cornucrapia

A response to Ownership and Privilege

2009-11-07T09:41:00.000-08:00

I've been having a discussion with Larry over at the Barefoot Bum blog.
The conversation started with this post on labour and labour power. It was followed with a response post titled ownership and privilege. Please read those posts and the comments first or this won't make much sense.
I tried to post this as a comment but the comment software didn't like it, too wordy or something. So I'm posting it here and will comment a link to this post. I'm open to continuing the discussion here or on the original post. Without further ado, here is my reply:

As a minor point of clarification, I lifted that definition of capitalism off dictionary.com. I think it's a fairly reasonable one, I wouldn't have posted it if I disagreed, just wanted to attribute it properly.
Now, to more substantive matters.

This ownership is the direct privilege of the owner to produce what he pleases, at the rate he pleases, and exchange the products with whom he pleases for the price he pleases.

In theory at least, the capitalist is subject to the coercive forces of competitive markets. Say I own a small factory producing widgets. Initially I produce only a small number at an enormous profit margin. This creates a large productive surplus for myself, that I can either reinvest in expanding my widget empire or just fritter away on vacations or marble counter-tops or whatever (that being my privilege as the owner of capital). However, these excessive profit margins encourage another capitalist to come along and build his own widget factory and undercut my prices. This will lead to a price war until only the person who can produce widgets at the lowest price that will still result in a better return to their capital than other market opportunities will remain, and the price of widgets will approach their real cost. Now, of course this is strictly theoretical, there are all sorts of barriers to entry that can allow non-competitive or monopolistic industries to thrive. These situations are recognized in economic theory and the prevailing wisdom is that in these particular situations (the electrical grid or telephone networks are an example) it is appropriate to introduce some form of government regulation, or even outright control. More importantly than what theory dictates, this is how much of the western world generally runs its economies. In situations where a special interest group of some sort has managed to gain an industry that isn't subject to market forces (your prison and healthcare industries come to mind, or to be fair the energy industry in Alberta) then I think of that as corporatism, not capitalism.

First, a production surplus must be concentrated to employ as capital; a surplus equally distributed to the population will mostly be directly consumed. Second, capital is physically necessary to produce the physical things all human beings need — food, housing, clothing, etc. — to survive and prosper.

So how is capital concentrated and allocated in a communist model? Is it more a democratic process? Is there a kind of central stockpile of capital that groups can submit requests to that voters/workers vote to either allocate to or not? In theory I like the sound of that but I'd want to know more details before I was convinced it was a plausible means of allocation

By definition, the owners of concentrated capital can produce and exchange these products as they please, exempt from social controls. It therefore follows that the owners of capital have indirect privilege over the very survival of the population, and there is no systematic compensating privilege for the workers, the owners of only their own labor power.

Again I would argue that the allocation of capital is subject to market coercion. In aggregate, capital will flow to the areas where it can expect the highest return, or in other words, to produce the greatest amount. Regarding the privilege of the workers: Many companies offer stock options, which basically make employees mini capitalists. Also, I think the increased mobility of labour is worth considering. My first job out of college was working technical support. The company ran into financial trouble, their stock plummeted and was eventually frozen on the TSX at a couple cents a share for over a year. When I got wind of these changes I decided to find an alternative employer. I'm sure a lot of capitalists lost a lot of money in sunk costs on that company, meanwhile I got all the wages I earned during my employment, and enough experience to move on to a higher paying job at a more stable company. I understand that this is not always the case for workers. People who have been working in a factory all their lives only to have it close down are in for a very rough time. Fortunately, modern economic theory and policy recognizes this and realizes that it is of benefit to everyone to promote labour mobility and provide a social safety net for displaced workers.

I'd like to go back to a comment you made in the post we started this discussion on labour and labour power:
Probably not, or at least not much. The small capitalists (petite bourgeoisie) typically derive their income from their own labor, not from simple ownership of capital; their ownership is not absentee but instrumental, similar to a mechanic owning his tools.

So we agree that owning a certain level of capital, particularly human capital (like a doctor or engineer "owning" their degree) is not exploitative, at least not much. I also think, and I'm sure you'll agree that corporations, at least once they get to a certain size, have serious market distorting effects that they can use to realize gains that are detrimental to anyone but them. My question (and I'm really asking, I honestly have no idea) is where this change happens and how? Let's look at an example:
Sam Walton opens a convenience store, he hires some staff, works long hours in the store personally, and thanks to a solid management style and some innovative inventory and stocking methodologies manages to make a pretty tidy profit while providing jobs at a competitive wage and goods at prices lower than his competitors. At this point Sam is one of the petite capitalists you spoke of and I don't see how anything he's doing is harmful. At some point the business expands and become Wal-Mart, one of the biggest ugliest examples of capitalism gone wild, importing shitty products from wage slaves in china to be sold by disinterested disenfranchised employees in the west and (at least in the states) relying on government welfare to meet the basic needs of its employees. What the hell happened? Where did it go wrong? As an aside, try reading through as much of "The Wal-Mart triumph" as you can stomach and then going to an actual Wal-Mart, the contrast is depressingly absurd.

Roman Polanski

2009-09-29T17:42:00.000-07:00

OK, I should really be doing homework right now, but I have to get this off my chest.
Why the hell is anyone (including Salman Rushdie, who until now I was very fond of) defending Roman Polanski? The guy admitted to drugging and raping a 13 year old girl. Do I have to keep writing? I can't imagine any circumstances that would make this at all a defensible action. I'm honestly completely flabbergasted at the outpouring of support I've seen for the man on the internet. That's not to say everyone is with him of course, but a disturbing number of people seem to be willing to overlook the fact that he DRUGGED AND RAPED A CHILD because he had a hard life, or made good movies, or "hasn't he suffered enough?". Well, no, I don't really think so. Fuck Roman Polanski and the horse he rode in on.

Propagandhi!

2009-09-12T13:07:00.001-07:00

I've been listening to these guys since around the 9th grade and I'm finally going to get to see them this Halloween. Here's "And we thought that nation-states were a bad idea" (maybe it's not so surprising I hold the political views I do, thanks Propagandhi)

Publicly subsidized! Privately profitable! That's the anthem of the upper-tier (the puppeteer untouchable). We focus a moment, nod in approval and bury our head back in the bar-codes of these neo-colonials while our former nemesis (ah, the romance!): the nation-state, now plays fund-raiser for a new brand of power-concentrate. Try again, but now we're confused- what is class-war? Is this class war? Yes, this is class war. And I'm just a kid- I can't believe that I gotta worry about this kind of shit!
What a stupid world! Yeah, this is just beautiful... absolutely no regard for principle. What a stupid world. (We're): 1) born 2) hired 3) disposed! Where that job lands, everybody knows and you can tell by the smile on the CEO's that the environmental restraints are about to go. You can bet that laws will be set to ensure the benefit of unrestricted labor-laws (all kept in place by displaced government death squads). They own us. They produce us. They consume us. Can you fucking believe this? What a stupid world. Fuck this bullshit display of class-loyalties. The media and our leaders wrap it all up in a flag- their fucking shit-rag. hooray!

Hans Rosling - Myths about the developing world

2009-09-03T11:07:00.000-07:00

Life as music

2009-09-03T08:19:00.001-07:00

Manufacturing Consent

2009-08-28T15:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Americans

2009-08-26T15:14:00.001-07:00

Please figure out this health care thing, I am really sick of all my favorite sites and stumble links talking about it. Also, I do not particularly care bout a Kennedy dying, or Michael Jackson for that matter.

Regards

Cornucrapia

Developing world teaching

2009-08-20T12:23:00.001-07:00

Because we're on the topic, and because I found it interesting

Rights vs. Obligations

2009-08-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

Regan says:

Your definition of a right is incorrect.

Using your definition of a right (you only have a right to things that other people don't have to provide for you) there are precious few rights that exist. Almost everything that we hold to be a "right" is provided either by other people directly (food/shelter/clothing) when we're helpless infants, or by society at large (right to free speech). Canada has a nice long list of things you're legally entitled to and education is one of them:

"Article 26.

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit."

From the universal declaration of human rights, which Canada signed. So when you say you don't consider education to be a right, I have to wonder where that comes from. You're legally guaranteed an education as a right in this country. It's not a "societal obligation" (as you further defined it in the comment section), it's a legal right, and there is a huge difference between two.

I suppose the short form of it is that I think that it's an important distinction whether or not education is a right or not, seeing as we're talking about alternatives to the current education system, which currently IS a legal right.

How I feel about any education reforms rest pretty heavily on whether or not it's a right or not. Suddenly taking that right away is a big deal. Is it a right (the actual definition of right) under your new system like it currently is?

I think the problem stems from a misunderstanding of my definitions. I don't regard whether something is enshrined in law or not as relevant to whether it is defined as a right or a societal obligation. For me, a right is something that you can lose, that is, I can say something and lose my job for it, depriving me of freedom of speech, or I can be sitting in my own home and have my right to privacy taken from me by someone spying. Contrariwise, societal obligations are things that society can fail to provide for me, such as food, shelter, medicine and education. Societies have an obligation to provide such things, because that is the function of a society, if a society deems the most effective way to provide those things is to enshrine them in law, excellent idea, similarly if a society decides that protecting the rights of individuals is best done through the rule of law, that's also excellent.

So, two questions: Are these workable, accurate definitions of rights and societal obligations? If so, is education a right or a societal obligation?

Get your snack on

2009-08-18T16:33:00.001-07:00

Inspired by, and listened to during, a sweet, after work snack.

The third wave

2009-08-18T14:22:00.001-07:00

I have chills

Education

2009-08-18T10:18:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure this post has more, longer and better comments than anything else I've done, be sure to read them as well

Well I'll be damned if my quick post on education didn't get a very wordy response.
Robert asks the following:

When you say a system of schools in which the alumni pay back a certain percentage of their income to the institutes they graduated from, are you speaking of primary and secondary education, elementary, middle, and high school? Regardless, I am not sure how this system solves the problems you accurately foresee in a private model. The issue partly boils down to this, Doesn't every child, regardless of ability, or socioeconomic status, have a right to a good education. I think the system that you suggest would create a set of excellent schools, and a set of bad schools.

As for your comment about vocational schools, if you are specifically referring to post-secondary education, I think that is fine. But in terms of primary and secondary education, we need to be teaching students some basic facts about the world around them, and teaching them critical and independent thinking. In America, with No Child Left Behind, are schools are turning into vocational schools, teaching students how to be good corporate suits, essentially. By teaching to a multiple choice test, the ability to think for oneself, and express ones owns opinions based on facts, and the ability to take in new facts and adjust your opinions accordingly are things that being eliminated from the public school system. For me, this is the most important aim of education. It is not to directly equip a student to get a job after high school, but instead to prepare the student to express his or her agency and rationally to the fullest later in life. If that makes any sense.

There are a number of points in that question that I disagree with. First, I don't think anyone has a right to anything that has to be provided for them by others. If I have a right to a formal education, that means that other people HAVE to teach me, and I don't think that's fair. That said, it would certainly be ideal for everyone to have an education, I don't dispute that.

Next, there is the idea that public education should teach critical and independent thinking. That would be great, but can you tell me of a time when that's ever happened? I didn't learn to think for myself thanks to the public education I received and I haven't seen anything to indicate that many people do, or that that's the intent of our current system. I just don't think the sort of education system that you could have the state provide could possibly provide this. Think about being taught history in school, I don't know about you, but I was taught a very Europeanized version of history, lots of stuffy white men in positions of power. Commendably the curriculum did take some steps to address the suffering of native people under colonization, but it was more a footnote, a regrettable episode in the inevitable journey of the white colonizers to control North America. The point I'm trying to make is that the state isn't going to teach you to question and defy the status quo, because it is the embodiment of the status quo.

Now, regarding the rights of children to equal education, regardless of ability or socioeconomic status, I agree with the latter, but not the former. Children, by the time they're ready for formal education at least, have certain natural aptitudes and weaknesses and I see nothing wrong with placing them in institutions that will play to their strengths. For example, a child could be very mechanically gifted, that is, posses a fine motor dexterity and an understanding of the physical interaction of machinery, but just not be very good at more abstract things like calculus. I don't see anything wrong with placing that child in an environment that will maximize their natural abilities while avoiding their weak points. Alternatively, the clumsy math geek isn't going to get a lot out of woodworking, except maybe some minor injuries and I don't see why it's wrong to put him or her in a program that will play to those strengths.

Under our current system there's almost no recognition of ability, beyond some scholarships that aren't really part of the official system, as most of their funding comes from external groups. As it stands the main thing that determines whether you go to Harvard or Podunk community college is how much money your parents make. Remember, George Bush received an Ivy League education and there are successful entrepreneurs (obviously intelligent in at least some regard) who are high school dropouts.

The whole point of the system I'm proposing is that it will maximize the incentive for schools to turn out productive members of society, thus encouraging them to select students based on their suitability for the programs offered. A medical school won't accept an applicant who'd make a crappy doctor, because they know that their return on his income won't be that great. Meanwhile they'll climb over each other to offer a position to some child prodigy, even if his parents don't have any money, because they know a potential star doctor like that will pull in a lot of cash during his lifetime. Incidentally, this could also help with the issue of immigrant professionals. Schools will have an incentive to get people accredited and out into the working world as quickly as possible, rather than draining them of as much cash as possible before setting them out into the field. I imagine we'd have a lot less electrical engineers driving cabs right now if they could get their school for free in exchange for a portion of their much greater potential income.

So far everything I've discussed has focused on vocational style training, the least controversial aspect of the idea. What about primary education? I think the principle still applies, although it is a little trickier to explain.
First of all, let me say that our current primary and post secondary education systems are, primarily, glorified babysitting jobs. Now I don't mean this to be an insult to the many dedicated teachers out there, I know they're doing the best they can with a crappy system and bless them for it. However, if you want proof of my premise, look at the salary of teachers, and ask yourself, is this the salary of a professional with about as many years of post secondary training as an engineer, moulding the next generation, or is it about what you'd have to pay the 16 year old down the street to babysit your kid, times the size of the class. Sadly, I think it's a fair bit closer to the latter.
I do think it would be nice if schools could teach all children critical thinking and how to be aware, concerned citizens, but so far I haven't seen any proof they can. With that in mind, let's look at how my suggestion could improve things.

Right now, if you want a really good education, prep school, private school, whatever, you have to pay for it. Once again we see socioeconomic status playing a bigger role in quality of education than actual ability of the student. The sort of incentive system I offer would have the advantage of attracting schools to the students they think they can get the most value out of, that is, teach to be the most productive members of society. Again, the kid who's already a brilliant piano player at age four becomes a much more attractive target than the one whose father was president but is otherwise devoid of special abilities (I should stop mocking Bush but it's so damn easy).
Back to the difficult part. What happens to the undesirables? Well I don't know exactly, one idea I have off the top of my head is that kids would be able to bargain for entrance by offering a higher percentage of their income than standard. Say you really think you'll be a great welder, but the school won't take you at %10 of future income, maybe you'd be worth it to them at %15.
The other point I'd like to make is that the children in question here, those with learning disabilities or whatever, aren't being serviced well by the public system either. I think there's a chance that a school could arise that would specialize in such children, and offer them a better education than what's currently available in the public system. Now they might have to finance this by again requiring a higher percentage of income than normal, but if the choice is between having a shitty free education that doesn't prepare you for life, and a specialized one that will let you be at least a marginally productive citizen, in exchange for a share of that enhanced income, why wouldn't you take it?

My main point is that presently the incentives of the education system are all wrong. We're rewarding cranking students out without much concern for how ready they'll actually be to exist in society and we grossly reward the rich by allowing them to buy positions in prestigious schools that all but guarantee a successful life. I think that by tying the incentives of education closer to their presumed desired outcome, productive members of society, we will encourage innovation that will improve educational quality.

Ok, now that I've actually said something substantive on the topic, let's see some real feedback, I get the feeling this discussion is just getting started. Freddy if you're still reading I'd love to hear from you, this sort of proposal strikes me as something that'd be right up your alley

Health Co-ops

2009-08-17T14:07:00.000-07:00

This idea warms my heart. It's about as close to the sort of anarcho-syndicalist organizational structure that I so admire as you could probably get, and it's for something as controversial as healthcare to boot! I love it! Of course I'm sure it's riddled with problems, thoughts?

Quick idea

2009-08-16T14:41:00.000-07:00

Regarding education, I've discussed before my concerns with the state being in charge of education. However I also couldn't think of a private model that wouldn't unfairly favour the rich. What about a system where schools were funded by their alumni paying back a certain percentage of their income to the institutes they graduated from? There would be positive feedback in that the most successful students would generate the most income, meaning that schools that did well would get more income, thereby allowing them to fund continued improvements. This is probably the most pure capitalist suggestion I've ever made on here, and I'm sure there are all sorts of problems with it, but it's an interesting starting point. Anyone care to comment?

A reply to Freddy

2009-08-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

I have readers! I honestly didn't think I did, beyond a few people I know in real life. Anyway, regarding my piece on market failure, blogger Freddy replies (all direct quotes from Freddy will now be in italics):

Freddy here, just wanted you to know that I have read your post and it has not changed my views on the free market system at all. Of course I do not expect my post to change your views, but since you did throw down the gauntlet, I had to reply. You and your readers can find my reply to your post here.
Also after this I do not see much need for us to continue on, because as I said we will not change either personal views, and we know it.

Whoa, now Freddy, how come you won't possibly change my mind? Just because you want to be close minded doesn't mean I have to, projection bias dude. Let's take a look at the reply

[W]ho this cornucrapia person is or what their credentials are, because they do not list their name or any personal information on their blog that I could find.

I'd be more than happy to fill in a few blanks for you Fred (may I call you Fred?) My qualifications are nill, you'll just have to take my arguments at face value, as you should do with any argument really. In terms of education, since you mentioned your one econ class, I've had two so far, although I'm an economics major and in a few months that number will increase significantly. As for who I am, I'm a young male Canadian currently living and going to school in Calgary, the rest is not really something I feel like shouting from the internet, for whatever reason.

Now that introductions are out of the way, let's move on to the counter-arguments, and my own responses:

But taking your example of the electrical grid, you are right it does not make much sense to run 4 or 5 wires to the house. But it does make sense for me to be able to purchase my electricity from 4 or 5 companies delivered over the same wires. That way I can select green, nuclear, or traditional sources if I want. The way I see it the only regulation that is needed, is that the company in charge of the wires would have to charge everybody the same rate, and be a not-for-profit company.

That's shifting the debate Fred, I was talking about the electrical grid. You've completely agreed with my point, the electrical grid cannot run according to market principles. Now imagine if a company owned the grid, and that company also had heavy investment in, say coal fired power plants. How much of a chance do you think competitive alternative providers would have of penetrating that market?

Regarding Microsoft, the argument is too long to repost here, please refer to the original blog for Freddy's view on why MS is a good monopoly.
Here's my problem with the thrust of Freddy's argument, as I understand it. Companies like Netscape and Lotus and Apple came along with superior products, sporting fancy new innovations, that threated Microsoft's total dominance of some aspect of the market, browsers or word processors or whatever. This forced Microsoft to incorporate those innovations to maintain their dominance. The idea is that Microsoft is still subject to competitive forces, even in a monopoly situation and therefore the consumer still benefits, no problem right? Well, what about all the companies that took on Microsoft and failed? Were these envelope pushing innovators rewarded as they so obviously should be under a market system? No, they were crushed under the weight of the reigning juggernaut. This is hardly an endorsement of monopoly as I understand the characterization.

Besides the Microsoft model, there is another way to attain monopoly:

That way is for a company to “buy” that position in the market place, by funding the campaigns of the elected officials in government. This gets them access, which they use to limit and harm their competition. They get favorable tax laws, such as an exception for a company that was incorporated on a certain day, in a certain state and produces a certain product. The get regulators to look the other way at the urging of those elected officials, that fund their departments. Finally they work with those officials to get laws passed that are suppose to regulate them, but instead really hurt their competitors more.

Well, I'm opposed to lobbying, and everything that's described here, and I agree that it happens and should be stopped. I should mention a slight variation on this theme. What can also happen is that a few major players in any sector, say for example, the handful of big media companies in the States, or looked at from another direction, maybe a chain of industries, like an group of companies that collectively extract, refine, transport and sell to end consumers oil and gas can collude to exploit the consumer, without even necessarily requiring the government at all (although it sure helps). For an idea of what this would look like, read up on Standard Oil

I'm trying to put together exactly what role Freddy wants for the government in all this:

The true source of large, sustainable monopolies is not free markets, but cooperation between government and business to the benefit, at least initially of both. Any market that allows government regulation, is by its nature not a free market. You can not have a free market when the regulations placed upon you limit the choices and products that a business can make. I will admit that there is most likely a level where government regulations help the free market, but just like anything there is a point where it turns dangerous. Even water if you consume too much of it will kill you. To take this analogy further, government regulations are like someone sticking a hose in your mouth and forcing you to drink. If the more water you drink, gives them more of what they want, they will always kill you before they are satisfied. My solution to the problem is to keep the hose out of my mouth.

Wait, what? Everything is subject to some government regulation, otherwise there'd be way more corporate hit men, among other serious issues. All markets are at least subject to the basic regulations, like no stealing, killing etc. Further, you've characterized at least one situation (the electrical grid) where government (I assume that's what you mean by a not for profit company that was required to charge everyone the same rate, I'd be fascinated to know how else that could come about) regulation would be necessary for competition among power plants. Now sure, if you bring government into everything, your metaphorical hose-drowning moment, we'd have problems, I couldn't agree more. All I'm taking from this is government is good when you have just enough of it, but too much or too little is bad. Well, yeah.

So I can choose not to purchase steel from plants that pollute or purchase items made using the steel from those plants. The next question is how will I know that, simple someone will most likely sell me, or if they are generous provide me, with that information for free. If enough people make those choices then the steel plants that pollute will either change their ways, or have to close.

I don't entirely disagree with this premise, I do think that to some extent, corporations respond to consumer pressure, I just think that it's often far easier for them to deceive people than actually improve. The only way you're going to get a company to disclose information that will hurt their bottom line (like the fact that the reason their steel is so cheap is that it comes from China, where there is no law against dumping all the by-products in the river) is to force them. If this someone in your example goes to a steel mill and says "Hi there, I'd like to come inside and see what you're up to" they are going to be told to fornicate themselves, unless there is a law saying the company has to let them in. If the government itself for whatever reason doesn't have inspectors of some sort to assess the quality of both the means of production and final output of a company, then some other quality enforcing entity must. There are items that are simple enough for the public to provide this mechanism, however, there are a much larger number of products that need professional attention. For example, presumably you don't have a problem with the FDA inspecting all the food you make to ensure food producers are following safe and healthy production methods. That's a form of government regulation, do we now have to add food production to the number of items that are not suitable for free markets? What exactly are we going to have left under this definition?

It goes on and on but I'm getting tired frankly. I think I can summarize the differences of our opinions with a sports analogy. Picture a game of football. Sports are competitive right? Nothing but pure competition here. How do we know? Well there are referees on the field, making sure the rules are enforced, it's a good clean game. But wait! One team seems to win all the time. It is discovered that it's because that team was all on steroids! Now is it competitive? What if one team has a much larger budget than all the others and can therefore afford to hire away all the better players? What if a couple teams are fixing their games to make money off gamblers? The list of ways there could be corruption go on and on. What you need is an external source of order. Getting back to the real word, that enforcing role is the government. Now there are a number of ways this can run into trouble. Freddy's examples mostly center around the government making it's own team, and giving them special treatment, or co-opting an existing team and doing the same thing. My examples refer more to the sort of within the rules game fixing I spoke of, steroids, throwing the game, etc. What we both want to see is a level playing field where what actually matters to people, be it a good clean sports competition or a responsibly produced, environmentally friendly, affordable bar of soap is most likely to be produced. The way I see things the more present and powerful danger to us and our likelihood of achieving these goals comes from corporations, but don't take that to mean I have much love for our government either. The fact is though, government has a larger built in mechanism for public accountability than corporations do, and what I really want to do, is put the power in the hands of people.

Two final notes. Please don't take my flippant manner of writing as an attempt to belittle, it's just how I write. I don't want to cause offense just because you're not familiar with my style. Second, while I'm not a communist, I do feel compelled to reply briefly to this statement:

That leads us into the third point I want to make. If what you truly believed work so well, why was the former Soviet Union not a paradise. The economy was completely regulated, there should of been no corruption or pollution, and everybody should of had all that they wanted or needed. But that was not the case, was it. Conditions in the Soviet Union were bad and still are bad. Pollution was worst there, then in the west, and corruption was the norm in the government.

As I said, I'm not a communist, but here are a couple posts from a communist that I highly respect that address your point:

Theory and practice
Communism and bad shit

I know you said you weren't interested in carrying on the conversation, and of course that's entirely your right, but I will say that I'd be happy to continue discussing things if you want to.

The Eurobounce

2009-08-16T10:39:00.000-07:00

An astute reader (my dad), has pointed me to something that provides some perspective on the faster recovery of at least Germany compared to the US. I don't know what this says about France and Britain but it goes to show that in something as complex as economics, it's easy to find a few numbers that will make it look like whatever you want is happening, so be careful.

More clarification on the eurobounce from Krugman. Looks like Germany might not be as much of an example as I'd like but from what I gather France is still doing rather well.

Framing

2009-08-16T10:34:00.000-07:00

-Idle thought:

When people discuss bias or discrimination in standardized testing, there's a common example they use:

Five birds are sitting in a tree, you shoot one, how many are left?

The idea is that a child educated in a Western school will respond that there are four birds, the "correct" answer. However, a child from another country, without formalized education, will answer zero, if you shoot one bird, the others will fly off.

I wonder if they way we spend at least 12 years of our lives answering questions of that nature has anything to do with the way we accept the official framing of issues, such as left/right, communist/capitalist, right/wrong

The free market strikes again!

2009-08-14T11:35:00.001-07:00

So Germany and France are recovering from the recession faster than Britain or America. They also fell into it later than their English speaking compatriots. How's that "flexible labour force" and low taxes scheme working for you free market geniuses? Keynes would be smiling

Health Care and market failure

2009-08-12T14:10:00.000-07:00

Mozglubov has handed off a post to me for commentary. In particular I've been asked to address the comments of one Freddy Boisseau, regarding problems with "socialized" medicine. Mr. Boisseau is a strong proponent of the free market model, stating "[a]ll my reading of history, philosophy, and economics show me that a system not based on free markets is doomed to fail."
This is a pretty broadly worded statement, presumably our sewer systems are not to work on free market principles, similarly I don't suppose he's suggesting that our democracy should allow the buying and selling of votes. Admittedly, I'm being deliberately sarcastic and taking his claim out of context, but I do have a serious point. As mentioned in a previous post, "free market" is in our modern vernacular, a pretty much empty phrase used to mean things we like, it's sort of like "freedom" and "democracy", technically is has a real meaning but you'd never know from the way it's used.

Without focusing on health care per se, let's look at some areas where a market solution just isn't feasible, and even most right wing Austrian school economists will agree.

Wikipedia has a very informative article on market failure, I'll use their definitions of the three forms of market failure, and then my own interpretation of what that means

First, agents in a market can gain market power, allowing them to block other mutually beneficial gains from trades from occurring. This can lead to inefficiency due to imperfect competition, which can take many different forms, such as monopolies, monopsonies, cartels, or monopolistic competition, if the agent does not implement perfect price discrimination. In a monopoly, the market equilibrium will no longer be Pareto optimal. The monopoly will use its market power to restrict output below the quantity at which the MSB is equal to the MSC of the last unit produced, so as to keep prices and profits high.

Basically there are situations where one player gets their foot in the door early, for whatever reason, and uses that advantage to forever squeeze out any potential rivals. Not a lot of incentive to improve service in any way when you're the only game in town right? There are various types of monopolies, some revolve around natural physical limitations. For instance, the electrical grid. It doesn't make any sense to run 4 or 5 sets of redundant wires to each home and business just to give people a choice. Whichever company gets the cash to set up the first grid will be the defacto controller of that resource. In a situation such as this, there has to be some form of external regulation (the way we work things now pretty much the only option is the state) in order to prevent rabid price gouging. Another, more insidious way you can get a monopoly is the ol' Bill Gates approach. What you do here is, get a product with enough market share and a premium on compatibility, and it's pretty much certain that nobody will go with an alternative. This is why, despite linux recently becoming better than windows in pretty much every conceivable way, and FREE(!!), people still buy windows.

Second, the actions of agents can have externalities, which are innate to the methods of production, or other conditions important to the market. For example, when a firm is producing steel, it absorbs labor, capital and other inputs, it must pay for these in the appropriate markets, and these costs will be reflected in the market price for steel. If the firm also pollutes the atmosphere when it makes steel, however, and if it is not forced to pay for the use of this resource, then this cost will be borne not by the firm but by society. Hence, the market price for steel will fail to incorporate the full opportunity cost to society of producing. In this case, the market equilibrium in the steel industry will not be optimal. More steel will be produced than would occur were the firm to have to pay for all of its costs of production. Consequently, the MSC of the last unit produced will exceed its MSB.

This one is pretty easy to understand, and again, it should be apparent that at least the way our society is set up, the only entity powerful enough to enforce externality costs is the state.

Finally, some markets can fail due to the nature of certain goods, or the nature of their exchange. For instance, goods can display the attributes of public goods or common-pool resources, while markets may have significant transaction costs, agency problems, or informational asymmetry. In general, all of these situations can produce inefficiency, and a resulting market failure.

This is the kind of catch all section. The issues of information asymmetry are obvious. If I'm selling you a car that looks great but I know to be a polished turd, we have an information asymmetry and I'm in a position to rip you off. Public goods or common-pool resources are also difficult to incorporate into a market system. It's difficult for a company to sell clean air, for example. Why would I pay them to clean the air when I can just let other people do it and enjoy the benefits anyway? This is the same for any sort of environmental restoration. Unless some external player like the state has imposed a penalty of some sort (there's those externalities again), a profit maximizing company has no incentive to compensate people for whatever negative externalities are incorporated in their process, be it ground water pollution, simply being very noisy, or any other number of things.

So this is a fairly generalized outline of market failures and why a free market solution is often just an empty buzz word. On a final note I'd like to point out what I see as a consistent failure of critics of socialized solutions. There is constantly this trope about the lazy government bureaucrat, who only cares about collecting his government salary and going home. This is contrasted with the sleek, profit maximizing corporate employee, who, through the miracles of capitalism will attend your every need for a reasonable price. My question is, have you ever worked for a corporation? I will admit that government employees are not always the bright smiling shiny people I'd like them to be, but the lady at the post office is just as attentive as the man working at fed ex. Have you ever been on the internet? Do you know how many websites there are out there devoted to staving off boredom at work? Surely you don't think those are only patronized by state employees. Of course government is full of corruption and waste, it's full of people, who tend to do corrupt wasteful things from time to time. Honestly though, what makes anyone think the corporate world is any better? Is it the lack of accountability? The reduced transparency? In this day of Enron and Worldcom, of banks basically holding the world economy hostage for taxpayer bailouts, can we stop pretending that "the market" is some incredible panacea?

If you want to design a system that works you have to look at who has the power, who wants what and how to make the rules such that the maximum amount of people benefit with the least amount of loopholes. Sometimes the regulatory power of the state is necessary, sometimes it's an unnecessary complication that promotes inefficiency and corruption, but you have to look at the whole system. Government regulating the price of toothpaste? Bad. Government regulating companies to pay for the environmental damage they cause? Good.

There's a host of topics I could jump to from here, game theory, health care in particular, the evils of corporations, the evils of government, etc. Perhaps Freddy has something to discuss? Please leave suggestions

International trade

2009-07-30T12:27:00.000-07:00

Mozglubov has sent me another topic request:

Other than the disparity in the price of labour and access to certain agricultural or raw resources, why is international trade such a huge issue? Doesn't it add a great deal of unnecessary expense? I mean, Germany is the largest exporter and second-largest importer of goods in the world - that just seems strange. Why not keep some of their goods domestic, and import less? That would seem like it ought to save money.

There are two answers I can provide to this, one is the classical explanation, which is explanatory particularly with regard to trade among developed nations, and the more real world, free market = stealing answer, which is what I regard to be primarily happening in the developing world.

The classical economic logic behind trade rests on a concept called comparative advantage. What that means is that two people (or countries, companies, entities) will gain from trading goods, even if one of them is better at creating either of those goods than the other person. A few examples should help clarify:

On an individual level, let's say that two people, Bob and Jim can either spend all day making bread or cheese. In one day, Bob can make 20 loaves of bread, or 10 bricks of cheese, whereas in a day Jim can make either 10 loaves of bread or 8 bricks of cheese. In absolute terms Bob can make more of either product than Jim in a day, so why should he trade with him? Let's look at the numbers. Say Bob and Jim both want bread and cheese, so they split their days equally between the two tasks. This works out to Bob making 10 loaves of bread and 5 bricks of cheese, with Jim making 5 loaves of bread and 4 bricks of cheese. Now say that they both just worked at creating the item they were best at producing, and exchanged them afterwords. This results in Bob making 20 loaves of bread and Jim making 8 bricks of cheese. In the original example, between them Bob and Jim produced 15 loaves of bread and 9 bricks of cheese, under this new system we have a total of 20 loaves of bread and 8 bricks of cheese. That works out to 5 additional loaves of bread for only one brick of cheese lost. Given that it takes either person much more time to make 5 loaves of bread than 1 brick of cheese, their total amount of goods produced is greater than anything they could have achieved individually, you can play around with the numbers to get slightly different outcomes but the general rule is if everyone can just focus on producing the good they're best at, relative to everyone else, there will be more goods to go around. This of course doesn't address how the surplus should be distributed and in the real world there are frictional costs to trade, primarily transportation, but also tariffs and other considerations that can eat away at the surplus.

Using countries as an example, let's say Canadians want bananas. Now we could technically grow them in Canada, but we'd have to build some pretty intense greenhouses and employ various other resource intensive means to create an appropriate environment. Alternatively, we could find a country that's great for growing bananas, say, Jamaica, and offer to trade them bananas for something that we're better at producing than they are, say, wheat, or electronic goods.

Now, in countries that are on relatively equal terms with regard to power, this classical model is actually pretty accurate and does realize gains for those who participate in trade. However, there are all sorts of ways to make something that you call trade work more like imperialism. The easiest way to do this is to offer developing nations loans that are only good for items or services purchased from the donor country. This is an easy way to make subsidies for favoured industries look like international benevolence. If you do it right, the economic gains the developing nation realizes should only be great enough to pay off the interest on the loan they received, but not the principle, thus placing them permanently in debt and allowing the donor country to siphon off all the excess value of whatever projects they already got paid to implement indefinitely.

Of course, on a topic as big and complex as this I'm skimming over a whole lot of details. Requests for clarification or helpful comments on where I was unclear or incorrect are welcome and encouraged

Poison the Well

2009-07-30T10:13:00.001-07:00

I saw Poison the Well last night, for the first time in about four years and they rocked my face off.

Folk Fest

2009-07-30T10:01:00.001-07:00

Last weekend I volunteered at and attended the Calgary Folk Music Festival for the first time. It was awesome. Pretty much the entire show is volunteer run. There's a few paid organizers at the top I understand but beyond that virtually the entire thing is based on volunteer labour. That's cool for a number of reasons, it got me into the show in exchange for a little work (I washed pots) instead of money that I need for school, but more importantly it made for much happier and friendly event staff than I've ever seen at a show, security included. Finally it demonstrated the ability of people to come together and organize something awesome, without financial gain as the main objective. In terms of environmental impact, the show also really impressed me. For food you gave a $2 deposit for a real plate, which you brought back when you were done eating to get your deposit back, a simple, convenient way to reduce waste. There were compost bins everywhere for all the food waste, along with napkins, and even the cutlery was somehow biodegradable (and actually a little better quality than your average plastic picnic cutlery). I haven't even mentioned the music yet. It was awesome, particularly Iron and Wine, who I will close this post with a song, a fantastic cover of "such great heights" that he opened his set with.

When is “The Free Market” not just a euphemism for stealing?

2009-07-10T18:21:00.000-07:00

I had this question put to me a while ago by Mozglubov and promised that I would blog a response. Here is my, rather late I'm afraid, reply.

Perhaps the best way to reply is to characterize a theoretical, ideal “free market” and then look at where real world examples fall short, or fail completely. In a perfect free market, all concerned parties would have the same amount of pertinent information relating to whatever transaction they were carrying out, and that information would include all the information that would be relevant. Additionally there would be no external coercion or assistance for any involved parties. I might be missing something but I think that's a fairly complete list of what you'd need for an ideal market transaction. It's pretty theoretical though, let's look at a real example. Say you want to buy an apple. You go to the store and you see an apple that you know is of good quality, you see the price is the same as or better than in other locations and you pay cash for it, receiving the exact apple you expected to, it's delicious. That's a fairly trivial example, but it characterizes a reasonably free transaction. There are, of course all sorts of problems and assumptions, even with this example. For instance, who says the price of apples at all the other stores is what you should be paying? Perhaps they've all banded together into some manner of apple cartel, and are artificially inflating the cost of apples. Or maybe the apple only looks to be good quality, the example assumes that you are qualified to judge the apple, for flavor, nutrition, and any other pertinent considerations.

The most common way to create a situation that you can sell as “free”, but is in fact stealing to some extent, is to create some external advantage or disadvantage and impose it on one party. For example, say two grain growing countries are trying to sell their product on the international market. If one country subsidizes their farmers, both directly and indirectly through things like providing roads and railways to transport their product on, who do you think will be able to sell grain for cheaper? Any time there is an imbalance of power or information between parties in a transaction, there is the opportunity for one side to disadvantage the other.

Shared items

2009-05-12T14:37:00.000-07:00

I've long espoused the many qualities of google reader, and rss in general. With that in mind may I direct your attention to the sidebar, where items that come into my reader that I found particularly interesting are shared. I apologize for the lack of posts lately, I have a few in mind. In the meantime there's some reading

On Torture

2009-04-24T10:45:00.000-07:00

Republican Senator Arlen Specter:

"If there is evidence of criminality, then the Attorney-General has the full authority and should prosecute it," he said yesterday in a statement. "But going after the prior administration sounds like something they do in Latin America in banana republics."

That's because it's usually only in banana republics that the executive branch is so wildly and obviously corrupt that such measures are necessary. We didn't have to indict Paul Martin for violating the Geneva Convention BECAUSE HE DIDN'T. Just like most western leaders. Congratulations Arlen, you've compared GWB to some banana republic dictator, I think the comparison is a lot more apt than you would have hoped.

*EDIT* I should have read the whole piece before making this post, there's more stupidity afoot.

"This idea of looking at the lawyers who gave the legal advice would be a nightmare for America," Republican Senator Lindsay Graham told Fox News. "Who would serve in the future as a lawyer knowing that your legal advice in hindsight could put you in jail?"

Or, who would give legal advice that they knew violated international law if they knew it could put them in jail? Man, that would be just awful eh?

More from the article

Perhaps the people who authorized the program should be held accountable, even if that means charging Mr. Bush and former vice-president Dick Cheney.

But not only would bringing criminal charges against a former president ignite a political firestorm certain to eclipse Watergate, senior Democrats might also have to be arrested because they were among the congressional leaders who were briefed on the program in 2002.

Oh no! You mean we'd have to hold EVERYONE accountable for TORTURING PEOPLE?!?!?!! What kind of rinky dink operation are we running here? No no, an issue like torture you only bring up to attack your political rivals, not because it's TORTURE!

Majority Leader Harry Reid, disagrees.

"I think it would be very unwise, from my perspective, to start having commissions, boards, tribunals, until we find out what the facts are," he told reporters. The Democrats must cope with a much more slender majority in the Senate than is the case in the House.

How exactly do you propose to get these facts Mr. Reid? Do you propose they come to you in a dream or something? I know! Why don't we set up a comission! We could get everyone together and task them with finding out what the facts are! Oh, you're right, too soon, let's find out what the facts are before we find out what the facts are.

Holy crap folks, the de facto leader of the free world authorized torture and everyone is acting like we should just leave it alone because it's "divisive". Talk about losing whatever remnants of a moral high ground you had.

Priorities

2009-04-18T06:20:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the lack of posts lately, finals and all that you know. Soon enough I should be in a better position to write, although by then the weather will be good and I may not feel like it, I do have a couple posts planned for when things get less crazy. Here's a quick one though.
First, a quote from this article

Should we stay, fighting a potentially un-winnable war, which has already cost the lives of 117 Canadian soldiers, in a pre-Industrial tribal society where the rule of law is not even a concept, let alone a functioning system? And yet, after Rwanda, Ethiopia and Darfur, can we turn away from the suffering of other people?

News flash: Darfur is still going on. Part of the reason we're not in Darfur is that all our military capacity is tied up in the middle east. Saying we have to be in Afghanistan after our failings in Darfur is therefore somewhat disingenuous, as is most wartime coverage I suppose.

Break the cycle

2009-03-31T06:31:00.001-07:00

Fly me to the moon

2009-03-30T17:05:00.000-07:00

I imagine most people by now have seen this image or something similar with the same slogan. While I understand, and for the most part agree with the sentiment, I do think there's a more accurate way to phrase it. I'd replace both "science" and "religion" with "western imperialism".
While science was certainly the means by which rockets were shot into space, the reason the mission received the funding, research, and overall effort and attention came about because of the cold war. While I'm sure many, if not all of both the Russian and American scientists working on their respective projects were dedicated to science and at least as interested in furthering our understanding of the universe as they were of beating their rivals, the reason the powers that be and society at large supported them was more political.
The situation is similar with 9-11. While the rhetoric used is coloured with religious references, and it's certainly accurate to characterize the perpetrators of the attacks as Islamic fundamentalists or religious fanatics the underlying rationale is secular. Reading Bin Laden's fatwa against America there's a whole lot of praising Allah, speaking of holy war and so on, but the actual grievances have much less to do with our freedoms or being heretics than they do with military bases in the holy land, and western powers fucking over Islamic nations dating back to the Sykes-Picot agreement.
I guess the point behind this is, if you're really an atheist, then to some extent it's silly to blame religion for things. Sure people say they're doing things for their God, in the name of their God, because their God commands it or whatever, but an atheist knows they're really doing it for themselves. Enron employees who committed acts that they might have recognized as immoral were they not surrounded by a culture that condoned it are in a similar position to a religious person practicing a religious right that outsiders would consider abhorrent.

Ear Candy: A Static Lullaby - Toxic

2009-03-28T10:22:00.001-07:00

Oh how I fiend for this record, and this song in particular

Protests

2009-03-26T08:55:00.000-07:00

I've been to two protests in recent times. The first was for George Warcriminal Bush, on March 17 and the second was a counter protest to an Aryan Guard white pride parade on the 21st.
Bush chose Calgary as his first international speaking forum since his clusterfuck of a presidency and I felt it was important to be there to give him an appropriate welcome. Unfortunately I had a research report due about the time the protest was due to start, so I missed a lot of the festivities. I arrived after the attendees had already been ushered inside, so I didn't get to heckle them at all, and I'm sure almost nobody saw Bush himself. I did get to witness some good chanting, people (including some adorable small children) throwing shoes at a huge print of George's face, a woman dressed as the infamous abu ghraib prisoner standing on a milk carton, and someone with an intense looking shoe cannon dressed as a Guantanamo inmate. There were also a ton of cops, apparently a few people got arrested before I showed up and I can't comment on how they were treated, while I was there the police behaved quite well, except for their failure to arrest the war criminal inside, which is probably a bit much to ask. There were some frustrations of course, the preponderance of 9-11 truthers and other such conspiracy theorists didn't help the legitimacy of the protest in my opinion. There's also the fact that George isn't in any position of power anymore, and even when he was he didn't seem to give a good goddamn about protests, so besides feeling good and being fun the protest probably didn't accomplish a whole lot. Oh well.
The next protest was a lot bigger and a lot more intense. Every year on the UN's international day to end racial discrimination, a racist group called the Aryan Guard organizes a white pride parade. Every year this is opposed by anti-racist protesters and after hearing about the event at the Bush protest I knew I had to attend. The rally (that is the anti racist counter protest) began at 10am in front of city hall. I arrived with my roommate around 11 and the place was already packed, at least 100 people (don't take my numbers too seriously, I'm bad at this) were already gathered with various signs and flags. I had a home made sign with some lyrics from the propagandhi classic “the only good fascist is a very dead fascist”. The event was pretty upbeat when I arrived, lots of people chanting, lots of cars passing by honking in support. There were some cops across the street keeping an eye on things and shooting photos and videos but they were a shadow of the police presence we'd encounter once the Aryan Guard showed up. After some delay, around 2:30 we got word that the Guard had arrived downtown and was beginning their march. People immediately set off in the direction they'd been spotted down Stephen Avenue. Some people set off at a steady march but the majority were closer to a dead run, tearing down the street, flanked by cops and shouting anti racist slogans, I must confess it was quite exhilarating. Tensions escalated significantly when we actually encountered the parade. A whole bunch of bike cops were using themselves and their bikes to form a makeshift barrier between us and the Aryans. I'd received word ahead of times that in past rallies the Aryans had taken pictures of counter protesters and harassed them after so I was sporting a bandanna provided by the anti racists and some sunglasses. The sides started hurling various insults and chants back and forth, along with some projectiles, although overall I must say that the news reports I read on the topic made that aspect seem a lot more extreme than it was.
Every so often for reasons that I couldn't ascertain the guard would move along, flanked by cops on all sides and everyone else would scatter trying to find the quickest route to block them off. Maybe a block or more away we'd cut them off again and the now familiar song and dance of mutual insults and threats would resume. I didn't keep close track of time but I'd say this went on for maybe an hour and a half. Finally I'm told the Aryans got on a bus and went back to their caves, however I was en route to their new location and didn't actually see them leave so I can't comment on whether it was a charter or city bus, there were rumours that the cops had paid for a bus to remove them, I can't comment on the accuracy of those statements. After the guard departed the approximately 300 strong anti racist protesters marched back to city hall chanting “Peace and Love” the whole way, we got a lot of approving nods and thumbs up from bystanders on the way back. There was even a wedding party we walked by and most of the protesters shouted some manner of congratulations on the way by. After we got back to city hall I left so I can't say what all happened after that, I imagine people hung out for a little while and then went home.
Overall I must say the cops did a commendable job in a very tricky situation. They were standing between two groups of very pissed off people and if they hadn't been there I can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that there would have been a very serious battle. I don't imagine they liked protecting the guard (our sheer numbers pretty much guaranteed that any fight would have ended badly for the guard, although I suspect that their side was probably more heavily armed and experienced with fighting, our side outnumbered them by at least 10 to 1) particularly the non-white cops. Protesters on our side heckled them pretty mercilessly, telling them to stop protecting racists and urging them to step aside. I read that a total of 3 people have complained about being mistreated by the police since the incident, 2 of ours and one guard member. I think my roommate actually has footage on his phone of one of the incidents happening. The story mentioned a woman being struck in the head and we both saw a rather large cop shove a woman in the head quite hard. We're planning to look into this more and submit the footage as evidence if appropriate.
Finally I'd like to discuss the makeup of the protesters on our side and also what I consider the rationale behind participating. In a democratic society such as ours it's not the role of the police to repress things like white pride parades. Should they turn into hate crimes or something that's another matter of course, but at the point where it's just some very misguided rednecks walking around with flags that say “white pride worldwide” I think that falls well enough under freedom of expression that I wouldn't want to set a precedent of allowing cops to suppress it. That is by no means suggesting that such actions should be endorsed in any way. In fact when one group is using their right to freely express their views that others consider abhorrent, the only legitimate action is to respond in kind, preferably with greater numbers, and that's exactly what was done. Just because the cops don't have the right to stop people from marching through my city inciting hate and intimidating non-whites doesn't mean that ordinary citizens have to stand idly by and permit it, active opposition is essential. Finally I'd like to address some dismissive comments I saw on the ctv comments page for this news story, claiming that the anti-racist activists were nothing but a bunch of thugs, anarchists and communists. I'm sure there were some people in our group who wanted to fight the guard, I have to admit I wouldn't have been very upset to see any of those pricks get a good punch to the mouth. That said they were in the minority and I actually overheard one individual expressing a desire to fight but an understanding that we couldn't lower ourselves to that and that the higher peaceful road was appropriate, several others nearby agreed with him. There was also a substantial communist and anarchist presence. Frankly I think the fact that not a single mainstream political party was willing in any way to express solidarity with our movement while anarchists and communists were actively involved in combating discrimination says more negative things about our democratic representatives than it does anarchists or communists.

Inconsequential rant

2009-03-20T12:48:00.001-07:00

Attention individuals who have those stupid roller suitcases with telescoping handles and castor wheels (even worse if it's just a little caddy to hold your handbag), I hate you. Seriously, pick up your shit and walk with it, you are inconveniencing everyone in a 10 meter radius of you. You have arms for a reason.

Love Cornucrapia (and no doubt many other commuters)

Behavioral Economics Experiment Rd. 2

2009-03-18T12:55:00.000-07:00

I waited too long before doing this post to get as detailed as the last one, but it was still an interesting enough experience that I thought I'd relate it. The majority of the experiment was the same, same room, even one of the people had been in the experiment last time with me. Once again there were two teams who never met and we were asked to solve a series of questions as a team. This time it was word jumbles and number sequences, both of them quite simple. The nature of this game was similar to the first, in that you had an initial holding of 10 dollars that you could contribute to a pot to be multiplied. The difference was, whereas before there was only one other person contributing to the pot, in this case there were 5 people from one team and 1 person from the other, all putting in money and having it divided equally between all parties. As a final twist you got to guess what the average contribution of the team of 5 would be and if you were within a dollar, you won a dollar. Additionally, assuming you weren't the 1 person from the other team you got to guess how much they would contribute, again winning a dollar if you were within a dollar of their actual contribution. All told it was rewarding to see how actual economic research is conducted and it was interesting analyzing the differences between the two experiments to try and figure out what sort of things the researcher was likely looking for. Making an easy $20 doesn't hurt my feelings either.

The Dirty Fucking Hippies were right!

2009-03-18T09:53:00.001-07:00

Chomsky on the Financial Crisis

2009-02-28T11:23:00.000-08:00

Excellent as always, here's a brief comment from Noam Chomsky on the financial crisis. Originally found on againstpolitics:

It is a worldwide crisis and it is very serious. It is striking that the ways that Western countries are approaching the crisis [entirely contradict] the model that they enforce on the Third World when there is a crisis. So when Indonesia has a crisis, [or] Argentina and everyone else, they are supposed to raise interest rates very high and privatize the economy, and cut down on public spending, measures like that. In the West, it is the exact opposite: lower interest rates to zero, move towards nationalization if necessary, pour money into the economy, have huge debts. That is exactly the opposite of how the Third World is supposed to pay off its debts. That this seems to pass without comment is remarkable.

Tragic Irony

2009-02-17T17:39:00.000-08:00

I have no words.

Ear Candy - Bon Iver

2009-02-17T15:07:00.000-08:00

I just got this album, listened to it a few times already today. I don't know why, I'm in a folky mood lately. Here's skinny love off of for Emma, forever ago

Once Upon a Time

2009-02-16T11:45:00.000-08:00

I might have to start reading Once Upon a Time regularly again.

It can be suggested that if World War I is largely forgotten, this is not only because it took place further back in time than World War II. ... The fundamental reason is no doubt that the First World War was the epitome of a totally absurd war. There was no valid reason to wage it in the first place, and the "victory" only gave birth to new problems. ... In contrast, thanks to Hitler's unilateral aggression, the Second World War remains the most justifiable of all wars, at least for the countries he attacked. As a result, constant reference to the Second World War is used to strengthen the case for war, whereas lucid reflection on the First World War would rather be an incitement to pacifism. This partly explains the difference between the way the two are treated. -- Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War, pp. 108-112

It's an absolutely valid point. WWI was completely absurd, nothing about it, including the negotiations at the end of it made any sense. If our history emphasized it rather than WWII you would find far less favorable historical comparisons to justify any current aggressions.

Behavioral Economics Experiment

2009-02-12T11:36:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I participated in an experiment. It was fairly interesting so I thought I'd describe it here. I was part of a group of 7 people, team 2, there was also a team one that we were kept separate from. First we performed what I can only assume was a team building exercise where as a group we had to match celebrity stage names with their real names. If we did well enough we were told we would get $7 each. After that was done we were all set up at a computer station and the other team was brought in behind a screen, so we couldn't see or interact with them. After that we played 11 rounds of a game. The premise of the game was fairly simple, you were randomly selected to play first or second and randomly matched against someone either on your team or the other, the only info presented was the order you'd go in and the team other other person. Each player receives $10 and whoever goes first has the option of giving the second player anywhere from $0-$10. The catch is that any money given to the second player is multiplied by 3, so if I went first and gave $5 to the second player, they would receive $15. The second player then has the option to decide how much, if any money they would like to send back to the first player. I generally seemed to be picked as first player and whenever I was I gave the full $10. Most of the time I got $15 back, which isn't exactly an equitable payment since they other player got $25, but on the other hand I never really got burned at it either. Whenever I was second player I just gave back an amount that would make us receive an equal amount. In the end I got $5 for showing up, $7 for getting the quiz right and the winnings of one randomly selected round, in my case $13. So all in all I got $25 to play a game for an hour, pretty good deal, I'll definitely participate again.

Ear Candy: Frightened Rabbit

2009-02-12T07:39:00.000-08:00

Oh how I love some good indie folk. These guys remind me a bit of Glen Hansard in Once, another incredible artist. Here's Modern Leper, enjoy

A logical measured response

2009-02-12T07:36:00.000-08:00

Poor Phelps. I hear he lost his Kellogs sponsorship too, what a waste.
South Carolina Lawyer says cops making arrests in Phelps case
For a more light hearted take on the issue, one of my favorite webcomics, The Pain weighs in

The Marshall Plan

2009-02-11T10:28:00.000-08:00

I've had a request to write up what courses I'm taking at university and what I think of them. I think this is a capital idea, not to mention I want to encourage topic requests. They will follow shortly, but before I do I want to get this rather lengthy post out of the way so as not to push them off the front page immediately (some people are apparently not using rss to read this blog for some unfathomable reason).

Here's an essay I wrote on the Marshall plan and the origins of development studies, I'm actually pretty proud of it and think the material is interesting, hope you agree. I didn't bother to include the footnotes because it's already quite lengthy, anyone wanting to review my references leave a comment and I'll post them

The latter half of the 20th century was a turbulent time. The aftermath of two world wars was still acutely felt and America found itself a lone super power. The world was made additionally complicated by the power struggle between America and its western allies against Communism's challenges to capitalist orthodoxy. This conflict between the two opposing world views quickly spilled beyond the borders of the principle nations to be fought by proxy for the hearts and minds of former colonies and other small nations. It is in the context of these great struggles that the modern discipline known as development studies and its theory of modernization took form. The purpose of this essay is to examine the political and economic circumstances of the early post World War Two era and how they came to shape development studies in general and modernization theory in particular.

Before the factors relevant to their formation can be discussed, it is necessary to provide a working definition of Development Studies and Modernization Theory in particular. Development Studies is a broad field of study, concerning itself with the improvement of the material, social and political conditions of marginalized peoples. The first comprehensive theory within this field, and the primary subject of inquiry to follow is known as Modernization Theory. Modernization Theory has several defining aspects. The first is a view of historical progress as a linear one from savagery and underdevelopment, progressing to civilization and development. Implicit in this view is that the end result of this modernization will take the form of societies very similar to western liberal democracies. Second is the view of the nation state as the primary unit for understanding development or underdevelopment and also the level at which changes should be made and progress can occur. The underlying assumption of this view is that causes of poverty and underdevelopment are internal to the nation state, brought about by primitive infrastructure, organizations and culture. External factors such as colonialism or other forms of external exploitation are not considered. Third and finally there is the view that since the west has achieved the end goal of development, other nations can be elevated to an equivalent level if they can be provided with the same institutions, industries and technologies of the west. This view leaves little room for participation from the societies in question, as they are not in a position to understand western culture the way development planners are. It also suggests that by remaking institutions in the mould of western ones and providing capital and technology, a traditional society will be transformed into a modern, western style one in a relatively short time frame. With these definitions in mind it is now possible to examine the historical context and causes that led to their creation.

It would be inaccurate to claim that the material conditions of the former colonies and other impoverished nations had not been studied prior to the end of the Second World War. Woodrow Wilson and his 14 points were instrumental in invoking the principles of self determination for all countries, including the former colonies. This was certainly a precursor to any program with the aim of improving the condition of their inhabitants, rather than the interests of colonial masters or foreign investors. Research was also done on the economic systems of former colonies. For instance the acclaimed economist John Maynard Keynes discussed the currency of India in his first book in 1913. In spite of these important contributions, it was only in the era closely following the Second World War, characterized by Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and the looming Cold War that development studies came about as a discipline in its own right.

The Bretton Woods system of monetary management was the result of a combined allied attempt, spearheaded by the United States to ensure stability and confidence in international trade. As a result of this system the American dollar, backed by the gold standard was established as the reserve currency of all international trade. The IMF and World bank were also created during the conference, designed to operate as holders of foreign reserves and lenders of last resort to offset the financial instability that had predominated the first half of the 20th century, particularly in the form of the great depression and world wars. These systems would prove profoundly significant to the operation and nature of development and modernization efforts, both among the powers that established them and for the impoverished nations. The Marshall Plan set the stage for the modernization projects that would follow it. Its success emboldened its architects to expand its same principles of aid tied to economic restructuring as a means of development to other nations struggling to succeed, unfortunately with less success than the original plan had enjoyed. Finally there was the Cold War, characterized by struggles between the western capitalist nations and the USSR and its communist satellites for world hegemony. Usually these conflicts, fought by proxy, created a sense of urgency to bring former colonies and other impoverished nations under the umbrella of capitalism, with economic aid and restructuring seen as the surest means to achieve those aims. In the following paragraphs each of these important factors will be analysed in detail to demonstrate their influence on the formation of modernization theory and development studies.

In light of the financial and economic turmoil that had characterized the early 20th century, world leaders felt it necessary to come together and establish an international system to stabilize world markets, and (they hoped) by extension international relations. This was the goal of the Bretton Woods Conference which took place even while World War II still raged. Bretton Woods brought together all 44 allied nations at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods to discuss a new international economic order. As a result of its military and economic advantage over the other nations, the conference was in large parts dominated by American interests. With their nations and economies ravaged by the war, even the mighty former empire of Britain was forced to subjugate its interests to those of the Americans, whose homeland had remained largely unscathed. The primary goal of Bretton Woods was to establish a fair basis of exchange, such that international trade would not be hampered by concerns over wildly fluctuating exchange rates or the ability of nations to make good on agreements. With this in mind the International Monetary Fund was established, to maintain a balance of currency to smooth over temporary trade imbalances without requiring nations to resort to deflationary tactics, and also to ensure stability of exchange rates against a gold standard. At this time the American dollar was the only gold backed currency, and so it became the default currency of exchange against which all other nations managed their exchange rates. The Bretton Woods planners also established the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, now better known as an institution of the World Bank. These institutions, originally conceived with the interests of the planning nations in mind, soon saw their mandate expanded to improve the condition of poor nations.

The first foray of these institutes into development planning and assistance began with a mission to Columbia in 1949. The mission eventually produced an exhaustive, 642 page report titled “The Basis of a development program for Columbia”. This report, beyond providing a roadmap for development in Columbia itself was seen as an important pilot project for further development projects, as Columbia was among the more advanced of the Banks underdeveloped members. The mission to Columbia was the start in a shift in priorities for the bank, away from stabilizing international trade among advanced western nations, and towards its current status as a lender and development planner to impoverished nations today.

The Marshall Plan was an American aid program, extended to Western Europe in the period following the end of the Second World War. It saw the allocation of $13 billion in aid over the period of 1948-1951. In many important respects, the Marshall Plan was the first, and arguably the most successful structural adjustment plan and it was as a result of the efficacy of its policies that later programs attempted to use its same principles in other regions of the world. While the actual aid itself was certainly a contributor to European recovery, allowing purchase of badly needed food and industrial supplies without upsetting export balances, the policy pronouncements tied to Marshall Plan aid were of even greater importance. Marshall Plan aid was distributed in such a manner as to allow the United States maximum leverage over the economies that received it. For every dollar of Marshall Plan aid received by a country, another dollar was required to be placed in a counterpart fund by the recipient nation, the allocation of which was subject to American approval. Thus for every dollar of aid given by Americans, two dollars of leverage were achieved. This leverage, in turn was used to ensure that the nations in question did not retreat into protectionist or centrally controlled economic systems, but instead employed market based, laissez faire solutions.

The methodology of infusions of capital tied to policy pronouncements set a precedent for development planners at the newly created World Bank and IMF when they began their own development projects. The goals of the Marshall plan, initially created with the people of war torn Europe in mind, seemed to beg to be exported to other marginalized areas of the globe. The following quote from George Marshall himself, stated in the context of revitalizing Europe, sounds exceptionally similar to the sort of pronouncements made by modernization theorists with regard to poor nations in more modern times

[T]he world of suffering people looks to us for leadership. Their thoughts, however, are not concentrated alone on this problem. They have more immediate and terribly pressing concerns where the mouthful of food will come from, where they will find shelter tonight, and where they will find warmth. Along with the great problem of maintaining the peace we must solve the problem of the pittance of food, of clothing and coal and homes. Neither of these problems can be solved alone.

In addition to the Marshall Plan and Bretton Woods institutes, which were primarily economic in nature, the political, military and ideological concerns the west felt with regard to the rise of communism and the looming Cold War were also of enormous importance in shaping the nature of development projects. Western powers, particularly the United States felt extremely threatened by the spread of Communism. This fear was characterized by American ambassador to India, Charles Bowes, in his reflection on the consequences of the cultural revolution in China and its implications for India and beyond.

If we lose India, as we have lost China, we shall certainly lose Southeast Asia with the repercussions running all the way through Africa. It is difficult under such circumstances to see how Japan could be held in line, and it would not be too long before we would find ourselves driven back into a "citadel"

This “Domino Theory”was not only applied to India, but all nations of the world not directly under the umbrella of either capitalist or communist orthodoxy and power. The concern was that the loss of one nation to communism could create a chain reaction in which other nations would topple, leaving western nations isolated in a communist world. The antidote to this dire prediction was seen to be development aid, modelled after the Marshall Plan and executed initially by American philanthropic organizations like the Ford Foundation and the MIT Center for International Studies. These two institutes, formed in the shadow of World War Two and the Marshall Plan, were intensely interested in exporting American values and economic systems to other nations, particularly those in southeast Asia. Among the luminaries of these organizations was Walt Rostow, who would go on to be seen as one of the founding fathers of modernization theory, particularly for his book “The Stages of Economic Growth: A non-communist manifesto”

American interest in development, particularly as it pertained to India and China was by no means confined to academic circles. John F. Kennedy, in his capacity as a Senator, teamed up with John Sherman Cooper, former ambassador to India to introduce the Kennedy-Cooper resolution to the senate. The resolution stated:

Resolved by the Senate(the House of Representatives concurring),that the Congress recognizes the importance of the economic developmentof the Republic of India to its people,to democratic values and institutions, and to peace and stability in the world. Consequently,it is the sense of the Congress that it is in the interest of the United States to join with other nations in providing support of the type, magnitude,and duration, adequate to assist India to complete successfully its current program for economic development
Having examined the preceding circumstances that led to what is now known as Modernization Theory, some common threads begin to present themselves. The first is the unparalleled influence the United States enjoyed and the steps it took to maintain and expand that influence. From this position of power and desire for even greater hegemony came all the other factors that would shape the world. Before the war had even ended America was leveraging its dominant position as the only industrialized nation largely unscathed by the war to ensure that policies preferential to it and its aims were enacted at Bretton Woods, thus providing it with exceptional influence in the flow of international capital. Shortly after the war this influence was further extended by the Marshall Plan. European nations, economies and industries ruined by the war were forced to adopt policies friendly to American interests, primarily in the form of liberalized trade regimes in exchange for desperately needed capital infusions and material goods. Having established dominance in international finance and achieved extensive influence over its allies in Europe, the next logical step to secure American influence was to ensure that the newly independent former colonies and other emerging nations subscribed to classical liberal economic orthodoxy. Given the culture of fear regarding the expansion of communism as a competing ideology and the already well established policies of economic assistance tied to institutional reform, the continuation of these policies globally seems almost inevitable in retrospect. While it would be overly cynical to say that the material improvement of conditions in developing nations was of no concern to early development planners, they certainly were lower in priority than goals relating to American dominance and preventing the spread of communism. In light of these priorities it is easier to understand why later thinkers from the developing nations felt it necessary to create their own alternatives to modernization theory. This is not to say that the actions of the individuals and organizations were completely self serving, they simply felt that the best way to improve the lot of people worldwide was for them to adopt the values and systems of America. The surest way to achieve this goal was through American dominance and the export of those values. This sentiment is apparent in the writing of Max Millikan and Walt Rostow in their highly influential policy document, “A proposal: Key to an Effective Foreign Policy”

[I]ncreasing the awareness elsewhere in the world that the goals, aspirations,and values of the American people are in large part the same as those of peoples in other countries; and ... developing viable energetic, and confident societies through the Free World. We believe, therefore, that such a program could be a principal and effective instrument in our efforts to produce political, social, and psychological results in the national interest

Writers block

2009-02-10T09:09:00.001-08:00

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Haven't had much to say on anything, anything original at least. Religion is for fools, politicians lie to you, people are stupid, sound familiar?

Maybe I'll throw up some more reviews in a while, I've been listening to a fair bit of good new music, any interest in that?

I bet he's got wicked lung capacity

2009-02-02T15:50:00.000-08:00

So now that one of the greatest athletes ever has admitted to smoking the reefer, can we stop acting like it's this big horrible drug and you'll never go anywhere in life if you use it?

Review: Indian edition

2009-01-26T13:17:00.000-08:00

I happened to consume two pieces of media in rapid succession that both dealt with India so I feel it's appropriate to combine them into one review.

The first is a book called "Train to Pakistan" by Khushwant Singh. The book details life in a small Indian village during the partition of India in 1947. I enjoyed the book equally for the story itself as well as the insight it offered into the circumstances of the partition. The story itself is fiction but from what I can ascertain the depiction of the events within it are fairly accurate representations of what actually happened. The book took me a little while to get into, while it's written in English there is still a great deal of non english terminology. Once you get used to it it adds a lot of flavour to the reading, but it does take a while to adjust, sort of like when you try and read Clockwork Orange. The focus of the book is very localized, concentrating on the events of one village, and only a handful of people in that village in particular, however from the context of what is going on in their lives and their discussions of the outside world a rich perspective on the whole of the partition is provided. It's a fairly short book and I highly recommend it to anyone curious about the partition of India who doesn't feel like just going on wikipedia.

The second is the movie "Slumdog Millionaire". It's the story of a young man from the slums of Mumbai who ends up winning the grand prize on the Indian version of "Who wants to be a millionaire?". Suspected of cheating he is interrogated as to how he knew all the answers and through this mechanic the story of his exceptionally difficult life is revealed. The movie is excellent, it's visually stunning with exceptionally colourful cinematography and the characters within it are very rounded and believable. This movie is certainly even less historical than the previously mentioned book but it does provide quite a bit of cultural flavour and regardless the story and acting are fantastic in their own right. Highly recommended.

Things that made my head spin today

2009-01-23T10:07:00.000-08:00

I was in political science today and we were having a discussion on the rule of law, among other things. The following comments make me wonder about my classmates. I'm paraphrasing of course but this is a fairly accurate representation of what was said (it only happened about a half hour ago)

"I don't think anyone is against freedom of speech or freedom of expression. When you speak of using soft power to convince people to come to our way of life who are you trying to convince? Doesn't everyone want these things?"
Well pretty much everyone, except, oh, this guy:He's probably the only one though.

Also stated: "I think we go too far with the rule of law, granting rights to everyone. If someone does something horrible like blow up a building and kill 200 people, why should we extend them any rights? Why should we give them a trial? If we're certain they've done this we shouldn't grant them any rights, they should just be executed."

I actually spoke out on this one. How do you propose to establish their guilt with any certainty without a trial? Are we simply to assume that their accusers are paragons of virtue? What's to stop me from accusing you of killing 200 babies? Such a crime surely doesn't require any trial, we should just kill anyone accused of committing it without any lengthy and expensive matters like a trial or evidence.

Did I have opinions this retarded when I was in my first year? I sure hope not, probably though.

Talk about not thinking your position through

2009-01-22T07:12:00.000-08:00

Abortion Protesters are asked "If abortion is made illegal, what should be the punishment for the women who have illegal abortions?" The answers are depressing. As an aside, while I don't think abortion should be illegal, if I were in their shoes I'd have responded something along the lines of requiring counseling for the women and punishment for the Doctors who provide the abortion. Since they seem unwilling to punish the women themselves (rightly so) that's about the only way I can see making illegal abortions carry any weight under the law. Sad that after upwards of 5 years of doing this work none of them had considered the full implications of what they wanted.

If you're too open minded your brains will fall out

2009-01-15T06:48:00.000-08:00

Holy crap.
I know we're supposed to respect other cultures and be tolerant of different lifestyles and in general I agree, but there is a line where universal humanist principles take precedence. Below is a forum question posted on my Anthropology class discussion board followed by some replies, presumably from students in the course. I've also included my response at the bottom. What's the scoop here? Am I an intolerant bigot or are these people bending way too far back in the name of tolerance?

Female genital mutilation (FGM) used to be, and often still is, referred to as 'female circumcision'. This latter term suggests that the operation is analogous to male circumcision, while in reality it is much more severe and can involve partial or complete removal of the external female genitalia. The practice is common in countries such as Sudan where over 90% of young girls may undergo the operation. Done usually for cultural or religious reasons, many mothers and grandmothers insist that their daughters and granddaughters are “cut”. Not undergoing the operation can have severe social consequences, including being unable to marry. The operation is often done crudely without anesthetic, however, and depending on the severity of the procedure, can have long term and severe mental and physical consequences. Is this practice absolutely wrong or must we accept that there are legitimate social reasons for it?

The word mutilation depicts a picture that is graphically intense, the first thought to come to mind is something wrong. If male circumcision was refered to as male penile mutilation it would also paint a horrible picture. If the procedure was done with surgically safe materials and in a germ free environment, then so be it. Cultures have there own practices and traditions, why regulate a tradition?, Christians take communion, if one was to say that the bread that is consumed causes allergic reactions to there skin does this mean that the practice shuold be abolished? edit: i also feel morally obliged to say that i am disgusted by this

Show Parent Post

To say the least this topic apalls and horrifies me to a very great extent. I am trying determinedly to show cultural tolerance in this regard, but it is fairly hard to seek reasons within our North American sheltered society, a society bound by the rights of minorities (particularly women and children), as to why any culture would knowing subject their people to such mutilation.

In saying that, however, it would seem that circumcision is deemed to be the equivalent of FGM in this society. Circumcised fathers for the most part grow up with the equivalent lifestyle as those who are not circumcised; in turn they bring about the circumcision of their own sons. And it is not deemed to be barbaric, if only for means of personal hygeine or religion. If the mothers of Sudan wish to have their daughters undergo FGM, while previously having undergone the procedure themselves, who are we to condone such behaviour? Perhaps these operations are undergone within horrid conditions; they could easily be made better. However, there are cultural components that some of us cannot even hope to understand that centre, no doubt, around conditions or bravery in the face of imminent physical threat.

(This statement by no means is meant to justify FTM, but in a larger manner I wish to express that my disgust is only that of someone who has yet to understand such cultural tactics.)

There's plenty more like that, those were just the first two posts. Below is my contribution to the discussion:

I'm all for tolerance, if someone wants to dress in a strange way, eat food I find disgusting or modify their body through tattoos, piercings or brandings then I say live and let live. That said, I think there's a few things about FGM that exempt it from this tolerant viewpoint. The first is that of consent. All the things I mentioned above are the sort of things that adults consciously choose to do. Equating a cultural tradition of eating mice or even piercing the lip with those giant hoops you see in national geographic are all things done by cognizant adults to themselves. It's strange to me to equate such conscious choices performed on oneself to a horribly unecessary and dangerous procedure being performed on a defenseless infant. A previous poster mentioned girls around the age of consent voluntarily undergoing the procedure and in that case the issue becomes a bit more clouded. To provide a bit of context I'm also opposed to circumcision of male infants and Jehovah Witnesses refusing blood transfusions for their children (although not necessarily themselves). I don't mean to directly equate either of these things to FGM, I'm simply saying that I employed a similar moral precedent when coming to my conclusions regarding them.

*EDIT*

I added this addendum to my comment on the board:

I would like to point out that it's the act of FGM itself I'm condemning as immoral, not necessarily the people performing the operation. Someone raised in an isolated community who knows nothing of potential alternative ways of living and who only knows FGM as a way of fitting in with the only society they're familiar with should not be condemned as immoral. However, I don't see why that should make the act itself any less appalling or in any way hinder attempts to abolish it. It's wrong to impose your culture or way of thinking on another by force but it's also wrong to stand by and permit such a brutal act without so much as a word of protest in the name of cultural tolerance. If you can convince someone through reasoned dialog or other peaceful means of coercion to forego such a despicable act then I feel you are morally obliged to do so.

International Development

2009-01-14T13:25:00.001-08:00

I've just finished a semester of "Introduction to development studies", a very interesting, if somewhat depressing course. It's depressing primarily because, despite fifty plus years of effort, we still can't seem to help developing nations. Even worse, policy is lagging so far behind theory that even if we were to come up with a solution that works, we wouldn't know for years. the IMF and World Bank, the two biggest actors on the development stage, are still primarily promoting policies and theories that were discarded in academic circles starting fourty years ago. "If we know they don't work, why are we still using them?" you might ask. As with most things involving politics, there is a dirty answer. As near as I can tell we're still doing it because the actual goal of the policies is not the same as the stated goal. The actual goal is the oldest one in the book, enrichment of the powerful at the expense of the disenfranchised. There's an excellent documentary on the impacts of structural adjustment policies on Jamaica called "Life and Debt" I recommend it quite highly. The essential premise is this: You're a poor nation, say one that was until recently a colony, and you need certain essential imports, say gasoline and medicine. Unfortunately you don't have any money, so you go to the IMF for a loan. The IMF agrees to give you a loan, but only on the condition that you change your economic policy in such a way that your ability to pay it back is almost annihilated and practically guarantees that you will need to borrow more money. Repeat this policy in perpetuity until your nation is so indebted to the west that you are more firmly under their control than you ever were under colonialism. "How cynical!" you may cry, "Western nations aren't perfect but our intentions are good!" Yes of course, and we invaded Iraq to get Al Quaeda, I mean WMD's, I mean bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, not oil. I'm not going to be so presumptuous as to say that I've got this problem figured out as well, but I will say that if we want the condition of these nations to improve, a necessary step will be to stop crushing them under mountains of death and fucking their domestic industries into the ground with brutally unfair trade policies. Beyond not actively fucking these poor countries over, I think it will also be necessary to recognize that our lifestyle is simply physically not universally obtainable. If you've ever taken one of those surveys that shows how many earths we'd need if everyone lived the way we do you know what I'm talking about. I don't own a car and I share a house with four other people and apparently my lifestyle still requires something like 4 earths if all 6+ billion of us want to live that way. Raising the living standards of poor nations may very well mean radically changing the way we in the west live. Are we prepared to do that? So far all signs point to a depressing no.

Nevermind

2009-01-09T11:43:00.000-08:00

I'm sure this will all be sorted out shortly

Israel and Palestine

2009-01-09T11:10:00.001-08:00

I had another post lined up for here but this has been in the news a lot so I figured it was worth mention. Primarily what I want to discuss is the obvious bias wester politicians have towards Israel. A quick caveat, I in no way endorse the rocket attacks or other terrorist measures taken by Hamas against the Israelis, they are unconscionable and should be condemned. That said, the day to day oppression of the Palestinians by Israel, the segregation, ghettoization to outright theft of their territory coupled by the fierce bombing that has been going on hardly paints Israel as a sympathetic figure. I would like to go back in time and smack whatever small minded buerocrat thought establishing a Jewish state in the middle of the Muslim world wouldn't have long term stability repercussions. It's hard to see a way out of this, taken individually the demands of both sides sound fairly reasonable, the Palestinians want their land back and the Israelis want to live in their new home in peace. But throw in religion, along with the greater geopolitical situation, particularly America's unflinching (presumably even in an Obama administration) support of Israel and the situation becomes much more complex. A year ago when I was last writing these posts it seems like I had a lot more potential solutions, or at least suggestions for things I wrote on. I apologize that I can't think of anything that would help resolve this crisis, at least beyond hippy dippy suggestions like "Maybe they can put down their guns and just hug it out." Fat chance of that I'm afraid

Book Review: The Life of Pi, Author Yan Martel

2009-01-03T14:02:00.000-08:00

Great book. If you just wanted to know if it's worth reading or not, stop here, it is. I can only think of one real complaint about this book. It's told from the perspective of someone writing about the life story of the main character, primarily from the character's own account but supplemented here and there by other sources. Anyway, near the beginning of the book, the protagonist tells the author "I have a story that will make you believe in God." This caught my attention. "Neat-o!" I thought to myself, "Certainly rational discussion hasn't done it for me, perhaps a story will reveal the existence of God." No such luck, I remain a committed atheist, and frankly can't understand how this story was supposed to make me believe in God. Existential reorganization aside though, it's a hell of a good read. I can't go into the story too much without spoiling it, but suffice to say the events in Pi's life are extraordinary. The dialog is extraordinary, the descriptions are evocative and there are some absolutely fantastic metaphors. If anyone knows what the seaweed island is supposed to represent please let me know, I can't figure it out and it's been bugging me ever since I finished the book.

The Financial Crisis

2008-12-26T00:01:00.000-08:00

I've heard a saying among physicists; "If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory" and I believe a similar expression would be relevant to the current financial turmoil. To paraphrase Bill Maher; "Some poor people in America default on their mortgages and Iceland goes bankrupt?" it's not exactly the sort of problem that makes a lot of intuitive sense. In light of this I have more questions than answers regarding this issue and I'd like to throw them out there and gather some input.
1) Is this going to lead to an ideological shift? It seems almost certain it will to some extent, but are we talking a small shift, like a move towards a more regulated financial system, something along the lines of Keynesian economics following the great depression or is this going to be a deal breaker that leads us away from capitalism altogether?
2)How bad is this going to get? It seems that it will certainly be worse than the last couple bubbles we had, like the dot-com, but are we facing another great depression? Something even worse? Or will this simply be a particularly bad recession? Hell, I'm not old enough to even know what a recession is like really so even that could seem quite major from my perspective.
3)Given the impact the crisis has had on oil prices, will this harm our motivation to look for alternative energy sources? I've noticed that the very fact that we are in a financial crisis has pushed global warming and environmental issues in general further from the public consciousness. Furthermore it's dampened the ability of politicians to sell environmental policies that could be seen to further slow our economy. What will be the long term impacts of this crisis in terms of environmental policy and outcomes?
4)What exactly does it take to get the American people outraged? Not like "ooh that makes me mad" outraged but actual get off your ass and do something outraged? Since I've started following the news I've seen America severely weakened on damn near everything that made it admirable. Losing civil liberties and international respect didn't seem to do it, how about having capitalist elites ruin the global economy and then have the balls to take 700 billion of your dollars to prop themselves up while your job gets shipped overseas? It's a tired rant I know, but really, what will it take to wake these people the fuck up?
5)What can we do to fix this? I've seen all sorts of solutions proposed from "Give the people who caused this mess a ton of money, no strings attached (well maybe a few, nothing too onerous though)" to "Global Communist revolution". Now it's an oversimplification to say that the right answer is always somewhere in the middle, sometimes things really are black and white, or close enough. That said, neither of these options looks particularly promising to me, is there a better way to sort this out?
6)This kind of relates to the first two questions. Karl Marx, when he outlined how Communism would arise (he saw this as a naturalistic process, completely inevitable, it was all very scientific you know) saw Capitalism as a necessary precursor to Communism. He recognized the enormous innovative potential of Capitalism and felt that it was a necessary stage in human development. However, he also viewed it as inherently unstable and felt that eventually we would be faced with a global crisis that would "emmiserate the proletariat", that is to say, the working class would notice that they were living in filthy hovels and eating gravel as a result of the crisis while the rich couldn't afford their second yacht. Basically the inequality inherent in the system would finally become so obvious that the working class would rise up and overthrow the capitalists. After that you get your dictatorship of the proletariat, which eventually leads to a whithering of the state as society becomes organized along more egalitarian principles and leading finally to Communism. Communism has kind of a dirty name these days, thanks to the USSR, China and so forth, so even if this were to happen, we probably wouldn't call the end result Communism, but how likely does this basic story sound? Keep in mind that Marx always figured Communism would arise in western industrial nations, not backwaters like China or Russia.

I wish I could provide some answers rather than just questions, but given that this is flustering people with a great deal more experience with this sort of business than me I hardly feel qualified. Anyone got questions to add? Even better, anyone got some answers to share?

Guess who's back?

2008-12-25T23:59:00.000-08:00

Hello internet, long time no chat. Believe it or not I actually got a few requests to relaunch this bitch (including one very nice drunken rant) and I've found it occupying my thoughts more and more, so here goes nothing. I no longer work at a slack job that affords me time to surf the internet for hours at a stretch mining for stories to write on however, so expect the regularity of updates to diminish. Subscribing to this blog by rss might be the most efficient way to keep up with it, or any site that you check regularly for that matter. Next post should be along shortly, topic requests, comments, and flaming tirades about how I will burn in hell are welcome as always.

He's still crazy

2007-09-24T14:42:00.000-07:00

In the interests of balance, he's crazy still.

Once upon a time

2007-09-24T12:48:00.000-07:00

I really must get around to updating my blogroll to include Once Upon a Time. Again, just a stub post but this one hit me hard, read it and be saddened.

Interview with Ahmandinejad

2007-09-24T10:49:00.001-07:00

Another stub post but the interview is very long, I don't want to add to it further. Go read, I found it informative

Legalize drugs to get crack whores off the street

2007-09-20T09:10:00.001-07:00

I couldn't improve on it if I wanted to, go read.

Alnoor might make a good mayor

2007-09-19T10:39:00.000-07:00

I have perused his website. I have read up on his issues and his stated solutions. I can't say I'll vote for him since I haven't looked into the other candidates but he's a hell of a lot better than Harry. Don't take my word for it though, go read his site, send him an e-mail, do what it takes to come to a conclusion you're satisfied with.

*EDIT* I did a quick google search and didn't come up with any other campaign homepages for any other potential mayors. I did read the wikipedia article on Bronconnier (our current mayor) but I'm a firm believer of a "throw the bastards out" voting policy. Looks like I'll be voting Alnoor unless further information comes to my attention*EDIT*

I don't want Harry to be mayor

2007-09-18T09:34:00.000-07:00

As you may recall, I wrote a letter to this "Harry for mayor" character whose ads have been popping up all over the city. What follows is his response, he didn't explicitly authorize me to share it but he didn't say anything to indicate otherwise and there's no confidentiality clause in his signature so I think I'm OK. The only thing in his response I've altered is where he mentions my name, as I like to keep this blog anonymous. By all means come to your own conclusions but I frankly don't think this is the guy for me. I'll try and post on the other candidates as I investigate them.

-Good Morning [xxxxx],

Sorry for the delay. I attempted to respond to you yesterday and lost my connection and this is the first opportunity I have had to give you some answers to your generous email.

Firstly, thank you for such an in-depth analysis of my what if… vignettes. I am feeling humbled to blown away that someone would take the time to give me that much feedback. Your points are all well made and comments interesting considering my motivation and inspiration to write them. They are but one man’s experience being a native Calgarian.

This campaign is organic. It is influenced by no one and doesn’t try to answer the political questions but acknowledge issues that many know but few want to discuss.

My Mayoralty campaign isn’t about me that’s why there isn’t anything there. I don’t have all the answers however I have ideas and a lot of feedback from the nomination process of going door to door city wide speaking to Calgarians from all stations of life.

The common denominators of concern from Calgarains I have met in the past number of weeks is encouraging and the struggles we face can be solved. There simply isn’t the leadership under the current municipal government. We need a clean slate. We need fresh ideas and energy driven by the people for the people.

This campaign is about giving the city back to its citizens. Empowering them to take charge of the desperate conditions that exist. We must move from the ME to WE.
We all know there needs to be a change in attitude and the environment of how decisions are made in this city and the participation of its citizens.

In the coming days and weeks I will expose myself and more importantly my supporting platform that is derived from Calgarians formed from the nomination process.

You will have to pardon my spelling and grammar. Its just not a priority for me, inspite of me having had the copy proof read. Perhaps a suggestion from a friend of mine. If he keeps a bottle of tequila close by and takes a shot and a grain of salt with every error he identifies, he finds he is able to get through to the heart and motivation of my writing.

Perhaps with me as Mayor, Calgarians won’t have to go to Mexico as often to enjoy a shot of tequila.

All the best,

Cheers,

harry

"Why Should Americans Vote For Someone Who Can Be Fooled By George Bush?"

2007-09-14T10:30:00.001-07:00

Bill Maher asks all the right questions

Harry wants to be mayor

2007-09-14T10:19:00.000-07:00

If you live in Calgary and especially if you take transit you have most likely seen the black and white mayoral campaign signs of Harry for mayor. I took the time to look over his website, harryformayor.ca and came away with more questions than I had going in. Take a look at his site, read over the what if? section and then read my letter to him. With his permission I'll post a response if I get one. If you're not from Calgary you probably don't give a shit so you can safely skip this one. Letter follows.

Dear Sir

I have perused your website at length and I want to begin by saying that I believe I agree with the spirit of your campaign. That said there are many questions and comments I have regarding your platform, such as it is stated on your website, I look forward to your response.

On your "All public employees got the same pay raise as the mayor and alderman. would they re think their pay raises before they imposed them on us?" page
You begin by suggesting a link between the pay of elected officials and civic workers, but by the end of the page the issue at hand is term limits. Which policy are you endorsing? Or is it both?

On "there were beds for all heads that came into a hospital or a shelter" You tell a tragic and touching story but there is little indication of what you would do to prevent such tragedies? What is your policy on housing? How will you relieve this crisis? People are aware of the problems, we look to our elected officials for potential solutions.

Again on "big truck traffic had to drive 10kph slower... would we still have a school teacher?" the question that is the title of the page is not represented in the rest of the page. Again you describe a terrible tragedy but I am unsure of what solution you propose to prescribe, is it the speed reduction policy suggested in the title? If so on what grounds do you make this suggestion? Is there a precedent set elsewhere that shows this would be an appropriate solution? What are the trade offs? Again, telling us of the problem is one thing, describing a solution another.

"the soul of our city wasn't condemned and was a priority to reopen "the eddy" king edward hotel"
Presumably this is meant to describe an overarching policy and is not just specific to the king edward hotel. Again I must ask, what is your solution? Public dollars to restore heritage locations? Some manner of legislation requiring developers to respect cultural landmarks? I'm unclear on your position yet again

"crack was only that part in the seat of your pants? would we look at it... or pretend we don't see it"
Once again, a tragic problem with no suggested solution. I agree that crack is a scourge on our city, what do you propose to do about it?

"the mayor marched down to the mustard seed and re donated (paid it forward) his entire war chest when its needed now... would he have a slim chance of being reelected or at least being in the race?"
Again I must admit I'm confused as to what you're trying to advocate here. I imagine such a move by an incumbent would be an impressive show of charity and increase his standing in the polls but I suspect that is not the point you're trying to make. Are you against the amount of money that is spent on campaigning? I must confess I've seen more ads for yourself and other newcomer alnoor than I have for our current mayor, in fact I haven't seen any evidence of his campaigning. Where where you trying to go with this? I confess I must have missed the point.

"not voting is the lesser of two evils. would that explain why only 3/10 of Calgary votes in our civic election?"
As another 20 something who tends to wear all black and spend his day in front of a computer (although I'm a QA analyst, not a web designer) I'm rather confused by what you're trying to express here as well. Should we not vote? Are you saying that all the candidates are basically the same and we shouldn't bother? If you feel that you are a brand new alternative and a reason for all these non voters to get out to the polls perhaps you should explain that and cite reasons for us to get out and vote. I often feel that in voting I'm selecting the lesser of two evils, minimizing harm rather than making a positive choice, at least I'm involved in the process.

"gangs could go down to city hall, pay a fee and the city would put up their logo on a nice professional sign and place it properly marking their turf. would we have less graffiti everywhere?"
This is the slogan that got me to actually look at your website, because I thought it was such a patently absurd solution I wanted to see if you were seriously advocating it. I'm glad to see you're not. However once again I find the page vague on actual solutions or courses of action. You say we need to talk to these youth, do you propose some sort of workshop or center for at risk youth? What exactly is your proposed policy to deal with gangs?

"haunted frighten trees and wild life had a say in their communities that houses were to be built"
Presumably this is an indictment of the urban sprawl that is Calgary. Once again I agree that this is an issue. But with the population exploding as it is, I believe you already touched on the housing crisis, what is the solution? Building up? Urban densification? Underground Lairs? Once more your site is heavy on the problems, light on the solutions.

"this city is so big and i am so small? or if the mayor wasn't so big and the city so small?"
I confess this one downright confused me. I'm really not sure what you're advocating here or what sort of message you're trying to get out, any clarification would be appreciated.

"the world is watching and witnessing the single largest lost opportunity of our time to lead"
Once again, a very nice story, and some real problems are mentioned, once more however we are somewhat short on solutions, what is your policy?

Thank you for reading through this, I hope you will consider my points and respond to them, as I said I feel that I support the spirit of your campaign, I'm just shaky on the particulars. Another point that I feel I must mention is that your website is riddled with very elementary spelling and grammatical errors. While nobody should base their political decisions on who can spell better, a quick spell check and once over would really clean the page up, make it easier to read and make it look more credible.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to read this, I look forward to your reply.

Sincerely

[xxxxxxx]

PS: I run an online blog and will be posting this letter to it. With your permission I would like to post your response as well. If you'd like I can send you a link to it first so that you can decide for yourself if you want your name associated with it.

How dare you call me a fundamentalist?

2007-09-14T08:25:00.001-07:00

Oh Dawkins, you kick ass. Go read it, it's awesome

Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine

2007-09-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

Some of you may be familiar with the name Naomi Klein already, she wrote the very popular anti-consumerist manifesto "No Logo". Well she's back with a new anti-capitalist manifesto called "The shock doctrine". I haven't had a chance to read the book yet, I do plan to get around to it though. I have seen the short film that she's made to accompany the book and it paints a pretty clear portrait of what to expect.

I like Naomi Klein, she makes some pointed and disturbing indictments of our consumer culture, however I think her criticism is aimed at the wrong thing. Free market capitalism isn't the problem, it's the manipulation of the free market and the people who make it up that's the issue. There is an undeniable correlation between economic freedom and prosperity and to ignore that seems bizarre. Again though, to be fair to Klein, many of the methods and tactics espoused by leading free market proponents are very damaging to people and world stability, however the issue should be taken up with the tactics and sneaky workarounds, not markets themselves.
In No Logo I don't recall her expressing a clear alternative to free markets and indeed most of her issues seemed to be with protectionist clauses and other things that aren't really inherent in markets. Perhaps this new book will promote a viable alternative, hopefully it won't just be communism, I think we can say it's had a fair shot and failed quite miserably.

Ron Paul v. Bill O'Reilly

2007-09-11T08:04:00.000-07:00

Fucking Bill-o is such a turd.

Things that rule

2007-09-06T14:04:00.000-07:00

Wow, I just noticed it's been a whole week since I've done a post. I think that's the longest I've gone since I started this gig. As to why, I suppose the short answer is that I just didn't feel like it. There are still things going on in the world that are interesting and merit discussion but I guess I'm getting a little tired of going over the same old things. Prohibition is wrong, there is no God, War is stupid senseless and barbaric, you get the picture. Anyway here's some things that have been keeping me occupied when I haven't been blogging.

First up, the new As I lay dying record, An ocean between us. This album fucking rocks, the more I listen to it the more I like it. It's a bit more polished than shadows are security, there's a few more singing parts as opposed to screaming but it's still some of the most crushing shit around, highly recommended for those who like face melting music.

The white man's burden, by William Easterly. I've discussed this book on a couple occasions over at erasetheinternet and I will continue to promote it. It's an excellent look into the failures of the various aid strategies that the West has forced on the rest over the course of history, from colonialism up to modern aid and military intervention. It is damning and compelling, highlighting the stupidity and ignorance that has caused aid to be such a complete failure in the third world. A depressing read to be sure but a very worthwhile one if you've ever wondered why all those billions don't seem to be doing much.

The selfish gene, by Richard Dawkins. It should come as no surprise to anyone here that I am a big Dawkins fan. This book is fantastic as it's Dawkins in his native area of expertise. Before he was known as the face of the new atheism he was a highly regarded zoologist. This book is compelling and fascinating, it's explaining evolution in a very accessible way without dumbing down the concepts too much. Highly recommended.

That's it for now, hopefully I'll find something worthwhile to rant about again soon.

Mother Theresa

2007-08-30T09:21:00.001-07:00

In case you don't know, it now appears that Mother Theresa suffered a crisis of faith for much of her career. It's all a very depressing story, suffering extreme doubt and depression she was told by the church that this was Gods way of testing her, or some BS, frankly it's hard for me to wrap my head around what she was told. Here's some links and a video.
Theresa, Bright and Dark, by Christopher Hitchens
The Sacrifice of reason, by Sam Harris
Finally, here's Bill Donahue of the Catholic League (loved him on south park) and Christopher Hitchens again on hardball

Poppies for Medicine

2007-08-28T11:44:00.000-07:00

I've blogged about it before. I've written letters to the PM, the minister of foreign affairs and every Canadian newspaper I could track down. The response? Sweet fuck all I'm afraid. But now a pretty prestigious sounding think tank is calling for the exact same actions I recommended! They even have a real research team that looked into it! Go to the site and read up on it, and if you agree, maybe send some political pressure at your MP, PM, whoever.

What the hell is that big red A?

2007-08-28T10:24:00.000-07:00

Not a whole lot. Dawkins has started a campaign asking atheists to publicly declare themselves as atheists, the red A is a symbol of that. If you want you could probably make an issue about this making atheism like an organized religion, or conformity, or always doing what Dawkins says. You could do that, or we could skip it all, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Are we really that different?

2007-08-28T08:07:00.000-07:00

I love my country. I'm proud to be a Canadian and think that I live in one of the best, most amazing countries ever. I also dislike a great many things about America, not so much what it's supposed to represent or the ideals espoused in regard to it, but what it is and is fast becoming. The thing is, to most of the world, Canada is just American lite. We're pretty much the same, just a little smaller and quieter, the sleepy backwoods town north of the exciting glitzy city. So how different is Canada from the US, both in positives and negatives. There was a time when I would read the news and see pictures of all the overly patriotic Americans waving their flags and putting those stupid fucking stickers on their big ass SUVs while not knowing what the fuck was even going on and I'd laugh and congratulate myself for living in Canada where people are a bit more rational. But if you live in Calgary, and likely other parts of Canada you have no doubt seen that we too have been afflicted with bumper sticker politics. What's worse, there's been a big shitstorm about city vehicles like the cops, firefighters or just municipal workers putting the ribbons on their vehicles. Jesus Christ! Is there any more inane statement than "support our troops!" No fucking kidding you should support people who are willing to submit themselves to the most atrocious thing known to man in defense of the country that you both love, FUCK! Anyway, I didn't want to make this just about the ribbons, that's a whole other post, what I'm thinking about right now is what makes us different from (dare I say better than?) the Americans we so denigrate.

So we've both got our fair share of people whose grasp of foreign policy is somewhat simplistic. I suspect the degree to which we have that is somewhat smaller. If you look at our foreign military blunders Afghanistan is a much smaller fuck up than Afghanistan AND Iraq AND now possibly Iran, I mean, at least we learned the first time. So Canada was part of an ill advised operation in the middle east (or southeast Asia, whatever you'd prefer), at least it had NATO backing, giving it legitimacy and we had the courage to resist going in with the US. Well, I hope it was the courage and not just that our military was stretched too thin already, as our inability to mobilize troops to Sudan suggests. On foreign policy it seems that we are kinda America lite.

How about culture? I think we win there. There's definitely still racism in Canada but I don't think it's anywhere near the scale of the states and you can't be proud enough of that. We were one of the first countries to legalize gay marriage, even if the conservatives are trying to backpedal we deserve some pats on the back for that. Lot less fatties in Canada too, I don't have hard statistics but having walked around Detroit vs walking around Calgary I'd say we have significantly less obese and morbidly obese individuals in this great nation of ours. Oh! and while we definitely have our own little evangelical Christian right sorta deal going on here they're much smaller and less influential. I think Stockwell Day is the only government official who's gone on record as a creationist, I'm afraid the stats are much worse in America. In regards to culture I think it's fair to say we're more than America lite.

OK that sums up what I think about Canada vs. the US. I'd love to hear from any Americans on this, although I suspect that with my readership it'll be mostly other Canadian voices, who are also welcome.

The greatest bullshit story ever told

2007-08-27T13:58:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, not a lot of original content going up lately, I'm sorry, I just haven't had anything to write about, post suggestions are welcomed (stupid writers block)
Anyway, with thanks to the Barefoot Bum, here's George Carlin in: The greatest bullshit story ever told.

Drug post roundup

2007-08-23T09:45:00.000-07:00

Yes it's that time again, you know the drill.

The top team on the congressional softball league is the pro-marijuana lobby team. They're called the one hitters and if that's not fucking awesome I don't know what is. Oh, it might be that the Office for national drug control policy won't play them, because they know they'll lose.

Marijuana Dealers Offer Schwarzenegger One Billion Dollars. Let us pay taxes they say! Jesus fucking Christ on a biscuit do we have to hit you folks over the head? Drug dealers are offering to bail the government out to the tune of one BILLION dollars, all you have to do is legalize. How is this a hard choice? FUCK!

And now just to show you why these stories are such aberrations, here's two of the lead candidates for the Republican party nomination, discussing drugs and drug policy. Sheer fucking lunacy, and if you think any of the other mainstream candidates are much better you're deluding yourself.

The Monkeysphere

2007-08-21T11:16:00.000-07:00

The Monkeysphere

OK right off the bat I'm going to caution you to take this as philosotainment (Hat tip to Scott Adams for the wicked name for bullshit philosophy) but beyond the absurdity and funny language of it all there is a serious point. Humans really can't possibly care about everyone in the world the way they do their close friends and family, we're physically incapable of it. I don't for a second think this excuses poor behavior towards others, we have evolved an intellect powerful enough to override our basic biological impulses (the fact that we actively work to prevent procreation is all the evidence for this you really need) but the fact remains that it doesn't come naturally to us to give a fuck about orphans in China or whatever, we have to make a conscious effort. I for one think the effort is well worth it but it appears that many of the people in power in this world of ours think otherwise. How sad.

Religulous is my new favorite word

2007-08-20T11:32:00.001-07:00

Dawkins on Hardtalk

2007-08-16T11:04:00.000-07:00

I heart Richard Dawkins, he's so dapper and charming.

Religion became a test of faith

2007-08-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

A fantastic article. The hypocrisy of religious organizations infuriates me to no end. People who will exploit humans deepest spiritual needs for their own personal gain are sick and I wish there was a hell so they could go to it.

Why Palestinians are pissed

2007-08-15T08:24:00.000-07:00

Graphics really speak volumes in this case.

Heh, the Chenguin

2007-08-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Pharyngula for this one

Erase the internet

2007-08-14T08:34:00.000-07:00

My buddy Choke has made a forum. I'm going to be hanging out there fairly regularly now since I'm going to start using it for globe and mail related discussions instead of the e-mail list I had going. Stop on by if you're hungry for more discussion and debate.

George Bush nigerian e-mail scam

2007-08-13T12:29:00.000-07:00

Fucking hilarious, also chillingly accurate.

Dick Cheney makes sense?

2007-08-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

OK, so 13 years ago Dick Cheney said something about Iraq that sounded very sane and rational. Fast forward to today and we have him doing the exact opposite of what he said at the time, with the results being exactly what he predicted back in 94. So I guess we've ruled out stupid as a reason for his actions, which leaves us with evil.

The Threat of U.S. Fascism: A Historical Precedent

2007-08-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

Read it and be afraid.

Fuck tha police

2007-08-08T11:57:00.001-07:00

I'm not sure if it's even ironic that her sign reads "resist totalitarianism" I think we've come out the other side to just plain tragic.

Free Will (again)

2007-08-08T07:30:00.000-07:00

Regan has brought up a good point in one of the earlier comments. Free will is a construct. If we're going to discuss whether or not it exists we'll have to define it as something. OK, so what could free will be? It's not entirely free, there have to be at least a few constraints. For example, will really hard for the sky to turn red, or your arms to grow longer, did it work? No, of course not, free will is still bounded by reality. So within those bounds, how much room for freedom is there? Right off the bat I'm going to say I only have vague ideas, most of what I'm going to put down here will be closer to a rhetorical question than any sort of definitive fact, hopefully some of the people who commented on the last posts will come back and help flesh these ideas out.

I think it's fair to start by saying that free will is inextricably tied to consciousness. We can hardly be said to be making decisions and doing things of our own free will if we're not even aware that they're occurring. This effectively rules out free will from subconscious processes, like digestion and all the other bodily maintenance your brain takes care of without your knowing. What about subconscious thoughts though? Do we have any control over that secret crush the develops unbeknown to us, or the jealousy we secretly feel for a coworker or friend? I'm actually leaning a bit towards no on this one, think how many people have said something like "I can't help the way I feel" or something similar in situations like what I described, even the people feeling the things don't seem to consider it something they chose.

What about personality? Can people really not help it that they're an asshole? This is a tricky one and it gets tied up in the nature vs. nurture debate. At least some portion of your personality is genetic, just look to really extreme cases like schizophrenics if you don't believe me. Those people have their entire personality controlled by whatever genetic anomaly made then psychotic. Now maybe not everyone is governed to that same extent, but maybe they are and nobody notices because they don't stick out, the question is hardly open and shut either way. So for the sake of argument let's assume we've escaped the nature argument with at least a bit of free will left, now we get to nurture. Once your genes have had their say in your personality there's still your parents, your friends, the town you grew up in, that really influential teacher you had..... all of these things are going to have an impact on you, the person you become and the actions you take. Now compared to some of the other constraints on free will, this is a pretty minor one, you could still run away from home, move, pick new friends, drop out of school and so on. However once you've chosen a course of action it will forever colour and impact your choices, both the choices you make and those you have available. In light of this, do we get less and less free will as we get older and do more things?

Another couple random things that can remove free will:
Drugs: Not a whole lot of choices if your veins are full of morphine, you're pretty much free to just lie there and not feel anything, I'm not aware of any drug anywhere that stops working if you really really think hard about stopping it.
Hypnotism/Brainwashing: Cultists (depending on your background this may or may not include the major Abrahamic religions), Kidnap victims, POWs, people who have been subjected to torture and so on can be made to do all sorts of awful and degrading things, they often speak after of feeling their will sapped or something to that effect. It seems that if we have free will there are certainly a lot of ways we can at least diminish it.
Neurosurgery: When the nice man with the scalpel slices your brain open and pokes this part here your arm will twitch, no will about it, he's hacking your brain and you're out of the command chair.
Brain damage: Similar idea to neurosurgery, frontal lobe damage can completely alter your personality and there's nothing you can do about it. Which begs the question of whether you're still free after, just within the new limited framework or whether the destruction of personality also destroys free will.
Coercion: This is a bit of a trickier one, it's not as obvious as the previous items I listed. Let me paint a scenario. You're in a room, completely restrained and unable to summon help. A madman has a revolver pointed at your head and he says that if you don't sing him a happy birthday he will murder you and everyone in your family. Now, on its face it looks like you have two choices, which in turn seems to open the possibility of free will, but in light of what those choices actually are would any sane person consider it a real choice? But if it's not a real choice, can it be free?

So once we've taken in all these restrictive factors what are we left with? The sober, conscious choices we make that aren't entirely dictated by a combination of the previously mentioned constraints. How much wiggle room is this? I have no idea, I'd like to think there's at least some but given how many questions I've raised and how few answers I (or I suspect anyone) have it would be presumptuous to say.

Now let's look at why free will would exist. Just because we'd really like something to be true doesn't make it true I'm afraid, and since the vast majority of things in this universe don't exhibit any signs of free will I'd say there's some onus on us to prove that we have it, it shouldn't be assumed. So why do we have free will, even if it's just a teensy little taste of it? Again we return to consciousness, if we had no choice in any of our actions, what would be the purpose of being aware of them? Nature is generally not one to just throw on features without some purpose, there's no wheels on sharks or racing stripes on kangaroos, if we do have free will there must be a reason. My best guess is that free will isn't so necessary to our survival as consciousness is. Every reasonably complex life form (where you draw the line is a matter of taste, for me it's near the insect level) exhibits signs of consciousness. It could be fairly safely assumed, given the available information, that consciousness is necessary for complex life. Now why would you need to be aware of the actions you were taking if you had no control over them? A rock doesn't need to be conscious because it can't do anything. Let's say a rock was aware that it was a rock, there wouldn't be a damn thing it could do about it, consciousness in that situation would be extraneous. So consciousness is necessary to complex life, we can be reasonably sure of this because all complex life exhibits signs of it to some extent. Following through on that the only reason I can think of that we'd need consciousness is if it allowed us to make choices about what was happening, otherwise we'd just be particularly mobile rocks, or zombies if you prefer. So since we know we have consciousness and the only reason we would have consciousness is so we can do something about things we must have free will to some extent, although I think most people assume they have a lot more control than they really do. For instance it seems like I'm writing this post of my own free will, there's certainly no gun to my head and I'm not aware of any drug or brain condition that makes you want to write long winded posts on philosophy. But really I'm writing this because I can't get the concept of free will out of my head, no matter how hard I try.

*EDIT* Still thinking about it, see? A new york times article about the subconscious, grab it quick, they go behind a paywall pretty fast*EDIT*

Consciousness

2007-08-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

Consciousness, it's a tricky fucker. What causes it? What has it? What doesn't? How do you make it? I have no fucking idea, sure is fun to think about though eh? Philosophers have been working on it since the ancient Greeks, so far, not a whole lot of progress I'm afraid. I'm going to try and sum up what I've learned from my reading on the subject, which thus far consists of those dilbert blog posts (linked last article), the mystery of consciousness and the mysterious flame. Note that both have some form of the word "mystery" right in the title, should suggest that we're at something of an impasse on this issue.

Of course, not knowing the answer has never stopped people from guessing, some with answers that sound better than others. Let's look at some of the basic theories of consciousness.

I'll start with materialism, or at least my interpretation of it. Materialism states that consciousness is entirely grounded within the physical confines of the brain. There's no supernatural or ethereal component, just neurons, hormones, and all the other gutty-wuts that make up your brain. In materialism the sensation of pain is entirely analogous to a physical state in the brain, perhaps characterized as some neurons firing in a region of the brain, although the specific mechanism is hardly set in stone (remember we know very little about how the brain actually functions). I should point out that when I say the sensation of pain is analogous to neurons firing, I don't just mean the pain itself, the signals sent from the nerves in wherever the pain is sending the message to the brain, I mean you thinking "boy that smarts" in response to this stimulus as well. Now, the refutation of this theory as I understand it (neither book I read accepted this view) is that because the sum of "c-fiber firing" or whatever does not seem to add up to the conscious experience of pain or joy, we can't have the whole story. The thinking goes that even if you were to add up all the neurons firing and hormone levels changing, maybe even the quantum states of things, you still wouldn't be able to take those things and add them up to get "conscious feeling of pain/love/yellow" or what have you. I can definitely see how people would be skeptical of this viewpoint, my conscious thoughts and feelings sure don't seem like they're just some neurons firing. On the other hand, the images displayed on my computer don't seem like DC voltage running through transistors, but at a low enough level that's exactly what it is. While materialism might not be the answer to consciousness, I hardly think it's been debunked just because we can't see the association between the brain states we're aware of and consciousness. Neuroscience has already determined many neural correlates and progress is being made all the time. Now it may be that at some point we'll encounter a wall and be forced to invoke something beyond the purely physical to explain consciousness, but I don't think it's a necessity.

The competing theory to materialism is called dualism. Now of course these are not the only two choices, but between them in the broadest sense most theories are covered. Now dualism is the supposition that consciousness is something external to the physical world. While there are correlates between it and the physical world, as previously mentioned, consciousness itself is separate from these things. Now the problem with this theory should be fairly self evident, if consciousness is outside the physical world, how can it have an impact on it? If my thinking that I want an apple is not the physical cause of my going to get an apple, what is? Now this theory is not entirely impossible either. What it suggests to me, if it were to be true, would be something like the monkey riding a tiger analogy. In it, the tiger is the physical body and consciousness is the monkey riding it. The monkey may think he's in control, and could quite likely delude himself into thinking that what's making the tiger go or stop or turn is the monkey on his back, but in reality the tiger is doing whatever the hell it wants and the monkey is just fooling himself. The problem with both these theories is that they don't really leave a whole lot of room for free will. Either we're entirely meat robots, no more in control of our actions than we are the motion of the planets or the digestion in our guts, or we're free conscious beings trapped inside zombie meat robots, deluding ourselves into thinking we're in charge.

This is basically where I, and the books I've read seem to hit a wall. Neither of these explanations seems particularly satisfactory, especially since they both rob us of our will, what is the alternative? In short, we don't know. Long answer is that there must be some sort of compromise between the two views. With the mind being firmly physically grounded in the brain, meaning consciousness arises solely from the physical states of the brain, but with a dualistic component, meaning that what arises from these processes is something greater than the whole, something capable of having conscious states and acting on those states. How this would come about I'm frankly not sure, and according to the mysterious flame, it's entirely possible that we're pushing up against the edges of our cognitive limits and may not even have the capacity of ever finding out, simply because our brains aren't structured to permit us to understand the answer. I'm a bit more optimistic than that but for now I must admit that I'm going to have to live with it being a mystery for now.

Free will

2007-08-03T13:28:00.000-07:00

Free will has fascinated me for a good while now. It's really been bugging me a lot since I read a couple posts on the dilbert blog. Basically the way I see the facts, we don't have free will. We live in a deterministic universe. All actions have causes that are governed by immutable natural laws. For instance, if I release a ball a few feet off the ground, it has no choice in what happens next, the law of gravity (and maybe some other laws) completely determine the course of action that will follow, the ball will drop. Likewise for chemical reactions and electrical circuits, completely governed by natural laws. Now since I have no supernatural beliefs I can only conclude that my brain, and the brain of everyone and everything else is completely composed of these same physical elements, again completely constrained by physical laws. So if everything there is in the universe is strictly controlled by natural laws, including us, how can free will possibly be anything more than a persistent illusion? I'm afraid that of all the people I've had this conversation with, nobody has been able to offer an acceptable refutation beyond the fact that they really really feel like they have free will, some silliness about quantum uncertainty (random isn't free either) or a spiritual retort, which, as an atheist I find unconvincing. So despite myself having a strong feeling that I have free will, I can think of no solid logical basis on which to anchor my assertion. The best I've been able to find from reading a few books about consciousness is contained in "The mysterious flame" by Colin McGinn. The premise of the book is basically that our brains and sensory perceptions are not equipped to understand consciousness, and by extension free will. Now this doesn't necessarily give us a free ride, but it's hardly fair to pass judgment definitively on a problem that we might be fundamentally incapable of comprehending. If the cost of free will is a little ignorance, I'll gladly pay it.

Islamophobia

2007-08-01T13:04:00.000-07:00

"Why are we so scared of offending Muslims?" asks Christopher Hitchens. Well, because they threaten to bomb things and kill people when they get offended. Oh shit, now I'm a bigot, I'm an Islamophobe, blah blah blah. Frankly I'm not so sure Islamophobe is even a negative thing to be. I am a little wary of Islam, not to mention Christianity, Judaism, Voodoo and the Pantheon of Greco-Roman gods, what of it? As a rational person am I not entitled to distrust a movement that advocates beheading apostates? That subordinates half its population and has waged a divisive civil conflict within itself almost since its very inception? No, to me it seems perfectly reasonable to be wary of any movement that advocates such blind, unthinking submission as all the major religions do. Certainly there are those whose distrust springs from illegitimate sources, there are those who hate Muslims because of the colour of their skin, or just for being different, this does not detract from the legitimate reasons to fear. The fact is that while there are definite examples of hate crimes and illegitimate fear of Islam and Muslims, a lot of what gets press simply wouldn't be an issue with one of the thicker skinned religions. To paraphrase Bill Maher, Islam is one of the few remaining religions that still "whacks" people. Think Salman Rushdie. If he'd written that book about the Catholic church you can be sure there'd be some hand-wringing, they might have even tried to call it a "terrorist act", although likely nobody would take them seriously. What they would not do is issue a holy edict calling for his death and sending him into hiding for over a decade. Summing up my (admittedly worthless) opinions on the matter, there is certainly a prejudice against Muslims in the world, as there is against any distinct group, be it religious, ethic or what have you. However the larger movement known as Islamophobia is actually more a reflection of the brutal bullying tactics of the Muslim world itself.

As I've said in the past, Christopher Hitchens is a bit of a douche bag, but he hits the nail on the head of this issue pretty hard, I started with his piece in Slate, I'll end the post with him on CNN

The national

2007-07-27T12:23:00.000-07:00

Two music themed posts in a row, and videos at that, I know, I'm getting lazy. But seriously, The National fucking rules. I'll let the video speak for itself.

Amen break

2007-07-26T12:30:00.000-07:00

A fascinating video of the history of the "amen break", one of the most influential samples in the electronic and hip hop genres. It also deals with copyright issues.

Middle east roundup

2007-07-25T12:18:00.000-07:00

I didn't want to put these into the main link dump because they all at least share a common thread and I thought perhaps I could share some thoughts on them as well.

I'll start this post off on a political note, with the original Fatwa of Osama bin Laden, reposted on a pro-Ron Paul website. Basically what started this was the Republican presidential debate, where Ron alleged that the reasons behind terrorism against the US were rooted in US foreign policy, a view that Rudy Giuliani (Grade A douche bag) found ludicrous, since they clearly hate us for our freedom. Well, if you read the fatwa there's mention of Islam, there's lots actually, but the focus is on foreign policy that was found objectionable (often on religious grounds but if it were your country you'd quite possibly object to a lot of them no matter how secular you are) and while I confess I didn't read the whole thing, there didn't seem to be too much mention of hating us for our freedom. Anyway, I didn't read the whole fatwa and I don't expect you to either, but do skim a bit of it, it'll give you an idea where the enemy's coming from.

Speaking of foreign policy, let's move on to one of the scariest things I've ever heard of, PNAC, or Project for a new American Century is a crazy imperialist conspiracy for the US to take over the world. Now they dress it up in a lot more flowery language but if you read their wiki you'll see that this is essentially their actual stated goal. Then when you're about to dismiss it as some washed up neo-con hawks, look at the member list, it's pretty much the Bush administration. Scared yet? I fucking am.

At this point, I'd like to once again recommend the amazing book "Hegemony or Survival" by Noam Chomsky. It goes into much greater detail regarding America's imperialist agenda and is a fantastic, if disturbing read.

Now since much of this focuses on the middle east it would be inappropriate to not at least mention Islam. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an extraordinary woman with an incredible life story. You don't have to agree with everything she says but considering her unique perspective I think it's important to seriously consider what she has to say.

Well that was all rather depressing wasn't it? Let's end it with a nice video of soldiers in a marijuana field in Afghanistan.

Evolution v. Medical Science

2007-07-25T12:13:00.000-07:00

I can't make head nor tail of this one. First off, I don't know if what it insinuates is even true. Even if it is, what do you do about it? Humanity has tried experimenting with eugenics before, it's never gone well, "catastrophic" or "genocidal" are better terms. Nevertheless, the article does have something of a point, are we weakening our genetic stock thanks to medical science allowing those who normally would be unable to pass on their genes? If we are, what can we do? I can't begin to think of a solution that wouldn't harm individual liberty to an egregious extent. To some extent information and advanced screening could assist, perhaps families who found that they'd likely produce a child with some genetic deficiency would elect to adopt or become pregnant through some artificial means, beyond that though, what can we possibly do? Lots of questions here, very few answers, anyone who knows more about evolutionary biology or medicine than me want to step in and help out?

Link Dump II

2007-07-24T11:46:00.001-07:00

Well it's that time again, where I dump a load of information that didn't warrant a full blog post.

First up, we have a story saying that China has overtaken America as the leading carbon outputting country, yay.

Rolling stone attempts to explain part of how with The secret campaign of President Bush's administration to deny global warming

This one's a weird one, people visiting some monkeys in China is increasing their infanticide rate

Mike Gravel speaks out against the other democratic hopefuls, Hil-Dog in particular

The Family Jewels is an enormous collection of CIA operations up to 1973, some crazy shit that has been kept hidden for along time is in here

Bush is outsourcing the federal government, and guess who's making all the money?

Aid to Africa might not be the best idea, especially if Bono is involved (hate that prick)

An excerpt from "The Assault on Reason" by Al Gore

Well, that took a lot less effort than actually typing up some original thoughts on any of these subjects. Perhaps a legitimate post as well today, stay tuned.

Hells Angels

2007-07-23T09:47:00.000-07:00

There was a lovely little reunion in Calgary this weekend. A large group of motorcycle enthusiasts known as the "Hells Angels" got together to, well celebrate motorcycles I suppose. Now here's what bothers me about this, perhaps I'm reading the reports wrong, but it almost sounds to me like this gathering got less police attention than the million marijuana march did. Now I ask you, where the fuck are our priorities if this is the case? Totally bizarre.

Marijuana while driving

2007-07-20T14:18:00.000-07:00

Personally I somewhat agree with this video and don't at the same time. I think the critical difference between marijuana and alcohol is that with pot you're going to be aware that you're too impaired to drive while with alcohol the confidence boost that comes with intoxication can overwhelm your judgment. In reasonable amounts I agree that marijuana does not have a negative impact on driving ability, however there is a level that you can reach where driving ability would certainly be impaired.

Framing the Russians?

2007-07-20T09:29:00.000-07:00

Antiwar.com is a website I have just started reading recently. It's very biased but there are still some good articles and opinion pieces. This one one Alexander Litvenko is a typical example. Parts of it bring up points I hadn't thought of and am now considering, others seem biased and unrealistic. Keep an open mind and give it a read.

Hard Drugs

2007-07-18T14:12:00.000-07:00

Well the initial drug policy debate has been concluded to my satisfaction. There was only really one voice opposed to the legalization of marijuana and while he's still personally opposed to its use he agrees with me as far as policy goes. Since I'm specifically against legislating taste I don't need/want to try and convince him to try pot so we'll drop that issue. However we still disagree with regard to the issue of hard drugs, think cocaine, heroin etc. I think they should be legal, he disagrees. I'd like to specifically outline why I think hard drugs should be legal here, as that's really a separate issue from marijuana and so far on this blog the two issues have been dealt with together.

My argument for the legalization of hard drugs is two pronged; First, I believe that in a free society, people must be given control over their own bodies, and second I think that dealing with hard drug use as a criminal matter is a failed policy and that the better course of action would be a health and social policy based one that focuses on harm reduction rather than punitive measures.

Perhaps a little disclaimer before we start, although I hope it's unnecessary. I do not condone the use of hard drugs, with the exception of responsible use of psychoactives in certain circumstances. Heroin, cocaine et al are horrible substances that should not be consumed by anyone. Now that that's out of the way, let's look at why they should still be legal.

First, I'll address the more abstract issue, that of freedom to control our bodies. We live in a free
society, as such we have certain inalienable rights. I feel strongly that one of those rights should be the control of our own bodies. For some examples of what this entails outside of the drug argument, think abortions and euthanasia. People should have the right to control if they give birth and they should have control over when they die. By the same token people have a fundamental right to alter their bodies in whatever way they see fit, regardless of what others might think of it. For instance, members of religious sects are allowed to refuse blood transfusions (when they do it on behalf of their kids that's a different matter, but I'm getting off topic). Refusing a blood transfusion certainly has the potential to do more harm to your body than doing a line of cocaine. Now personally I wouldn't recommend doing either, but since it's not my body I can't imagine what would give me the authority to impose my decision on others. Now there is something of a caveat to all this, people must be aware of what they are doing to their bodies and aware of the consequences or else all bets are off. That's the difference between a government agency banning a food product that was found to be carcinogenic and banning cigarettes. People who were buying the banned food product likely would not have purchased it had they known it was a carcinogen, food is assumed to be at least reasonably safe and healthy. However things like cigarettes and fatty foods are different. In both those cases the detrimental effects are well documented and intrinsic to the nature of the product. People weigh the cons of increased risk of heart attack, or bad cholesterol, or lung cancer vs. the pleasure they receive from a nicotine buzz or eating a fatty/sugary/salty piece of junk food. The key components here are information and choice. If someone knows that something has negative side effects, and they have the choice not to do it then there's no need to ban the item in question, assuming the risks assumed are borne solely by the individual making the choice and not society. Looking back that strikes me as a bit convoluted so perhaps I'll try and summarize and paraphrase; We let people do all sorts of harmful and dangerous things to themselves assuming the impact on society as a whole is minimal. Examples include skydiving, eating a steady diet of Twinkies and beer and climbing to the top of mountains. What exactly is it about the consumption of cocaine that is fundamentally different from these other activities? From a perspective of rights and freedoms of choice it's hard to see one.

Finally, less theoretical and more practical reasons. People abusing drugs is a bad thing. People
eating unhealthy food is also bad for many of the same reasons, it's unhealthy for them personally and makes them more of a burden on society with increased medical bills and a reduced ability to be a productive member of society. Now obviously in scale eating a Twix isn't the same as doing a line but if you look at someone who is morbidly obese you can see that there are severe health consequences for both, taken far enough. Now, one of these problems of consumption is handled in what I consider a reasonable manner, the other completely unreasonably. For the eating issue, a campaign of awareness has been launched, the Canada food guide being an example, along with various public service announcements and awareness campaigns, both government and privately organized. A health food industry has arisen, and
responding to pressure from consumers many junk and fast food companies are taking steps to make their meals healthier, or at least remove the worst offenders (think trans fats). Meanwhile with drugs the information campaign is limited to blatant fear mongering and propaganda and rather than encouraging treatment for those who suffer from addiction (as we do with those who have unhealthy eating habits by making workout plans and diets) the measures are punitive and completely fail to address the real issue. Think about this scenario for a second. Let's say we have two families, both with a son who is struggling with cocaine addiction. One family addresses the issue with love, support, dialogue and possibly counseling or some other addiction treatment program. The other family feels that "tough love" is the correct approach and call the cops on the little bastard, resulting in a 10 year jail term. Now, fast forward 10 years, who can we reasonably expect will be better off? My money's on the one who got treatment.
Going back a little bit, I compared the dangers of doing hard drugs to various other legal activities that also carry inherent dangers. I'd like to examine that comparison a bit more closely now. Previously I made this comparison in an online conversation with Calden, in that case the examples we were comparing where heroin and boxing I believe. I'll stick with these two as they are great for making my point. The point was made that unlike heroin, boxing, while dangerous is heavily regulated in such a way as to minimize risk. Medics are on hand, there is a professional referee, mouth guards and gloves are regulated and required. Now how do you think these things came about? I suspect it has something to do with boxing being legal. I've never been to an illegal boxing match but I imagine many of the safety considerations that are present in a legitimate ring aren't there. The same is true of heroin. Heroin is a very dangerous substance, true. But ask yourself this, would it be more or less dangerous if it came from some sort of company or government agency that was accountable to the law and public scrutiny and regulation or from a drug dealing criminal only interested in maximizing profit? Who would be more inclined to cut their product with baking soda or arsenic or whatever? Legalizing heroin wouldn't make it safe, not by a long shot, but it would make it a great deal safer, reducing harm to the individual and society. If it were legal we could ensure a consistent level of purity that would reduce the risk of overdose and unanticipated complications from drugs being cut. We could restrict access to the drug to adults more effectively (Have you noticed how the guy at the liquor store asks for ID but your pot dealer doesn't?)

There's two other reasons I've heard to keep hard drugs illegal and they kind of relate to
each other, first being that if drugs were legal, more people would do them and second, that if drugs were legal the government would appear to be condoning them. From my perspective both of these arguments are rather easily dismissed. Addressing the first claim you could point to the fact that marijuana use is lower in the Netherlands where it is legal than in Canada or even the States, who take a very tough approach to drug policy. If that's not enough for you simply ask yourself this question: "If Canada legalized cocaine tomorrow, so that I could buy it at any corner store for $1 a hit, would I do it?" The answer for me, and I would think most people is trivially no. There's so many better reasons not to do cocaine besides the legality that it's hardly a factor in the equation. Next up is the assertion that if the government were to legalize hard drugs they would appear to be condoning the practice. Now let's think about this for half a second. Is anyone under the impression that the government condones smoking tobacco? I didn't think so, and this despite the fact that it not only allows the production and sale of tobacco but also collects enormous tax revenues from it. Why on earth would anyone assume that the impression would be so different for other hard drugs?

Finally there's a couple societal consequences of the legalization of drugs that I think would be positive. On a more local basis you would take away an enormous source of revenue for organized crime. The influence of the mob was severely reduced at the end of prohibition, the results would be no less dramatic if the current prohibition against other drugs were ended. Less money for gangsters means less gangsters means less guns, means less gun fights and so on. On a larger scale, (and this is more aimed at the Americans although our presence in Afghanistan means we have to shoulder some of the blame) we could end the global war on drugs which punishes poor farmers in impoverished third and second world countries because we can't stop doing the drug that is made from what they grow. Does the Columbian cocoa worker or Afghani opium farmer deserve to have his sole source of income, his very livelihood destroyed because rich White people can't resist the temptation of a line of coke or a needle of smack? Of course they don't and it's appalling and unjust that we act like such actions are justified.

In conclusion, legalizing hard drugs, even the most dangerous ones would be beneficial to the individual doing the drugs (no interactions with organized crime, guaranteed to be getting what he asks for, option for treatment as opposed to incarceration) beneficial to society (treated rather than incarcerated and potentially hardened drug users, less gangsters, less tax dollars wasted on enforcement and incarceration) and better for the world (no more narco states and no more planes dumping herbicide on innocent farmers) The only "downside" I see is that we won't be punishing people for doing drugs any more. Now if you feel that our justice system is about punishing wrongdoers that will probably bother you, myself, I have a more practical view. I feel that the goal of the justice system should be to preserve order and protect society, an aim much better served by legalization, information and regulation than criminalization and incarceration.

At this point I'd like to turn the debate over to those who disagree with me (and Regan, I can never tell if you actually agree or not but you sure love playing devils advocate, so go nuts) I'm sure that there are weak areas in the argument I presented or at least areas that need clarification or elaboration so go nuts, call me on my shit, point out my sloppy logic, poor analogies or factual errors, the only way this issue is going to be resolved is with well thought out reasoned dialogue and this post has a ways to go before it can be called that, help me out.

The Balzac Mega-Mall

2007-07-17T14:20:00.001-07:00

Those of you who don't live in or near Calgary can probably skip this post, it's mostly of regional interest. As you may have heard, plans are underway to build a monstrous new entertainment complex in Balzac (go ahead and laugh at the name, I still do) that will rival West Edmonton Mall in size. There's so many things that are stupid about this. First off, as this article explains, there's not enough water. Second, have you heard about the labor shortage we're experiencing in Alberta? Who are they going to get to build this thing? Everyone's already building new houses, roads, pipelines, hospitals... the list goes on. Not to mention once it's built, who's going to staff it? With the option to go make 10k a month on the rigs right out of high school they may be hard pressed to find enough minimum wage flunkies to sweep the shit and staff the kiosks. Finally, the location bothers me. Calgary sprawls enough as it is, I recall reading that we take up as much space as New York city, but with 1/8th the population. Now we're going to build a ginormous mall/racetrack/casino halfway between Airdrie and Calgary? Hellooooooo suburbs and urban sprawl. I know it's tempting to build out with all these plains around but seriously, Calgary is already a difficult enough city to navigate without a car without expanding too far outward.

What with my recent anti-stampede post and now this it may seem to some that I dislike Calgary. For the most part this is untrue, there are a great many things about Calgary that I quite like. Unfortunately there's also a lot of bullshit and I try to call it when I see it.

Every argument on the internet explained

2007-07-17T14:18:00.000-07:00

Trust me, I know a vast amount about these sorts of things, this is exactly the cause of every argument on the internet ever.

RSS

2007-07-12T13:45:00.000-07:00

I've had quite a few friends inquire with me lately about RSS, what it is, as well as how and why to use it. This struck me as the sort of thing I could make a blog post out of. So first off, what is RSS? Well, a very in depth explanation can be found on wikipedia, but in essence RSS allows you to subscribe to a website, blog, section of a website, podcast or really any internet content that is published regularly and has decided to create an RSS feed, which these days is damn near everything.

So why would you want RSS? Well, you may not. If you only go online to chat or check e-mail, you probably don't need RSS. However, if you're like me and have several sites that you check on a regular basis, RSS can be a real lifesaver. Rather than checking multiple sites to see if they have new content you can simply set up an RSS reader that will retrieve all content (or in some cases a headline and link to the actual content) published on that particular website. For example, I have RSS feeds for all the blogs I read, plus the Globe and Mail (broken down into sections such as politics, prairies and health) Digg (again broken down into categories), webcomics and a few other feeds. Now, before RSS if I wanted to check all these things I'd have to load up each site individually and scan through the pertinent sections to see if there was anything new from the last time I checked. With RSS I simply bring up my feed reader and am shown a very nice list of all the content that's new since I last checked.

"Fantastic!" You say, "How does one go about getting such a wonderful tool?" Well it's actually insanely simple these days, you just need a feed reader and the link to the feed of whatever you want to subscribe to. Now for a feed reader my personal choice is google reader, for several reasons. First of all, I fucking love google, I use them for everything, e-mail, start page, this blog and now RSS, google kicks ass. Second of all, the fact that google reader is web based as opposed to being a software solution means that I can check my feeds anywhere I have internet access, say at home or at work. Of course you may have different needs and in that case there may very well be a reader that's better for you, for this I'm going to stick with what I know. So anyway, assuming you already have a google account (you DO have a google account don't you?) all you have to do is log into the reader and start adding feeds. Adding feeds tends to be extremely simple as well. For instance, any blogger blog (and I believe some others) you can simply click "Add subscription", and input the blog address. Other websites will even give you a link that says "add to google", which will automatically set up a feed as well. If you don't have either of those options, all you have to do is find the little orange RSS logo and paste in the address it takes you to, for instance, for instance, for the CNN top stories feed, just paste in http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss, some feeds may end with .xml instead, you don't need to do anything different to use them though. Once you've added all your feeds you can put them in folders to keep them organized. For instance I have all my webcomics in one folder so I can scroll through all the new ones on one page. I also have a folder for all my digg feeds and a different one for news feeds. If you have your feeds in folders it allows you to either browse posts by individual feed or by folder, whichever is more convenient.

That's pretty much all there is to say, I'm sure you'll all tweak it a bit for your own purposes but I've laid down the basics. In conclusion, if you have more than a couple sites that you check regularly, you should really be using RSS.

Impeach that crazy asshole!

2007-07-10T12:08:00.000-07:00

Artificial adolescence

2007-07-10T11:01:00.000-07:00

"They said all teenagers scare / The living shit out of me / They could care less / As long as someone'll bleed"

Oh teenagers, so silly. But we were all one once, we all remember how it felt, although certainly our experiences were varied there were unifying themes. Besides the standard hormones, body hair etc. there was the awkward transition from childhood to adulthood, a transition that this psychology today article suggests is artificially inflated. There's no doubt that adolescence is a real phenomenon, at least to some extent, but I agree that the extent and duration of it has been largely created by us. I remember when I was a teenager (not too long ago, I'm 22 now) I figured that my classification as a "not quite adult" was appropriate, after all I still didn't know everything or behave responsibly all the time, as I naively assumed adults did. Now that I'm older and actually interact with adults as an equal I've come to realize that I acted more like an adult at age 14 than a lot of people ever will. The article particularly struck a chord with me where it discussed the artificial segregation of teens from the adult world. That's certainly true and I agree that the consequences are dire. Teens are capable of being as responsible and competent as adults, but since they're prevented from turning their motivation into real valuable pursuits they waste enormous amounts of time and resources on superficial shit like fashion and celebrity trivia. Now obviously this problem is not solely present in teenagers, nor is it universal among them. But the fact that they don't have the option to pursue a career or get properly involved in politics limits their options and makes superficial pursuits seem like a better choice, especially since they're being constantly told they're not competent enough to function in the adult world.

I especially enjoyed the suggestion of competency exams in place of arbitrary age restrictions, to quote the article:

"It's a simple matter to develop competency tests to determine what rights a young person should be given, just as we now have competency tests for driving. When you offer significant rights for passing such a test, it's highly motivating; people who can't pass a high-school history test will never give up trying to pass the written test at the DMV, and they'll virtually always succeed."

That rings quite true for me, think back to your own high school experience, how many semi literate imbeciles did you still see driving around in vehicles shortly after turning 18. Now admittedly, for many the motivation to be able to vote wouldn't be as strong and maybe some of them wouldn't pass and would be barred from voting long past the current age limit, I frankly don't have a problem with this. I'd rather have a 16 year old who is competent and aware of the issues enough to pass a basic test vote than a 30 year old who is barely aware of a world outside his own personal experience.

So if teens are so competent and this protection is unnecessary, how did we get here? According to the article, the induction of restrictions on youths came hand in hand with the factory and factory style education systems. On the one hand, children needed to be protected from forced labour in the horrible conditions of the factory and it was necessary to create an educated workforce, using the most efficient method as it was understood at the time, factory style mass education. Now of course times have changed since then, for one thing factories are a lot safer and nicer to work in, and force feeding education is not necessarily as great an idea as we once thought. With the scope and diversity of information available and the myriad of career paths out there it seems a little silly to try and run everyone through the same system for the first 12 years of their formal education.

"Our current education system was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was modeled after the new factories of the industrial revolution. Public schools, set up to supply the factories with a skilled labor force, crammed education into a relatively small number of years. We have tried to pack more and more in while extending schooling up to age 24 or 25, for some segments of the population. In general, such an approach still reflects factory thinking—get your education now and get it efficiently, in classrooms in lockstep fashion. Unfortunately, most people learn in those classrooms to hate education for the rest of their lives.

The factory system doesn't work in the modern world, because two years after graduation, whatever you learned is out of date. We need education spread over a lifetime, not jammed into the early years—except for such basics as reading, writing, and perhaps citizenship. Past puberty, education needs to be combined in interesting and creative ways with work. The factory school system no longer makes sense."

Summing up, teens have the potential to be just as competent and valuable contributors to society as adults, our artificial restrictions on them are hurting them (in retarding their development, creating an artificial and largely superficial youth culture, which in turn decreases their potential once they are finally allowed into the game) and us (we're losing out on a lot of potentially productive members of society and replacing them with disrespectful assholes who hang around the mall all day buying designer clothes because they can't actually do anything useful with their money)

Teenagers scare the living shit out of me, but they don't have to