Ishmael II

p. 139: "'Every increase in food production is answered by an increase in population somewhere. In other words, someone is consuming Nebraska's surpluses—and if they weren't, Nebraska's farmers would stop producing those surpluses, pronto.' 'True,' I said,…'Are you suggesting that First World farmers are fueling the Third World population explosion?' 'Ultimately,' he said, 'Who else is there to fuel it?'"
        Okay, first off, this doesn't make much sense on the face of it. Is Quinn honestly trying to tell us that there is some sort of worldwide psychic cooperation between First and Third world peoples, so that the Third World peoples send messages to the First: "Don't worry about reproducing to match your food supply; we'll handle that for you, thereby not violating the Law." Why in the world would this Law apply to entire populaces only, and not to geographical subsets? Can you find a single example in the wild in which this is true? No, of course you can't, because it's a law of individual behavior, not some psychic collective force.
        But secondly, Ishmael [Quinn] here betrays his profound ignorance of American farm economics. First: It is assuredly not true that Nebraska farmers would stop producing surpluses if no one consumed them. They would produce regardless, because the government purchases the surplus. The government might then (and has) simply destroy it. Or they might send it—for free—to those starving third world countries, whose people might not be able to afford Nebraska corn on the open market. This has several effects. First, free food does increase population among poor peoples—if there is food enough for six kids this year, perhaps two of them will survive next year, when famine returns, whereas if I only had two children, both would likely die. If I have to pay to feed my children, the calculus is entirely different. Second, free imported food drives the price for locally-grown food to zero, driving local farmers out of business and increasing the certainty that famine will continue, increasing their reliance on free Nebraska food, which tends to increase their population still more. And why does the U.S. government do this? To prop up Nebraska food prices! Why? Because food can be produced so cheaply, and there is so much food relative to the paying world population, that only large corporate farms can compete in a free market. To keep smaller farms afloat, government props up prices. There is plenty of food. There is no need for starvation. To end world hunger, only one step need be taken: convert every country in which there are starving people to market capitalism (and stop giving them free food). Modern, wealthy, post-industrial nations have a stable or declining population. Problem solved. Check out The Disaster of International Foreign Aid Programs for a fascinating overview of the problem.

[Go back to pp. 141–2. I feel that there should be something to say here.]

p. 143–4:
        What extinction? I don't see a case having been made of a path that will lead to human extinction. Is this just assumed?

p. 147–8:
        Yes, the Leavers have a great life (and Quinn quotes Sahlins! Cool). They're wonderfully happy, and rich with food (although I still say that they are benefiting, food-wise, by our decimation of their brethren). We are miserable by comparison. But that is the price we pay for our increased population, strength, and resilience to disaster and famine. I hope to help remedy the mental diseases (crime, addiction, loneliness, all the things he mentions) created by this situation.

p. 165-66: I'll have to check my Bible, but IIRC, Man wasn't made to rule the world, not in a Taker way at least. It was only after he was cast out of the Garden that he got that job. See Asimov & Rand on the subject. The Garden of Eden story is an allegory, from a Taker point of view, of the move from Leaver life to Taker life. The fruit of the tree of Knowledge is an allegory for man's loss of innocence and his new necessity of rules—of Good and Evil (nothing's evil to a Leaver—nothing anybody would ever want to do anyway. Emotions are in line with right action. Not so with Takers). See Asimov's Guide to the Bible for more details. It's a racial memory thing. Early agriculturists weren't so sanguine about the change, and looked back to "the good old days."

p. 166: "The world is at the point of death."
        How so? Is this just assumed? Who says? You?

p. 167:
        I don't see that Takers deliberately forced neighbors into agriculture. Back this up.

p. 169:
        Leavers would not have come up with the allegory of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, because the knowledge it gave is that, according to Quinn, the way of life of the Leavers is evil.

p. 173–4:
        He's likely right about Cain & Abel though. Cf. Asimov again. But this is a separate story from the Eden story. Because the Eden story is about "us," not "them." Therefore told by agriculturists. Or something.

p. 204–5:
        The Takers didn't forget how to live; they discovered that the old rules didn't work anymore, so they came up with new ones, and then forgot the old ones. The story didn't play out the way he says.

• Okay, any new rules the Leavers come up with are inventions too. You're making a false distinction. It's just that conditions change very slowly among Leavers, and new rules/ideas have a long time to settle out and fly or fail. Not so among Takers; by the time we've adjusted to one rule and started to be able to see its long-term consequences, conditions change and new rules are needed.

p. 214: Unrelated note: "I don't think you can start wanting something until you know it exists." Or know it's useful, or know a specific use for it, or hear how it can benefit you. Yes. But note how this concept applies to the idea of marketers creating demand by popularizing such things as underarm deodorant. No, people didn't complain about not having it until it was available. But the change did not occur because of marketing brainwashing, it came because people discovered they wanted something they had only just discovered existed.

p. 217:
        What's this about the Plains Indians being agriculturists? Look this up.
        P.S. I'd love to be a Leaver. It sounds like a fantastic life. But I can do more good here. Plus: books.

p. 218–9:
        Crucial point: The reason almost nobody rebels against our Taker life is that they realize that they'd almost assuredly die were we to revert to primitivism.

p. 220–1:
        Okay—the day-to-day life may have been as good as you say—sometimes. But the hard times could be brutally hard—deadly. Twenty good years cannot make up for one bad year (people expand to fit their food supply, right?) for people who cannot store food. The tribe can be killed or mortally wounded by one bad year. This is why agriculture is so attractive. Otherwise—why become agriculturists at all?
        P.S. We're not first on the menu of any remaining predators. Hmm.

p. 238:
        Stop. Takers aren't subject to evolutionary forces? Bullshit. All life is. True, we've tried to make ourselves rich enough that we're no longer as susceptible to the mass death that goes along with much evolution (Leaver life is just a bowl of cherries, right? Riiiiight), but we're not exempt.
        No, I can't leave this like that. Leavers are subject to evolution, he says, right? They're part of the community of life. They're subject to the will of the gods. Well, what do the gods of evolution say? They say, "You, and you, and you, and you, and all of you over there, must die so that my approved remnant may thrive." And that remnant may include humans—and it may not. The gods could kill all humans as surely as they killed all dinosaurs. And even on an ordinary level, they may kill all but one out of twenty in a tribe, or one out of twenty tribes. Are you sure you wish to live subject to the gods' will? Hello? Wake up! Evolution is harsh. Evolution's a bitch. The gods of evolution care not one whit whether your family, your tribe, or your entire species lives or dies. Mother Culture—does. This is the most crucial issue of all, and yet Quinn glosses it over while talking out of both sides of his mouth about it. In Leaver life, things are great—until the Grim Reaper comes calling and wipes out your entire genetic line in a blink.

        By the way, on the note of lamenting as unspeakable, unjustifiable evil the destruction (by assimilation, competition, or murder) of Homo sapiens leavers by Homo sapiens takers, where are the Homo erectus? Hm? Oh? The Leavers killed them? How interesting. So we're not so unique after all.

p. 242:
        Oho! Ohoho! So we should go back to hunter-gatherer/agrarian life to wait—and leave room—for the next intelligent creature, who, if we wait long enough, will kill and enslave us?? Thank you, no. Go to hell.

• Oh, that's precious. "Man? Oh, yes, man! What a wonderful creature he was! He owned the world—and then gave it up so we could arise."
        "Whatever happened to him?"
        "Eh? Oh, we killed him, of course. Couldn't have him around—he might have taken it into his head to try and reclaim his throne and deprive us of our destiny. Couldn't have that. No, he had to die. Noble creature, though. There might be a few left in zoos and preserves."
        I'm with Heinlein. We have to be the biggest, meanest, roughest, nastiest kid around—so that when somebody else big and mean shows up and wants to take our lunch money (and dinner money, and breakfast money, and every meal forever after), we'll have a chance to fight him off. This is also why I believe that we should never completely get rid of war.

--
Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Journal Entries at 10/04/2007 11:00:00 AM

Ishmael

p. 56–7:
        I've had bits to quibble about before this—such as the idea that the idea of German racial purity and superiority is "nonsense"—it's not nonsense, not on this level; it's a major driving force in human history (no, not the Germans, race) from time before writing—but nothing to write about 'til now. And this isn't really a disagreement, just a comment (the author is obviously a genius, by the way):
        Yes. If evolution is seen as teleological, it is of course a myth. And admittedly, that myth is prevalent throughout our worldwide culture. But it's merely anthropocentric vanity, which I (and most biologists and other people informed in evolution) am free of.
        But anthropocentrism is not inherently wrong. It's only wrong to be teleologically anthropocentric. The jellyfish was right to end his story with the creation of jellyfish, and man is right to end his with the advent of Man. That does not imply that Man is the end of creation, merely that Man is our primary—sole—interest, so this is where we focus the story. Further, it is not wrong to think the world is there for the taking, any more than a coyote is wrong for thinking a rabbit is there for the eating. It is. It is only an error if the coyote believes that rabbits were made to be eaten by the coyotes, instead of that coyotes were made to eat rabbits, which is true. So the error comes only if man believes that the world was made to be exploited by man, rather than that man was made to exploit the world. The former point of view engenders an erroneous attitude. If coyotes were made to eat rabbits, that says nothing about the sustainability of the rabbit population—in fact, what it says about individual rabbits is that they will be eaten and die! Coyotes could easily eat all the rabbits, and then where would the coyotes, who were made to eat rabbits, be? Dead! Starved!
        But—if rabbits were made to be eaten, then it's not the coyotes' responsibility to worry about the rabbit population, is it? It is the responsibility of whoever or whatever made the rabbits. Fall to! Have at it! They exist to be used, so use them! However, since rabbits weren't made to be eaten, but instead to be rabbits and eat greens, this sort of attitude will ensure the destruction of rabbitdom and the death of the coyotes. It's an error in teleology.

p. 84: "There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world."
        You're speaking of natural law. But what kind of natural law is being discussed here?

p. 85–6: "Millions have been willing to back their choice of prophet with their very lives. What makes them so important?"
        Card (in Xenocide, I believe) answers this. In short: Prophets are civilizers.

• "If [drug legalization] ever becomes a serious possibility, people…will…begin combing scriptures to see what their prophets have to say on the subject."
        No. They will comb scriptures to find justification for what they already believe. This is a serious point that's being ignored.

p. 87: "You know how to split atoms…but you don't know how people ought to live."
        Yes. This is my life's work. We don't know how to live in this world we've created. Why? Because we weren't made for this world, nor it for us! We were made for the world of the Leavers, the primitives. I've known this—forever, I guess. The goal is to understand ourselves well enough to figure out how to live well in a post-agricultural/post-industrial world. Sociobiology is a path to this understanding.
        But it's not the only path; there are others. Molecular psychology and genetics are two other possible ones. And another which blindsided me—Economics. Economics can largely shortcut the process, starting with common-sense assumptions about human nature, and reach startlingly broad conclusions about human conduct. It's thrown me off my path, for what I expected to take decades or lifetimes with sociobiology has taken mere years with economics. Economics can solve or address vast swaths of what I wanted to accomplish with sociobiology.
        So I'm left at something of a loss. Now what? Where do I go? What problems do I solve? I never set out to solve purely philosophical problems. Philosophy has always been a means to and end for me: a way of honing my ideas, but especially of developing a rigorous method of explaining my ideas, so I could convince some others of my rightness (this bleeds into rhetoric, of course, but that's later) so they would help me with this sociobiology project. When the prevailing wisdom makes the truth you have make no sense to almost everyone, you must come up with a counter-wisdom, and a way of explicating it that makes clear its truth.
        This was my project; this was my plan. But it hit a snag. Sociobiology should still work, up to a point—it will at least let you figure out what sorts of ideas will likely fail—but Economics will get you there much faster, and, presuming sociobiology gives any real answers at all, they will likely read: Economics is the place to look! At least in part. In fact I can dimly see that even now.
        So why bother with sociobiology at all? Well, sociobiology can still be valuable. The story of "Why are we the way we are, and how did we come to be that way?" is an incredibly valuable one, worth pursuing. And also, Economics only really answers the question, "How should we structure society?" Not, "How can we, individually, be happy?" a question of tantamount importance, that I am keenly interested in. Sociobiology can certainly help answer this question. But I am also fascinated by another, perhaps bigger question: "How can we figure out the best way to live?" Which combines all of the above, plus a cogent theory of science to help us figure out how best to figure out how to do things better. These are my work.
        Thank you, Mike, for reminding me.

Epistemology—What is it to know?
Metaphysics—What kind of world do we live in?
Theory of Evidence—How can we tell what is true?
Natural Philosophy—How does the world work? How do we work?
Moral Philosophy—Given answers to all of the above, what is the best way to live in the world, both societally and individually?

p. 89: "[The Taker philosophy is that] no knowledge about [how to live] is obtainable."
        Every natural law theorist ever, down to and including Rothbard and his followers, disagrees with this. Where did you get this idea? (to p. 91) And I, most vehemently, disagree. I have been striving all my adult life to find the Laws of Humanics (Laws of Aerodynamics do not tell you how to build an aeroplane. They only tell you what sort of designs may work and what may not).

p. 127:
        Civilized people—"Takers"—exterminate their competition, whereas "Leavers" and other animals do not. He says that this is an invariable rule—a law—of the wild. Why? "If competitors hunted each other down just to make them dead, then there would be no competitors. There would simply be one species at each level of competition: The strongest."
        This is a powerful argument. It threw me for a loop. It is also wrong (worth noting because little has been actually wrong so far).
        Let's see why:
        First, civilized humans ("Takers") do not always exterminate their competitors. They don't even usually exterminate their competitors. Do we have any record of one race or nation utterly exterminating another? It's possible, surely, and it's been tried, but I don't know if it's ever been accomplished. In the instances I know of that come closest, the losers were decimated to the point that they were no longer a viable threat, then left alone. Competing races, countries, nations, etc. can live next to each other with only occasional squabbles, if both of them are of nearly equivalent power levels.
        And that's the key: similar power levels. When one competitor has an obvious power advantage over another, the game changes. The actual outcome depends on the degree of discrepancy between the groups. If the difference is small, some ground may be gained. If the disparity is large, conquering or extermination may take place. This is what happens with, say, humans (Takers) vs. wolves, or bears, or cougars. Even one cougar can be a serious threat, so if there's enough of an advantage to be assured of success, going after cougars is not a hard choice. Primitive humans simply do not have enough advantage for that kind of war to be worth trying. As for the rest—you're only observing the natural world after it has reached a stable equilibrium. You have no idea how baboons, for instance (or for that matter "leavers"), would behave if you introduced a significantly weaker, but still threatening competitor or predator into their environment. My strong suspicion is that they would try to eliminate or neutralize it.
        I imagine this has happened many times throughout prehistory. My point is that this discrepancy between 'takers' and 'leavers' is more one of power levels than attitude (look what happened when Indians got horses and rifles, and note that there is strong evidence that primitive peoples drove the sabertooth tiger and wooly mammoth to extinction), and that competitors of similar power levels can coexist alongside each other effectively indefinitely.
        Or to put in economic terms: real competition keeps everybody honest.

p. 132:
        Okay, this species diversity thing may have some merit, but we need to remember that things aren't a bad as they seem—culturally, I mean. I mean that it is only very recently, in terms of human history, that we have gained the power to actually gain the upper hand over our environment. Call it a couple of centuries. And we have not really had that power in spades until—say 1945. Sixty years. Fifty when this book was written. Only since then have we had the ability to rapidly and drastically change our environment. Only in the last 200 or so years have we had the tools to deliberately exterminate other species. So don't be so harsh. We struggled against long odds against the Earth for a long time. Now, yes, we've won—and don't know what to dow with our newfound power. And quickly, we're trying to adapt. CFC's, smog, parks, endangered species lists, etc. We're stumbling forward. But not for 10,000 years—just for 2–300.
        Also, if what you're worried about is the world, rather than humankind, you can stop. The world has survived several catastrophes of the magnitude of anything like what humans are likely to do to it. Mass extinctions are far from uncommon, geologically. So get straight what you're worried about, over what timeframe. Don't fall into the trap of considering Nature as one eternal, unchanging status quo that we're meddling with.
        However, the diversity issue (that we're systematically reducing species diversity in order to eliminate competition for ourselves and our food) is a serious one. I don't see it solving itself; that is, if population increases indefinitely, this trend could continue to worsen unless we recognize it as a problem. However, if we do, a properly-functioning capitalism should solve it to the limits of our knowledge and ability. That or we get nailed by experience and learn the hard way. I just have a hard time believing that we as a culture are that powerful, that important, that unique. "There's nothing new under the Sun."

p. 133: "Any species in the wild will invariably expand to the extent that its food supply expands. But, as you know, Mother Culture teaches that such laws do not apply to man."
        That's right; they don't. Man is unique in this respect: He can plan. He can, in a limited sense but far better than any other species, foretell the future. And it is this foretelling that exempts him from this law. He is not forced to act on the information about what food supplies are now, but can act on what he believes food supply will be like in the future. This actually happens. Man is exempt from this law. (There are analogous laws, adapted for man, that he is not exempt from.)
        (10/4/07) I am, in fact, a case in point that man is not subject to this law. Because of the ZPG and overpopulation scare in the '70s, my parents decided to have exactly one child—me. Later, they wanted another—and decided to adopt. Was our food in short supply? Hardly! My father ran a corporate ranch! We could easily have afforded food enough for five kids.

p. 134: Oho! At last we begin to see the underbelly of the beast. Quinn reveals his socialist leanings. "The biological community is an economy, isn't it? I mean, if you start taking more for yourself, then there's got to be less for someone else…"
        So for Quinn, economics is a zero-sum game. We're almost done here.

p. 136: "Increasing food production to feed an increased population results in yet another increase in population."
        Wrong! Then why is Russia paying people to have babies? Food production in industrialized nations is outpacing population growth.
        Hey Malthus: give me a food price graph for Britain for the last 300 years, will you?

p. 138: You've opened a huge can of worms here and don't know it. ""…all the same, it's hard to just sit by and let them starve.' 'This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler. 'I will not let them starve. I will not let the drought come. I will not let the river flood.' It is the gods who let these things, not you.'"
        True, a ruler may speak this way. But so may a brother, a son, a friend, a neighbor. If you see that a fellow resident of your city is about to be hit by a falling limb, will you take action, or will you let him be hit and perhaps killed? By saying that we do not let people starve, you are saying that we are not part of a global community; that they are not our brothers; that we have no concern, nor should we, about what happens to them. Do you wish to say this? Choose your words carefully. [P.S. He's still right about the effects of giving free food to a starving populace.]

--
Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Journal Entries at 10/03/2007 11:00:00 AM

xkcd

Okay, xkcd is an awesome webcomic about, as it says, "romance, sarcasm, math, and language." Actually, science should be thrown in there somewhere too. But the "Powers of One" strip is particularly awesome. As with several webcomics, there's a little additional joke in the tooltip (mouseover) text, and in this case, it's cooler than the actual strip. See the strip to understand what's going on, but I'm adopting the tooltip joke as a new quote: "It's kinda Zen when you think about it, if you don't think too hard."

That so sums up much of Zen-type stuff for me. That's how I believe a lot of Zenlike stuff (I'm not really dissing Zen itself here; Zen philosophy is too complex for the kind of light treatment I'm giving here. So let's say this applies to some actual Zen stuff and a lot of pop Zen, or Zen-like, stuff) is. It sounds all cool and spooky and paradoxical until you actually examine it closely enough to understand it. For instance, I got an email from a friend today that said, "My father's mother once said 'I'm not a feminist. I'm not particularly feminine' and she was both right and wrong." Now, I'm not poking fun at the author of this email; she knew exactly what she meant, and so did I. But this is the sort of quote that could be interpreted all Zen-ly: oooh, something's both right and wrong at the same time, there's no absolute truth, we've just got to go with the flow and take a lot of drugs (or meditation, or whatever) so we can try to grasp, non-intellectually, the ultimate, seemingly contradictory Truths of the Universe.

Poppycock. For someone with an intellectual, scientific mindset, this is a simple problem (and I realize I didn't choose a particularly difficult example; if someone has a better one on tap, I'd gladly use it). Either this was intended to mean "she was both right and wrong at the same time and in the same way," in which case it's utterly contradictory, therefore it was nonsensical, therefore there was no meaning in the statement whatsoever; or it meant "she was right in at least one way and wrong in at least one other way," in which case it makes perfect sense, but isn't creepy or mystical or contradictory in any way, it's just couched in a shorter, more-interesting-sounding way (this is precisely how it was intended to be understood in this case, by the way).

Again, I realize I used a simple, almost straw-man example, but I really view a lot (if not all) of the seemingly-contradictory, mystical statements of the Zen-loving crowd this way: either they're actual contradictions, in which case they're both meaningless and utterly useless, or they're not, and a little analysis will uncover what's actually going on, thus removing the spooky mysticism from the situation. Yes, sure, this removes a little of the mystery from the Universe, but isn't the point of mysteries that it's fun to try to solve them? There's plenty more mysteries in the Universe to uncover, and meanwhile, you've increased your understanding of the world, which in my mind is more important than maintaining unnecessary mysteries.

--
Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts at 6/04/2007 09:57:00 AM

South Carolina Republican Debate

Did I hear this correctly? Mayor Giuliani has proposed not just a national ID card, but a mandatory nationwide database of everyone in the country at all times? Do we have any idea what this means? Universal person registration??????

And Mitt Romney came straight out and said that we should "double Guantanamo." Well, Mitt, that's a little difficult unless we go to war with Cuba. Why don't we do the easy thing and just establish concentration camps around the U.S.?

Ron Paul did splendidly. He mildly stumbled once or twice; when he was asked if he would actually get rid of the Department of Homeland Security in a time of war, I think he should have said, "Absolutely. We already had a Department of Homeland Security: it's called the Department of Defense." He actually had a better quote on his website than the one he used: "Only in Washington would anyone call the creation of an additional layer of bureaucracy on top of already bloated bureaucracies 'streamlining.'" He also seemed a bit nervous at first, stumbling over words and fiddling with his pen.

But at moments he was brilliant. The fight between him and Guliani was awesome. I loved Guliani's quip, that he'd never heard that theory (that Al Quaeda attacked us because of our wars and intervention in the Middle East) before. That's wonderful, since, as Paul said, that's the reason that Bin Laden himself gave. The pundits are saying that it was a boost for Guliani and that Paul is done. I think quite the opposite. Guliani and McCain are spouting the standard Bush line that they hate us because we're rich and free. That plays well for the hardcore, Fox News-watching base of the Republican Party, but for anyone with any brains, they've been asking that exact question for six years now: Why did they attack us? The Bush answer doesn't compute. Paul gave them the answer tonight. Expect this to work in Paul's favor far more than the pundits have any idea.

There was one more great Paul moment, but I don't remember what it was right now. I'll repost when I figure it out.

Update: Ron Paul is #1, with 30%, in the Fox News debate poll! The guy who announced that said that perhaps Paul has a better organization to coordinate his supporters texting. I don't think so. It's not so much a matter of coordination or organization. I mean, the email we got today was an appeal for money; it didn't even mention the debate. His blog post for today gave the number and message to text, but that's about it. The rest of it is just grassroots. There are several websites not formally associated with the Paul campaign that have sprung up to support him. He had a lot of people who believed in him (myself included) long before he declared his candidacy.

But none of that explains the results. Surely, with as many Paul supporters as there may be, they're a small fraction of the number of people watching the debates. This has got to be a genuine popular upswell of support. There have been accusations that Paul supporters were somehow fudging the online MSNBC and ABC poll results. Honestly, they were so distorted that even I thought it was possible. But the results from Technorati and, in particular, Alexa (you can't distort the drop in visitations to other candidates' websites that happened after the first debate) seem legit. And I just don't see how you can distort text message polls; presumably (hey, let me try...) you can only vote once from any one phone (hm. I got a response when I voted the first time, but this time my message dropped into a hole. But maybe I missed the end of the voting. Update: I did get a response, hours later. It was the same response as I got to my first message. So perhaps it went through after all. Hard to say). To fudge these results, you'd have to have tons of cell phone accounts. That's money that Paul supporters don't have.

Part of this can be explained by the fact that libertarians have a much higher proportion of techie types than any other political persuasion. Online polls and text message polls are only accessable to those with the technical knowhow to access them, and libertarians lead the pack on that count.

More:
One of the candidates (Duncan Hunter, I believe), in the post-debate interviews, just said, in response to Ron Paul's comments, that "we didn't attack a middle eastern country, we saved a middle eastern country—Kuwait—and our reward was being attacked on 9/11." But that's precisely Paul's point! That was our reward for intervening in the Middle East!

Paul didn't say anything about immigration that I heard tonight, so this wasn't directed at him, but this same guy said, in support of stricter immigration controls, "we caught 1100 [illegal immigrants] from Communist China [crossing the border from Mexico]," I presume within the last year. This is a point against allowing immigration? 1100 of the most industrious, intelligent people in the world want to come here to escape Communist oppression, and that's a bad thing??

Update 2:
This is priceless. Immediately after the post-debate show on Fox, there is a show on Discovery Times on Osama bin Laden where they clearly say that bin Laden was severely upset by the U.S. liberation of Kuwait, believing that it was the duty of the Muslim world to do so. This (along with, I'm sure, what the show will say later) utterly validates Paul's point. It has nothing to do with us being rich. How could it? Saudi Arabia is crazy rich. Bin Laden himself is incredibly rich. It has nothing to do with being free. As bin Laden himself said, why then did he not attack Sweden? It has everything to do with blowback from our intervention in the Middle East.

Update 3:
I remember now, after seeing the video of Paul's performance in the debate, what his last great moment was: His gripe that they were dealing with hypothetical situations when the real Osama bin Laden was still free and we were basically ignoring him. Awesome.

--
Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts at 5/15/2007 08:26:00 PM

You have no right to a speedy trial

I'm speechless.

Marcia Cooke, Federal judge trying the case of Jose Padilla, has held that our Constitutionally-protected right to a speedy trial only comes into play when a suspect is actually charged with a crime. Before that time, Government officials can hold you in a cell indefinitely. So, if the government never wants to see someone come to trial, all they have to do is not charge them with any crime. I see. Well, that's alright then. No possibility of injustice there.

Someone tell me…when is it time to revolt, again?

I'm waiting.

--
Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts at 3/30/2007 01:12:00 PM

The Hidden Costs of Socialism

I’m still a college student, and I found myself this semester retaking a Precalculus class that I had begun a couple of years ago but had to pull out of, largely for military reasons. I was pleased, upon reading the syllabus, to see that the same book that I had used for the previous class was still assigned; it would save me having to purchase another $100 textbook. I wasn’t sure whether the same edition was still being used (the syllabus didn’t specify), but I figured I would give it a shot; even if the edition I had was out of date, I figured it would be usable. After all, how much could mathematics have changed in a couple of years?

Everything was going fine until I got about halfway done with my homework and realized that several problems were assigned that did not exist in my text. Frustrated, I went to Morris to check out the current edition from the Reserve room. The answer to the question of how much mathematics had changed in a couple of years was not much; there was very little difference between the readings portion of the two texts. In fact, the only difference I noticed was the removal of a tidbit I had thought interesting about the origin of the word “Algebra.”

The Exercises portion, however, was another story. It was completely different from what was in my old text. Problems had been added, existing problems had been moved; sometimes the only noticeable change was that the problem sections had been rearranged and renumbered. Why? Was the new format somehow superior to the old, aside from the additional problems? No; it was about the same, just reworded and renumbered. Why then? For one purpose: to stiff poor college students like myself.

It’s a cute trick; leave the text substantially alone, but rearrange the exercises in order to instantly outdate the old textbook and force students to buy the expensive new edition instead of purchasing the old one used. It’s particularly transparent in mathematics, where (at least on the undergraduate level) things change so slowly that publishing a new edition every two years is patently silly. But it’s a trick that is used throughout the massively profitable textbook publishing system. Publish a new edition, discontinue the old edition, and rearrange things sufficiently so that the old edition is incompatible with the new. This bit of skullduggery, along with the exorbitant price of textbooks, combine to jilt college students out of millions of dollars every year.

How is this possible? How is it that in a free-market economy where it seems that nearly every other commodity or service seems to get better and/or cheaper over time, can textbook publishing be stuck in this Dark Ages cycle of ripoffs and exploitation?

The answer, oddly enough, would seem to be socialism. In particular, socialist colleges and universities. “Huh?” you might ask. “What socialist universities?” There’s one right before your eyes. I attend one. SIUC is a state-owned, and therefore socialist, school. Its tuition rates are subsidized, particularly for state residents, so that its tuition rates are substantially below market rates for a comparable education.

So how are state schools responsible for textbook prices? Simple: socialist schools have no incentive to keep costs low for their students. Their tuition rates are already low, so they can expect high enrollment even if they heap other, hidden costs on the students (although SIUC, amazingly, seems to be doing a horrible job at enrollment, even so). What’s more, the low price of state schools removes poorer students from the free market for higher education, so that (except for the intellectual cream) private schools rarely even attempt to entice them. This results in reduced price competition between private schools. Someone who is paying $20,000 a semester (or whatever it is now) to attend MIT is unlikely to balk at a $500 textbook bill.

If state schools did not exist, low-cost private schools would spring up in their place, and (given the magic of the free market) would likely be providing a superior education at equivalent or lesser cost within a few years. What’s more, a free market in education would tend to solve the textbook problem. If schools could compete freely for the poorer students, textbook cost would likely become a factor.

And the solution to the textbook problem is astonishingly simple: Textbook cost should be counted as part of tuition. Students don’t pay room-rental fees for their classrooms; they don’t pay electricity fees for the energy they use while in class. All of that and more are part of the cost of tuition. If textbooks as well were considered as part of this cost by a majority or substantial minority of schools, textbook prices would plummet. Why? Because schools, trying to minimize their textbook cost, would press professors to choose cheaper texts, and those that are not updated more often than necessary. A market for cheaper textbooks would spring up, and publishers would move to fill that market. In fairly short order, this ridiculous stranglehold publishing companies have over students would be abolished. As of now, there is no market for cheaper textbooks. Sure, you want a cheaper textbook, but you are not the one who chooses the textbook you have to buy; your professor is. And your professor is not the one who has to pay for it, so he will rationalize the cost to himself, and you are, once again, screwed.

So remember: The next time you think government would do a better job than the market at providing some service or good, don’t forget the hidden costs.

--
Posted by Calion to Carbondale Bytelife at 1/18/2007 8:12:46 PM

Public Schooling

Reposted from The Perfunctory Hero:

Public "Schools": Destroying Lives
Get.
Your kids.
The fuck out of.
Public "school".
This instant...


... if you really do love them.

Evidence.

--
Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts at 12/11/2006 12:26:00 PM

It was pretty good while it lasted

The American experiment is over.

--
Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts at 12/10/2006 03:45:00 PM

Gingrich

This is possibly the best speech I've ever heard.

--
Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts at 12/09/2006 08:11:00 PM

Conflict of Interest...

Okay, here’s the sequence of events:

At the 21 November Carbondale City Council meeting, Mike Heck (President of the Carbondale Park District Board but speaking for himself) encouraged Councilmen (councilpeople? Ugh.) Wissmann and Haynes to abstain from the Carbondale Clean Indoor Air Act (otherwise known as the smoking ban) because of a supposed conflict of interest. Mr. Wissmann declined to abstain, but Mr. Haynes was convinced to.

At the 5 December Carbondale City Council meeting, no one mentioned conflict of interest between Wissmann’s job as part-owner and editor of the Nightlife and Carbondale’s Halloween policy.

In the 7 December Daily Egyptian, the editorial staff wrote what I consider an asinine and insinuating editorial questioning Wissmann for not abstaining from the smoking ban vote and for pushing a Halloween policy that might secondarily or tertiarily (is that a word?) benefit his newspaper.

In the 8 December Daily Egyptian, there appeared a letter I wrote in response to the aforementioned foolish editorial. It’s purty decent, if you ask me (if you don’t follow any of the other links, follow this one; it’s kinda the whole point here. I’d repost it in full, but Dave wants these things kept short).

On...hey, it’s still December 8th, isn’t it? Things move fast. Well, today, after the letter was published, I got a couple of emails from Councilmen Fritzler and Wissmann correcting me about a couple of things in my letter, and in the sprit of full disclosure and honesty, I’ll list the corrections here, so the world can see.

First, Joel (Fritzler) rightly pointed out that no one “requires” council members to actually hold real jobs. I knew this, of course; it was a poor choice of wording. Second, Joel informed me that Haynes no longer managed Kroger West; he’s at a different Kroger’s now. I didn’t know that. Third, Chris (Wissmann) told me that he doesn’t own part of Thomas Publishing, as I thought and implied he did. He only owns part of the Nightlife. Last—no one pointed this out to me, but I caught it myself; I implied that the DE used the word “recused” in their editorial, but I was inexcusably sloppy on this one; they did no such thing.

One more thing: Joel pointed out to me that my arbitrary example about Kroger West and rezoning actually had a fortuitous ring of truth, having to do with Kroger, CVS, and the proposed Murphysboro Wal*Mart. Does anyone have any more info on this?

--
Posted by Calion to Carbondaley Dispatch at 12/8/2006 7:12:46 PM

Leopard=Windows?

Screenshots

There are some very interesting "screenshots" that have recently been released purporting to be of the next version of Mac OS X, 10.5 "Leopard." The most tantalizing thing about these supposed screenshots is that apparently, Windows applications (in this case, Internet Explorer 7) can run natively on a Mac under OS X in Leopard.

If true, this is revolutionary. Windows and OS X applications running concurrently on a Mac? This is the Holy Grail of computing. Now, I don't know if these screenshots are real or not. If they're fake, they're superbly done. But here, it doesn't matter; I just want to talk about the idea, not whether or not Apple is actually doing it.

Explanation

Now, there are positives and negatives to this idea. Before we go into them, let's examine exactly what we're talking about here. The new Macintoshes (as of 2006) are now based on Intel processors instead of the old IBM/Motorola/Freescale PowerPC processors. Since Intel (or Intel-compatible) processors power all Windows (and Linux, for that matter) PC's, that introduces a possible level of compatibility between Macs and PCs impossible previously. Already, Apple has released software called Boot Camp that allows the new Intel Macs to boot into Windows XP. Now, this is a separate boot situation: You can turn on your computer and have it be a Windows PC, or turn it on and have it be a Mac. While this is useful (for more details see my previous post on the subject) for occasionally running Windows-only software like games, it's anything but seamless, and there's almost no real benefit besides saving desk space over just buying an actual PC. The recently released Parallels software is another option for running Windows on your Mac: It provides an environment similar to the old Virtual PC, where Windows, and Windows applications, run in a window on your Mac. This is better than a dual-boot situation; you may lose a tiny bit of speed, but not much, because Parallels on an Intel Mac is not an emulator like Virtual PC on a PowerPC Mac; it's a "virtualization machine" and therefore runs at near-native speed. The problem with it is that it's still not seamless. Parallels is one application on your Mac; all your Windows applications run within that application, in a window with the Windows desktop in it. Functional, but ugly, and a bit of a pain to work with.

The ideal solution is something called a "compatibility layer." This will allow Windows applications to exist side-by-side with Mac applications—completely seamlessly. Done right, the only way you'll know which kind of application you're running is by how it (the application itself) looks and behaves. Instead of being like having a Windows machine on your Mac, it would be like simply running Windows applications in the same way you run Mac applications. In a perfect world, Windows apps would exist on your hard drive right next to your Mac apps and documents and files, with the only distinguishable difference being in the icon. Mac OS 9 (Classic) applications work exactly like this on PowerPC-based OS X machines now. There is currently no way to do this, but the Darwine project is working on it, and this is what is promised by the Leopard screenshots mentioned above.

Consequences

What are the ups and downs of this last method? Well, the ups are obvious. Being able to run any Windows application natively on my Mac without having to deal with the horrid Windows operating system is, as mentioned above, the Holy Grail of computing. There have been many times where some service or game or function that I wanted to access or use was only available for Windows, and I didn't have a Windows machine or emulator, so I and my beloved Mac were left out in the cold.

The downs are a little more interesting. Viruses are obviously the biggest threat. I don't need to describe here how horrible the virus situation is in the Windows world. Running Windows on your Mac obviously exposes you to virus risks that are currently nonexistent for OS X. Dual booting is no more or less risky than simply using a Windows box. Your Mac is a Windows box then. The situation is similar running virtualization software; whatever partition of your hard drive is dedicated to Windows is vulnerable to Windows viruses. The virus risk for compatibility layers is an unknown; we've never seen one in the wild, so it's hard to tell. There's reason to hope, for solutions like Darwine, that the virus risk would be somewhat lessened, as you're running Windows applications, but not Windows itself. With the hypothetical Leopard version, however, it doesn't look like that would apply, as the screenshots imply that Windows is running in the background (just like Mac OS 9 does for Classic now). It could even increase your Mac's exposure to viruses if, as I suggest above, Windows applications reside on the same logical drive that your Mac applications do…which is why it won't be done that way.

But there's a much more important potential "down," that I mentioned in detail in my previous post on the subject: That the ability to run Windows software on your Mac will serve as a serious disincentive for developers to write new software on the Mac. This was my biggest fear before, and is echoed by others, for instance this comment on MacRumors: "[Running Windows apps natively]= the end of native Mac development as we know it"

I certainly understand why people might think so, but I no longer do. See, my Economics classes have finally started to have some effect in my brain, and I think the process will work itself out quite differently from the "Those Macies can just fire up Windows if they need to use our software. Ha ha ha (evil laugh)." scenario. In fact, given the insights from my Economics classes, I suspect it might be just the opposite: The ability to seamlessly run Windows apps on the Mac will attract millions (yes, millions) of new Mac users. This will increase the Mac's market-, user-, and mind-share dramatically. These new converts from Windows will run their old Windows software, sure, but as time goes on, they will gradually migrate to Mac OS X applications (exactly as happened during the transition from OS 9 to OS X via Classic), because of the greater esthetic value, interoperability, compatibility and functionality of Mac software on the Mac platform vs. Windows software on the Mac platform. Besides (and this is really the killer point), it doesn't matter if they migrate or not. Maybe they will all keep using the old software they've got until it's so old that it's useless. Still, when they go to buy new software, they will look for Mac software first. If they can't find any at wherever they're looking, sure, they'll buy Windows software and use that. No big loss. The point is, though, that a developer that offers a Mac version of their software has an opportunity to make a sale that the developer of Windows-only software will miss out on. This will provide a powerful incentive for software developers to program for the Mac. No, this won't cause every single Windows publisher to put out a Mac version. Not by a long shot. But, if Leopard does include native Windows support, and if that in fact causes a boom of Mac switcher sales, expect the amount of Mac software (and, possibly, even Mac-only software) to increase, not decrease.

Gavin Shearer of Microsoft has an interesting article with a similar perspective on this issue.

--
Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts at 6/24/2006 06:18:00 PM

Insanity

Alright, I haven't posted here in a looong time, and frankly hadn't intended to, but an item I ran across has incensed me so much that I just couldn't stop myself.

The essence of the story is this: A passenger asks too many questions during the airline screening process, and is subsequently held, interrogated, bullied and threatened with arrest by government officials. The story is actually a bit scarier than that, but I'm wanting to focus on something else: the fact that simply asking questions makes you a suspect in our War on Terror.

Let's think about this for a minute. What sort of person is likely to be asking awkward questions during a security screening? A terrorist? Good God, no. Asking questions is the last thing a criminal or terrorist is likely to do. "What if the terrorists are investigating the security system?" one might ask. What if they are? Again, the last thing a competent terrorist (and al Qaeda has shown that, if nothing else, it is competent) would do is to actually ask about the security; it might draw attention, and therefore suspicion, to themselves. No, what actual terrorists will do is send someone through the targeted checkpoint several times. Heck, make him a regular flyer; a familiar face. In fact, if he is going to ask any questions, it will be of the names of the screeners, so he can say, "Hi, Bob, how's it going today?" He will become familiar; ingratiated; a no-threat. Someone that gets the most cursory pat-down, or gets to bypass the more intrusive measures, because he's "safe."

That's the high-investment scenario. It's risky, because you still might get caught when you actually have the weapon or explosive on you. Another is the shotgun approach: send a bunch of people through a bunch of checkpoints a bunch of times, so that you get a notion of what behaviors are safe, of what always gets checked, what usually gets checked, and what only rarely or exceptionally gets checked. Then, on der Tag, send twenty different people (carrying weapons, or explosives, or whatever) though twenty different checkpoints at twenty different airlines at as close to the same time as possible. Sure, some of them will get caught, and your terrorist ring is busted; but there is a strong likelihood, if you've done your homework, that several will get through to do the mission.

There are other possibilities, which I'm not going to go into here; this isn't a terrorist training manual. Heck, for all I know, the two ideas above are horrible ones that would never work for some reason. The point is that no intelligent terrorist is ever going to ask awkward questions. They're not interested in civil liberties. They're not afraid of humiliation. Their only interest is to get through the process without calling attention and suspicion to themselves.

So if detaining and interrogating question-askers and rights-asserters doesn't do anything to harm or deter terrorists, who does it harm?

Why, you and me, of course.

Even if we never fly on an airplane, it harms us. Intimidating, bullying and threatening someone who simply asks what his rights are has only one effect: to condition us never to question authority. It doesn't stop terrorists. It doesn't hurt terrorists. In fact, if, as President Bush claims, what the terrorists hate is our freedom, it helps the terrorists. By treating anyone outside of the norm as a suspect (note that I'm not talking about strange-but-quiet behaviors like what the SPOT program is targeting; SPOT is a good idea (UPDATE: er...or, well, maybe not)), we inculcate the idea that being in any way out-of-the-ordinary is criminal. By detaining those who question the system, we ensure that the system is never questioned. By refusing to publish the rules, we condition the people to accept whatever they are told.

How is this anti-terror?

It's not.

It's anti-freedom.

It's anti-American.

Don't for a moment think that this is going to end at the airline check-in counter. This is a precedent that will spread, and spread, until it ultimately dominates the American landscape, unless something is done.

Make no mistake: the American police state is here.

--
Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts at 6/09/2006 07:30:00 AM

Story Idea

I just had an idea which would make an excellent—nay, superb—story. I was thinking about the effectiveness of capital punishment (while reading Brian Aldiss' "Danger: Religion!") and considering the fact that liberals (not to be denigrating; I was a liberal for many years) claim that statistics show that capital punishment does not deter capital crime. But they never explain why this should be so. I don't think they know. In fact, I don't think anyone knows what would be a successful deterrent. The problem is that those who make laws for criminals are not criminals themselves and don't know what motivates or deters them. I don't think anyone knows. I mean, you could ask the criminals what would work, but although this may provide some insight into the criminal mind, the vast majority of criminals are not very smart, and those that are would probably lie to you. So the only real way to find out would be to become a criminal yourself. I imagined myself going out, committing crimes—robberies and such—possibly with a gang of some sort, and coming "home" at night and writing down my feelings and thoughts. I imagined killing a policeman, and writing down my feelings of regret. This, along with notes from speaking to other criminals, would be compiled into a scholarly work of sorts. Of course, a collaboration of some kind would probably have to be established with a mainstream sociologist, who would present the work as his own, compiled from interviews with me and others. Otherwise, it would never be taken seriously. After all, who listens to criminals?

Just remember, make this a work of imagination, not of fiction. Imagine what you would do and write it down.

--
Posted by Calion to Genius/Idiot—Journal Entries at 7/02/1998 11:10:00 AM

History

        Histories should be divided into two parts (not necessarily in the same work): narrative history and factual (factal?) or evidential history. The former is normal history: telling a tale, piecing together of facts within a framework of tapestry to weave a coherent and interesting story.
        The second or evidential history is a far more rigorous, scientific document. It delineates the facts gathered, the conclusions reached, the connections between, and—most importantly—the entire evidential chain back to its original sources, so that no conclusions are based on others' data or conclusions without an understanding of how they reached their answers, so as to point up where errors may gave occurred, and to be able to understand not only the lineage and origins of the data (in order that the reader might draw her own conclusions) but also its degree of sureness and veracity at every point, thus giving first an indication of the likely accuracy of the current conclusions, and second a way of making apparent what of the conclusions must be called into question if any of the sources are proven wrong, without invalidating the entire work.

I also believe that history writers, after completing their research, should read a book of their favorite fiction, or perhaps Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—which does an excellent job of expository philosophy while reading like a good novel—before writing their narrative history, so that they won't wrote sentences like the above.

--
Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Journal Entries at 7/02/1998 11:00:00 AM

Cracking the Bible Code

[This Book Note refers to Cracking the Bible Code, by Jeffrey Satinover.]

         P. 83: This accuracy/inaccuracy in the Jewish Lunar Month is, although this will surely be ignored by everyone, the greatest confirmation—yea, proof—of my theory that the Torah is the product not of myth and mysticism, nor of God, but of an incredibly advanced human culture (the same logic also rules out aliens). The proof is simply this: The Jewish calculation was more accurate than anyone else's—in fact as accurate as theoretically possible without going into space—but it was inaccurate. God—or aliens—would have known the correct value. Unless the decoding was wrong, or the Moon has slowed since then, or the value somehow got changed by this insignificant amount (in God's name, how?), or the satellite data is somehow wrong, this is conclusive unless you are willing to accept God the liar or God the fool. I would very much like to know what the Egyptian values for this are.
        Indeed, the very fact that only the first five books of the Bible are encoded in this fashion is strong evidence to support my thesis. Of all the Bible—even of all known religious works—the books written by Moses are the only ones with this sort of coding. Why? Why would God never do this again? I say it is because it was Moses himself, not God, who composed the pentateuch and the code within, based on his great arcane knowledge he learned from the Egyptians (Much thanks to Graham Hancock and his The Sign and the Seal, particularly chapters 12 and 13, for the inspiration for all of this).

Update: Monday, July 25, 2005
        I have come to the conclusion that the entire Bible Code is fraudulent. Though I haven't made an extremely extensive study of the matter, the very method that is used to find coded material (deciding what you want to find and then looking for it) pretty much shows the entire Code to be spurious. You can (and people have) find any number of things in a complex work like the Bible, but that doesn't mean that they're authentic or prophetic. The Code only tells us what we want to hear. What finally convinced me was a History Channel special that, while it doesn't set out to debunk the Code, lays out far more clearly than the book mentioned above does the incredibly subjective and non-scientific way the Code's messages are "discovered." Too bad. And it fit in so nicely with Hancock too.

Reason.com has some more information on the subject.

--
Posted by Calion to Genius/Idiot—Journal Entries at 6/23/1998 11:00:00 AM

Slavery

Here is the test of slavery—is your work something you do of your own choice, or do you work for fear of punishment from other people? By this definition, nearly all children are slaves. It is also possible to be in a slavery situation of your own devising, where a simple choice will release you. No, members of the military are not slaves; they are indentured servants. They knew what they were doing when they signed up. Draftees, on the other hand, are slave warriors, unless they were given the choice to renounce their citizenship to avoid being drafted.

--
Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Journal Entries at 5/24/1998 11:40:00 AM

More Work

So—time to write about what I originally meant to write. Work. What is work? Work is the effort we put out in order to achieve our goals and dreams. How perverse then, that we (or just I? ? ?) are taught as children, by school, by parents, that work is the unpleasant thing you must do or else get in trouble which keeps you from doing the things you want! Perverse. Insane. How—why—do we do this?

--
Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Journal Entries at 5/24/1998 11:30:00 AM

Occult

I think it would greatly behoove me to study occult magic. I started on a book about it last night, and it seemed to me nothing more than sophisticated Zen-like mind control—or mind access. I think it would work—as far as possible, anyway. And if magical powers were stored inside the mind, that would be how to get at them.

--
Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Journal Entries at 5/24/1998 11:20:00 AM

Humanitarian Intervention

A Libertarian friend of mine has on more than one occasion defended to me the belief that there is nothing wrong, and indeed something very right, about the United States using force in a foreign land to liberate oppressed peoples. For this reason he defended the Iraq war, regardless of the reasons it was actually fought, because it had the consequence of liberating the people of Iraq. I vehemently disagreed with him, yet somehow was unable to come up with convincing arguments why.

Tonight I watched parts 1 and 2 of the West Wing episode "Inauguration," in which the President is faced with just such a choice: to send troops into an African nation (I don't remember the name, but it was meant to be Rwanda) to stop the genocide of one group of people against another. And I believe I have my answer.

Nevermind that we almost never have a real grasp of the nuances of the particular situation, and therefore have every likelihood of making things worse in the region rather than better. Nevermind that no one ever thanks us for helping; that we make no friends by intervening in other people's business. No, the real reasons to keep our dick in our pants are twofold. First, not only do we not make friends through foreign intervention, we are almost certain to make enemies. For when we intervene for one group of people, we are intervening against another. If we don't mind having a National Security State; if we don't mind living in constant fear of attacks from random people who hate us with blinding passion, then this is not a problem. But the larger reason is simply that "liberty," "tyranny," "oppression," and "liberation" can be rather slippery words, especially when other people, with their own agendas, are using them about you. What I mean is that "liberating the oppressed" and "helping the helpless" really have no limit. How "oppressed" do you have to be to rate military intervention by the U.S.? It seems an easy call when there are millions dying, but what about when there are only thousands? Hundreds? Perhaps there is no mass murder, but people are being pulled out of their homes and tortured. What then? What if a people simply lack the right to protest government policy? Is that a legitimate criterion for invasion? The point is that this path can easily lead to world hegemony, with the U.S. (or the U.N.) dictating to all nations exactly how they will treat their citizens. Is this the world we want to live in? If we think people hate us now, wait until we have intervened in half of the regions on Earth.

No, the answer is not intervention. It's liberty. One of the stories told in the West Wing episode I mentioned was that mothers were stationing themselves in front of attacking tanks in an effort to preserve their people. What if those mothers had tanks themselves? The answer to oppression and genocide is not invasion; it is not intervention. It is simply allowing people to defend themselves, and any individuals who wish (as happened in the Spanish Civil War) to assist in that defense. It is impossible to commit genocide against a well-armed people. Instead of sending them troops, sell them guns! If a people is so oppressed that even this is impossible, then allow American citizens to arm themselves and help out on their own. But the notion of selling oppressed peoples weapons goes against our grain. Why? Is it because we don't like guns? No, we don't mind at all if we have them. No, this bothers us for a darker reason: We prefer to do the job for them instead of selling them weapons to do it for themselves because we want to retain control. We want to be in charge. Providing weapons to a people gives them power, and we don't want that. In fact, we in America would be quite happy if we were the only nation on Earth to possess weapons of any kind. That's why we prefer intervention to assistance.

No, the only sensible answer is the same most sensible answer to almost any political problem: More freedom. Not enforced freedom, not freedom at the point of a gun, but the freedom for people, individually, to do as they think right.

--
Posted By Calion to Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts at 6/21/2005 04:23:00 PM

Macintel????

So Apple has decided to ditch IBM and ally with Intel. What's the world coming to? Has Hell frozen over? It's going to be a tough transition, regardless.

I'm not sure I have any new wisdom to add to what is said at the pages linked above, except to make a couple of minor points. (A lot of this is laid out very nicely in an (as usual) excellent Ars Technica article and accompanying discussion forum.)

• Forget running OS X on Non-Apple PCs. It's just not going to happen, folks. At least not in a sanctioned way. Despite what some people have said in the past, Apple is not an OS developer that happens to sell computers. Apple's bottom line is and always has been mostly CPU sales.

• The idea of being able to run Windows natively on a Mac is a neat idea, but ultimately mostly useless. Presuming the technical difficulties (motherboard differences, hard drive format, etc.) are overcome, all you've gained is a little cash and a little desk space (and, admittedly, a prettier office) over just buying a PC. And you lose the advantage of being able to use both at once.

• What excites me more is the prospect of a really good Windows emulator on my Mac. Since no processor emulation is necessary, Windows apps should positively hum, making buying a separate PC pretty much unnecessary, even, hopefully, for games. And if you just have to have the latest and greatest game and it won't run fast enough under emulation, well, that's when you fall back on the dual boot model mentioned above. This might just work out really nicely. Especially for PowerBooks. Imagine being able to haul around one machine and run any program, play any game...this might be fun.

• Neat as all this is, this is still not the CHRP platform we were promised 'lo these many years ago. As I recall, CHRP was supposed to allow the running of multiple OS's simultaneously. But perhaps I'm misremembering. I do recall having great hopes for the CHRP platform, and am still sorry it died. Consistency has not exactly been Apple's strong suit. I could probably write a whole website devoted to promising technologies Apple has abandoned (oh, OpenDoc, I miss you so!).

• I do have a couple of fears, however. As well as the Mac has been doing lately, I worry that Apple has been slowly watering down the distinctiveness of the Mac platform. For years now, Apple has been doing little things here and there to make the Mac more PC-like. You can trace it as far back as Apple changing floppy drive vendors so that the drive no longer sucked your disk out of your hand when you inserted it. OS X has several PC-like features in the interface, not least the requirement that all filenames have a damned TLE on the end. And now Macs will actually have Intel Inside. At what point will consumers decide that it's not worth paying a couple of hundred extra for a PC with a prettier case? It's been really nice (especially since the G5 was released) gloating to all my PC friends about how much faster, particularly megahertz for megahertz, Macs are than PCs. I don't like having my gloating turned back on me. Could this trend lead to the homogenization—nay, the commoditization—of the PC industry? The prospect doesn't frighten me as much as it once did. Admittedly almost entirely thanks to Apple, Microsoft seems to have released its first decent GUI OS ever—Windows XP Pro. I've used it (though not extensively), and it's not half bad. Not good enough, no, but it seems consumers are finally starting to demand something resembling elegance in their mainstream OS's. Add that to the downright cool-looking boxes companies like Alienware are putting out, and though I would still be crushed if Apple vanished or sold out, I would no longer see it as the end of the (computing) world.

• My biggest fear, though, was summed up by phjones on MacFixIt:

"Whilst I think Steve Jobs and the Apple crew would only act in the best
interests of Mac users, I still have a knot in the pit of my stomach. From my
point of view, the big question is whether Macintel machines will be able to
run Windows at full speed. If they do, it's the beginning of the end for MacOS.
At the moment, software producers have an incentive to produce MacOS-
compatible software because it gives them access to a market that would be
otherwise unavailable - admittedly some companies feel the market is too
small but that's their decision. If Macintel machines are capable of running
Windows, there will be absolutely no incentive for new companies to produce
MacOS versions of their software: "Those Macies can just fire up Windows if
they need to use our software. Ha ha ha (evil laugh)." Inevitably, less new
software will be written for MacOS and existing software will slowly drift
away.

I hope this doesn't happen."

So do I.

• Lastly—there's something that has been bugging me for years. When the PowerPC processor first came out, basically the entire computer industry was saying that CISC technology was dead. Intel was going to be able to crank out maybe a generation or two more by cramming circuits a little tighter and running a little hotter, but eventually was going to be forced to switch to RISC like the PowerPC or die. This apparently didn't happen. Does anyone know what actually did happen? Let us know.

--
Posted by Calion to Genius/Idiot—Current Thoughts at 6/08/2005 04:09:00 AM