awareness!

Or, I suppose, less sarcastically, the fundamental unimpressiveness, at least to me, of everyone who's ever tried to cast themselves for the part.)

It's all a ridiculous fantasy, of course.  I know as well as everyone should all the theoretical reasons why it can't work, from the Calculation Problem through Mistake Magnification and Values Dissonance, and the demonstrable pragmatic reasons why it hasn't worked, from a mere litany of ever-failing programs, economic failures and general misery to the mountains of corpses left behind every time some stalwart Utopian has got hold of enough unchecked power to put his ideas into practice, and for that matter the principled reasons why it shouldn't even be attempted, starting with the beyond-even-my-grasp presumption and hubris that one is so all-fired wise as to rule everyone for their own good, and their own notions of what their good is be damned.

But sometimes... it sure is tempting.

1. Yes, yes, some of these folk do occasionally talk about the virtues of free thought, dissent, "speaking truth to power", etc., etc.  Given the violence of the screaming tantrum that they all throw the moment someone exercises the faculty and wanders off the reservation with it, I am comfortable in asserting that they're all lying.  Even if they're lying to themselves about that.

The First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Simple, isn't it?

Congress shall make no law.

You will note, I trust, that it makes no mention of whose or what's freedom of speech might be abridged.  That's a big ol' universal, right there.  It doesn't mention citizens, or residents, or aliens, or humans, or monkeys, or dogs, or big blocks of cheese.  It doesn't mention corporations, non-profits, churches, bands, guilds, mobs, mediacorps, journalists, neighborhood associations, or protesters.  It says not one damn thing concerning what the speech is to be about, whether it's enlightened technocratic discourse, populist ranting, manipulative advertising, or shooting the shit at the watercooler about last night's "American Idol".

It says "Congress shall make no law."

Which makes all of the profoundly tedious bloviations going around the Internet concerning political speech versus regular speech, and corporations versus non-profits, and mediacorps versus regular corporations, and groups of people versus individual people, and so on and so forth until we're all thoroughly nauseated a complete and utter waste of everyone's time, because the Constitution, the fundamental law of the land, is (a) speaker-neutral, (b) content-neutral, and (c) entirely damn clear.

Congress.  Shall.  Make.  No.  Law.

Now, granted, while I like it this way, goodness knows there's a lot of statolatrous buggers out there who don't.  To those on the Right, I say - well, actually, I just say "Arse to the lot of ye!", since once you start ignoring the plain words of the Constitution you've wandered off any conservative reservation either I or the definition of the word would care to acknowledge.

To those on the Left, I'll just say that while I acknowledge y'all are pretty much philosophically down with amending or weaseling around the Constitution to make it better fit your version of How Things Ought To Be, considering the amount of pious yammering y'all have indulged in over the last decade about the Gross Impropriety of Amending the Constitution to Take Rights Away - well, the hypocrisy, are you not soaking in it?

Tax Reform

It is that time of year again at which I must again advocate that most important of tax reforms: the abolition of withholding of income tax, so that everyone, not merely the self-employed, must go through the delightful procedure of computing their total gross income, and then in turn computing from that figure exactly how much of it the IRS – and their local state Department of Revenue – demands, and then finally write the check and mail it off to them.

And having done that, I must also advocate the abolition of sales taxes and other one-slice-at-a-time forms of taxation, and that the collection of those funds be rolled into the income tax, too, or at least into the same annual return.

After all, an informed population is supposedly a Good Thing for democracy, so what objection could anyone have to eliminating the obfuscatory salami tactics that make the average chap distinctly unclear as to how white he’s being bled?

Supreme Court Decision

What does "Citizens United" mean to us in practice? Why, that foreign corporations will be able to influence, persuade, and lobby the public directly, instead of the dirty underhanded foreigner tricks - say, slipping an envelope full of used hundreds under the door of a Senate toilet stall - that they use now. We should applaud. That's the American way.

The Underappreciated Filibuster

Well, I'm seeing a lot of complaints these days about the filibuster, and the difficulties of passing a bill despite a 59-41 majority. Which seems to be a tad ridiculous, in the popular opinion.

(Not just yours, Kenn, although yours are the most recent I've seen - and come with the handy geometric-and-starting-to-look-exponential graph.)

Well, I would like to take a moment to sing the praises of this underappreciated political maneuver. Quite apart from a personal belief that 59% is a crappy basis to get all mandatial over, it is doing very well at performing the Senate's intended function of slowing populist wackiness down to a crawl.

And, hey, as long as both sides of the aisle are dominated by lunatics, thugs and procurers, anything which both defeats the attempts of *either* of them to act substantively, and which *neither* of them are willing to abolish for fear of the other... well, then, that's just the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Debt Forgiveness

So, I see we’re forgiving Haiti’s foreign debt to us.

To which I had two reactions: (a), nice gesture, and (b), well, while it IS a nice gesture, with the shambolic state of our national current balance sheet, are we really in any position to be forgiving anyone’s debt to us?

Of course, then I read the above-linked article and discovered that Haiti’s total public external debt is of the order of $1.8 billion, and the total owed to the Paris Club members that are forgiving the debt is a fraction of that at $214 million, and since that includes Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK along with us, the amount of debt we’re actually forgiving would, were we to collect it instead, probably not even cover the State Department toilet-paper budget.

And let’s face it, even if it was collectable before, it sure as hell isn’t now.

Yeah.  Nice gesture.

How Not To Deal With Paranoiacs

In a 2008 academic paper, President Barack Obama's appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated "cognitive infiltration" of groups that advocate "conspiracy theories" like the ones surrounding 9/11.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures," in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine" those groups.

[…]

Sunstein, whose article focuses largely on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, suggests that the government "enlist nongovernmental officials in the effort to rebut the theories. It might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts."

…seen to control.  Nice phrasing, more so in context.  Doubly more so in recent-healthcare-study-news context.

Sunstein argued that "government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories." He suggested that "government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action."

Estrin notes that Sunstein advocates in his article for the infiltration of "extremist" groups so that it undermines the groups' confidence to the extent that "new recruits will be suspect and participants in the group’s virtual networks will doubt each other’s bona fides."

Congratulations.  By saying all of this in public, you have now successfully VALIDATED the paranoid worldview which most conspiracy theorists exist within, by proposing an entire schema be created which looks exactly like the sort of thing that they’re paranoid about.  Nice job, well done.

Idiot.

Good Stuff Seen On The Net Recently

The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage, from the conservative lawyer attempting to overturn Prop. 8:

“Many of my fellow conservatives have an almost knee-jerk hostility toward gay marriage. This does not make sense, because same-sex unions promote the values conservatives prize. Marriage is one of the basic building blocks of our neighborhoods and our nation. At its best, it is a stable bond between two individuals who work to create a loving household and a social and economic partnership. We encourage couples to marry because the commitments they make to one another provide benefits not only to themselves but also to their families and communities. Marriage requires thinking beyond one's own needs. It transforms two individuals into a union based on shared aspirations, and in doing so establishes a formal investment in the well-being of society. The fact that individuals who happen to be gay want to share in this vital social institution is evidence that conservative ideals enjoy widespread acceptance. Conservatives should celebrate this, rather than lament it.”

Nice to see that this conclusion isn’t as limited as I expected it to be.  Although I suspect his ongoing argument is a bit too libertarian to convince many conservatives, even the non-religious clade.

A British perspective on America, courtesy of the NYT.  See, folks, it’s not just me!

The first thing I ever heard about Americans was that they all carried guns. Then, when I came across people who’d had direct contact with this ferocious-sounding tribe, I learned that they were actually rather friendly. At university, friends who had traveled in the United States came back with more detailed stories, not just of the friendliness of Americans but also of their hospitality (which, in our quaint English way, was translated into something close to gullibility). When I finally got to America myself, I found that not only were the natives friendly and hospitable, they were also incredibly polite. No one tells you this about Americans, but once you notice it, it becomes one of their defining characteristics, especially when they’re abroad.

[…]

If the typical American interaction involves an ostensibly contradictory mixture of the formal (politeness), the casual and the cordial, what happens when one moves beyond the transactional? Like many Europeans, I always feel good about myself in America; I feel appreciated, liked. It took a while to realize that this had nothing to do with me. It was about the people who made me feel this way: it was about charm. Yes, this is the bright secret of life in the United States: Americans are not just friendly and polite — they are also charming.

[…]

You can see all of this in operation on flights back across the Atlantic from America to Euroland. At first we are under the spell of America. Instead of plunking ourselves down next to someone without a word, we say “Hi.” Maybe even indulge in a little conversation, though this American readiness to chat is counterbalanced by the fear that once we’ve got into a conversation we might not be able to extricate ourselves from it. By the time we’re mid-ocean, a kind of preparatory freeze has set in. As the flight stacks up in the inevitable holding pattern over Heathrow, we begin to revert to our muttering and moaning national selves. But, for a week or so after landing, a form of what might be called Ameristalgia makes us conscious of a rudeness in British life — a coarsening in the texture of daily life — that had hitherto seemed quite normal.

…read the whole thing.  I endorse it all!

They’re all mad.  Mad! Wash. lawmaker wants to banish negative language:

SEATTLE (AP) -- Decades ago, poor children became known as "disadvantaged" to soften the stigma of poverty. Then they were "at-risk." Now, a Washington lawmaker wants to replace those euphemisms with a new one, "at hope."

Democratic State Sen. Rosa Franklin says negative labels are hurting kids' chances for success and she's not a bit concerned that people will be confused by her proposed rewrite of the 54 places in state law where words like "at risk" and "disadvantaged" are used.

The bill has gotten a warm welcome among fellow lawmakers, state officials and advocacy groups.

…as a related side-note, in the event of my, say, losing a leg, anyone who uses any term but “crippled” to describe my then state will be beaten soundly about the head with a crutch.  Have we not learnt yet that changing the word doesn’t actually make it any nicer – it just makes you sound like a condescending git.

And finally, some hopeful political news, inasmuch as it seems we’re almost ready for cyberdemocracy:

45% of voters would rather pick names randomly from the phone book to run the country than have the present Congress do it; and that number rises to 51% among independents.  And 59% of Republicans, although that’s less surprising.  (I bet if they polled libertarians, they’d get an even higher figure.  But then, I suspect most of us would rather have the random number generator in charge…)

Rasmussen poll here.

Some Rights for Some People (Sometimes)

I hear a lot of people these days saying "All Rights for All People!".  Or even "All Rights for All People, All The Time!".

Sorry, you can't claim that.

Even I can't claim that, and I'm a mad-dog deontological libertarian.  I support gay marriage (as long as no-one's compelled to perform one) and oppose the security state.  I believe in every single one of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, and that without all the qualifications edited into them by legislation of dubious constitutionality and bad Supreme Court decisions over the years.  I believe in the unfortunately not legally binding unalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the one Locke mentioned that the Declaration didn't, property, and the really unfashionable one implicit in the right to liberty, freedom of contract.  And just to demonstrate the depth of my attachment to principle, here, I'm also deeply dubious as the the legitimacy of birthright citizenship¹ as a violation of what someone else might call the right of self-determination (if they allow it to be applied to individuals at all), and I would classify under freedom of contract, namely, the freedom of the individual to contract with a state for governmental services.  In short, even among anarcho-capitalists (of whom I am not one), I have yet to meet, read, or hear of the man who supports a more extensive view of natural and civil rights (in their proper, negatively-phrased, sense) than I, and when I do, I shall doubtless amend my opinions, or at least have a good, hard think about them.

And even I can't say it.  A good part of that because of the large number of entitlements bruited about as "rights" these days (so-called "positive rights").

But the other part of it, well, now, that's a matter of the subdivision of rights, and why it bugs me.

(Now, to be clear, I approach this from the point of view that the unalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness - parsed as the Greek eudaimonia - are the foundation of ethics.  As an atheist, I'm not of the view that we're endowed with those by our Creator, of course, but I would argue that they are inherent in the nature of sophont existence. [This argument is lengthy and off-topic; apply separately if you really want to see it.]

This is, of course, axiomatic.  Since it is no more axiomatic than anyone else's deontology and considerably less than most - and since anyone who talks in terms of "rights" is implicitly deontologist² - frankly, this doesn't bother me all that much.)

You see, I don't believe in a "right to marry", or a "right to privacy", or a "right to bear arms", or even, if it comes right down to it, a "freedom of speech".  I believe in life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, by which all these individual things are implied, and of which all these individual things are strict subsets.  So this slicing down of the rights pie, as it were, bothers me because it shouldn't need to be stated.  Of course there's a right to marry³ - it's right there under "liberty", along with freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, the right to party, the "right" to jump up and down on one leg while singing the Marseillaise, and damn near everything else.

Which is fairly trivial, I suppose, except inasmuch as phrasing often reflects thinking.

But it also bothers me for the same reason as it did many of those who opposed the notion of having a Bill of Rights in the first place.  For example, I find myself in the rare position of agreeing with Alexander Hamilton in his argument that a Bill of Rights would act to limit our rights to only those enumerated in it, and presumptively allow control over everything else:

I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted⁴.

I certainly find - it is indeed very easy to find - examples of people, legislatures, and indeed courts,  the purported defenders of our rights, up to and including the Supreme Court, who while being pleased to defend or even create by tortuous interpretation one or another narrowly defined "micro-right", are all too happy to nibble away at the edges of rights only defined as broadly as those enshrined in the Bill of Rights, while rarely a day passes without some new infringement upon the very unalienable rights upon which this country was founded - usually advocated for, voted for, and cheered on by the same people who, in another context, fight for one or another micro-right.

(Of course, those systems which have lacked a Bill of Rights, such as the British system, have fared even further down the road to tyranny than we have - but half a loaf, in this case, is only barely better than one.)

Including, of course, just about everyone who demands "All Rights for All People!".

Now, really, this is a modest pecadillo in most ways and cases, if for no other reason than its sheer ubiquity among people - I am, as I mentioned, a self-aware mad-dog libertarian, and yet I still occasionally have outbursts of thinking "There oughtta be a law!" before I get a chance to sit myself down, speak sternly to myself, and remind myself that it's almost certainly none of my damned business - albeit one that occasionally rises to the level of amusing hypocrisy when you see someone flip from "don't impose your morals on me!" to egregious prodnosing and back in the course of a single conversation, or indeed sentence.

But leaving aside my pedantic irritation at the fact that "All Rights" never appears to mean "All Rights" in any but the strictest personal sense⁵, I could just wish the consequences of characterising rights this way, as a collection of "micro-rights", were more apparent to more people.

For a start, everything gets fought as its own tiny battle.  Don't misunderstand me; I'm glad when one is won, and more people receive their due; that is an undeniable good.  But while we may win one battle in one place, over one group's one specific rightlet, or one individual's case, Leviathan leaps forward everywhere else, with a hundred laws, a thousand regulations, and ten-thousand bureaucrats busily engaged in narrowing the scope of life in areas that we aren't paying attention to right now and/or that don't have a big or noisy enough pressure group.

But more importantly, establishing a whole archipelago of little, disconnected rights-to-this and rights-to-that creates a climate, presumption, and even doctrine that, as Hamilton warned us of, those narrowly defined, pinpoint rights specifically enumerated at any given time are the only rights we have.  Presumptively, then, everything else, the entire remaining sphere of activity, is subject to regulation and control.

And surely you've noticed that this is how politicians talk and it is how governments act, even here in the so-called "free world".

Now, if you are a totalitarian (or just deeply ideologically committed to the expansion of the State or the politicization of the personal), or merely are convinced that all right-thinking people agree with you, are in the majority, and always will be, and furthermore all wrong-thinking people should be corrected, or even are just content with the micro-right privileges handed out to you, well then, I imagine you're okay with that.  "Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."

But if you're not, then, I beseech you, consider the harm that accepting this frame for the debate does.

1. It's isomorphic to signing up to an open-ended, unwritten, unilaterally-modifiable-by-the-other-party contract in which you waive the ability to sue for specific performance and (in many cases) damages - which would merely be stupid, except you can't not sign up.

Under any other circumstances, no-one but a madman would call that just, fair, or reasonable.  And yet...

2. To the utilitarians in the audience: if you're not willing to entertain and defend as morally just a hypothetical scenario in which the net positive hedonic utility to homophobes of banning gay marriage or indeed stoning all the gays to death exceeds the net negative utility of doing so, and therefore it should be done forthwith, you've got some deontology in your ethical theory.  Sorry.

3. Or, rather, a right not to be prevented from marrying.  A "right to marry" is fairly ludicrous, since if interpreted the same way as other "rights", it implies that someone has to provide you with a spouse if you don't have one.  Although it is more catchy slogan-wise, I admit.

4. And I defy anyone to claim that the abuse of the general welfare clause of the Constitution, the outright perversion of the Commerce Clause, and the coercive manipulation of funding of states by the federal government, do not constitute "claiming more than were granted".

5. Since it's usually an extension of our legal rights, it's not those approved by the courts.  Since many of them aren't found in the Bill of Rights, it's not those either.  They're not the Lockean natural rights, or the UN Declaration of Human Rights, or whichever document you care to name, and since most people who say these things are definitely against, as I am also, letting democracy or the popular will "put people's rights up for a vote" - well, just where do they come from?

Similarities in Statolatry

Incidentally, to submit another minor piece of evidence in favor of the already tediously well-documented thesis that fascism and socialism are, at core, essentially the same school of totalitarian statolatry wearing different suits and silly moustaches, surely I can’t be the only person to have noticed that the Mussolini quotation I adopted to title my last post:

Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.  (“Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato.”)

And that oft-quoted progressive/left slogan (and one becoming at least de facto accepted across most of the political spectrum, distressingly):

The personal is political.

Are basically the same “Yay, serfdom!” meme wearing different hats?

Everything Within the State, Nothing Outside the State

From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

There are few things as mystifying as the dissonance of modern American progressivism. And nowhere is that dissonance more apparent than on the bright line dividing foreign and domestic policy.

For the past eight years, the dominant strain of progressive thought railed against neoconservative foreign interventionism. It abhored the use of coercive hard power -- military might -- to achieve ostensibly desirable goals such as the spread of democracy. Progressives found the promotion of American values through brute force arrogant and even cruel.

[…]

The progressive notion that American power projection is problematic on moral grounds and dubious on empirical ones remains strong today. In a pre-Christmas piece on The Huffington Post, Tom Englehardt recalls that in 2001 the Bush administration "had expansive dreams and gargantuan plans." The neocons were "desperately in love with the U.S. military and complete romantics about what it could do." Alas, "in the biggest dreams" we find "the largest miscalculations."

[…]

Yet turn the subject to domestic policy, and what happens? Progressives eagerly embrace the use of coercive hard power to achieve their aims. Force industry to adopt a cumbersome cap-and-trade policy to reduce carbon emissions? Check. Force the country to adopt a health care "public option"? Check. Threaten people with fines and even prison to impose an individual mandate? Check.

So much for the concern about "social engineering" and well-intentioned but "heavy-handed meddling." When it comes to domestic policy, progressives are just as eager as neocons are to embrace "expansive dreams" and "gargantuan plans." Just as hopelessly romantic about what the threat of force can achieve. And just as arrogant about the rightness of wielding it. (Writing on the Web site Open Left, for example, Adam Bink defends the individual insurance mandate thusly: "I don't care if people don't want health insurance . . . .Pay up, folks.")

Well, progressives might say, lower carbon-dioxide emissions and universal health care are greatly to be desired, and they cannot be achieved without government compulsion. What's more, progressives do not see themselves as cramming policies down an unwilling public's throat. They see themselves as rescuing the public from the bad guys: corporate polluters and greedy insurance companies. Fair Enough. But by the same token, neoconservatives don't see themselves as bullies, either. They also see themselves as rescuers -- stopping genocide and liberating the oppressed from the yoke of tyrants such as Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.

[…]

Of course, everything that has just been said about progressives could be turned with equal validity against conservatives of the talk-radio right -- many of whom think Americans should push the rest of the world around, but leave one another the heck alone.

Nice to see an article in the mainstream press from time to time that acknowledges the essential similarity between our two major factions of State-worshipping jackboot fetishists, although I personally might append that most so-called “moderates” are no better than the immoderates when it comes to the jackboots, whether wearing them or just licking them.

Austerity

Headline seen just now: White House hints that FY2011 budget will be “austere”.

Thanks, Mr. President.  I needed a good laugh this morning.

Drastic Times Call For Drastic Measures

So, I’ve read several arguments this morning on the general incoherence of the healthcare debate from both sides, and I can’t honestly say I disagree with any of them.  The whole thing really is becoming distinctly wearing.  So, here’s a new, simple, cutting-through-the-Gordian-knot, one-point plan to solve all our healthcare cost issues in one fell swoop (well, almost – it does have high first-year costs, but then, it’s hugely revenue-positive in subsequent years, so that’s a win):

• Immediately euthanize everyone who thinks their health and/or life is so all-fired important that they should be able to rob other people to pay for it.

The subsequently reduced population should place much less of a burden on the system, and as a bonus, the ones who are left won’t have a problem with it.  Or at least not this particular problem.

Elegantly simple, no?  Really, is there any problem that can’t be solved by mass killing?

(Well, underpopulation, I suppose.)

((Ab, bs pbhefr V'z abg frevbhf.  Sbe gur ybir bs Tbq, crbcyr...))

The Tragedy of Andrew Ryan

So, yeah, I just finished Bioshock today.

And now I must ask a question of all of you who believe that Bioshock is one big Take That to objectivism/libertarianism, or, to put it as one review did, believe that “[Ryan] believed in his idiocy to the end” – were you even playing the same game I was?

[cut for some spoilers (quotations from audio diaries) – if you’re reading this on LiveJournal and worried about spoilers, SKIP TO THE END NOW]

The Lesson of Afghanistan

…is that we cannot do any form of sustained military action any more, since in attempting to steer a course between the hawks demanding action and the doves demanding inaction or retro-action, every administration will invariably split the difference in trying to fatally offend the minimum number of people, and go straight for “half-assed action”.

Essentially, if we want our military actions to be effective, we need to make them short enough to be over and done with before the bitching, kibitzing, and armchair quarterbacking starts; and at the same time, brutal enough to get the job done in one.

Or, to put it another way, preemptively eliminate essentially every option between “commando raid” and “nuke ‘em”.

(And as a bonus, you don’t need approval from Congress for either of those.)

Writer’s Block: Smoke Screen

Today’s LiveJournal writer’s block:

What are your feelings towards smoking? What rights do you think smokers and non-smokers should have?

Speaking for myself, I don’t particularly care to do it.  I have enough vices already (caffeine, alcohol, sarcasm, Bioshock, …); and, knowing the risks involved and having tested the reward, it comes out a pretty clear negative.

However, that’s me, and to rule upon other people’s risk-reward tradeoffs is the act of a presumptuous jackass.  If anyone wants to smoke, so long as they don’t do it around my books or hard drives, I’ve got no problem with it.

As for rights: well, obviously, the same rights as everyone else, most especially the right to do as they damn well please up until it butts into the rights of others.  In practice, and getting to what was probably meant by the question – although putting it in “rights” terms is vaguely silly – this means the following:

• In open, public volume, smoke all you want.  There’s plenty of space and the atmosphere is huge for it to disperse into.  When the EPA comes up with some figures showing a statistically significant ppm of tobacco smoke components in the air at large, then we’ll talk, but until then, regulating smoking in the open air is just plain idiotic.
• In other people’s homes and on other people’s property in general, you have the right to respect the property owner’s wishes or leave, really, just as you have in re absolutely everything else.  (And yes, I know that’s not necessarily true in law, but we’re talking “rights” here.)
• In your own home, or your own property – which specifically DOES include business or other property open to the public, and for that matter, your vehicle too – you may do exactly as you see fit.  Any attempt to tell you that you cannot smoke or permit others to smoke on your own property is an intolerable impertinence, and should be opposed to the hilt by all right-thinking people (even if you’re a non-smoker, if you start allowing people to tell you what to do on or with your own property, how confident are you, really, in what they might come for next?).  It’s your damned choice, and “a man chooses, a slave obeys”.

Words Have Meanings, Even When French

I’m not going to comment on this in the place where it came from, because – well, frankly, because it’s part of my antinomian reading, and as such, there’s no point.  But look at the following statement:

The difference is that in india, the salt tax was designed to control the production of salt rather than to merely tax the purchasing of a neccesity - india's coasts are great for producing salt, but the thing about the british approach to laissez faire economics was that it was taken as a given that british companies couldn't compete with native ones, so the policy was to first demolish the traditional economies of a region and to jam a more centralised british one into the country that was occupied, as that allowed the companies and governors to control prices.

This person is describing the economic policy of the British Empire, perhaps the single greatest exponent of mercantilism in the ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE WORLD, as practicing “an approach to” laissez-faire economics.

He is describing, per the parts of this quotation that I highlighted in bold, an economic policy which allowed monopolies, cartels, and governors, for pity’s sake, to apply price controls, as laissez-faire economics.

And in this extended thread, among what appear to be educated if wrong-thinking people, no-one has (yet) called him on it.

Gee, you’d think no-one knew what laissez-faire meant any more, wouldn’t you?  And you would appear to be right.

The Real Meaning Of Climategate

This Climategate, as reported in various places, for those as yet unfamiliar with the term.

Now, the real meaning of Climategate is not, as I expect some skeptics to leap to assume, that climate change/global warming is not happening.  In fact, one can’t draw any reasonable assumptions about global warming from it, except that all the evidence derived from these chaps and others implicated is irretrievably compromised and should be discarded forthwith.

No, the real meaning of Climategate is that I was right all along.

And all those of you, and you know who you are, who have consistently told me that academic and government science is engaged in a fearless search for truth and the public good uninfluenced by political and financial considerations, as opposed either explicitly or implicitly to the bad ol’ commercial science practiced by private organizations and Those Wicked Old Energy Companies, and is therefore ever so much more trustworthy, should therefore SHUT THE HELL UP, and NEVER presume to speak on matters of practical epistemology or trust again, EVER.

Because your attempt to apply it is not FAIL.

It’s not even regular EPIC FAIL.

It’s EPIC FAIL in the same manner as the Iliad and the Odyssey are EPIC POETRY.  This is the defining instance of the genre.  If there was any justice in the universe, centuries from now, mothers would be using you people as a cautionary tale to explain blind, idiotic, naive, trusting, ideological devotion to their children.

And, for that matter, the thing that really makes me angry is just how much damage this whoring out of supposed truth to political ends has done to public trust in science, and for that matter, to science itself as an institution.  Oh, well done, ideologues!  Well done, indeed.

Responses to Criticism

So, I’ve seen a few people responding to criticism – admittedly, harshly-worded criticism, but hey – of things they’ve said in various fora by citing this George Orwell quotation:

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

This is true.

But, intrinsically, it also includes the right of the people you’re telling to in turn tell you something you don’t want to hear, even if that’s any or all of “you’re (a) wrong, (b) stupid, (c) evil, or (d) unfit for civilized society”.

Freedom of speech ain’t just for thesis, my darlings, it’s also for antithesis.

Buy Nothing Day Must Be Bipartisan

…for it is both Stupid and Evil.

The Stupid, I already pinged about.  Because it’s just like all those Don’t Buy Gasoline Today protests about oil price rises; what you needed today, you need tomorrow, and with a few small exceptions for impulse buys, what you wanted today, you want tomorrow, too.  It’s not Buy Nothing Day, folks, it’s Buy Something 24 Hours Later Than You Otherwise Would Have Day, and I know it, and you know it – or at least would know about it if you let the concept pass through your frontal lobes on its way to your limbic system – and the whole thing is therefore utterly pointless in terms of bringing the mighty engine of consumer capitalism to a halt, because consumer capitalism is entirely capable of coasting on through such a tiny hiccup without deviating an inch from its course.

Here’s Stupid #2: This is scheduled for Black Friday.  Congratulations, guys, bearing the above in mind, you’ve essentially planned to miss the Black Friday sales and instead buy those things that were on sale for Black Friday at the regular retail price.  Global Capitalism publically applauds your commitment to pump even more money into the system, and lauds your sacrifice.  (Privately, it just mocks you.)

And finally, here’s the Evil: if this, against all likelihood, makes a significant impact, and you make the Black Friday numbers look bad, well, congratulations.  Since those numbers are what is generally used to make projections for the rest of the season, you will have successfully panicked the retail sector, kicked another chock out from under the economy, driven retail prices up, and made a whole bunch of low-paid service workers get laid off.  Well done, O Noble Activists!  Your caring for the people at the bottom of the economic pyramid is, as ever, appreciated.  When they can't buy presents for their children this Christmas, we'll send them to you, and we hope they explain it to you with a 2x4.

(I like the Whirl-Mart notion in particular, that way.  Who shops at Wal-Mart, and is most likely to be inconvenienced by this sort of thing?  Well, free clue, it’s not the kind of middle-class parlor pink that’s attracted to Adbusters and their tiresome neo-Marxist wank.  Yes, yes, they didn’t mention any particular store – although they implied one pretty heavily – but if anyone at all tries this at, say, Whole Foods, I’ll personally eat The People’s Flag Of Deepest Red.

And, yes, it is the customer who’s going to be inconvenienced.  Wal-Mart is a huge freakin’ company.  Even if this plan went off like a dream everywhere, Wal-Mart can blow off a day’s revenues and barely even notice.  The poor sod who's begged the daycare to keep the kids a bit longer so she can go cash her paycheck and buy food for tonight's dinner (even though her daycare provider charges double for anything after 5 pm), and is now stuck in the snarl of people created by the Anticonsumerism Antics going on in the aisles of the store in question for hours longer than planned and so ends up owing the daycare an amount of money that is a sufficient fraction of the paycheck that just got cashed that now it's a matter of "what bill don't we pay this week", she’ll notice.  But, hey, you’ve got to break a few eggs to make the People’s Omelet, right?  And she should be grateful that y’all could take a day off from your lives to Smash the Big Bad Oppressive Global Capitalism that sells the cheap groceries in question.)

But don’t worry.  It’s almost certain that nothing worth noting is going to happen.  After all, as all good parlor pinks know, the best place to Smash Global Capitalism is from your couch.  After all, where else are you surrounded by so much of it…

Welcome to Libertarianism

Deplorable although the results of the gay marriage vote in Maine are, per se, it is nevertheless refreshing to observe the outpouring of outrage at the general concept of putting people's rights up for a popular vote.

(The idea of anything at all being too sacred to put up for a vote seeming to have become such a controversial position in this democracy-fetishizing age, after all, despite being more or less what the Founding Fathers were counting on to keep the government under control, re-revolution included if necessary.  And, for that matter, the reason that a limit on the scale of the income tax to a maximum of 10% wasn't included in the 16th Amendment, although that outrage sure didn't show up on time.)

So, yes, it is time for much rejoicing.  It would be nice if some of the people espousing this outrage at having to have one's rights approved in the first place would remember that it should be a generally applicable principle, eh?  And, for that matter, that it applies to assorted means by which they can and have been taken away again by fiat in the past.

Dear Maine Voters

So, at the same time you legalize medical marijuana, you also (re)ban gay marriage?

Does statist fuckheadery obey a conservation law, or something?  The Law of Conservation of Minding Other People's Business?  Or just regular old Conservation of Assholery?

Y'all just have to be screwing someone, don't you?  The Cerebrate is disappointed.

Dear Morons

Sometimes, you people are almost enough to turn me into a statist, do you know that?

Because, really, if so many members of the self-designated "reality-based community" actually believe what they claim, namely that the eight years of the Bush administration were an orgy of deregulated, free-market, laissez-faire capitalism fit to warm the cockles of a libertarian's heart...

...well, then, the arguments for mandatory eugenics take on a new immediacy.

Aristotle: Right?

So, recently I was linked to another tedious article in the Guardian, in which someone complains about there being too much culture, too much stuff, out there.  Which seems to be the perennial lament of some segments of the self-styled intelligentsia, as you may have noticed - evidently whatever marvellous things they have learned don't include self-control or the ability to prioritize.

But then I got to this frankly disgusting part:

Here's what I want: I want to be told what to read, watch and listen to. I want my hands tied. I want a cultural diet. I want a government employee to turn up on my doorstep once a month, carrying a single book for me to read. I want all my TV channels removed and replaced by a single electro-pipe delivering one programme or movie a day. If I don't watch it, it gets replaced by the following day's selection. I want all my MP3s deleted and replaced with one unskippable radio station playing one song after the other. And every time I think about complaining, I want a minotaur to punch me in the kidneys and remind me how it was before.

In short: I've tried more. It's awful. I want less, and I want it now.

And I thought about this.  And then I thought about all the people I know or know of who want, or claim they want, to be made to do this, and prevented from doing that, and regulated in their doing of the other, and then it hit me:

Aristotle's theory of natural slavery is seeming more and more plausible by the day.

Remember that?  It goes like this, paraphrasing broadly and eliminating some of the elements clearly 'of his time': Some individuals lack an adequate deliberative faculty; i.e., there is a defect in their mentality that renders them incapable of determining, and subsequently pursuing, those ends that constitute eudaimonia.  Therefore, their only way of participating in the Good Life is to be directed by another who possesses an adequate deliberative faculty.

Now, let us consider those who, as Aristotle put it, 'participates in rational principle enough to apprehend, but not to have, such a principle' and therefore is 'a slave by nature'.  Alas for their plight in these modern times, since we have for good and adequate reasons abolished slavery - and yet, they still know at some subconscious level that they need to fill in for that innate lack of deliberative faculty.

I submit that the most common response in the modern era - leaving aside such minority quirks as the Gorean subculture - is to join some religion, political group, faction, or party, or other top-down belief structure which will gladly, oh so very gladly, relieve you of the need to think, choose, speak, decide or eschew for your own damn self, thus relieving the intolerable psychological pressure of needing to think while being unable or unwilling to think.

Depressing as hell, really, as theories go, but consider for a moment just how well this explains how both right-wing authoritarianism and left-wing collectivism accumulate hordes of memebot-like followers - or, for that matter, the Cult of Apple - and I bet you'll feel truthiness.

Blog Action Day '09: Global Warming

Well, folks, it's Blog Action Day again!  I missed 2008's, unfortunately, so that link points back to 2007's post.  Which, coincidentally, was about the environment, which is still kind of relevant this time around, given the topic, so you might as well go back and read that one again, too.

This time around said topic is Climate Change.  Woo!  Which given the range of positions I've occupied on the topic in the past should be interesting for me to write about, but hey, that's what makes this fun.

Okay.  Let us start by defining the problem.  I suspect most people think the problem's already pretty defined, but then, that's half the problem in debating any issue: whoever gets to it first makes up the terms of the debate and thus puts everyone's thinking - splut! - right in the box.

Let us start by admitting to ourselves what we really want to do, and why we really want to do it.  We want the climate not to change, for sundry reasons, which boil down to (a) it changes the ecology and (b) it has really inconvenient side effects, like coastal cities becoming modern Atlantises.

And as we all know, or at least those of us who've ever looked at the big geological picture know, the climate varies all the damn time.  Over the history of our lovely blue planet it has varied from the frigid chill of the Ice Age to the stinkin' tropical bogs of the Carboniferous Epoch, and for that matter, a good while ago, it varied so much that this wasn't a lovely blue planet, but rather a murky yellow-green planet whose atmosphere consisted largely of carbon dioxide and methane and other such yummy stuff.  Party time for the prokaryotes, but nothing you'd care to live in.

Now, the interesting thing about that is that through all of those changes, the actual planet - by which I mean, for all the pedants out there, not merely the big ball of rock and mud, but also the planetary ecology, has muddled along just fine.  Sure, the anaerobes had a pretty hard time when oxygen became the Next Big Thing, and the dinosaurs all died out, and there have been Ice Ages, and extinctions, and goodness knows what throughout the few billion years there's been an environment, but if you look at it in the large, well, the planet and life on it just keeps muddling along.  And every time some shift in the climate comes along and whacks one form of life, nature comes back with three more freshly invented ones next week to suit the new climate.

(And, incidentally, we're nowhere near the hot end of the geological record.  Just so you know.)

So, give up all thoughts of "saving the planet".  It won't notice what we do, and it won't care, any more than it would notice or care if we just let everything run amuck.  Forget about "fighting for nature".  Nature doesn't give a crap, and would merely use the opportunity to come up with an awesome fish that likes hot water and plants that make their own shade.  While you're at it, have done with "protecting the environment".  Over the last few billion years it's shrugged off worse crap than anything humanity could do, even if we TRIED to destroy everything.

So.  First point of honesty, here - we're, meaning the general we, not interested in preventing climate change here for the environment's sake, or because warming is particularly bad, per se.  We're interested in preventing climate change because the Great Midwestern Desert and Coastal Floodening, or, for that matter, Ice Age 2: Glaciers Devour Canada Before Coming For US, is monumentally inconvenient for our nice, comfortable, human-civilization-y lives and some species we find useful.  No-one wants to have to start importing wheat from Canada/Siberia, to move house because their old town is in the middle of a new desert/10 feet underwater, or to have to face the prospect of a million Third Worlders knocking at the door 'cause the same thing has happened to their entire country.

(Those blessed with empathy may also consider the potential for vast human suffering and the extinction of species which we, as humans, find cute/photogenic/interesting in some way - oh, come on, you know it's true.  Everyone with a heart gets all weepy about the polar bears and the baby seals, but you know as well as I do that if the poster animal for climate-changed caused extinction was the sea cucumber or the banana slug, no-one but a few cranks would give a rat's ass.)

Having reconciled ourselves, then, to the essential self-centeredness of the whole exercise, and hopefully not been too put off by the Canute-like nature of attempting to stop the turning cycles of the world in their courses, let us consider next the question of anthropogenic climate change.  So much of the arguing back and forth appears to be concerned with whether it is, or it isn't, caused by human action in one way or another.  I'm going to adopt something of an iconoclastic position here: why give a damn?

Well, okay, yes, it is relevant when considering possible solutions.  But with regard to whether we should do something about it or not, really, it's irrelevant.  Just because we caused a thing doesn't mean we should have to fix it, not if its effects won't matter, and if we really are staring ZOMGWTFBBQ-scale disaster in the face, whether it's anthropogenic or solagenic or deigenic or freakin' Martian-lizard-genic hardly matters, because we're staring ZOMGWTFBBQ-scale disaster in the face!  Unless you actually are one of the three cranks who feel morally obliged to sacrifice yourself to nature, just not to the feelthy works of man, but if you are, please understand that the other six billion of us don't want to do that today, thank you so very much.

Having thus dismissed that question, we then come on to the real question of the day, the Global Warming Debate.  Not "is it anthropogenic", but "is it happening at all?".  And yes, it is a debate, for the painfully simple reason that people are still debating it.

Well, on this question, I Take No Position.  Frankly, inasmuch as the quality of the debate is about, say, Creationists arguing with GOSPLAN about this year's tractor-production statistics, I think "I Take No Position" is the only reasonable position for anyone not actively engaged in primary research to take, assuming they have some pretensions to intellectual integrity.

Because the only thing I have learnt, after hours and hours and days and days of reading through primary, secondary, and tertiary sources on the topic is that everyone lies like weasels for the good of the cause, misrepresents data, misrepresents what other people have said, makes extremely dubious use of statistics, and generally fudges the issue to suit what they want it to be.

Yes, I said everyone, AND I MEAN EVERYONE.  Don't come yammering to me about the scientific consensus.  I'm not some schmuck who missed philosophy of science class, I know that's not how science works, and you know it as well as I do.  The scientific consensus pre-, during- and post-Wegener was that there was no such thing as continental drift, and yet they move.  Don't come bleating to me about how the oil companies/Big Energy/the elite/the Republican Party/the Bavarian Illuminati/the Jews (And yes, I've heard all of those, except for the Bavarian Illuminati.  Yet.) are bankrolling studies to serve their interests instead of the truth as if it was all one-sided.  Public choice theory blew that one out of the water long ago, and if you don't believe that politicians and government regulators have self-interest in greatly expanding the scope of their control over the economy and daily life, well, then, keep taking the soma.

(Did you really think it was just a coincidence that, the Green fetish for alternative energy aside, the vast majority of the proposed political solutions to climate change are just coincidentally a grab-bag of a progressive statist's existing wet dreams?

One might also mention the way that these people love to cite the IPCC reports to demonstrate the existence of climate change, yet somehow they all fall silent when it comes to the economic portion of the IPCC report.  Which report identifies the A1T economic model - summarized as 'capitalism, globalized, strong emphasis on market-based solutions' - of all the economic models they used in the study as the one which produces one of the lowest cumulative emissions while still growing the economy at the highest rate.  Anyone think that's a coincidence?  Granted, that may well have been knocked on the head by the recession, but it has nonetheless been the "scientific consensus" for over a decade.  Intellectual dishonesty rampant.)

And yes, while I'm fairly confident most of you won't bother to verify this, while the climate change denial side has been caught fabricating data, distorting the evidence to fit their beliefs, and just plain practicing bad science, so too has the pro-climate change side.  A couple of its proponents have even been unwise enough to go on record stating that a bit of falsified disasterbation is entirely justified if it makes the public Wake! Up! And! Take! Action! Now!

(I'm not terribly interested in arguing over a specific list of lies, which are many on both sides, so no, I'm not going to provide you with one.  Google should suffice; most are well documented, and it's not my job to do your research for you.  This is an opinion piece.)

But never mind that for now.  While actually asserting the existence of climate change in the present is probably unwise, given the climate (sic) of intrigue and politicized deception, let us proceed arguendo on the assumption that it does exist.  It is, after all, reasonably probable that this is correct, and therefore that something ought to be done about it to preserve our civilized asses.  And, indeed, the comfort of our civilized asses, since very few of us would enjoy subsistence farming, however "green" it might be.

(It isn't, by the way.)

I shall now proceed to attack a couple of sacred cows.  I shall begin with the notion of alternative energy...

...well, actually, no I won't.  The need for an alternative energy source is pretty damned obvious, and would be there even if not for the climate.  I shall, however, attack the notion of government subsidies for alternative energy - and, since this is a climate change post, I'm going to do so not on my regular economic grounds, but on the much simpler grounds that to do this with any effectiveness at all requires the government's experts to be able to predict the future, in order to know which approaches will work out before trying them.

Even if Cassandra were working for the Department of Energy, no-one would believe her.

And as the non-existence of the flying car, the lack of a pressing need to solve the problem of horse dung inundating the streets of New York, the lack of the Master Computer for the American Continent being cooled by the entire flow of the Colorado River, etc., demonstrates, the government experts - and, indeed, regular private-sector futurists and other would-be technocrats - are pretty bloody awful at predicting useful future solutions.

A bidding war over whose pet project gets funding - which, Congress being Congress, will mean "whose district" most of the time, committing money to political projects that it's too embarrassing to cancel, God-awful carbon-pessimizing side-effect-ridden boondoggles like corn biofuel, and various other ways of sucking capital away from whatever the eventual winner turns out to be does nothing but obstruct and distract the development process that will lead to whatever the eventual solution turns out to be.

The purpose of the various means of internalizing the emissions externality is to give the private sector an incentive to find ways of getting rid of said externality.  Do that, and then leave it the hell alone.

Next, I'm going to go after the whole notion that we can solve the problem of climate change by cutting emissions.  No, we can't.  Really.  I've nothing against cutting emissions, being generally not in favor of pollution, but seriously, people.  Won't work.

Partly it won't work because the numbers just don't add up when you go beyond simple carbon-neutrality.  I know that, and you know that too, and as soon as the requirements of extreme emissions-cutting become apparent to the general public, they'll know that too.  But let that pass.

Here's your real problem: we're not alone in the world.  Or rather, we have two real problems, and they're called China and India.  And other not-yet-at-the-Western-lifestyle countries, too, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to these two.  Together, they contain 2.5 billion people, somewhere between a half and a third of the entire population of the world.

And a large proportion of those people are dirt poor peasants.

But, thanks to the wonders of globalization, a lot of those dirt poor peasants have seen American television, even if only on the one shared television set in the village.

If you think telling rich, spoiled Westerners that their lifestyles have to be cut a little is hard to do - and it seems to be - imagine what it would be like to go back and live in the actual, genuine, Shit Age.

Now imagine that you're not telling this to rich, spoiled Westerners.  Imagine that you're telling it to dirt-poor peasants who already live there, with the corollary being that the rich, spoiled Westerners are (a) getting to keep some of their stuff, and (b) are YOU.  And they will never, ever, EVER get to stop living miserable subsistence-level lives or get any of that neat stuff they saw on television.

The governments of India and China have some experience with, um, popular revolts.  They know what happens to governments that are stupid enough to tell their people that they're that screwed, especially at the behest of wealthy foreigners.  And neither India nor China is governed by complete morons, so they're not going to tell their people that.  They're going to tell us, the wealthy foreigners, "You first", which is exactly what they have been doing, knowing that there's almost no chance they'll have to follow through on it, and then even if we did, they'll turn around then and find some other excuse for not doing it.

And both China and India, this very large segment of the world's population, are sitting right on top of huge deposits of brown coal, which has the advantage of being real cheap and easy to turn into energy, coupled with the disadvantage of emitting CO2 (and other fun things like sulphur dioxide) all over the place.

So, not to put too fine a point on it, it doesn't matter a damn what the West does in re emissions, in real terms.  We could abolish every form of energy generation more advanced than waterwheels and windmills tomorrow, and aside from most of us dying in the next few months, and it would have bugger all effect, because that coal is there, those people are determined to have the benefits of a modern, industrialized society, and short of blowing them right off the map, there is not one damn thing you, I, or anyone else can do about it.

So, what am I telling you you should do, I hear you cry?  Pray for geoengineering, folks, and I'm not just saying that because I think orbital megastructures are awesome (although they are) or because it would revitalize our moribund space program (although it would), or even because building a giant orbital sunshade would solve future climate issues, such as global warming from waste heat, something that doesn't seem to be taken into account nearly as much as it ought to be, especially since the laws of thermodynamics tells us that you simply can't cut those emissions, period.

(Although it would have the tiny political flaw that a few design modifications would also make it a handy-dandy space weapon, suitable for melting entire cities into glass.  Enh.  Can't make an omelet...)

But it's time to seriously consider ideas like that and the other geoengineering concepts that have come up.  And not just the megascale engineering; it's time to start thinking about regrowing wetlands and constructing flood barriers and replenishing aquifers and better redistributing water and moving people out of flood plains and generally doing all the tedious detail work of civil engineering needed to shape an infrastructure that can help us address the local consequences of climate change, and adapt to and ride out the ones we can't head off.

It's hard.  It's unglamorous.  Frankly, a lot of it is boring.  And it doesn't let you sit in the limelight for spending billions of dollars of public money, preen yourself for being greener than your neighbors, or have all the jolly fun of ordering people around and tell them how to live their lives.

But it's also vital, 'cause if this thing's real, then it's coming right at us, and all the wishing and pretentious wankery in the world's not going to save us when it hits.

Democracy Is Rightfully Skeptical, Not Sick

This Ezra Klein article - It Is Democracy, Not Health-Care Reform, That Is Sick - dates from back in August, but since:

• (a) I have only just seen it;
• (b) He's a well-known voice on his side of the argument;
• (c) It's really got a huge historical hole in it;

I'm going to address it anyway.

Here's the key paragraph in the article, but I suggest you go and read the whole thing anyway:

What we're seeing here is not merely distrust in the House health-care reform bill. It's distrust in the political system. A healthy relationship does not require an explicit detailing of the "institutional checks" that will prevent one partner from beating or killing the other. In a healthy relationship, such madness is simply unthinkable. If it was not unthinkable, then no number of institutional checks could repair that relationship. Similarly, the relationship between the protesters and the government is not healthy. The protesters believe the government capable of madness. There is no evidence for that claim, which means that there is no answer for it, either. That claim is not about what is in this bill, or what government has done in Medicare and Medicaid and the VA. It is about what a certain slice of Americans think their government -- and by extension, their fellow citizens -- capable of.

Now, I think that most of us would agree that the relationship between many people and the government is not healthy.  Or, for that matter, that it is very dysfunctional.  But what Mr. Klein generally fails to address - except in the quoted "There is no evidence for that claim, which means that there is no answer for it, either." - and hopes we pick up on, is that in his view the blame for the dysfunctionality falls on the shoulders of the protesters, who are just being silly and irrational in their suspicions of the government.

Unfortunately, historically speaking, there are plenty of examples of a government being capable of madness, just in the 20th century, and almost as many examples of the fellow citizens of the victims being happy to go along with it.  One might ask, on the one hand, if Mr. Klein would have been advising German Jews to trust in the sanity of their government and fellow citizens in the 1930s.

But let us, to be charitable, confine ourselves to our government, and remember only things like:

• The Tuskeegee syphilis experiments.
• State-run eugenics programs.
• "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
• The internment of Japanese-Americans.
• Civil asset forfeiture.
• Indefinite detention of terror suspects.

To mention only the things that leap immediately to mind.  The history of the 20th and 21st centuries alone is replete with examples of people who found themselves on the wrong end of what their government and fellow citizens turned out to be capable of, after all.

So, Mr. Klein, to return to your metaphor, indeed, the relationship is dysfunctional. But it is dysfunctional because the people still remember the bruises from the government's previous outbursts of madness, and in this case, placing the fault with the side that's expecting the next blow to come at any time rather than with the side who has a half-empty whiskey bottle in one hand and a mouth full of promises that he can change, really, and no, he won't act like that any more...

Wait. Which political set is it that keeps complaining about the other ones always being too quick to blame the victim? I'm confused.