Dated June 29, 1998:

An Open Letter to Orrin Hatch

Dear Sen. Hatch,
Although I am no longer a constituent, I lived in Utah for several years while attending school at BYU, so I hope this letter reaches you.

I have a few comments regarding the position you’ve taken in the Justice Department’s suit against Microsoft. According to a press report, you recently said of Microsoft:

“I find it rather surprising that any one company would, rather than seeking to prevail on the merits, instead have the hubris to try and use the appropriations process to ‘go on the offensive’ and seek to restrain a federal law enforcement agency that has an obligation to enforce the laws, as was recently reported.”

In fact, it’s companies like Netscape and Novell who decided to use the blunt force of government to get for them what they could not get for themselves. Upon finding they were not successful competitors to Microsoft’s valuable and popular products, they cried foul.

For years, Microsoft and other software firms had gone about the business of making quality products and letting consumers decide which ones they wanted to buy. But now that Microsoft is proving to be a better competitor than they anticipated, Netscape and Novell have decided to go on the offensive — instead of attempting to “prevail on the merits.” It is odd that you should seem so surprised that Microsoft is attempting to fight back by using techniques resembling the ones that Netscape and Novell pioneered. It is you and the companies you’re trying to “protect” that drove Microsoft to have to concern itself with the political climate. Before then, it was able to focus on what it does best: creating and selling software that people want to use.

I applaud the court’s recent decision that recognizes the value in integrated products. What’s disturbing is that Microsoft should have been required to demonstrate this at all. Are the Justice Dept. and the Judiciary so unfamiliar with basic economics that you don’t realize that when consumers receive more products at a higher quality for a lower price, this is beneficial?

At the crux of this public debate is whether Microsoft should be allowed to include Internet Explorer in its Windows operating system. Of course they should! Windows was created by Microsoft and Windows is owned by Microsoft — not the public, not the government, not Netscape. As property of Microsoft, Windows can and should contain whatever Microsoft wants to integrate with it. And we shouldn’t forget, without Microsoft’s successful Windows operating system, Netscape wouldn’t be in millions of homes today; it would still be just a toy used by computer science majors. Netscape owes much of its success to Microsoft, and it returns the favor by asking its Big Brother to beat it up.

Antitrust law is a vague, broad umbrella under which a company can be charged for almost anything. If prices are too high, you’re gouging. If prices are too low, you’re dumping. If prices are the same, you must be in collusion. Antitrust laws can be wielded as a weapon against anyone who’s successful, for whatever reason the government dreams up, and envy of the success of others is a prime motivator in antitrust cases. Those who can’t win in civil competition instead turn to government force to take the bounty for them. And you should be ashamed for helping them. There may be government laws against vague antritrust considerations, but there’s a higher law against coveting your neighbor’s wealth.

I don’t work for Microsoft, and I’m not affiliated with them in any way. My only reason for writing this is my concern that justice be served. Sen. Hatch, if you’re truly interested in justice you should lead an effort to stop the attack of Microsoft. Your current position has no merit, and harms the consumers you purport to help.

It’s easy enough to protect content in WordPress, in any number of ways, so it’s only available to users of your choosing. It only took minutes to figure out how to set an expiration duration for that protection — a piece designated as being in the “Subscribers” category becomes openly accessible, say, 24 hours after being posted. But the details of this challenge initially had me stumped. How to set the exact same expiration time for protection on all new “Subscribers” content, regardless of when during the prior 24 hours it was posted? As far as I could tell, no existing plugin performs this function.

My eventual solution was to call the current time into a variable, then set up an obscene array of variations on it, truncating and adding to some, and transforming some of those modifications back and forth between date strings and Unix timestamps, until I could create the right set of conditional statements using mathematically comparable timestamps.

Here’s the result as applied to the site theme’s single.php template:

<?php
$post = $wp_query->post;

$todaysdateandtime = current_time('mysql');
$todaysdate = substr($todaysdateandtime,0,10);
$currenttimestamp = current_time('timestamp');
$yesterdaystimestamp = strtotime('-1 day', $currenttimestamp);
$yesterdaysdateandtime = date("c", $yesterdaystimestamp);
$yesterdaysdate = substr($yesterdaysdateandtime,0,10);
$yesterdayscutofftime = $yesterdaysdate . ' 06:00';
$yesterdayscutofftimestamp = strtotime($yesterdayscutofftime);
$tomorrowstimestamp = strtotime('+1 day', $currenttimestamp);
$tomorrowsdateandtime = date("c", $tomorrowstimestamp);
$tomorrowsdate = substr($tomorrowsdateandtime,0,10);
$tomorrowscutofftime = $tomorrowsdate . ' 06:00';
$tomorrowscutofftimestamp = strtotime($tomorrowscutofftime);
$articletimestamp = get_the_time('U');
$todayscutofftime = $todaysdate . ' 06:00';
$todayscutofftimestamp = strtotime($todayscutofftime);
$catmarker = 0;
$timemarker = 0;

foreach((get_the_category()) as $checkcat) { if ($checkcat->cat_name == 'Subscribers') { $catmarker = 1; } }

if ($articletimestamp > $yesterdayscutofftimestamp && $currenttimestamp < $todayscutofftimestamp) { $timemarker = 1; }

if ($articletimestamp > $todayscutofftimestamp && $currenttimestamp < $tomorrowscutofftimestamp) { $timemarker = 1; }

if (current_user_can('read_private_posts')) {

include ('protected-readable.php');

} else {

if ($catmarker == 1 && $timemarker == 1) {

include ('protected-hidden.php');

} else {

include ('protected-readable.php');

}

} ?>

It works like a charm.

Tweaked variants of this code are also applied to content loops on the front page and the RSS template, so that notice of protected content also doesn’t reach non-subscribers, except in specific chosen circumstances.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find that there’s a much more elegant way to do this. It would also be useful to turn this functionality into an actual plugin, so that the template files themselves can remain untouched. But it was a pretty satisfying exercise to figure out, step by step, how to make this work correctly.

[Cross-posted to ThinkTankOverflow.com.]

Roughly 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are given to healthy farm animals to foster rapid growth and make up for unhygienic living conditions. Many bacteria that live on animals adapt and transfer to humans, spreading superbugs that are often resistant to treatment.

For more than 35 years, the FDA has recognized that giving antibiotics to farm animals poses a risk to human health, yet the agency has done almost nothing to stop it. Indeed, it has mastered the art of making inaction look like action. Last May, NRDC and our partners sued the FDA to prompt it to take action. Instead, the agency retrenched.

It started by claiming the livestock industry could police itself. In our lawsuit, we asked the FDA to finally rule on two citizen petitions — one filed 12 years ago, the other six years ago — urging the agency to stop the use of antibiotics in healthy animals. In November, the FDA announced that although it shares concerns that the use of antibiotics to make animals grow faster is dangerous for humans, it would deny the petition because it was pursuing an alternative strategy.

This “alternative strategy” turns out to be just another name for the status quo. Instead of banning the use of antibiotics in healthy animals, the FDA is allowing the livestock industry to follow a voluntary approach. But we already know voluntary doesn’t work. The FDA has been operating under that model since 1977, yet the practice has expanded exponentially over the years. Talk about the fox guarding the hen house.

In December, the FDA tried to further justify its inaction by erasing the historic record. Back in 1977, the agency proposed to withdraw approval for the use of several antibiotics in animal feed based on findings published in two notices posted in the Federal Register. The notices containing the findings have been listed in the Federal Register for more than three decades. But just before Christmas a few weeks ago, the FDA pulled the notices. Soon after it buried its 35-year-old proposal, the agency tried to have it both ways. On January 5, it proposed banning off-label uses of a class of antibiotics known as cephalosporins on healthy livestock.

To be clear, although I’d like to avoid the consumption of antibiotic-treated livestock as much as possible, I don’t think the FDA should ban it — a clear overreach of government power.

The lesson here, though, is that when a government agency is tasked with protecting the public interest, public-sector incentives make it a near certainty that the agency will eventually instead collude with special interests in working against the public interest. Instead of serving the one function that is clearly useful for industry oversight — education and advice to consumers who can then make a more informed choice — the FDA has become a legal arbiter of illusory safety.

If the FDA allows a product or practice, the public at large regards it as safe. If the FDA disallows something, society assumes danger. But instituting a top-down decision-making process to centralize the level of risk that consumers should be allowed to take leads to a system that serves nobody well. Life-saving drugs are barred from being used by people who are more than willing to accept their potential hazards. The sale of healthy food is criminalized because of the mere possibility that it could make somebody sick, despite the fact that people can and do get sick from the FDA-approved alternative. And, as shown in The Atlantic, because people trust that D.C. paternalists are looking out for them, they carelessly consume anything that the FDA has let slip through its otherwise iron grip.

A bureaucratic overlord is incapable of choosing the correct balance between risk and reward even for the people in his neighborhood, let alone for more than 300 million strangers scattered throughout the country. There is, however, an alternative, as Larry Van Heerden noted in The Freemam:

The first step to correct these problems is to abolish the FDA, stripping the government of the power to approve drugs (and medical devices) for the market or to remove them from the market. Any rule-making for disclosure and lawsuits for fraud should be devolved to the states.

Even if the FDA were omniscient, objective, and impervious to outside influence, it would be wrong to give it the power to withhold drugs from the market. The proper function of government is to protect individual rights and guard against fraud, not to restrict freedom of choice to protect people from their own ignorance. In fact, the FDA has shown itself to be imperious, subject to prevailing political winds, and indifferent to the thousands of deaths and injuries it has caused.

[...] Forcing all consumers to live by rules that cater to the least responsible individuals imposes huge costs on everyone else and ultimately fails to protect even the willfully ignorant.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

The Fonz could knock down doors with a slap of his hand, summon any girl with a snap, and most often on the show displayed his classic power of fixing the jukebox by banging on it. It’s a seductive fantasy that one might be able to fix a complex piece of machinery through an application of blunt force, without having to worry about the intricate mechanisms that actually allow the machine to work.

Unfortunately, this is the mentality that has reigned for decades in applied public policy.

Is the economy broken? Bang on it. That’ll get it chugging along again. Wait, that didn’t work? You didn’t bang it hard enough. Or maybe your leather jacket needs to be a little cooler next time. At any rate, it’s your fault. If you’d only smacked the economy the way that Fonzie showed you, it totally would have worked.

Economic prescriptions thereby stem from a non-falsifiable tenet of faith in a grown-up power fantasy.

This kind of magical thinking convinces many because it is accompanied by a veneer of rigorous thought. There are even equations! Surely, equations are scientific! But as economist Don Boudreaux pointed out at Cafe Hayek:

The ability to write letters on a board in the form of an equation, to give those letters names that seem to correspond to some imaginable economic things, and to assemble quantitative data on those things, is not necessarily good science.

Keynesian macroeconomic variables lump heterogeneous goods and services into undifferentiated masses, no longer to be understood as the complex workings of a dynamic system of social cooperation. But just because you can gather a bunch of statistics and aggregate them into a variable doesn’t mean that the variable has a meaningful application to the real economy.

If you want to fix a jukebox in real life, a mechanic might be able to get the job done by tinkering with the machinery until each piece once again functions correctly. It’s easy for people who have a facility with physical forms of engineering to take a similar view of the economy, thinking that if only the right people were in charge, they could tweak policy here and there to ensure successful outcomes for everyone. Adam Smith explained why the economy can’t be successfully engineered in such a way:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Even though an economy can’t be planned, or even tailored, successfully from on high, that form of scientism is at least understandable. It at least takes into account a small measure of the complexity of decentralized economic activity, even if it doesn’t — indeed, can’t — consider the rest. Keynesian macroeconomics is far worse, shunning even the scientistic attempt to grapple with at least some heterogeneous microeconomic factors as being the causal source of economywide trends. Instead, they insist that policymakers expropriate as much cash as humanly possible and wallop the economy with it as hard as they can.

Economist Steven Horwitz summed up the real prescription for economic recovery:

Being too focused on Keynes’s aggregates can also mislead us as to the best ways to get out of the recession once we’re in it. It may look as if all we need more is investment or more jobs. But once we understand that the “fundamental mechanisms of change” have to do with the boom’s microeconomic misallocation of capital and labor, we see that what is needed is a reallocation of resources not just more of them. Capital needs to move out of unproductive lines and back toward productive ones, and the same is true of labor.

Stimulus spending, bailouts, and extension of unemployment benefits only prevent the fundamental mechanisms of change from doing their work in unwinding the errors of the last decade. The cure for macroeconomic discoordination is freeing up the entrepreneurial market process to reallocate and coordinate resources. But 80 years after Hayek first made the point, the fascination by economists and politicians with Keynes’s aggregates continues to conceal the fundamental mechanisms of change, and in so doing, also continues to block the processes through which a sustainable recovery can take place.

In the end, the economy is not a jukebox, and neither a mechanic nor Ben Bernanke in the coolest leather jacket ever made can save it from its turmoils. Instead, the economy is made up of hundreds of millions of people with billions of plans, many of which fail but some of which succeed. Nobody knows for sure which plans will pan out in advance — not the citizens making them, and certainly not their public officials.

Only by letting individuals, alone or in voluntary association with others, respond to local conditions with unique knowledge can the best plans be discovered, expanded, and replicated. That process is made much more difficult when they face continual interference from central planners who only pretend they can know what’s best.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

The video is obviously edited — for what purpose, I do not know. It could have been to cut down its length or to stitch together a narrative that puts the person being interviewed in the worst possible light. Though, admittedly, given his statements, I don’t know how that’s possible.

I understand that people who are put on the spot with a camera in front of their face are going to stammer and search for words. After seeing thousands of these kinds of videos, I’m convinced that people generally do not do well when confronted with on-the-spot interviews.

• The sentiments expressed seem to be endemic to the Occupy Wall Street movement.
• The easiest way for me to address this is to take it point by point with a wrap-up at the end.
• This is going to be a long post.

Man on the street: “The top one percent don’t produce anything.”

There are some awkward questions that need to be asked in response to this assertion.

Besides the obvious catchy “one percent of the people own 43 percent of the wealth” trope, why not move that arbitrary line to the top five percent? If the top one percent own 43 percent of the wealth, wouldn’t it follow that the top five percent own even more of the wealth? How about the top ten percent? The top 25 percent?

The arbitrary line is chosen because it fits nicely into the idea of the proletariat struggling against the bourgeois. What is being insinuated here is the top one percent own the means of production while the 99% are the factors of production.

How is the “1 percent” being defined here? One percent of the population of the United States or of the population of the world?

The question matters a great deal, for a couple of reasons:

One percent of the population of the United States is a little more than 3 million people (approximately the population of Mississippi). Just playing the numbers game, it strains all credulity to accept the assertion that the more than 3 million people being referenced here don’t produce anything.

One percent of the world’s population is about 70 million people (approximately the population of California, New York, and Ohio combined). Of course, this takes credulity to the breaking point.

The question hardly needed to be asked. The only population statistic being used here is the population of the United States. The OWS crowd skirts over the fact that if they were to count the entire population of world, the majority of them would end up in the top 1 percent of people who control wealth. That’s simply an argument they dare not broach. I’ve addressed this briefly here, but I’ll expound on it just a bit.

Even adjusting for purchasing power parity, if you make $34,000 or more per year, you are in the top 1 percent of world income earners. Income disparity between someone who makes $34,000 and someone who makes $500,000 per year in the United States seems pretty significant, but not nearly as significant as the income disparity between someone who makes $34,000 per year in the United States and someone who makes $7,000 dollars per year in India, or $1,000 per year in Africa.

The standard argument against this line of reasoning goes like this:

“Living off of $1,000 a year in sub-Saharan Africa is a lot easier than living off of $1,000 a year in the United States. In order for the comparison to actually have any meaning we need to adjust income for the cost of living in these various countries. In some places it is possible to live off of a dollar a day, and in some places you can’t live off of a hundred dollars a day.”

Lest I be accused of making up my own argument to refute, that’s a response I got on a recent Reddit thread addressing what I said above.

At first blush, this makes quite a bit of sense. Commodities do seem to be more expensive in the United States than they are in the Sub-Sahara (unless you are living in a country with hyper-inflation). Earning $1,000 per year will certianly not give you the purchasing power to buy or rent a house or an apartment. You may or may not be able to afford transportation. Food and clothing would also be difficult to acquire.

But, one is tempted to ask; would you rather live in the United States with an income of $1,000 per year or in Sub-Saharan Africa with an income of $1,000 per year?

Here are the two main problems I see:

First: The United States (and other First World countries) have many orders of magnitude more consumer goods and commodities to choose from than all of the Sub-Sahara put together. In the United States, $1,000 goes much further because there is so much more you can do with it. You must also consider basic welfare entitlements to every poor citizen in the United States to be used for food, shelter and clothing, along with other factors of income like child support payments and not being required to pay taxes.

It further discounts the ability to barter for goods, rely on charity, and utilize the cast-offs of the rich and middle class. Our country is awash with high-class “junk.” It is very easy to acquire clothes, furniture, gadgets (TVs, microwaves, phones, radios, etc.) just by asking for it. It’s unbelievable how much stuff the well-off just leave on the curb for others to pick up. Whole virtual communities like Freecycle and Craigslist thrive around the concept of either exchanging these types of goods or just giving them away. If you are savvy enough, it is possible to get hundreds of dollars worth of name brand products for free through the practice of extreme couponing. There are literally hundreds of blogs dedicated to the concept of extreme frugality, meaning there are people in this country who choose to live well below the poverty line by recycling, reusing, budgeting, couponing, growing their own food, bartering, etc. From all accounts, they have healthy and happy lives.

Second: If you take all other factors into consideration, even for those at the very bottom of the socio-economic scale, life is comparatively much better here. On average, people in the United States live 20–35 years longer than those in the Sub-Sahara. In America, there is an infant mortality rate of eight out of every 1,000. In Mali, the rate is 191 out of 1,000.

While millions have perished in Africa because of famine, I have not been able to find any account of a single person starving to death in America because of an inability to acquire food. There are rare cases in which people are starved through abuse or neglect, but the issue of general access to food was not a factor. On the contrary, we are constantly reminded that we have an epidemic of obesity in our country. Looking at population statistics, this is a problem that affects the poor almost exclusively.

Millions more have been butchered in war, slavery, and genocide in Africa during these past 20 years. With the exception of 9/11, war, slavery, and genocide have killed exactly nobody in America — unless you count the “War on Drugs.” (I’m excluding here our military adventures overseas — which both liberals and conservatives love — and focusing on civilian deaths within our borders.

More than 1 million people die from AIDS/HIV in the Sub-Sahara each year. Nearly 2 million more contract the disease yearly. The region accounts for about 14 percent of the world’s population and 67 percent of all people living with HIV and 72 percent of all AIDS deaths in 2009.

Contrast that to the United States, where there are approximately 1 million people infected with HIV. About 56,000 new people become infected each year, while roughly 18,000 per year die from AIDS.

Even the poorest of poor in America have the means and ability to protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases that ravish other populations.

This represents just a cursory look over publicly available data, of course, but many inferences can be drawn. Living off $1,000 per year in the United States is actually a lot easier than living off of $1,000 per year in the Sub-Sahara.

In the United States, $1,000 per year still makes you pretty well off compared to a huge majority of the world’s population. Instead of the OWS asking why this is the case (different economic and political policies have different economic and political outcomes), they are insisting that it’s not the case, in the face of all empirical evidence. It’s a complete break with reality.

All of this begs a basic question. We know that there are millions of people living in Africa on $1,000 per year or less, but are there people living on $1,000 per year in America?

Maybe. According to the 2008 United States Census, the number of individuals living on $2,500 or less is 12,945. If you count households instead of individuals, that number drops to about 3,000.

Looking at demographics, we find that many of those either live on Indian reservations or in closed off religious communities. The vast majority live in very rural areas, with the exception of some communities in Texas and California.

This brings up another awkward question. Can we differentiate between the worthy and the unworthy poor? Is it safe to say that those living on an Indian reservation are most likely the victims of centuries of oppression, paternalism, and other factors beyond their control, and deserve our sympathies, while those whose religious doctrines call for unsustainable familial and community growth (though still collecting welfare entitlements) don’t?

Back to the original point. Taking this all into consideration, the speaker (along with 70 million of his fellow human beings) is more than likely in the top 1 percent of income earners in the world. Does he produce nothing? Do the other 70 million people produce nothing?

If he had a shred of intellectual honesty, he would advocate taxing anyone who makes $34,000 per year or more at a very high rate so that money can be redistributed to the absolute poor in Africa, India, China, Afghanistan, etc. If you’re going to advocate forced redistribution, what’s the more moral course of action? Paying off student loan debt and making secondary education free for those who are extraordinarily rich in comparison to world standards, therefore giving them further opportunities to collect more wealth, or giving that money to someone who will quite literally starve to death without it?

Interviewer: “Steve Jobs didn’t produce anything?”

Man on the street: “Steve Jobs took in the wealth that others produced. No, he didn’t.”

Even though you can tell he’s searching for the concept, what he’s attempting to recall is the Labor Theory of Value, which suggests that the value of goods derives from their labor inputs. Some take it a step further and suggest that goods should therefore be priced according to those labor inputs rather than in response to the demand for those products.

This murderous idea has been refuted too many times to count and isn’t taken seriously by mainstream economists. As with the devastating yet simple argument against Pascal’s Wager, this is a case of rudimentary logic pitted against religious thinking.

If a laborer labors all day making mud pies instead of pumpkin pies, he may well have put in a great deal of work, but still produces absolutely nothing of value. Not understanding why someone would do that, I come along with a novel idea. Why not hire that labor (which is obviously motivated to work) and have him make pumpkin pies instead? Which is more valuable, the labor or the idea that moved the labor in a profitable direction?

Given time, one of my workers gets a workable idea that it will actually make it more time- and cost-efficient to divide the labor and go into business for himself making ready-made pie crusts to sell back to me. In turn, he hires 10 more people.

Another person figures out that growing local pumpkins for production is not sustainable or efficient, so he saves his capital and starts an import business to buy pumpkins to sell back to me. In turn, he hires 10 more people. Of course, that import company creates demand from pumpkin farmers halfway across the country, signaling to them that they need to hire more people. But what about packaging? How will I wrap all those pies? Where will I get the metal for pie tins? How do I even make a pie tin? What if I want to branch off into cherry pies or apple pies? What if I want to sell coffee with those pies?

The Labor Theory of Value is an epic failure of imagination. At any given moment, there are two types of birds on the face of the earth, those that are airborne and those that are not. Do you know what the number of birds in each group will be, say, 10 seconds from now? The answer may well be impossible to ever figure out, but there is an answer as concrete and real as the computer screen you’re looking at. It will take a great deal of dispersed observation, knowledge, and computer power to ever figure out the answer to that question, but it takes an even greater amount of imagination to think of a use for the question in the first place.

On the labor side of the equation, how many people per day, independent of each other, not even knowing of each other’s existence, were involved in making Steve Jobs’s ideas a reality?

Can you imagine it? Can you even begin to try to imagine it? When you do, dig deeper. When you do that, dig deeper still. You will find yourself trying to comprehend a voluntary network of a number beyond your comprehension all working independently but in concert with each other in order to make that idea a reality. The vast majority have no earthly idea that they are working toward a common goal.

If you’ve read the essay “I, Pencil,” you can start to grasp the amazing complexity of what goes into creating one simple product. Once you’ve started to grasp that concept, you realize that an iPhone or a Macbook is nearly infinitely more complex than a pencil.

When you think you have a grasp on all of that, add into the mix all the competition that Steve Jobs inspired in the economy. Microsoft, Google, Android, Unix, Linux, smart phones, laptops, programming, software and hardware development, battery efficiency — the list goes on and on.

Multiply everything above by factors unimaginable when you add in each new facet of competition.

How many people were involved in making Steve Jobs’s ideas a reality? Like I said, there is a concrete answer to this question. I don’t doubt that computers will some day be able to figure it out. I’m not confident that it will ever happen in my lifetime. However, if you are able to imagine the several billion neurons in your brain exchanging countless bits of information each second, culminating in what we call human consciousness, then you are getting close to the complexity involved in the network of voluntary exchange Steve Jobs helped put into motion.

Now think of the consumer side of the equation. For the purpose of this example, let’s limit ourselves to the latest model iPhone. For about $199, plus a two year contract with a cellular phone company, you can walk out the door with an iPhone 4S.

Putting aside for a moment all the apps you can use, these are the features that come built in, off the shelf:

• Two cameras, front and back. Rear camera is capable of HD, low light photography, f2/4 lens with face detection, and photo editing software.
• 1080p HD motion stabilized video camera, accompanied by an editing suite and the ability to share videos instantly with anyone on the Internet.
• Facetime video teleconferencing over a WiFi connection using either the front or rear camera.
• Unlimited texting to other iPhone, iPad, or iPod users, with the ability to exchange videos or photos.
• A digital assistant that is able to help efficiently organize your daily life. It syncs with any other device you use on iCloud.
• A phone. Pretty standard, but it lets you talk to any other human being on the face of the earth who also has a phone. It’s ridiculously portable, so you can use it anywhere there is cell phone coverage, which is pretty much 90 percent of the United States.
• Email. Check your Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, or any other industry-standard IMAP and POP mail systems. Access multiple accounts at once. Write and send email without ever touching your keyboard by using its voice recognition software, Siri.
• Internet. You have a virtual world of information at your fingertips, accessible to you any time and anywhere.
• An iPod allows you to access your complete music library, with instant access to many thousands of songs.
• The video player allows you to rent or buy movies from iTunes, and either stream them or download them to your device.
• The photo organizer will store all your photos and organize them by location, date, or face. Take a photo and it will automatically share with all other devices hooked up to iCloud. Share photos by text, Twitter, Flickr, or Facebook. Print wirelessly through AirPrint.
• App Store with access to over 500,000 paid and free apps.
• iTunes to buy music, movies, TV shows, and ringtones. Download whole college courses and thousands of podcasts.
• Maps+Compass, with an automatically updated GPS displayed on up-to-date maps. Search for a location. Zoom in and out, view live traffic information, and receive point-by-point travel directions.
• Game Center allows you to play games against others over the web.
• Calendar.
• Contacts allows you to organize everything you want to know about a person — address, all phone numbers, email addresses, birthdays, notes, websites, and anniversaries. Make a change on one device and it is updated on all others through iCloud.
• Find My iPhone assists you in finding a lost or stolen iPhone by viewing its location on a map. Remotely wipe all info, remotely send a message to your phone to tell others it’s yours, and lock remotely.
• Newsstand to read magazines, newspapers, etc.
• An up-to-the-minute stock ticker.
• Extended weather forecasts for multiple cities and locations.
• A notebook.
• Access to YouTube.
• Voice Memos.
• Calculator (scientific).

Another exercise in imagination, if you will: Consider every bit of technology listed above (we will ignore the wonderful advances in lithium battery, sensor, and storage technology for the purposes of this exercise) and the infrastructure needed for it to work. Now take it back in time just 20 years, to 1991. Keep in mind, all of this wonderful technology is crammed into 4.5 by 3.11 by 0.37 inches, with a total weight of 4.9 ounces.

How much would something with comparable functionality cost back then?

The logical answer would be that the technology did not exist 20 years ago, so it would be priceless. But this is a thought exercise, so we can at least break down some of the components and price them individually.

In 1991, the most common portable analog phone (cell phone technology was still in its nascent stages) was a Motorola MicroTac 9800X. It was lauded for its compact size, and for being the first flip phone on the market. It was an inch thick and nine inches long (when opened), and weighed close to a pound. The only thing it did was make phone calls. The quality of the calls were reportedly pretty bad. You couldn’t use the phone while traveling outside your metropolitan area, and it was pricey to make any phone call.

It sold for anywhere between $4,153 and $5,822 in current dollars (adjusted for inflation).

The first digital camera was released in 1991. It was a Kodak Digital Camera System, and had a resolution of 1.3 megapixels. It also came with a 200 MB hard drive that could store about 160 uncompressed images. The hard drive and batteries had to be tethered to the camera by a cable.

Cost in current dollars, adjusted for inflation: $33,317.

This is where I stopped. At just two laughingly inefficient components (according to today’s standards; back then, they were miracles of technology) in comparison to what comes standard on any iPhone available for $199, I was already hovering around an overall price of $40,000.

Extrapolate all of that out, including all the infrastructure required to make it work, and you can easily conclude that literally all the money in the world in 1991 could not buy you an iPhone.

Today, I can walk into a store conveniently located near me and get a device that makes it nearly impossible for me to get lost, lets me communicate with people I’ve known my whole life who are scattered all over the globe, allows me to take wonderful pictures and record moments of my life, provides access to all the information available on the Internet, streams any number of movies or TV shows directly to me, tells me an extended forcast, lets me video chat with my daughters and phone anyone I wish, along with any number of other things — all for the paltry sum of $199 and the price of a two-year contract.

A product that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, the Queen of England, and any royal prince would be unable to purchase 20 years ago is now as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. That’s what Steve Jobs produced. And, as a bonus, the wealth created by his idea provided the means to countless other people around the world to purchase what he produced.

Interviewer: “The system you’re interested in is one in which somehow that voluntary web of association is no longer allowed.”

Man on the street: “Correct.”

This pretty much speaks for itself. In this guy’s preferred system that disallows voluntary economic association, in order to get from point A to point B, a whole lot of murder, mayhem, theft, and rape will have to occur first with an end result of abject poverty for hundreds of millions of people.

Interviewer: “So, instead of those voluntary associations, what would you put in its place? Who would make all those decisions?”

Man on the street: “All decisions would be made democratically.”

There’s quite a bit of political philosophy that can be addressed here, but the next question pretty much sums it up for me.

Interviewer: “Like, for instance, when Athens democratically decided to kill Socrates?”

Man on the street: …

This is a brilliant rejoinder. Popular democracy is nothing more than mob action. If everything is up for a vote and decidable by the “will of the people,” then there can be no individual rights, ever. The individual will always lose.

The argument I often hear in support of popular democracy goes a little something like this: Wouldn’t you vote against Hitler to keep him out of power? Well, the very fact that someone like Hitler can run for an election tells me that the system is completely invalid. If the election is deemed valid and workable because he weren’t voted in, it would be just as valid and workable if he were voted in.

That’s the long answer. The short answer is, “No, but I’d gladly shoot him in the face.”

Even the OWS crowd seems to understand that popular democracy is basically the rule of the mob, because they have set up rules in their assemblies dictating that 100 percent consensus must be reached before anything passes. But that just makes the mob smaller.

Man on the street: “I don’t believe there’s any need for individuals like Steve Jobs in this system to flourish based on their particular talents or particular genius.”

An argument from belief is a religious argument.

Also, framing an argument based on what you think that other people “need” is highly paternalistic. At worst, if carried out to its logical conclusion, this line of thought is murderous, if not genocidal.

What is not acknowledged or understood here is the notion that a person’s talents and particular genius are priceless. A person’s talent and particular genius is nearly the whole sum of a person. Disallow a person to use his talents or genius in voluntary association with others, and you’ve essentially murdered his spirit. You’ve destroyed the greatest resource on the face of the earth, and it can never be replaced. Ever.

Man on the street: “I don’t believe it’s possible to continue this kind of system. It’s a retrograde system. It’s a system that no longer works. It creates war. It creates mass unemployment. It creates poverty.”

I’ve already eviscerated this notion above. It obviously does work. It obviously does not create mass unemployment or poverty. It obviously does not create war.

In three minutes time, this person said he would do the following if he were in power:

• Disallow voluntary association.
• Steal money (and everything money represents) that doesn’t belong to him.
• Impose mob rule.
• Hobble those with talent.
• Impose poverty on the masses.

None of this can be done without a whole lot of guns and a whole lot of cold-blooded murder. And in his mind, Steve Jobs creates war, poverty, and unemployment?

I’ll just put these few examples here.

• Deaths in the Soviet Union from communism: 20 million
• Deaths in Communist China from communism: 65 million
• Deaths in Cambodia from communism: 2 million
• Deaths in North Korea from communism: 2 million
• Deaths in Africa from communism: 1.7 million
• Deaths in Afghanistan from communism: 1.5 million (and climbing)
• Deaths in Eastern Europe from communism: 1 million
• Deaths in Vietnam from communism: 1 million
• Deaths in Latin America from communism: 150,000
• Deaths caused by Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan:  60 million

Combined with all other genocides, wars, famine and repression caused by national governments, the death toll for the 20th century is approximately 160 million.

If you took half of the population of the United States (every other man, woman, and child) and shot them in the head, you would have the number of people murdered by governments, the majority of whom were killed by their own governments.

• Communism, socialism, Nazism, imperialism, theocracy, statism: 160 million dead.
• Steve Jobs: Zero dead.

Of those 160 million murdered, how many may have turned out to be like Norman Borlaug, the man credited with saving up to 1 billion people worldwide from starvation? For those of you counting, that’s one seventh of the world’s current population. Can one honestly confront that number and still insist that talent and genius are not important? That free association should be done away with? That mob rule should prevail?

Man on the street: “You know, to hell with Steve Jobs.”

As Billy Beck brilliantly said when he linked to this video on Facebook, “Have you ever seen a man cut his own throat with philosophy?”

Well, dear reader, you just have.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

Idolize Bill Gates, Not Steve Jobs: At the end of his life, Steve Jobs obsessed over his legacy: Apple. Bill Gates stepped away from Microsoft in 2006 and has devoted his genius to solving the world’s biggest problems, despite the fact that solving those problems doesn’t create profit or fame.

I quickly pointed out that it was laughably ironic that this was posted in an atheist forum as it oozes religiosity.

Well, no, actually. This has everything to do with being in the Atheism subreddit because it is religious nonsense. Let me rewrite that for you:

Idolize Bill Gates, Not Steve Jobs: At the end of his life he did not repent his sins and he obsessed over his legacy: Apple. Bill Gates stepped away from sin and is living a life of good works, despite his prior sin.

There are no economic or philosophical arguments here. We are just told whom to admire (idolize) and whom not to admire (idolize) based on a moral judgment, when none is warranted. How many people benefited from the success of Steve Jobs? How many people’s lives are better off because of that success? How many more people have access to free or near free limitless information because of the competitive nature between Apple and Microsoft?

These questions aren’t asked. Don’t admire Steve Jobs because he didn’t rebuke sin on his deathbed. Admire Bill Gates because he has rebuked sin and is now doing good works.

Religiosity is a very hard thing to let go of, apparently.

Edit: It’s not only astounding that this was posted in an Atheist forum without comment on its religious nature, it’s fantastic that my comment is getting down-voted for pointed it out.

I made a few more running comments, but most were down-voted rather quickly.

This is something that has been on my mind for quite a long time, now. That ardent ‘atheists’ recycle this kind of religiosity is amazing to me. The modern atheist movement has developed some of the most effectively devastating rhetorical tools arguing against the case for God that it’s sometimes embarrassing to watch people try to defend against them.

Yet, many are blind to this kind of religious thinking. More ironically, the same arguments are just as effective against it. And still they do not see.

Religiosity and biases are indeed powerful forces in our nature.

So, I figured I’d start writing about what I’m reading. Maybe that will get the creative juices flowing. So, for a while, anyway, I’ll be posting about the books that’s I’m reading, as I read them. Fun, huh?

Currently in my hands is, Watching Baseball Smarter. A professional Fan’s Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks.

Those who know me, know that I’m not much of a sports fan. I have no love for football or hockey. I’ve never been interested in soccer or basketball. But, I do have a history with Baseball, of a sort. Like most kids, I spent a few summers playing the sport in loosely affiliated city leagues. I don’t remember liking it that much. I never have been much of a “team player”, so that’s not too surprising.

I do remember owning a baseball glove well enough. I liked the ritual of oiling it up, shaping it with a baseball and sleeping with it under my pillow. I always liked playing catch with the neighborhood kids, and older family members, if I was lucky. But, for all that, I never followed the sport, apart from watching a few games when the Cardinals are in the World Series.

Which, to be honest, is partly why I picked up this book. If you’ve ever been in an office environment during a home team’s post season play-offs, you know you can look forward to hearing about it, ad nauseum, until the end of the season. Which is what happened. But, I would find myself drawn to these conversations, in spite of my lack of knowledge about the overall game.

The conversations I would get sucked into were all about statistics and strategy based on all sorts of known and unknown variables. How pitching worked. What the probability of hitting a fast ball or a curve ball were based on how many strikes or outs there were, etc…

I find this kind of stuff fascinating. I’ve come to realize that baseball is a game played for and by individuals as much as it is played for or by a team. Individual strategy counts every bit as other factors. When I read the quote by Red Barber that said, “Baseball is dull only to dull minds”, I knew I found a sport I could follow.

So, in anticipation for the beginning of next year’s season, I’m reading as much about the sport as I’m able. And, since I live in St. Louis, I may as well align my tribal allegiances with the Cardinal Nation.

Go Cards!

We are what we do — not what we wish to be, not what we say we are — but what we do. And what we do here in Washington is rescue large companies, large financial institutions, and rich people from the consequences of their mistakes. When mistakes don’t cost you anything, you do more of them. When your teenager drives drunk and wrecks the car, you keep giving him a do-over, repairing the car and handing him his keys, he’ll keep driving drunk. Washington keeps giving bad banks and Wall Street firms a do-over: ‘Here are the keys; keep driving!’ The story always ends with a crash.

And:

We need to stop trying to imagine we can design housing markets, mortgage markets, financial markets, and compensation.

Watch the whole thing:

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

The Demands Working Group of Occupy Wall Street unanimously endorsed and is circulating for discussion the following demand, which will be submitted to the General Assembly of OWS:

Jobs for ALL – A Massive Public Works and Public Service Program

We demand a massive public works and public service program with direct government employment at prevailing (union) wages, paid for by taxing the rich and corporations, by immediately ending all of America’s wars, and by ending all aid to authoritarian regimes to create 25 million new jobs to:

-Expand education: cut class sizes and provide free university for all;
-Expand healthcare and provide free healthcare for all (single payer system);
-Build housing, guarantee decent housing for all;
-Expand mass transit, provided for free;
the infrastructure—bridges, flood control, roads;
-Research and implement clean energy alternatives; and
-Clean up the environment.

Wait, you didn’t think I was talking about corporate bailouts, did you?

No, I’m talking about the rich people who make up the Working Group of Occupy Wall Street.

There is a very inconvenient and awkward question that is not being answered by the OWS crowd, as it pertains to wealth. Even making the assumption that the majority of those protesting are lower-middle class (a very liberal assumption, by anecdotal evidence), that would still mean that they are richer than 80 to 90 percent of the world’s population.

In fact, the poorest 5 percent of the United States is still richer than 68 percent of the world’s population. When compared to the poorest in India, China, or Afghanistan, the inequality is breathtakingly staggering. That college kid who is 60 grand in debt may as well be Bill Gates to a girl born in parts of rural China or Afghanistan.

Whenever this is brought up, you will inevitably hear this as a riposte:

“The problem is that attitude can be very easily used as an excuse for dismissing the complaints of literally anyone who is not the most oppressed, marginalised, and miserable people in the world.”

In other words, you cannot ignore what is bad here because things are worse elsewhere.

Well, that statement may well have merit, were it argued in another context. In this context, it is meaningless. Here’s why.

The above “demands” have everything to do with trying to bring the classes to a parity rather than fixing the economy. We are constantly barraged with the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent rhetoric. This, in itself is a lie. At worst, the people protesting on Wall Street are the 32 percent. More likely, they are the 20 percent and up.

If there were one shred of intellectual honesty in this movement, the above demands would be much, much different. They would be calling for taxing everyone in America at a much higher rate and redistributing that money to the poor in China and India. As the holders of 20 percent of the world’s wealth, they surely can afford it. After all, there are millions upon millions of people living in soul-crushing, abject poverty at this very moment. A vast number of them can never hope to make more than $1 per day, if that.

Instead, we get demands for free education and free housing for all (well, for all the rich people living in the United States, anyway — everyone else can go get stuffed). This is nothing more than the rich seeking taxpayer money for bailouts through the use of force.

Sound familiar?

I’m not being flippant, here. When it comes to entitlements, tariffs, trade barriers, immigration or where I purchase my goods, I’ve not yet heard a convincing argument for why I should regard a middle-class or working poor American in any higher regard than the absolute poor of other countries.

When I’m told that I should buy American in order to save American jobs, I wonder why a South Korean’s job is of any less importance. When I’m told that I must pay my fair share to help the deserving and undeserving (relatively) poor of this country, I wonder why the absolute poor from other countries shouldn’t get that money first.

But this is what it’s come to, now.

Rich college-age kids asking for taxpayer funded bailouts in order to relieve them of a debt (paid by the taxpayers) that they voluntarily took on with full knowledge that they would have to pay it back. Not only that, the vast majority of them have the means to pay off said debt through hard word and dedication.

Now, tell me again why I should care that a rich kid got a liberal arts degree that didn’t pan out, when tens of millions are living in absolute poverty around the world. Tell me again why rich kids with liberal arts degrees aren’t sacrificing their income, well-being, and happiness to redistribute their wealth to those more in need.

It’s time that we stopped focusing on this murderous idea of “inequality” when we should be thinking instead of relative standards of living over time.

Maybe then we can focus on what’s wrong with our economy rather than just fight about which rich group of people get which bailouts.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

I doubt the cartoon’s creators were thinking about government stimulus of aggregate demand when they conceived this, so it has become a piece of appropriated satire. And, like pretty much all great satire, it doesn’t play completely fair with its target. Even so, it contains a substantial nugget of truth.

Readers of this blog who are familiar with the book from which it takes its name will be well-acquainted with the broken window fallacy, first created as a parable by Frédéric Bastiat and later appropriated by Henry Hazlitt, who applied it to a mid–20th century economy.

In a nutshell, the parable explains why destruction doesn’t make a society wealthier. It may stimulate short-run economic activity as people rush to replace and rebuild what they’ve lost, but always at the expense of overall prosperity.

Within the past few years, Bastiat’s and Hazlitt’s critical heirs have applied the fallacy again and again to modern Keynesians. Here’s a video that does exactly that to Paul Krugman’s application of Keynesian theory to the destruction wrought by terrorist attacks (featured on this blog last year):

One objection to this line of thought could be that the broken window parable doesn’t apply to general stimulus, because government spending absent a disaster isn’t the same thing as destruction, and so isn’t analogous with a broken window. One response to this objection would be that the broken window parable is part of a larger essay about the unseen effects of various types of economic action. People explaining the arguments in the larger essay, which does indeed include government spending, might reasonably refer to them by invoking the best-known portion of that essay, the parable of the broken window. Conjuring the whole of an essay by referring to one part would be a kind of allegorical synecdoche, if you will.

Another response would be that spending may not destroy useful physical objects, true enough, but it does divert resources from more productive to less productive uses. Although private-sector businesses can’t be sure what their most productive potential investment will be, the government is by nature even less informed and therefore less capable of investing wisely. Siphoning resources from the private sector to the public sector destroys wealth, even if it doesn’t destroy specific goods. An allegory of a destroyed object certainly applies to the reality of destroyed wealth.

Keynesian apologists, and even some non-Keynesians, have cried foul in still more nuanced ways, pointing out that advocates of government stimulus don’t per se want destruction, and may not even think it will bring increased wealth, but think instead that it will increase short-term economic activity, increasing employment and smoothing over economically troubled times.

There are indeed shades of meaning and intent here. Believing that destruction may benefit the economy in some structural way, thereby sustaining short-term damage for long-term gain, isn’t the same thing as thinking that any individual act of destruction will increase economic wealth. After all, as Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, entrepreneurs engage in short-term “creative” destruction all the time, writing off temporary losses as a necessary cost of pursuing their visions for long-term productive investment.

The evidence, however, shows that government spending intended to stimulate the economy and smooth out the business cycle instead exacerbates the business cycle, leading both to higher peaks and lower valleys.

As Russ Roberts pointed out at Cafe Hayek:

So the hurricane will put carpenters back to work. But it would be even better if there had been no hurricane and people had just given them a check. Charity is more productive than destroying stuff and paying people to get back to square one.

But the charity approach is what we’ve been doing for the last few years. It’s called unemployment insurance. I know, it’s supposed to be stimulative but there’s no sign that it is. Why would it be? It doesn’t solve the problem that there are too many carpenters.

When there’s a downturn in the business cycle, there’s a structural problem with the economy — too many people in some occupations, not enough people in others. General stimulus provides no economic information about where people should go to find sustainable productive work, meeting real demands by providing the goods and services that people want rather than the trumped-up illusory demand prompted by government spending. You can’t build a healthy body on a string of sugar rushes, and you can’t build a healthy economy on a series of artificial top-down influxes of cash.

Stimulus only spurs some sectors of the economy by dampening others, whether present or future. The more that government officials tamper with the economic signals that let entrepreneurs know when they should invest and when they should steer clear, the more skittish investors become. Regime uncertainty entrenches malinvestment, and keeps the economy limping along.

So, Keynesians, please stop celebrating destruction as a cure for economic ills. If truly creative destruction needs to happen in order to move less productive resources into more productive uses, private-sector entrepreneurs have the decentralized knowledge necessary to determine which of their own resources need to be replaced or reshuffled. Government officials do not.

The only real cure for our lagging economy is for the government to quit breaking windows.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

The other day, Andrew Hanson posted a blog entry recounting a series of Tweets between us. I would have been happy to make additional conversational headway in the comment section there, but I seem to have been blocked from posting additional comments.

Andrew quoted four of our Tweets; I’ll quote them all, for context. I almost never go to Twitter, so I don’t see other people’s Tweets unless I get an email notification. Some of the Tweets in the series below are therefore responding directly to a non-adjacent Tweet in the conversation, having lagged behind an email delay.

arhanson Andrew Hanson
@ericddixon RT @ModeledBehavior Arnold Kling: a conservative economist against teacher merit pay news.heartland.org/newspaper-arti…

ericddixon Eric D. Dixon
@arhanson Kling doesn’t oppose merit pay at all; he thinks test scores are a lousy measure. And whaddaya know, I’ve always thought that too

arhanson Andrew Hanson
@ericddixon “A government-run system of teacher compensation, based on test scores, would in some ways be the worst of all worlds.”

arhanson Andrew Hanson
@ericddixon seems to oppose merit-pay systems based on test scores, e.g., NY and DC. Do you oppose them as well?

ericddixon Eric D. Dixon
@arhanson Govt is incompetent, and test scores are a lousy measure of teacher success. I’m not sure what part of this is supposed to be new.

ericddixon Eric D. Dixon
@arhanson I oppose public schools. Details of their implementation will never be better than second-best.

ericddixon Eric D. Dixon
Why do people have conversations via Twitter? #pointless

arhanson Andrew Hanson
@ericddixon Doesn’t really answer whether you agree w/ Kling on “worst of all worlds”; difference between second-best and least-best

ericddixon Eric D. Dixon
@arhanson Try speaking for yourself in the future.

arhanson Andrew Hanson
@ericddixon See my twitter feed/blog/policymic articles for personal thoughts: amateurphilosophy.wordpress.com policymic.com/profile/show?i…

arhanson Andrew Hanson
@ericddixon just thought you’d find the piece interesting, not trying to start a twitter arg, no hard feelings

ericddixon Eric D. Dixon
@arhanson Maybe someday I will, if I have reason to believe you’ll say something worthwhile.

arhanson Andrew Hanson
@ericddixon Not all of us can be as intelligent as you, sir.

arhanson Andrew Hanson
@ericddixon Also, it’s unbecoming to give orders to people who aren’t your children or subordinates.

ericddixon Eric D. Dixon
@arhanson seems to think it’s OK to put words in others’ mouths in a public forum w/ faint qualification, pretending it’s all friendly convo

arhanson Andrew Hanson
@ericddixon has ruined my Twitterverse reputation!

In his blog entry, Andrew quoted four of those Tweets, following it with another quote by Arnold Kling, and Andrew’s own summation pointing out that he was correctly characterizing Kling, and I was not:

Arnold Kling on EconLog:

Against Merit Pay for Teachers (title)

That would be my position.

I guess me retweeting Modeled Behavior representing Kling as “a conservative economist against merit pay” whose self-titled blogpost is Against Merit Pay and says that’s his position counts as “putting words in others’ mouths”.

At least in the strange world of Internet arguments.

An exchange in his blog’s comment section ensued:

Eric D. Dixon Says:
October 13, 2011 at 12:23 am
So, now that I’ve seen this blog entry, and Justin’s comment on Facebook explaining an alternate interpretation of your comment that I had not previously considered, I think that I should make myself perfectly clear.

The Heartland article that you originally Tweeted at me had Arnold Kling arguing against a very specific type of merit pay — based on test scores within public schools. He says in that same piece that “I believe good teachers should be rewarded,” a view that would entail support for some form of merit compensation, if not in public schools, and if not based on test scores. Hence my contention that “Kling doesn’t oppose merit pay at all; he thinks test scores are a lousy measure.”

So, later, you pointed to another post at a different location titled “Against Merit Pay for Teachers,” stating that this is, indeed, his position. But he also follows that statement with additional text placing his position in a very specific context — merit pay based on test scores in public schools. Although the title of this post elides his opinion that “I believe good teachers should be rewarded,” the entry itself doesn’t contradict his view that he would favor merit compensation of some form in something other than public schools.

You also didn’t mention Kling’s full conclusion, which includes his suggestion that the public school system should be discontinued in order to achieve real student gains.

When you Tweeted this follow-up, leaving out the word “Kling” before the word “seems,” I assumed you were disingenuously trying to sum up my own unstated opinion to score unearned rhetorical points:

@ericddixon seems to oppose merit-pay systems based on test scores, e.g., NY and DC. Do you oppose them as well?

I see now that I was incorrect, but I still think it’s a reasonable reading of what you wrote — the obvious reading, even — so I objected to you putting words in my mouth.

This brings me back to my own Tweet from the other day, which most accurately sums up my take on this mess:

Why do people have conversations via Twitter? #pointless

Andrew R. Hanson Says:
October 13, 2011 at 10:33 am
As I told Justin’s friend Billy, I don’t really have any interest in discussing politics or philosophy with someone who can’t do it civilly without throwing out personal insults. For the record, I wasn’t looking for an argument, I just read the piece and remembered you and I had discussed merit pay earlier and that you respect Arnold Kling, so I tagged you on the retweet. I’ve had many discussions via Twitter with libertarians and other adversaries and never had an issue with someone insulting my personal integrity, let alone people I know and have hung out with.

Eric D. Dixon Says:
October 13, 2011 at 1:27 pm
Agreed, which is why I was so stunned to see from you what appeared to be clear, shameless trolling designed to provoke.

Eric D. Dixon Says:
October 13, 2011 at 2:23 pm
I also missed the part where I insulted your “personal integrity.”

Anonymous Says:
October 13, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Dude, get over it. Not everything is as dramatic as you seem to think. You’ve written your nine-paragraph essay. Move on. I won’t send you hyperlinks in the future. Lesson learned.

For the record, I did find the link interesting, even if I wasn’t immediately ready to draw the same lesson from it that Andrew was. I didn’t object until it appeared that he was trying to put words in my mouth, not Kling’s, in a public forum, summing up an opinion that I had not stated. Although his Tweet still clearly reads that way to me, he says that’s not what he meant, and I take him at his word. If he had meant it the way it reads, though, I would indeed consider it a purposeful misrepresentation, and therefore a breach of personal integrity — certainly worthy of rude dismissal, even if that’s not a particularly effective rhetorical strategy. I’m glad that’s not the case.

And although I wish I hadn’t jumped to that conclusion based on the obvious reading of what he wrote, I don’t think it was an unreasonable conclusion. Glib tweaking, if not outright trolling, has been at least an occasional feature of Andrew’s debating style the entire time I’ve known him. For instance, one time Andrew altered a Wikipedia article during the course of a Facebook debate to define a term the way he wanted, using my own out-of-context words as the text of that definition. I immediately changed it back and added a note to the discussion page for that entry. It was a joke on Andrew’s part — perhaps even a good joke — but I have trouble humoring people who are glib about serious ideas, especially in a public forum.

Still, although I may have handled the Twitter situation rudely in response to what I viewed as a clear personal slight, a rude dismissal is not the same as insulting personal integrity. Andrew deleted a Facebook comment in which I called him a “nice guy with terrible ideas,” which is also not an insult of his personal integrity. I’m not a fan of Andrew’s ideas, it’s true, in the same way that I think that Paul Krugman has terrible ideas, Cass Sunstein has terrible ideas, and John Maynard Keynes had terrible ideas, ones that make the world a markedly worse place the more they’re heeded by people in positions of power. That’s why I argue against those ideas whenever I have time and inclination. Still, I know that Andrew is sincere in believing his ideas to be as careful and beneficial as he can make them. That sincerity is a marker of his integrity, whether or not I agree with his conclusions — which I do indeed believe to be largely terrible.

It also seems that Andrew thinks that I and other libertarians have terrible ideas, else why would he argue against them so frequently? He might not use the word “terrible” — perhaps “misguided” or “ill-conceived.” But, really, is there a huge difference? We’ve vastly disagreed on almost every policy issue we’ve ever discussed, immigration being one notable exception. I don’t mind being thought of by others as woefully wrongheaded, though, and have never considered it a personal insult. Validation from others is nice, I guess, but largely irrelevant to my personal values.

At any rate, no, I don’t make a habit of reading Andrew’s blog entries, and will almost certainly continue that aversion in the future. This is the first one that I’ve read in more than a year. This doesn’t mean that I think Andrew’s a bad guy, or even that I couldn’t learn from his thought process, conclusions aside. Life is short, though, so I spend my reading time elsewhere. It’s not Rotten Tomatoes, but it’s a system that has worked for me so far.

After a good bit of discussion with friends and loved ones about the issue, I feel that I should ‘walk back’ some of my comments, clarify others, and expound on the issue as a whole.

My concerns are not with the original incident (man in the elevator) or Ms. Watson’s initial reaction. It’s with her reaction to people questioning her over the incident and then the piling on from P.Z. Myers and Phil Pliat. This I’ve well documented in my previous post.

As I’ve said before, her concerns were with her feeling sexually objectified (which I’ll address downstream), rather than feeling like she was in any danger of being assaulted. The whole specter of rape only came up after P.Z. Myers jumped into the debate; and as far as I can tell, Watson has done nothing to correct that misconception.

Now, allow me to ‘walk back’ or clarify a few points.

Starting from the beginning: That Watson felt uncomfortable is not in question, nor is it really part of the debate. I believe her when she said the incident made her feel uncomfortable. I have no earthly reason not to. However, we are dealing with so many layers of conjecture and speculation here that it’s nearly impossible not to project your own feelings, prejudices, and biases into the discussion. Because of this, I am doing the best I can to look at this without any preconceptions.

Regardless of what Phil Pliat says, the problem was not because a man was in an elevator with a woman late at night. The problem people have is with the solicitation. Had the man never said a word to her, or looked at her during the ride, not a word would have been spoken about this.

Which is interesting to me. A rational person would recognize that a man and a woman alone in an elevator together does not heighten the risk of sexual assault by any degree of certainty. In fact, if we are to extrapolate out for population, it can be assumed that this very scenario occurs hundreds of thousands (if not millions of times) per day around the world and we don’t see internet blogs blowing up about it.

So, at what point does it turn into a “potential sexual assault” in people’s minds?

Where is the line? Is it when he speaks to her? Is it because it’s at 4:00 a.m. instead of 4:00 p.m.? Is it when he says he “finds her interesting?” Or is it only after he utters the words, “would you like to come back to my room for coffee?”

This is a serious question. From where I stand, it seems to me that if the guy had sexual assault on his mind, then the act of solicitation posed no more of a threat than him just being there.

This is where I take extreme issue with people like P.Z. Myers and especially Phil Pliat. That they are blind to the above is a cognitive failure. Do sexual assaults happen on elevators? Yup, of course. But, how statistically prevalent are they? Under what conditions do they occur? How often are the two parties known to each other? What other factors come into play? That these questions are not being asked or addressed by skeptics is distressing to me.

Cannot men and women alike agree that when Phil Pliat jumps right to “potential sexual assault” just because a man and a woman are alone in an elevator demeans the whole conversation? Do people not understand that this goes right to the heart of irrational bigotry? I don’t care what Pliat’s motivations are, here. I care about what he said. If you are going to spend most of your professional career debunking things like astrology, religion, psuedo-science, and general quackery under the umbrella of skepticism, don’t be surprised when people call you on it when you fall for the very same cognitive biases that you attack on a regular basis.

This is why, under the conditions that Watson herself described, I see no reason to fall into the “Oh my God, she could have been raped!” line of thinking.

I also see no reason why one cannot state, in a perfectly civilized tone of voice, that though the fear of being raped on an elevator may be valid for some (given their past histories, experiences, etc.), it is an irrational fear for most people to hold onto.

Given that, I also see no reason why men (or anyone else for that matter) should feel obligated to change their behavior to accommodate those with irrational fears, regardless of the subject matter.

Of course, more empathy is needed from everyone. Never intentionally make someone else uncomfortable, if you can avoid it. To do otherwise is impolite and boorish. But there is no need to kowtow to irrationality as you go about your everyday business.

Onto the matter of the solicitation. This is a bit trickier to tackle, as there are several issues wrapped into one, here. I can easily understand why such a solicitation would creep many women out. However, I can just as easily understand why it would not. I’ve heard excellent arguments from women taking both sides.

To me, that means it’s all situational. Would I proposition a woman on an elevator at 4:00 a.m.? I honestly don’t know. Certainly not if all the right signals were not there. Certainly not out of the blue, like this gentleman apparently did. But what if she were looking at me suggestively? What if our chit-chat was sexually charged in some way? What if we just got done talking for three hours in a group and I felt there was a strong mutual attraction between us? What if, what if, what if.

So, all this talk of “never solicit a woman in an elevator at 4:00 a.m.” may be too ridged. I make this point because there have been dozens of follow-on posts instructing men on “how not to pick up women”, etc. This may very well be good advice to follow, but how do we allow for outliers?

The questions that aren’t being answered or addressed are:

• How many times has this tactic worked on women?
• Would we even hear about them if it did?
• If there is a significant population of women who do not mind being propositioned in such a way under the right circumstances, why should men not attempt such a proposition when they feel they have a chance?
• How many women proposition men in this fashion?
• How many men have said it’s creepy when women do this?

These nuances are exactly what inflames the “gender war” and sends people swirling into orbit with righteous indignation. You have people of both sexes claiming everything from “misogyny” to “potential sexual assault” to “creepy behavior.” Then again, you have people of both sexes insisting that absolutely nothing bad happened in that elevator. That this is a non-issue, to be forgotten and derided.

So, what are we as skeptics to do in this situation?

We need to ask difficult questions and rely on the facts. If something is irrational, we need to point it out. We ask people to show their work. We do not accept emotional overreaction or unfounded conjecture to cloud our judgment. This is an important point as the “skeptic movement” has taken great pains to be a “big tent” organization, inviting people in from differing political ideologies, social strata, genders, race, etc. That there will be conflict when such diversity is present is a given. Feminists and men’s rights activists cannot expect to be immune to people questioning their beliefs any less than skeptics question religiosity, psuedo-science, or quackery. In a skeptical organization, everything is up for debate. Feelings and beliefs do not matter as much as reason and facts.

As stated above, I do not hold any truck with the “potential sexual assault” line of thinking, but I do have sympathies for Watson’s feelings of being objectified, to a point. From what I can tell, this is what Watson’s main complaint is. If so, it’s rather more difficult to pin down any solution.

We can take Watson’s word for it that she gets a great deal of wanted and unwanted attention from men. Obviously, her gender and her looks have a great deal to do with this. But so does the field of interest she’s in and the way she comports herself therein.

If I may clarify, Watson can’t help being a woman anymore than I can help being a man. She can’t help being an attractive woman, anymore than I can help being an average looking man. That people are attracted or disinterested in us for those reasons and those reasons alone are beyond our control. Just because she is a woman means she will attract a good deal of men. Just because she is blessed with good looks means that she will attract even more men (and women). This is basic biology and to deny it would deny the very precepts of biological and social sciences.

So, that’s not the issue, here. The issue is how men (and women) approach her, under what circumstances, under what motivations, etc. I can very well accept the fact that because of her gender and looks, she receives more unwanted attention from men (and women) than an average-looking man would. If this is bothersome, I honestly do not know how to fix it. It depends on the circumstances.

For example, after I wrote my first blog post, my girlfriend and several very close female friends stated to me that I just didn’t understand what it was like to be leered at, ogled over, and approached in an unwanted sexual manner on a near-daily basis for no other reason than being a woman.

They were absolutely correct. I do not know. I have no idea what it’s like, nor do I have any frame of reference on how that would make me feel.

I will not, however, concede the point that this is due to “male privilege.” Just as I would not claim “female privilege” for women who do not understand or have any frame of reference for how men feel in certain situations. This is a conversation-stopper and serves no purpose other than to position yourself as morally superior.

I can only think of one conceivable solution to the problem, and I am open to suggestions.

Anyone at the receiving end of or a witness to such obviously bad social behavior (man or woman), should not hesitate to shame the person/people engaging in such behavior. Do not stand by and allow yourself or other people to be bullied. People (men and women) get away with vile social behavior because people around them allow them to get away with it. I fully understand that a woman might be too intimidated to say something, but this isn’t because of gender. Plenty of men are also afraid to speak up as well. What this says about humanity, I’m not sure. I do recognize that these are social pressures, however. That we turn a blind eye to vile social behavior says more about us as people or a culture than it does about us as men or women.

Watson’s field of interest and how she comports herself are much more under her sphere of control, however. Though many women are beginning to join such organizations, it is still recognizably male dominated. That many more women are joining, however, speaks volumes for the adaptability of such organizations.

How she comports herself is something completely under her control, and it’s a point that is most likely to be misunderstood and attacked. It is not unreasonable to state that if you play the “sexy skeptic” role to your advantage by way of pin-up calendars, sexual innuendo, sexually charged conversations, sexually charged blog posts, semi-naked pictures, whatever, you cannot expect some men (or women) not to approach you as a sexual object. As I stated before, it is not liberating for a woman to talk about sex, but objectifying for a man to talk to a woman about sex. That’s an obvious double standard.

It’s also not unreasonable to point out that double standard when you make the claim of objectification, whether right or wrong.

This is where I’ll be attacked for saying “she was asking for it.” Of course, this is not the case. I’ve been very clear. Every man and woman has the right to express their sexuality without fear of harm or the need to apologize for it. What every man and woman does not have the right of, however, is to not accept the consequences for their actions. If that means that more people view you as a sexual object, then that’s what that means. It does not give a pass to anyone to engage in bad social behavior (leering, ogling, foul language, a repeated unwanted sexual advance) without censure. It does not give anyone the right to initiate force against you (physical contact, herding, etc.) without the the law becoming involved.

A single, unwanted sexual advance does not necessarily equate to “objectification.” I think an argument can be made in this case, taking the entire evening into context, that it could be, but I’m still not sure why anyone should feel overly offended by it. Certainly not to the point of Watson’s actions after the event.

I’m going to deviate a bit from the skeptic point of view, here, and wade into some gender issues that I’ve been thinking about.

A good friend of mine brought this point up when commenting on my original blog post:

Phil Pliat = pre-crime? Your reworking is brilliant by the way, because it underscores the essential challenge of equalization of society. We all approve of setting a disenfranchised group apart in order to provide some uplift and legislation to assure them that the dice cast of all lives are not twisted and turned unfairly by the powers that be. However, who really is willing to draw the line and say – ok, we’re done here. Even steven. I have yet to see that happen. No one who achieves a victory just goes home. I don’t believe it is a slippery slope – I believe it is more like gambling. When you are winning, you don’t leave the table.

First, let me say, I am not a men’s rights advocate anymore than I am a women’s rights advocate. As I have clearly laid out on this blog, I stand up for human rights. Nobody should get special treatment under the law, regardless of their gender, race or, creed.

Women certainly have been cruelly oppressed throughout history. It is my belief that the strides in equality that have been made have much more to do with democratization, industrialization, free trade, and our over-all shunning of religious dogma rather than the feminist movement. Indeed, it is only because of the liberalization of our society that feminism even exists. I believe this is empirically demonstrated by comparing western, First World societies to Third World dictatorships and fiefdoms (which was Dawkins’s whole point when he spoke up).

As we come ever closer to a parity between the sexes, the differences become more stark, and more trivial.

It is not unreasonable to point out that there have been some severe societal over-reactions in our attempt to achieve parity.

It is also not unreasonable to point out that men have serious negative issues relating to their gender, just as women do.

Men are overwhelmingly the victim of more assaults and murders than women, for example. Men are more likely to commit suicide than women. They are more likely to be diagnosed with depression or schizophrenia. Though there are more men on top of the IQ spectrum, there are more on the bottom end, as well.

Diseases like colon or prostate cancer are just as deadly and more prevalent than breast cancer, but they do not receive anywhere near the amount of attention.

Men are more likely to die on the job than women.

Men have shorter life-spans.

Men are more likely to suffer from PTSD.

If a man does not sign up for the draft when turns 18, for whatever reason, he is automatically shut out of all opportunities that would include federal or state funds (college) or any government job. Can women say the same? If this were really an issue for women (as I’ve been told it is) it would have certainly been fixed by now, as women make up at least 50% of the voting block.

Men will overwhelmingly lose custody of their children in a divorce case. Divorce laws around the country are so unfairly biased towards women that it borders on a civil rights issue.

I accept that you are leered at, ogled over, and sexually propositioned more than you care to be. Will women accept that I am also stared at, pointed at, or angrily talked about in a passive-aggressive way by women who see me holding my daughter’s hand out in public?

As a woman, can you imagine any scenario where you would be under immediate suspicion were you walking by yourself in a park where children were present? What if you were out taking pictures?

Do women understand that because of our socialization, men are expected to approach women when they are interested in them, thereby putting themselves in a position to accept all the rejection? Do women face the same social pressures? Must they face the same amount of rejection throughout their lives?

This is a very serious question, because I believe it goes right to the very core of this whole issue. Rebecca Watson is just a much a victim of how women act in the dating world as of how men treat her. If you can imagine a society where both genders take an equal amount of risk when it comes to rejection, I think you would find the incidences of men approaching you would drop somewhat.

Men and women each have their own problems because of their gender. This is where so many people fail when entering this discussion. Some men are every bit as dismissive of those problems as women are. However, feminists cannot expect to be taken seriously by many men until they are willing to at least concede that these problems exist.

Feminists also cannot expect to be taken seriously until they concede that many of the problems listed above (on both sides) are, for the most part, First World problems.

Finally, a point about Richard Dawkins’s statement in all of this. I’ve read hundreds of comments lambasting him for being an “asshole” and “insensitive” for making those comments.

First, not very many people in the atheist movement were very concerned when Dawkins was being an “asshole” or “insensitive” about religion. I don’t know how you can deride him when he attacks something else that he finds equally as irrational in the same manner.

Second, Dawkins repeatedly asked people to explain to him why what he said was wrong. He asked for clarification and intimated that if he were wrong, he would change his statement. Can the same be said about Phil Pliat, P.Z. Myers, or Rebecca Watson?

I wouldn’t think so, certainly not from her “rich, white, male, heterosexual” statements. How does this add to the discussion? How can Watson expect to be taken seriously from this point forward?

Lastly, I’ve run up against the “privileged white male” statement a number of times over the past few days. Please understand that when confronted with such inanity, I will be more than happy to repay you in the same coin by referring to you as a “spoiled brat.”

And, until further discussion arises, I guess that’s all I have to say about that.

This will be a rather long post, so brace yourself. Much back story is needed to set all of this up properly, and it delves into atheism (for a part), skepticism, feminism, and rational thought, among other topics.

I can’t promise that I’ll get the whole story straight, as it is a bit muddied, but I will do my best. I’ll be happy to correct any factual errors. I’ll be willing to modify any speculation made by myself if persuaded. Where I will welcome all challengers, however, is in the opinions I reach about the whole affair, great or small.

Before I begin, a few disclosures about my preconceptions of the main players, least I be blamed for any type of confirmation bias:

• Before a few days ago, I had never heard of Rebecca Watson (aka Skepchick). I have since read through several of her blog posts and have watched some of her videos. I think I understand her shtick and have no real problem with it, in and of itself. I do have problems with it in the context of what I’ll be writing about below.
• I have read several of Richard Dawkins’s books and have frequented his website from time to time. I like his personality and have no problems with his ideas on atheism, although his delivery methods have made me squeamish from time to time. I have frequently and loudly derided his enthusiasm for the moniker The Brights, for example. People like Christopher Hitchens agree.
• P.Z. Myers has crossed my radar a few times in the past, but never about scientific/skeptical issues. I can’t vouch for his scientific knowledge, but I assume he knows what he’s talking about, given that he’s a highly regarded figure in the scientific community. The area where I have taken strong issue with Myers is in his take on libertarians. See here, here, and here for examples.

My take on libertarian thought is well documented, as you can see elsewhere on this blog or over at The Lesson Applied, so it’s only honest to say that I have somewhat of a dog in this fight. But this particular post isn’t about libertarianism. I’ll try not to belabor this point too much, but it ties directly into how P.Z. Myers conducts himself in what I’ll be writing about below. Suffice it to say, I find his opinions on the matter lazy, unoriginal, vacuous, and far beneath any reasonable measurement of “rational thought.”

Phil Pliat (aka The Bad Astronomer) is someone I came across about five years ago, peripherally, when I started reading books by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. I also have an amateur’s interest in cosmology, so I always enjoyed reading his posts. To date, I’ve not read his book and have only rarely visited his blog in the past year or so.

A few notes on some beliefs I hold, relevant to this subject …

I am an atheist myself, but apart from some writings back and forth a few years ago, I mostly keep that to myself now. I don’t think that I, or anyone else, is intellectually superior for being an atheist. Too many people conflate being an atheist with being intellectually superior to everyone who isn’t, which I find amusing. As you’ll hopefully see in what I’m about the write, atheists, “free thinkers,” and skeptics are just as prone to cliquish behavior, psychological biases, cognitive dissonance, and downright willful ignorance.

As for feminism: I have serious problems with feminist ideology when it deviates from equality for both sexes. I am happy to concede that women, as a gender, have their problems. I am more than happy to educate myself about those problems and help work towards an equatable solution. I would hope, that in return, feminists acknowledge that men, as a gender, have their own problems.

I’ve talked to very few feminists who will concede this point. But, apart from rampant objectification of men in society (turn on any sitcom at anytime and witness the oafish man that is there but for the grace of his girlfriend/wife), let me point this out, just as a primer. According to many feminists, girls are oppressed into gender roles early on by the Patriarchy. May I suggest trying to imagine yourself as a young boy growing up in rural Texas or Montana and showing absolutely no interest in sports? Also victims of the Patriarchy? Do mothers not shame their sons into pursuing these goals as well? Do young women reward socially awkward, chess club members with physical and emotional affection? Or, are they instead labeled creeps or nerds?

Once people realize that both genders have their problems and social pressures they must adapt to, they can start learning to work towards equality. But when those problems are flatly ignored, or, worse, denied for half the population by the very people who should be most sensitive to gender equality, well, you can understand why there’s quite a bit of cynicism out there.

Granted, this is an oversimplification to a very complex problem, probably better left for a longer post later on, but I wanted to put it out there for the sake of honesty. This is how I’m approaching this debate.

Onward:

On June 20, 2011, Rebecca Watson posted a video on YouTube and her blog discussing random goings-on in her life and her recent panel discussions at an atheist convention in Dublin. At around the 4:30 mark (I encourage you to watch the entire video so you can put this completely into context), she says:

… so I walk to the elevator, and a man got on the elevator with me and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?” Um, just a word to wise here, guys, uh, don’t do that. You know, I don’t really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I’ll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at 4:00 a.m., in a hotel elevator, with you, just you, and — don’t invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner …

So far, so good. At first blush, I don’t have much of a problem with this. We all have our discomforts and we are all free to express them.

However:

There has been an incredible amount of speculation as to the circumstances surrounding this event, and I’ve taken the time to read through several accounts. Some of this is supposition, but most of it is based how Watson has described the evening.

Watson and others were in the hotel bar until around 3:30 to 4:00 a.m. There was a recent discussion revolving around sexism and feminism in the atheist community. It is unclear whether the man in the elevator was present for this discussion. At the end of the night, Watson said something to the effect of, “I’m tired and I want to go to bed,” and excused herself to do so. Again, it is unclear whether the man in the elevator followed her or whether he too decided it was time for bed and also excused himself. In the end, I don’t think any of this really matters, in the slightest.

What we do know (according to Watson’s own account) is the following. As they were riding the elevator, he turned to her and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?” There is no talk about him being threatening. No talk of leering or aggressive body language. No talk of anything at all, really. He asked a question; it’s assumed that she politely declined, and that was it. I assume they got off at their respective floors and went on their way.

Of course, it can probably be safely assumed that “coffee” means “sex.” But, without the benefit of reading this gentleman’s mind, I can’t ascertain that with perfect certainty. It is possible, I suppose, that he really meant just having a cup of coffee.

Before I wade into the resulting explosion in the skeptic/atheist community, I’m going to tip my hand, here.

Regardless of how Watson felt about the incident, if I’m to take her version of events as an accurate accounting of what happened, I pretty much see nothing wrong with anything that transpired that night.

Without casting aspersions upon the gentleman in the elevator or making any assumptions on his awkwardness or lack thereof, this kind of thing happens thousands of times a day, all over the world. Men ask women for sex. And, surprisingly, women also approach men and ask them for sex. We do this whole dance about “coffee” because it’s a psychological defense that allows both sexes to pretend that if the offer is made and rejected, it really was just about coffee. In fact, asking someone out for coffee as a euphemism is a whole hell of a lot LESS creepy than just saying, “hey, wanna go fuck?”

I’m not saying this as a criticism to Watson. I’m not obtuse enough that I can’t mentally put myself in an elevator at 4:00 a.m. in the morning with a strange man and imagine how that might make me uncomfortable, or fearful. That’s fine. I get it. But where I draw the line is her making sweeping statements for all men and women as a reaction to that fear.

Um, just a word to wise here, guys, uh, don’t do that. You know, I don’t really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable …

If Watson feels uncomfortable being alone with a man in an elevator during its 40-second accent, that’s fine. However, the correct thing to say here is, “Men, don’t do that to ME.” This would be a perfectly rational, sane, defensible, and responsible thing to say. It clearly delineates boundaries. It lets the rest of us know what you are and what you are not comfortable with. Problem solved.

What Watson is blind to, and what I take exception to, is the idea that many women don’t feel uncomfortable in that situation. In fact, I’ll wager a guess that that line of approach has worked for scores of men AND women.

She is also blind to the way that she is treating men in general. I know it’s a cheap trick, but this is a fast way to get my point across. Let me just change what Watson said slightly and see if you feel any differently:

… so I walk to the elevator, and a black man got on the elevator with me and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I like those shoes you have on, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?” Um, just a word to wise here, black guys, uh, don’t do that. You know, I don’t really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I’ll just sort of lay it out that I was a smaller white man, you know, in a foreign country, at 4:00 am, in a hotel elevator, with you, just you, and — don’t invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when black men talk about shoes in that manner …

Racist and reprehensible. The very definition of base human thought. And yet, if I take a page from the Watson’s defenders, I would have every right not only to feel that way, but to say publicly that I feel that way, without recourse. After all, just as most rapists are men, there are more African-American men in prison for violent crimes than any other race or gender, so it must follow that my fears were justified. These are verifiable, yet unnuanced, facts.

Yes, most perpetrators of rape toward women are men — unless we are talking about our astronomical prison population, in which case, men also consist of the overwhelming number of victims. There is no hard statistical evidence, but the incidence of prison rape is so monumental that it nearly brings the instances of man-on-woman rape down to parity.

Also not mentioned is that the majority of non-consensual sex occurs in situations where the two people know each other in some way. All the way from casual acquaintances to close family members. Women being raped by strangers is certainly not rare, but it’s not anywhere near the level where anyone should feel uncomfortable (to an irrational level) sharing an elevator ride with a man who asks you to his room for “coffee.”

As for the African-American man analogy, although it is true that there are more African-American men in prison than of any other race or gender, a closer look explains much of that statistic away when one examines how our immoral and — dare I say, irrational — War on Drugs has done everything it can to destroy the African-American community.

But, to be fair to Watson, she never brought up the specter of rape. She did, however, imply it, as unintentional as that may have been. She was just talking about “creepy behavior,” here, but “creepy” is just too subjective to define.

This is sexism defined. Watson expects all men everywhere to curb their behavior to a level she finds “comfortable,” while not bothering to take into account that many other women may, in fact, not mind being propositioned in such a way.

Before I move on to the other players in this docudrama, this is the very crux of what bothers me about Rebecca Watson. Most of her shtick is the “geeky, nerdy, hot girl who likes to talk atheism and skepticism and stuff.” I’m not denigrating her by saying that, because I’ve watched a number of her videos and read through her blog, and I’m impressed by her intelligence. She’s articulate, well-spoken, and has a grasp on complex and complicated problems.

But she also does a good deal to sexualize herself. She plays the “hot geeky girl” angle to the hilt. There have been Skepchick pinup calendars, sexually suggestive blog posts, public sexual innuendo, cutesy and provocative pictures, etc., etc., etc.

There is absolutely nothing in the world wrong with this. I find it all a bit obnoxious after a while, only because I get bored easily and would like to skip to the substance rather than linger on the filler, but that’s a personal preference. I’m not going to Dawkins’s or Hitchens’s websites for their sex appeal, for example.

It seems to me that this is what gender equality is all about. Women shouldn’t hide their sexuality or apologize for it, just like men shouldn’t hide or apologize for theirs. If you don’t want to be “sexualized in that way,” don’t sexualize yourself in that way. You can’t justify the opinion that women talking about sex is liberating, but a man talking to her about sex is objectifying.

As a final note, one has to wonder what exactly Watson’s objection is, here. Was it the come-on, or where the come-on took place? Had this happened in the corner of a crowded lobby, for example, would we be hearing about it? And was she really being “sexualized” at all?

If you parse out the language, I don’t think even that plays out:

Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I would like to talk more

This takes whatever “creepy” factor there was way down. The guy obviously cares about what she thinks of him, and about the overall situation. He’s genuflecting and trying to connect to her on an intellectual level (however awkward it may be). It sounds like this gentleman was attracted to the whole package, not just tits and ass. Is that sexualization? Don’t men and women get together all the time based on mutual attraction, and fornicate?

What’s the problem, here?

Phase Two: The Plot Thickens.

I’m not the only one who is thinking along these lines, and thank goodness for that.

On June 22, Stef McGraw posted what I thought was a well-thought-out rebuttal to the original video.

Here’s the money quote:

Watson is upset that this man is sexualizing her just after she gave a talk relating to feminism, but my question is this: Since when are respecting women as equals and showing sexual interest mutually exclusive? Is it not possible to view to take interest in a woman AND see her as an intelligent person?

Someone who truly abides by feminist principles would, in my view, have to react in the same manner were the situation reversed; if a woman were to engage a man in the same way, she would probably be creeping him out and making him uncomfortable and unfairly sexualizing him, right? But of course no one ever makes that claim, which is why I see Watson's comment as so hypocritical.

If you really want social equality for women, which is what feminism is, why not apply the same standards to men and women, and stop demonizing men for being sexual beings?

Yup, pretty much exactly what I said above.

Things start to rapidly fall apart from here, and Watson is to blame for it. In a boorish move, while giving a talk about the Religious Right’s War on Women at the CFI’s Leadership Conference, Watson publicly called out Stef McGraw — who was sitting in the audience, with no chance to defend herself. From Watson’s blog:

I pointed out that she posted a transcript of my video but conveniently left off the fact that I had already expressed my desire to go to sleep. I also pointed out that approaching a single woman in an elevator to invite her back to your hotel room is the definition of “unsolicited sexual comment.” But those are unimportant details in comparison to the first quoted sentence, which demonstrates an ignorance of Feminism 101 – in this case, the difference between sexual attraction and sexual objectification. The former is great – be attracted to people! Flirt, have fun, make friends, have sex, meet the love of your life, whatever floats your boat. But the latter involves dismissing a person’s feelings, desires, and identity, with a complete disinterest in how one’s actions will affect the “object” in question. That’s what we shouldn’t be doing. No, we feminists are not outlawing sexuality.

I hear a lot of misogyny from skeptics and atheists, but when ancient anti-woman rhetoric like the above is repeated verbatim by a young woman online, it validates that misogyny in a way that goes above and beyond the validation those men get from one another. It also negatively affects the women who are nervous about being in similar situations. Some of them have been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted, and some just don’t want to be put in that position. And they read these posts and watch these videos and they think, “If something were to happen to me and these women won’t stand up for me, who will?”

Here’s where we start to descend into irrational tripe disguised as righteous dogma. It is important to take note (because this will be a HUGE factor later on in this post) that Watson isn’t complaining about feeling threatened in an elevator late at night, here. Her complaint is her feeling of being objectified. Oh, and it just happened to happen on an elevator.

This is a classic shaming tactic, used in an unforgivable condescending tone from someone who calls herself a “free thinker.” Basically, she’s saying, if you don’t believe that I was objectified, you’re a misogynist. If you’re a young woman who questions if I was objectified, you can’t help it, you’re just parroting “ancient anti-woman rhetoric.” You’re a victim of the patriarchy, you poor young thing. But it’s OK. I’m here to help you through this.

This is offensive to the point of stupidity, and nobody should ever accept being talked to in that tone.

So, this is where Watson loses me. Her original post was flawed, but fine, as things go. She felt uncomfortable, she expressed that (in a poor way), and as a “free thinker” she should by definition be open to criticism without resorting to vile behavior.

Ah, but it gets so much better.

After several people took Watson to task for her boorish behavior at the CFI conference, P.Z. Meyers waded into the swamp with a classic bait-and-switch tactic.

You’ll have to read it for yourself, because it is rather long, but here’s a paraphrase: That guy in the elevator was a complete and total creep. Men and women are equals, but they really aren’t equals, so men should know better than to ever talk to them in any way that they might find creepy or make them uncomfortable. Don’t ever approach them about sex, because that’s inappropriate and it’s “unwanted pressure.” Also, all men see women as “lower status” creatures, but they’re totally equal, and stuff. Oh, and yeah, that guy was a total creep and probably a rapist. But I don’t want to talk about that, so I’ll get to my point.

He insisted that how Watson conducted herself at the CFI conference was defensible and not passive aggressive. He likes it when people “name names.”

Which is fine. I get it. Debate should be open and free, especially among those who call themselves “free thinkers.” (See how I keep harping on that point?)

Here’s what he says:

As Watson says, she loathes passive-aggressive behavior. So do I, and this is a fine example of it. Name names, always name names, and always do your best to be specific. It is right and proper as good skeptics to confront and provoke and challenge, and you have to be direct about it. Would it have been better if Rebecca had talked vaguely about broad-stroke disagreements, fuzzily mentioning some unnamed persons with some unrecognizably blurred wording of disagreement, and then taken that blank-faced effigy to task? I don’t think so. It also would have been a tactic to blunt subsequent rebuttals.

But that’s not the point, here.

The point is, Watson used her time on a panel addressing the Religious Right’s War on Women to publicly call out a member of the audience who wrote on a blog something about her with which she happened to disagree. Name names? Well, sure. Get on your video blog and respond that way. Don’t waste everyone else’s time talking about something you weren’t invited to talk about, while at the same time tying a woman’s valid criticism (as unintentionally as it may have been) to right-wing bigotry. And certainly don’t do it in a way where she can’t respond. On top of that, don’t make lame excuses later that she could have used the Q&A session afterward to state her claim, especially when you yourself have stated in the past that you don’t appreciate people who use up Q&A sessions as a way to facilitate a debate.

As I said before … very boorish behavior.

P.Z. Myers misses this point, completely:

And now, of course, Watson is getting all this heat because she was willing to stand and deliver the goods. Disagree with her all you want, but apparently, you’re not supposed to be confronted over your differences, ever. You can name Rebecca Watson as a villain, but she can’t take you to task over your characterization. When did skepticism become a one way street?

Stupid and lazy thinking. Watson was free to name names and respond all she wanted, on her own time and on her own dime. That this escapes Myers is nothing but a mystery to me.

This is right about where Richard Dawkins comes into the picture.

In the comment section of Meyers’s blog, Dawkins wrote:

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep“chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

This is when everyone starts to go ape-shit crazy, of course. But I think there’s a great deal of astuteness in this statement. It has always really bothered me, for example, that western feminists seem to turn a completely blind eye to horrific, barbaric, and downright evil conditions that the majority of women live under in underdeveloped or developing countries.

Forced abortions in China. Women stoned in Iran. Girls suffering acid attacks for daring to go to school in Afghanistan, zero reproductive rights, forced to wear identity-stripping and soul-crushing clothing, rampant rape and genital mutilation, etc., etc., etc.

Yes, yes, I know these things have been addressed, but you’re more likely to hear it from the conservative side of the spectrum than from second-wave progressive feminists. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has spoken extensively on this subject, and was so disenchanted with her treatment from the “left” that she shifted her whole political ideology to the right and has been speaking out on this subject through that prism ever since.

I cannot account for why western feminists so blatantly ignore women’s plight in the Third World. I have my ideas, but they are based on pure supposition. What I do know is that because of this nearly unforgivable failure, it makes many people give up completely on gender issues.

This isn’t to say that what happens here is irrelevant because people have it worse elsewhere. But it does call for a bit of perspective.

This is what Dawkins is saying … and remember, up to this point, nobody has overtly brought up sexual assault or rape (except for P.Z. Meyers, in his lazy way). What happened between Watson and the man in the elevator was a complete non-issue. Given the facts at hand, nothing happened that was objectionable. The worst criticism you can come up with is that it might not have been overly smooth to attempt such a verbal pick-up in an elevator, but … meh.

But Watson is waving the bloody shirt, here. She’s taking up the mantle of feminism and deriding anyone who disagrees with her. Men who think differently are misogynists. Women who think differently are victims. Only Watson herself has the right to speak on behalf of both genders, shaming one and patronizing another, all over a perceived belief that she was “objectified” by a man who asked her to his room for “coffee” in what appears to be a slightly awkward yet polite way.

When you have a wider world view of real suffering and oppression, how can this be taken seriously? A better question: Why should it be taken seriously?

Enter Phil Pliat:

In a blog post titled Richard Dawkins and male privilege, Pliat attempts to take Dawkins to task for his comment. You’ll have to read the back and forth to get the full context, because Dawkins follows up on his original comment with two more that clarify what he meant. It’s all here on the provided link.

Pliat rambles on about male privilege and then proceeds to get the vapors:

I can understand that it’s hard for men to truly grasp the woman’s point of view here, since men rarely feel in danger of sexual assault. But Jen McCrieght’s post, and many others, make it clear that to a woman, being alone on that elevator with that man was a potential threat, and a serious one. You may not be able to just press a button and walk away — perhaps he has a knife, or a gun, or will simply overpower you. When there’s no way to know, you err on the side of safety. And what makes this worse is that most men don’t understand this, so women are constantly put into situations ranging from uncomfortable to downright scary.

Put even more simply: this wasn’t a guy chewing gum at her. This was a potential sexual assault.

So you may not think anything bad happened to Rebecca on that elevator, but something bad did indeed happen. He didn’t have to physically assault her for the situation to be bad. The atmosphere in there was enough to make it bad. And Rebecca was absolutely right to talk about it and raise awareness of it.

I have never witnessed such a horrible case of twisted thinking, cognitive dissonance, and just pure stupidity from someone so intelligent.

Let me break this down for you again with the same tactic I used way upstream and you can determine whether or not it’s fair:

I can understand that it’s hard for black people to truly grasp the white person's point of view here, since black people rarely feel in danger of being robbed by whites. But Jen McCrieght's post, and many others, make it clear that to a white person, being alone on that elevator with that black person was a potential threat, and a serious one. You may not be able to just press a button and walk away — perhaps the black person has a knife, or a gun, or will simply overpower you. When there’s no way to know, you err on the side of safety. And what makes this worse is that most black people don’t understand this, so white people are constantly put into situations ranging from uncomfortable to downright scary.

Put even more simply: this wasn’t a black guy chewing gum at a white person. This was a potential mugging.

So you may not think anything bad happened to the white person on that elevator, but something bad did indeed happen. He didn’t have to mug the white person for the situation to be bad. The atmosphere in there was enough to make it bad. And the white person was absolutely right to talk about it and raise awareness of it.

I’m not prepared to say that Pliat is an idiot. But his statement goes beyond idiocy. It’s reprehensible.

If Pliat believes, actually believes, that all women must be protected from being alone with a man she does not know on a 40-second elevator ride because just him BEING THERE makes the “atmosphere bad,” then he’s a sexist fool. It demonizes all men and infantilizes all women in one fell swoop. As I said above, nobody (man or woman) should ever submit to being talked to like that.

If Pliat believes, actually believes, that the situation Watson described was a “potential sexual assault,” then he is a dangerous sexist fool and I cannot understand for one moment why anyone would take him seriously on any subject thereafter. What he is espousing is worse than any kind of religious fundamentalism I’ve ever run up against.

Following his logic, any woman is a potential prostitute.

It’s meaningless to the point of absurdity, and offensive to any person who values reason and intellect. How someone could twist their way into that way of thinking confounds me. There is nothing else I can say but shame on him. And I mean that. His conduct is shameful and it’s right that people are calling him out on it.

To kind of wind this back and forth up (up to this point, anyway), we’ll end where we started, with Rebecca Watson.

In a July 5 post titled The Privilege Delusion, Watson gets in her jabs against Dawkins:

Well, PZ Myers, Jen McCreight, Phil Plait, Amanda Marcotte, Greg Laden, Melissa McEwan and others have all already said it, but I figured I should post this for the record: yes, Richard Dawkins believes I should be a good girl and just shut up about being sexually objectified because it doesn’t bother him. Thanks, wealthy old heterosexual white man!”

This is just pathetic and lazy and … OK, I’m running out of pejorative adjectives.

Feel free to read the rest of the post, because it really is quite the education, but I’ll just comment on the paragraph above before I move on to my closing comments about this whole brouhaha.

And again, please note, Watson is using the term “objectified,” here. Not “harassed,” not “threatened,” not “scared” or “uncomfortable” or “in danger” or “rape” or “assault.” “Objectified.”

Of course, Dawkins didn’t say or imply anything of the kind. As I stated above, he was adding a bit of perspective to the discussion. Agree or disagree with the tone, the message is clear. He’s saying that if this is the worst you can come up with as a feminist, well, I don’t respect it, nor do I have time for it, but here, have a bit of my biting sarcasm, just because.

This needs to be said. You can feel like you were sexually objectified all you want. That’s your right. You can talk about it all you want. That, too, is your right. What you cannot do is demand that men change their behavior because you feel you were sexually objectified, especially when there are plenty of women in the world who would not feel sexually objectified under the same conditions.

You cannot claim to speak for half the human population in defining what is and what is not sexual objectification. I believe that individual women can make that decision on their own, thank you very much. We all know well enough now not to approach you in that manner, so you’ve made the job that much easier for all men.

You do not get to go around implying that because men have a penis they are just waiting to rape you in an elevator once they get the chance and not expect people to go ape-shit crazy about it. The very idea is sexist.

You do not get to make a huge deal of how you are a sexually liberated, hot, geeky girl who talks about science and atheism and cool nerdy stuff, via pin-up calendars, sexual innuendo, sexually charged discussions, being overly flirtatious and then cry foul when someone actually dares to approach you based on your sexuality. If you are really concerned about not being perceived as a sexual object for men, don’t promote yourself as a sexual object for men.

If this above paragraph is confusing, scroll up to the part where I wrote that any man or woman should feel absolutely free to express their sexuality nor should they feel they need to apologize for it. But, if it’s equality you’re after, you can’t have it both ways. Men are going to be sexually attracted to you. Some for your intellect, some for your body, some for both; and you would be lying if you said you weren’t attracted to others for the same reasons.

Lastly, the “wealthy old heterosexual white man” comment makes me embarrassed for Watson.

I’m going to assume that Watson isn’t an overly affluent person, but given her status in the community and the number of speaking engagements she attends (worldwide), along with other gigs, I would guess that she does alright for herself. But, let’s just say for argument’s sake that she makes around $50,000 per year.

At that rate, she is richer than about 97 percent of the world’s population.

Sure, Dawkins might be a tad wealthier. Let’s say he’s worth $50 million dollars, and I imagine that’s an over-estimation. That would make him about 98 percent richer than the rest of the world’s population.

Kind of changes things when put in perspective, no?

As a woman, Watson will statistically outlive Dawkins (in overall years). And, as such, her life expectancy is greater than almost every other human on the face of the earth (in the aggregate).

Unless I missed something, Watson is white, too, is she not?

I assume she’s heterosexual, but I could be wrong.

So, in perspective, the only real difference we are looking at here, is gender, right?

And, I don’t see anyone rushing to Dawkins’s side of the argument because he’s a man. I do see a whole lot of that on Watson’s side, which is interesting to me. It’s not what she’s saying or even how she’s saying it that’s being defended. It’s because she’s a woman, and women should never, ever have to be in the situation where they are alone in an elevator with a man who awkwardly, yet politely asks her for “coffee,” ‘cause that man is a potential rapist. And he’s creepy. And he objectified her. And, blah, blah, blah, blah …

So, who’s the person with privilege, here?

It’s a weary temptation, crowding out the rational, promising the unattainable.

When its shadow crosses my mind, I attempt to throw my thoughts towards the sublime. A remembrance of fingers interlocked, resting on the center console of the car, in perfect unilateral symmetry, her thumb resting slightly, effeminately upon my own.

When that fails. And, it will fail; I turn towards a path in the autumnal woods, treading lightly upon halcyon leaves not yet turned to dust; the air slightly penetrating, carrying the sound of my footfalls throughout creation, daring another soul to reach out towards its origin.

These paths are well worn. Distant footprints from past episodes are mutely present; some meandering, some following a well traveled groove. Trenchant and indecisive shadows of journeys past intermingle, recreating muted synaptic firing, retarding serotonin uptake.

This is where depression takes me, shrouded in reds and golds, the surrounding trees perpetually shedding their life-force, catching me in a rain of falling chlorophyll starved leaves, spreading themselves upon the forest floor as a dryer fresh blanket is snapped upon a waiting bed, smoothed out at the corners by still warm hands, gently patting down unsightly lumps that fight against conformity.

It’s an indulgence that lulls one to complacency, a siren song willing you to rest your nodding head upon your breast, shushing you with a whispering lullaby. Sleep. Sleep. There’s always tomorrow. Sleep.

One must always fight this, one must always lift leaden legs and begin to stomp through the woods, crashing into the scenery, making a mockery of, and destroying the landscape.

One must make this place uninhabitable, turn a cold eye towards it and tear down its facade.

It’s a battle. It’s always a battle. It’s the ineluctable and unwanted chore of turning against yourself, mocking that part of you that wishes to ablate. The strongest part of you must reach down to the bottom of that medicinal bottle and torch the leaves, kill the landscape. One must be unmerciful about the matter.

One must always hope that others hear your baleful footfalls carried over a penetrating breeze.

Though it stoops, the diminutive must not be allowed to conquer.

Click here for the podcast and the supplementary information.

Here’s the money quote from the very end of the discussion:

I think the problem with what I would call a market language rather than a market process is that, too often, government policy takes the language of markets, which is fundamentally about incentives, which is what this is about, and then tries to graft them into institutional arrangements where there’s no market process. There’s bureaucracy or government mandates, and the incentives are supposed to then be tailored and tweaked so that it looks like…acts like a market, because it has these incentives. And, the problem is without the full range of effects, it doesn’t work at all.

It reminds me of the California energy market, when they tried to use incentives to allocate energy, but they didn’t have a market. It was a government created market. And, it seems we’re are doing that in education, that the main beneficiaries are the people who, as we talked about earlier, who fund the…who create the circular ad-ons, the consulting, the training, all the bells and whistles. They don’t get to the students. And, yet, it has the language of markets, so people like me are going to be lured into thinking, ‘well, they’re incentives, so it’s just like a market.’ But, it’s not. And, there’s no fundamental process that allows those market improvements to take place.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

—A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt

In 1919, Oliver Wendell Holmes proclaimed that you cannot “shout fire in a crowded theater.” The ignorant, the credulous and the cynical have been misusing that phrase ever since. The argument usually follows a well defined euphemistic process:

Person X says something offensive or inflammatory. Person Y denounces not person X but rather his speech by saying, “there is no such thing as free speech. You can’t shout fire in a crowded theater.” Implied is that speech is already restricted, so there’s no problem in restricting it further for whatever the reason du jour.

I’ve heard this argument from both sides of the political spectrum.

Here’s the thing. Justice Holmes was using the ‘fire in a theater’ analogy to refer to speech that had no “conceivable useful purpose,” or was “extremely or inherently dangerous.” In this case, the speech in question were fliers handed out in Yiddish opposing the draft for Mr. Wilson’s war. (In case you missed it, Mr. Wilson is the great “Progressive” president that oversaw a government apparatus of which Josesph McCarthy could only dream, longingly.)

Is this perfectly clear? Justice Holmes, with the full weight of the judicial branch behind him, with enthusiastic support from the executive branch, ruled that any verbal or written opposition to war was of no purpose and was extremely dangerous, essentially nullifying any First Amendment rights on the issue. Many hundreds of people languished in prison for long periods of time for the “crime” of “shouting fire in a crowded theater,” and this is inevitably the problem with arguments from authority or arguments from tradition. They almost always lead back to Yiddish-speaking pacifists. Please remember this the next time one of your friends feels the need to use this canard in any future discussions about speech.

I am going to be unequivocal in what I say next. There will be no genuflection. There will be no apologies. I ask for no quarter and welcome all challengers on the subject.

I will stand up for and next to mentally ill, idiotic, book-burning pastors with all the ignorant religiosity and disgustingly offensive things they stand for before I’ll give one nod of acknowledgment to the likes of Senators Harry Reid and Lindsey Graham (Democrat and Republican, respectively) and their pusillanimous simpering; anytime, anywhere.

When Harry Reid says, “We’ll take a look at this of course … as to whether we need hearings or not, I don’t know,” I say, “It’s none of your business. It’s none of the government’s business.” Not only should Harry Reid be fundamentally embarrassed for uttering such a statement, his constituency should be incredibly alarmed.

When Lindsey Graham says, “I wish we could find a way to hold people accountable. Free speech is a great idea, but we’re at war,” my response is to ask, “when are we NOT at war?” I will also go on to say that in all of human history, nothing thoughtful or nuanced has ever been uttered after the phrase, “Free speech is a great idea, but. …”

Any bien pensant has more than a few choice words for the likes of Pastor Terry Jones and his ilk. He has expressed his First Amendment rights, as is his birthright, and we fight him in kind, with … wait for it … free speech. That’s how it works. We want people like Terry Jones and his maniacal followers in the light of day. We dare not use the force of government to censor him, for fear of driving him underground to fester, to lend him credence. That’s how it works in an enlightened, secular, civil society. When offended, we do not go around beheading people. We do not rend our clothes and beat our breasts. There are no overwrought gesticulations. We go to the public square, without hindrance of or succor from the government, and we fight it out.

It needs to be said. Clichéd euphemisms do not need protection. They are banal and lazy, but rarely offensive. We fight these battles at the desolate outer fringes of respectability. We do this because we understand that to censor speech is to set up a chair in the anteroom of all our minds, inviting any petty bureaucrat to have a seat. Whom do you trust to take on such a role? Senator Harry Reid? Senator Lindsey Graham? Who among your friends would you appoint the gatekeeper to your thoughts?

Burn a book? I would stand on the side of any person who burned every beloved word of William Faulkner if it demonstrated how serious I am about free speech. I say that with no small amount of emotion. Just the thought of it makes me tear up.

I do not wish to have the devil turn on me and, in turn, have no protection, all the laws of the land laid low.

Shame on those who think otherwise, whatever their political ideology.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

Now there’s a site that will not only allow my phone to view NOTHING BUT the mobile version of the site, despite my user agent setting intended to trick it into giving me the real thing, but that mobile version is ALSO entirely blank. (Thanks, St. Louis American!)

Why do so many attempts at greater compatibility turn out to make things worse in practice?

ADDENDUM: When I posted this as a note on Facebook, Lee Sharpe pointed out this on-the-nose XKCD strip.

Seriously, though — no matter how much I’ve always loved the taste of pretty much any variety or preparation I’ve tried, corn is terrible for you.

The state—or, to make the matter more concrete, the government—consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

According to the Houston Chronicle:

Eight officers were suspended without pay while Houston Police Department Internal Affairs and the DA’s office investigated the incident. In June, four were charged with misdemeanor official oppression and violating the civil rights of a prisoner.

Police Chief Charles McClelland did the right thing and fired the four indicted officers, along with three others who were involved.

But the video raises an obvious question: Why weren’t misdemeanor assault charges, the most serious possible under existing law, not filed as well against some of the officers? While McClelland said he believes citizens understand that the department took “swift and strong disciplinary action,” those viewing the tape may question whether the action was severe enough and whether state law should be changed to provide for felony assault charges in such situations.

A gang of civilians surrounding a cop and beating him would be put away for a long time. The same should hold true in reverse — but these guys should be given even higher punitive sentences, for wielding the power of the government and abusing it.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

Eulogy

For as long as I can remember, it seemed like wherever we went — any part of town, any event, any other city or state to which we traveled — mom would run into somebody she knew. All of you gathered here today knew and loved Denise Dixon in different ways and in different contexts. The funeral program contains a few of the highlights from her life, and her sister Nancy collaborated with her on a longer memoir that I imagine she’d be happy to share with those of you who’d like to read it. For my eulogy, I’d like to share a few memories of her from my own perspective as her son.

What I remember most about her right now are small moments: dancing in the kitchen; singing solos in church, and punctuating conversations with song every day; groaning at our puns; playing Scrabble; watching Wheel of Fortune; wearing her muumuu around the house; bundling up even in weather that felt warm to the rest of us; shuttling us everywhere in our urban assault vehicle; teaching us German folk songs on our long summer road trips to Boise; listening to the Tijuana Brass or her collection of South Sea islands records; always welcoming our friends into our home and making them feel like family; telling us how she planned to tackle us on the tarmac when we flew home from college to visit, and insisting on itemizing every piece of food in the kitchen available for our consumption once we arrived; tearing up every time she told us how much she loved us.

One pastime that she particularly enjoyed was reading biographies and autobiographies of famous people. When I was a kid, I used to wonder whether it was a form of escapist entertainment for her, but as I grew older, I realized she saw them as cautionary tales of excess and mistaken priorities. A public life may be fascinating, but she often told us how she only ever aspired to be a wife and mother, and she was content building a good life with her family and helping her children gradually become adults.

Even though she wanted to devote herself to a life in the home, she worked as hard as anyone. I remember her spending hours in the evenings poring over bills and our finances, trying to make ends meet. Sometimes, when people say they can’t find a job, they mean they can’t find a job that they don’t feel is beneath them. But when it became necessary for her to find a job to make ends meet, she dove right in to one of the most thankless jobs there is — fast food, at the neighborhood Arctic Circle. Before long, fortunately, she was able to find a job as a nanny, which she did for more than a decade for multiple families, helping to raise their children with the same care she gave to her own. When the nanny jobs dried up, she started to work in retail sales, until we convinced her that her declining health was more important — she didn’t have to work any more.

Her own individualistic streak may be the reason that she always made sure we knew that she would be happy with whatever we chose to do in life, as long as it was something productive that we enjoyed. She had no preconceived notions about a perfect career choice or an ideal life path. It was important to her that we knew our lives were our own to choose — as she put it, “just as long as you’re not a bum!” She encouraged, but didn’t push. Instead, she inspired us to want to succeed in life.

At some point in my early teenage years, I remember mom coralling all of us kids. The bishop had addressed several parents in the ward, concerned that many children had no idea whether their parents loved them, because not everybody goes to the effort of saying or demonstrating it. She was not the type of person take expressions of love and gratitude for granted, and she wanted to be sure that we knew she loved us with all her heart, so there would be no doubt. And when she explained this to us, we laughed — because how could there ever have been any doubt? She told us, and showed us, how much she loved us every day. She didn’t know how to do otherwise.

This is not to suggest that she was perfect. She sometimes had a temper, although the older I grow, the more I understand how a handful of rambunctious little kids can try anybody’s patience. She had a stubborn streak, which I inherited in spades. Perhaps most tragic of all, she struggled throughout her life with a weakness for the sugar that ultimately ravaged her body. If there’s any one thing I could have changed for her, it would be that.

But we have to be careful what we wish for. People are complex, and the mix of qualities that make them unique and vibrant can’t be easily separated and altered. Mom loved life, loved living it fully, loved music and food and people and dancing, and consistently celebrated the joy that life had to offer. Although I wish we could have her here with us — healthy and energetic — for decades to come, the time that she did spend with us was filled with happiness. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

I’ll always love you, mom.
 

Graveside Memorial Service, Part 1:

Graveside Memorial Service, Part 2:

Graveside Memorial Service, Part 3:

Graveside Memorial Service, Part 4:

Graveside Memorial Service (Highlights, set to “Moon River”):

I had a dream last night where I was running errands in Ashland and all of a sudden you appeared with sweet concert tickets for that night (I don’t recall the group, though). You said I had to hurry and find someone to watch the kids if I wanted the tickets for Dan and myself. I felt like I was on a game show hesitating: “uh, let’s see, who do I know that can watch the kids”…as the clock ticked. Finally, we agreed that since you’re family, you could stay long enough to watch the kids yourself before handing out more sweet concert tickets to other people. I woke up and thought that would be the perfect side job for you; handing out random concert tickets to people who needed good music. You even had this magical room that people could step into and hear the music you were sending them to so they could get a taste of how good it was. The room had amazing acoustics.

I know, bizarre dream, but I was sad that it wasn’t true : (

micehell

“The essential difficulty of pedagogy lies in the impossibility of inducing a sufficiency of superior men and women to become pedagogues. Children, and especially boys, have sharp eyes for the weaknesses of the adults set over them. It is impossible to make boys take seriously the teaching of men they hold in contempt.” — H.L. Mencken

For the most part, the out-of-proportion response to the suspension of five juveniles for wearing clothing emblazoned with American flags to school on Cinco de Mayo is all over but the shouting. Though this incident serves as incredibly effective fodder for the ever increasingly silly (and almost wholly invented) culture war being waged at the fringes, it also reminds those of us less prone to “the vapors” to recognize what’s important in cases such as these … and it is a central libertarian theme.

Sometimes we are put in the position where we feel obligated to defend stupidity.

Let’s not be coy about it. The act of donning over-the-top patriotic garb on Cinco de Mayo was an act of adolescent sophistry. Not that I’m opposed to such actions, were it aimed in the proper direction. But this was not an act aimed against an authority or unjust policy. It was simply aimed to, well … disrupt. Being such, it was impolite, uncouth, and a bit stupid. Certainly not an action that would elicit my sympathies. Until, that is, the Man stepped in and screwed everything up.

When the principal of the California school got involved, things got a bit surreal. Telling the students that they were welcome to wear such accoutrements any other day other than Cinco de Mayo, said principal immediately made himself out to be a bit of a buffoon. When he suspended the boys for the day and sent them home, he unwittingly thrust himself and the entire brouhaha into the national spotlight, proving to everyone in America what children have known for ages: A school administrator wielding arbitrary power is an irresistible recipe for ridicule.

Don’t let’s get caught in these culture war traps. What these boys did was silly and unwarranted, a feat begging to be ignored. Any intelligent school administrator would have recognized this stunt for what it was, and acted appropriately — that is, not at all. What we have now is a principal (and the school administrators who backed him) worthy only of ridicule and censure.

Race and immigration policies are tangential, here. This is about restraint (the wisdom of knowing when to wield and when to yield the power you have) and personal responsibility, two capacities for which individuals could stand to develop more.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

The very first reading assignment that Tom gave to the interns was Frédéric Bastiat‘s essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” It’s pretty powerful stuff, even today, and even for those of us for whom the ideas contained in that essay are old hat. That may be partly because of Bastiat’s clear, lucid, illustrative way of making abstract economic concepts understandable and unmistakable, but also because the economic fallacies that Bastiat debunked are still widely believed today, so his points remain relevant to modern political and social problems. When journalists — and even a Nobel laureate economist — begin to credit wanton destruction as a form of economic stimulus, it becomes obvious that Bastiat is more relevant than ever. Henry Hazlitt updated Bastiat’s essays for a new generation in his book for which this blog is named. Tom Palmer is helping to bring them to the YouTube generation.

Tom has begun producing a series of video clips with Atlas that aim to take these fallacy-busting arguments viral. I’m far from the first person to link to this clip, and I’ll be far from the last. The belief that destruction — or, for the same reasons, government spending — can stimulate the economy in a useful way is a symptom of lack of forethought. Anybody reading this right now can help stem the tide of economic ignorance by passing on the link to friends, or suggesting it to the reading audience of whatever forum you might participate in.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

It turns out, the reason given was much less nuanced and rather refreshingly honest:

Carmel Shama, from the governing Likud party, plans to bring the “popcorn law” for a vote when parliament returns from its Passover break next week, the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper reported Wednesday.

“We have to put an end to this. The public should not have to mortgage their houses for a soft drink and a snack,” Shama told the paper.

A large box of popcorn usually sells for about five dollars (four euros) at theatre concession stands, more than double what it costs at a supermarket and 10 times more than it would cost to make at home.

When I say “refreshingly honest,” I mean that there are no hidden overtones here. Carmel Shama doesn’t appear to be overly concerned with health. This doesn’t appear to be a redistribution scheme, where the proceeds from taxed popcorn would go into some government coffer. This is pure, straight-up theft.

This does raise an interesting question, however. Why is popcorn so expensive at the movie theater?

Economist Steven Landsburg isn’t so sure that it is. In chapter 16 (aptly named, “Why Popcorn Costs More at Movies”) of his book, The Armchair Economist, Steven Landsburg goes through a number of explanations for why the price of popcorn is as expensive as it is. The reasons may surprise you.

Intuitively, we would guess that the price of popcorn is high because once we enter the theater, we are a captive audience. They have, in effect, a monopoly on popcorn, since most theaters won’t allow outside food onto their premises. But, as Mr. Landsburg points out, at that point, the theater has a monopoly on pretty much everything within the sphere of its influence. There are no other restrooms, for example, other than those provided. There are no other drinking fountains or front row seats, etc… And yet, all of these conveniences come gratis with the ticket price. The reason for this is easy enough. Any ancillary charges once inside the theater would make said theater less attractive to customers. In order not to lose those customers, the theater would have to charge less for the ticket price. In essence, it’s a wash.

And so it may be for popcorn, as well. We pay higher prices for popcorn in order to pay lower prices for our tickets. But, in order to make prices attractive to all (popcorn munchers and popcorn abstainers alike), a happy medium must be found. This may be a matter of one part of the theater subsidizing another. Not everyone, after all, partakes in popcorn. They are only paying for the ticket to the movie and are therefore taking advantage of those who buy popcorn at a higher price point so ticket prices can economically be lower.

Another theory put forth by Mr. Landsburg suggests that since most movie goers go to movies in groups, it follows that some of them will want popcorn and some won’t. If a theater offers low popcorn prices and high ticket prices, those that don’t eat popcorn may not want to go. The same follows, visa-versa. The trick is to get both the popcorn and the ticket prices to a level both groups can agree upon.

This is economic theory backed up by the very theater owners that would be affected by such a law:

Yaacov Cohen, the owner of one of Israel’s largest theatre complexes, said owners made virtually no profit from ticket sales and would be hard pressed to survive if food sales were limited.

“It would destroy the entire industry,” he told Yediot.

Also, as a parting shot, it bears remembrance that those who trade $5 for a medium popcorn value the popcorn more than they do the $5. Even if said bags of popcorn sold at $100 per, the same holds true. And although the New Paternalists may have something to say about that (waiting periods for high-cost items, etc…), it is still a voluntary exchange, of nobody’s business but the two parties involved.

One last unintended consequence. Carmel Shama may well succeed in making high popcorn prices illegal. If so, people will no longer have to worry about mortgaging “their houses for a soft drink and a snack”. They’ll be doing that just to buy a ticket. Either that, or a whole lot of movie theaters will be going under.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

In 1982, Motorola produced the first portable mobile phone. It weighed about 2 pounds and cost $3995. Within a very few years they were much smaller, much cheaper, and selling like hotcakes.

Today there are some 4.6 billion mobile phones in the world, and counting, or about 67 per every 100 people in the world. The newer ones allow you to carry in your hand more computing power than the computers that put Apollo 11 on the moon. You can cruise the internet, find your location with GPS, read books, send texts, pay bills, process credit cards, watch video, record video, stream video to the web, take and send photos — oh, and make phone calls from just about anywhere. Unimaginable just a few years ago.

And to celebrate this incredible achievement, Slate and the New America Foundation are holding a forum titled “Can You Hear Me Now? Why Your Cell Phone is So Terrible.”

This is an old story. Markets, property rights, and the rule of law provide a framework in which technology and prosperity soar, and some people can only complain.

Read the whole thing.

This reminds me of the inspiring book by Stephen Moore and Julian Simon, It’s Getting Better All the Time: Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years. The state smacks down the economy every day with its gigantic dead hand, and yet efficiency still finds a way through in many ways, continually improving our lives. Eliminating as much of that dead-weight regulatory loss as possible will absolutely make the world a better place.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

Copied from an email message I sent, dated Sept. 9, 2007, here goes:

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I always have trouble with lists like this. I tend to want to create lists of favorites, rather than judgments of “best,” which could change with varying criteria anyway. So, although I might agree that films like The Rapture, The Apostle, The Life of Brian, or even Dogma are some of the “best” religious films, there’s stuff that I don’t necessarily think is better that I’m more likely to include on my own list.

So…

1. The Book of Life (Hal Hartley, 1998)
2. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
3. Frailty (Bill Paxton, 2001)
4. The Believer (Henry Bean, 2001)
5. Bash: Latter-Day Plays (Neil LaBute, 2001)

This illustrates one problem with using favorites. Four films from 2001? That can’t be right. And the last one is really just filmed stage readings, anyway.

But this list contains some powerful stuff, all the same. The Book of Life, for me, is like a distillation of everything that makes Hartley movies so great. Searching, philosophical dialogue mixed with deadpan absurdist humor and occasional explorations of the artifice of making the films themselves. That wouldn’t be enough, though, if he didn’t pull it off so well. It also had perfect lead casting. Martin Donovan had become the iconic conflicted hero in Hartley’s movies by this point, and Thomas Jay Ryan had nailed down a perfect performance as a Hartley antihero in Henry Fool. So, sharing the bill as Jesus and Lucifer? Kind of like the Hal Hartley version of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino sharing a scene together for the first time, in Heat…

Spirited Away is rife with Shinto references, so the elements that seem like pure fantasy to American audiences probably make it more of a religiously-themed movie for the Japanese. It’s not only the best anime film ever made, it’s one of the best films ever made in any category.

The Believer shows how religion can stay embedded within us even when we try to reject it — and that an obsession with fighting a belief system stems from an impulse that’s not too far removed from faith and acceptance.

The list also represents my inordinate fascination with Mormon movies, even if the connection is tangential (like the brief appearance of gun-toting Mormon thugs in The Book of Life, or the fact that the star of The Believer grew up in a Mormon family). I’ve become hopelessly addicted to “Big Love” on HBO, and I might well be inclined to put States of Grace (Richard Dutcher, 2005) on the list, I’ve spent so much time following Dutcher’s career for the last several years. But there’s no getting around the fact that Dutcher’s movies released to date aren’t quite ready for prime-time (despite the fact that each is better than the last, and they’re all light years better than just about anything else in the fledgling “Mormon cinema” trend). Dutcher’s films are also likely to be seen by outsiders as vehicles for proselyting, at least a little — even though he’s left the church.

Bash: Latter-Day Plays was written, staged, and then filmed while LaBute was still a Mormon. A convert during his days as a theater major at BYU, Bash takes an unflinching look at some disturbing cultural traits LaBute saw in some of his fellow students. Belief can lead to an in-group/out-group dichotomy that can make it easier for some people to fail to recognize the humanity in outsiders.

And last (but not last), Frailty hit home for me because of my own religious background. A lot of Mormons were upset about Jon Krakauer’s book Under the Banner of Heaven, because he suggested that certain violent episodes in the history of the church — both the mainstream group and splinter groups — stemmed from an integral part of the religion. When I saw Frailty, I immediately thought of the Lafferty brothers, polygamists who left the mainstream church and had a “revelation” that God wanted them to kill a disapproving sister-in-law, her baby daughter, and a couple other people. Frailty came a few years before Krakauer’s book, but I made a similar connection when seeing it.

To my mind, there’s no question that Krakauer’s thesis was at least partly correct. Close to the beginning of The Book of Mormon, we have the story of Nephi and Laban. Nephi’s father, having had a vision that Jerusalem would be destroyed, took his family to live in the wilderness. Not long after they left, he sent his sons back to talk to a local rich guy named Laban, to retrieve from him the “brass plates” — which supposedly contained the books of Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and some other stuff that didn’t survive to become part of the eventual Old Testament (Zenos, Zenock, and Neum, for those keeping score). The Lord had told them they needed the writings of the prophets for their journey.

Laban wasn’t having it. They asked for the plates; he said no. They tried to buy the plates; he took their payment and kicked them out, plateless. Nephi’s brothers were ready to give up. Then Nephi, “led by the spirit,” came across a drunk man lying on the ground who turned out to be Laban.

The spirit tells Nephi to kill Laban. Nephi demurs, having never killed anybody before. The spirit insists: “Slay him, for the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands; Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.”

So Nephi lops off Laban’s head, dresses up in his clothes, fools Laban’s servant, and makes off with the brass plates.

This is the tension at work in Frailty. Your dad tells you the Lord has revealed to him that he should start killing people to fulfill a higher purpose. Is he crazy? Is it an actual revelation? The movie doesn’t let us off easy. We can say with confidence that we believe people like the Lafferty brothers to be crazy, but all indications are that they were sincere in their belief that God wanted them to kill a couple of relatives.

In modern Mormonism, there’s an interesting dynamic between the church’s structure of top-down, hierarchical leadership and the religion’s focus on the ability to receive personal revelation. The structure of the church may keep potential crazies in check more than would be the case with breakoffs like the Laffertys, but still…

When I was in seminary during high school, in the year we spent focusing on The Book of Mormon, the first verse of scripture we were asked to commit to memory was 1 Nephi 3:7:

“And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.”

This is one of the best-known Book of Mormon scriptures in the church, although I believe Mormons think of it out of context most of the time — considering it simply a powerful statement about faith and obedience. But the context is bleak — it’s the prelude to Nephi’s murder of Laban. Killing a man is the way that the Lord prepared for him.

The idea is there, in a fundamental portion of Mormon theology, that God can decide he wants you to kill somebody to accomplish a greater mission — and in a more personal sense than most of the God-approved killing in the Old Testament.

Although religion may discourage some forms of rigorous thought, I don’t think it creates insanity where there was none before (although I grant there may be exceptions). Religion may, however, give that insanity an extra sense of confidence and purpose.

And, Frailty asks, what if that insanity isn’t really insanity at all? Chilling stuff.

There are also a few movies I’d want to include just for the sake of seeing them represented by anyone at all — Malcolm X; Saved!; Cremaster 2; Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones; South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut; Orgazmo; Salome’s Last Dance; Heaven Can Wait; Defending Your Life; The Ten; even The Devil and Max Devlin and Oh God, You Devil (Bill Cosby, Elliot Gould, and then George Burns in dual roles! I haven’t seen these last two since I was about eight years old, though).

The one I hear most goes something like this (and I’m paraphrasing):

Imagine you live in a growing city approaching one thousand people. Imagine a transportation system that has 3 buses. If you don’t fill out the census, how will we know if we need more buses? Do you want to be on a really crowded bus? Of course not! Fill out your census so we can know how many people live here so we can buy more buses!

I’m not as droll as the narrator of this piece, but I can attest that this is the thrust of the argument. If you don’t fill out the census, public transportation will become ineffectual because, well, apparently that whole “three overly crowded buses” in a small metropolitan area is not enough to signal to the powers that be that…”hey, we need more buses!”

Ironically, what this commercial hints at is the complete failure of centralized planning (a rather funny unintended consequence). A public transit system needs a form filled out every 10 years letting them know how many people live in the area in order to function? Really?

Would several competing, privately owned mass transit companies need this information? Of course not. Private companies pay attention to the ‘signaling’ their costumers telegraph their way. It’s not too difficult to literally SEE buses becoming overcrowded. What inferences would you draw from that observation? Perhaps it’s time to put another bus on the road?

If markets were more fully involved in supplying transit services, when people demand more buses, the market will provide more buses, until supply and demand meet at a parity. But that’s another post altogether. I just can’t tell if this propagation of incorrect economics is willful or just ignorant. Perhaps both?

Edit: Marginal Revolution just picked up on this phenomenon, independent of myself.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

David Friedman has made compelling arguments that “nudges,” attempts to establish innocuous choice architecture, would likely soon become more like shoves.

Yesterday, I discovered that economists extraordinaire Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman (check out this nice encomium to Rizzo by Peter Boettke) had thoroughly dismantled the idea that would-be paternalists have the ability to make better utility-maximizing decisions than the aggregate population they hope to influence, let alone cement this ability in a set of public policies that would implement the benefits of their omniscience in practice. Titled “The Knowledge Problem of New Paternalism,” one additional reason it caught my eye is because they published it in the law journal of my own alma mater.

(Last time I went poking around the archives of BYU’s scholarly journals, incidentally, I stumbled across this gem from 1976, which provides the interesting bit of trivia that Milton Friedman and Dallin H. Oaks had been friendly colleagues during their mutual time in Chicago.)

At any rate, Rizzo and Whitman give “libertarian paternalism” the full Hayekian analysis, concluding:

In principle, we can embrace the idea of making people better off according to their own true preferences. That goal cannot be made operational in practice without access to information that policymakers do not, will not, and often cannot possess. Yet policymakers have to make policy on the basis of something, and so they will appeal to their own preferences, the preferences of self-appointed experts, or the (alleged) preferences of the public at large. They cannot implement people’s “true” preferences, but they can implement what they believe are the “right” ones, and the new paternalist paradigm will provide the intellectual cover to do so.

It’s an excellent piece, worthy of a full, careful read.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

Outlaw pot farmers in Calif. fear legalization could actually hurt their business:

“The legalization of marijuana will be the single most devastating economic event in the long boom-and-bust history of Northern California,” said Anna Hamilton, 62, a Humboldt County radio host and musician who said her involvement with marijuana has mostly been limited to smoking it for the past 40 years.

Local residents are so worried that pot farmers came together with officials in Humboldt County for a standing-room-only meeting Tuesday night where civic leaders, activists and growers brainstormed ideas for dealing with the threat. Among the ideas: turning the vast pot gardens of Humboldt County into a destination for marijuana aficionados, with tours and tastings — a sort of Napa Valley of pot.

The irony is deliciously delicious…in so many ways. But, foregoing all that, this is basically an issue of rent seeking. People who deal in black-market goods are protected from the ‘legal’ market. Not only do the goods they are producing/trading have an unnaturally high price point, they are shielded from competition from the free market. If anyone can get into the pot growing business, prices will dramatically fall. Some of the former illegal growers will then be priced completely out of the market.

We see this type of rent seeking behavior every day. Groups from manicurists and hair stylists to HVAC repairmen to interior decorators insist on licensure laws as requirements to enter their professions.

Those doing the rent seeking will nearly almost always claim that these types of licensure laws are needed so that only qualified people get the job. It’s a safety issue. Or a quality issue. Or, well, pick your reason.

In truth, it’s none of those. Rent seeking protects jobs using the force of government by way of restrictive fees and time-costing measures. It protects the few at the cost of hurting everyone else by way of decreased competition, higher prices and fewer employed people. You have a limited amount of money and you want to become a florist? Do you have the right license? Have you paid enough fees and attended enough classes? Sorry, you’re now priced out of the market. Some select florists benefit; the aggregate suffers.

But back to the rent seeking pot farmers of Humboldt County, California. Not only are their actions unbelievably immoral, they’re frightfully hilarious. The whole thing reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer Simpson is bullied out of the chiropractic market:

Steve: [walks in] Simpson! You’re not a licensed chiropractor, and you’re stealing patients from me and from Dr. Steffi.

Homer: Boy, talk about irony. The AMA tries to drive you guys out of business, now you’re doing the same to me. Think about the irony.

Steve: [grabs Homer by the collar] You’ve been warned. Stop chiropracting.

Homer: Not unless you think about the irony.

As pot legalization becomes more likely, I would expect to see more of this type of behavior. Just remember, the behavior is equally ridiculous when applied to interior decorators or florists, or the nearly other 30% of the workforce that requires licensure.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

Over a span of several articles on the subject, Professor Lakoff attempts to explain what he calls global warming denial as problem of ‘framing’ the discussion; meaning, well…several things:

In a May, 2009 article on the Huffington Post titled, “Why Environmental Understanding, or “Framing,” Matters: An Evaluation of the EcoAmerica Summary Report,” Professor Lakoff says:

How the environment is understood by the American public is crucial: it vastly affects the future of our earth and every living being on it.

The technical term for understanding within the cognitive sciences is “framing.” We think, mostly unconsciously, in terms of systems of structures called “frames.” Each frame is a neural circuit, physically in our brains. We use our systems of frame-circuitry to understand everything, and we reason using frame-internal logics. Frame systems are organized in terms of values, and how we reason reflects our values, and our values determine our sense of identity. In short, framing is a big-deal.

All of our language is defined in terms of our frame-circuitry. Words activate that circuitry, and the more we hear the words, the stronger their frames get. But if our language does not fit our frame circuitry, it will not be understood, or will be misunderstood.

That is why it matters how we talk about our environment.

It’s worth it to read the entire article to really see what Professor Lakoff is driving at, here. Framing is a ‘big deal’ because it is basically the storage space where ‘input’ is translated into ‘output’. Apart from the first sentence, regarding the environment (I’ll get to that in a bit), I have no particular argument with this line of thinking since, admittedly, my knowledge of cognitive scientific theory is spotty, at best.

I do, however, know a little bit about praxeology, being a rational person (in an economic sense) who voluntarily interacts with other rational people (a society!). Where Professor Lakoff looses me (and veers off into dangerous nonsense) is when he abandons hard science for pseudo-Freudian theory.

In February, 2010, Professor Lakoff wrote the following in: A Good Week for Science (Or, What Eating Worms Reveals About Politics):

All three results follow from a cognitive science study called Moral Politics, which I published in 1996 and was reprinted in 2002. There I observed that conservatives and liberals had opposite moral worldviews structured by metaphor around two profoundly different models of the ideal family, a strict father family for conservatives and a nurturant parent family for liberals. In the ideal strict father family, the world is seen as a dangerous place and the father functions as protector from “others” and the parent who teaches children absolute right from wrong by punishing them physically (painful spanking or worse) when they do wrong. The father is the ultimate authority, children are to obey, and immoral practices are seen as disgusting.

Ideal liberal families are based on nurturance, which breaks down into empathy, responsibility (for both oneself and others) and excellence — doing as well as one can to make oneself better and one’s family and community better. Parents are to practice these things and children are to learn them by example.

Because our first experience with being governed in is our families, we all learn a basic metaphor: A Governing Institution Is A Family, where the governing institution can be a church, a school, a team, or a nation. The Nation-as-Family version gives us the idea of founding fathers, Mother India and Mother Russia, the Fatherland, Homeland Security, etc.

Apply these monolithically to our politics and you get extreme conservative and progressive moral systems, defining what is right and wrong to each side.

There are a couple of ideas put forth here that strike me as wrong-headed. We of ‘conservative’ political ideology (I’m assuming Professor Lakoff is lumping anyone who is not ‘progressive’ into this realm, which, in effect, is a false dichotomy, and rather meaningless as there are plenty of Republicans who don’t have a conservative bone in their body) tend to believe that Liberalism* is a philosophy that cannot help but lead to overly patriarchal forms of government. (Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc… are all movements from the Left). That, essentially, is what we are always railing against.

*The word Liberalism is used here to describe a leftest ideology. I do notice, however, that Professor Lakoff has cleverly ‘framed’ his own language throughout his writings. He consistently refers to Liberals as Progressives (never the left-wing). Conservatives are still conservatives and often the “right-wing”. Historically aware people may find this a bit curious as the term “Progressive” was once proudly used by the most racist, war-mongering, intolerant group of people our country has ever witnessed. 100 years ago, “Progressives” got us into World War I, outlawed dissent, outlawed alcohol, banished African Americans from federal employment, purposely starved to death thousands of Germans after the November 11 armistice was signed, censored newspapers and the mails and generally acted like the worst kind of abusive parent. Not to mention their “enlightened” view on eugenics, an idea supported by a majority of scientists and politicians of the day (sound familiar?). A policy so repugnant, it led directly and irrevocably to the gas chambers in Hitler’s Germany.

I would be wary to hitch my wagon to such a term.

Secondly, this strikes me as an example of polylogism; the “belief that different people or groups of people have different forms of logic.” This is a collectivist idea most famously used by Karl Marx when he referred to proletarian logic vs. bourgeoisie logic.

Ludwig von Mises addresses this form of polylogism in Chapter 2 of his book, Human Action:

Marxian polylogism asserts that the logical structure of the mind is different with the members of various social classes. Racial polylogism differs from Marxian polylogism only in so far as it ascribes to each race a peculiar logical structure of mind and maintains that all members of a definite race, no matter what their class affiliation may be, are endowed with this peculiar logical structure.

There is no need to enter here into a critique of the concepts social class and race as applied by these doctrines. It is not necessary to ask the Marxians when and how a proletarian who succeeds in joining the ranks of the bourgeoisie changes his proletarian mind into a bourgeois mind. It is superfluous to ask the racists to explain what kind of logic is peculiar to people who are not of pure racial stock. There are much more serious objections to be raised.

Allow me to rewrite that last paragraph in more modern terms, with apologies to Lugwig von Mises:

There is no need to enter here into a critique of the concept political belief as applied by these doctrines. It is not necessary to ask the Progressives when and how a leftist who succeeds in joining the ranks of conservatism or libertarianism changes his liberal mind into a conservative/libertarian mind. It is superfluous to ask the Progressives to explain what kind of logic is peculiar to people who are not of pure progressive thought. There are much more serious objections to be raised.

In any case, this is all a pretext. To get back to the original intent of this article, what astonishes Professor Lakoff the most is the simple fact that there are individuals out there who are skeptical (he uses the blanket term ‘deniers’) of anthropogenic global warming.

Professor Lakoff is further quoted in this article:

“It relates directly (to global warming) because conservatives tend to feel that the free market should be unregulated and (that) environmental regulations are immoral and wrong,” Lakoff said. “And what they try to do is show that the science is wrong and that the argument is wrong, based on the science. So when it comes back to science, they try to debunk the science,” Lakoff said. On the other hand, he added, liberals’ cognitive process allows them to be “open-minded.” “Liberals say, ‘Look seriously at the science and look at whether people are going to be harmed or not and whether the world is going to be harmed,’” Lakoff said.

…

Lakoff, however, said that “99.999 percent of the science is final” on global warming and, in fact, the term “climate change” should be changed to “climate crisis” to more accurately describe the phenomenon. “Climate crisis says we had something to do with it and we better act fast because that’s the reality,” Lakoff said

There are plenty of excellent reasons to be highly skeptical of Professor Lakoff’s claim that “99.999 percent of the science is final”. (How do you empirically come up with such a statement about science, anyway?). Trying to explain all this away by claiming conservatives and liberals are cognitively different smacks of metaphysical desperation.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

Proposal to ban toys in unhealthy kids’ meals

“One in three kids are overweight or are obese, and we’re finding out more and more that if you’re obese as a child, you’re going to have health problems your entire life,” said Yeager.

In an effort to combat the nation’s epidemic of childhood obesity, Supervisor Yeager is proposing Santa Clara County create an ordinance regulating fast food restaurants’ ability to offer toys or other incentives with kids’ meals.

“Ten out of 12 meals that are associated with the promotional toys are the high-caloric, high-fat, high-sodium meals,” said Yeager.

No empirical scientific data is alluded to. We are to take it at face value that giving toys away with children’s fast food meals is…bad. According to Mr. Yeager, it’s bad because these meals are “high-caloric, high-fat, high-sodium meals.”

Here’s a list of proposed questions for Mr. Yeager:

-What scientific studies have been conducted proving a correlation between fast-food toys and childhood obesity?

-If no scientific studies have been conducted, are we just talking about a feel-good, anecdotal trope, here?

-What experience to you have, personally, with the science of nutrition and obesity?

-What other items that are ‘bad for you’ are you willing to ban?

-Do you feel you have a right in assisting me in determining the choices I make for my children?

-If yes, why?

-Do you lay awake at night, fists clenched, with the knowledge that somewhere, somebody is enjoying themselves beyond your scope of control? (My apologies to H.L. Mencken).

The article ends thusly:

Supervisor Yeager expects such a public health ordinance banning fast-food toy incentives could draw a challenge from the California Restaurant Association, but that it would legally fall under the health and safety codes.

If it is passed, this would be the first such legislation in the nation.

It will be the first, but it most assuredly will not be the last. We are all children, now.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

-An increase in the Nanny State.

I first heard this argument put forth in my Junior year at high school: “Seat belts should be mandatory because we pay for the uninsured drivers who would get hurt without wearing them.” Since then, this argument has taken on more manifestations than I care to acknowledge. We need to regulate trans-fats, salt, cigarettes, cigars, MSG, butter, alcohol, fast cars, ad infinitum…for the same reason.

It’s about to get a whole lot worse. ‘We’ not only pay for the uninsured, now, ‘we’ pay for everybody. Since ‘we’ pay for everybody, ‘we’re’ now responsible for everybody’s health.

This is in no way hyperbolic. It’s happening right now: Brooklyn Dem Felix Ortiz wants to ban use of salt in New York restaurants.

As absurd as this sounds (and we’ve all had our laugh), his reasoning is ominous:

Ortiz says his bill is designed to save lives, just like laws that ban the use of trans fats and require chain restaurants to post nutrition information.

“It’s time for us to take a giant step,” Ortiz said yesterday. “We need to talk about two ingredients of salt: health care costs and deaths.”

He claims billions of dollars and thousands of lives would be saved if salt was taken off the menu altogether.

On second thought, perhaps this consequence won’t be so unintended, after all.

-People are going to get sicker and more obese

There is good reason to believe that the fault of our country’s current “obesity crisis” can be placed directly at the feet of well-intentioned governmental interference based on incorrect science. If we can expect the government to have an ever increasing role in what we can and cannot put into our bodies (see above), it follows that people will be lead to the conclusion that the way to maintain a healthy diet is to decrease fatty foods (red meats, butter, natural fats, etc…) and increase the intake of complex carbohydrates in the form of grains (whole wheat breads, cereals, rice, oats). This is most certainly the exact wrong thing to do.

There is enough on that subject for a whole different post (one that I believe Eric will be undertaking, soon). For the purposes of this post, it will have to suffice to say that the current model (the government backed food pyramid) is based on wildly outdated and faulty science. But, even if you don’t believe that a low-carb, higher fat diet is the road to health, at least you had a choice in the matter. Doctors have slowly been coming around to the notion that low-carb lifestyles have terrific benefits. Can anyone doubt that obesity patients (and patients with Diabetes, blood sugar problems) will soon be robbed of those choices? If the government backed model is X, you can bet that when the government pays doctors who treat obese/diabetic patients that X will be the prescription. The result will be an inescapable negative feed-back loop.

-When everyone is forced to have health care insurance, only criminals won’t have health care insurance.

As snarky as that may sound, this legislation will make criminals out of a whole new class of people. It’s really rather simple. There are no provisions for those who want to opt out. If you’re a woman and you don’t want maternity coverage…tough. If you don’t want mental health coverage…tough. If you don’t want coverage at all, for reasons that, quite frankly, are none of anyone’s business…tough.

Oh, we’re assured (wink, wink) that nobody will actually end up in jail for not buying coverage, but don’t you believe them. The end result is always the same. It’s always force.

-We will see a sharp increase in mental health cases in this country.

Everyone must now be covered for mental health. This can be as innocuous as a couple of trips a year to your therapist or as serious as treatment for Schizophrenia or OCD or ADD. Psychotropic drugs (Prozac, etc…) will also be covered.

When something is universally offered at a price below market value, people are going to naturally take advantage of that something. I imagine we are going to see a rather steep incline in the number of people seen by mental health professionals. This, of course, leads to a whole separate Pandora’s Box of unintended consequences. How much more money will be funneled into mental health, thus creating another negative feed-back loop? More people see more mental health professionals, triggering more federal money pouring into the field of mental heath, triggering more people seeing mental health professionals, etc…

Also, will more people be forced to take psychotropic drugs either based on bad advice or against their will? That, too, may be a subject for a future post.

Unintended consequences are a powerful thing. I wish more people were able to think deeply about them before jumping on bandwagons, however well intentioned they may be.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

“The most frequent fallacy by far today, the fallacy that emerges again and again in nearly every conversation that touches on economic affairs, the error of a thousand political speeches, the central sophism of the new economics, is to concentrate on the short-run effects of policies on special groups and to ignore or belittle the long-run effects on the community as a whole.”

By far, the aspects of economics I pay attention to the most are those of Unintended Consequences and opportunity costs. When Hazlitt talks of “the short-run effects of policies on special groups and to ignore or belittle the long-run effects on the community as a whole”, Unintended Consequences and Opportunity Costs come into play

Several such consequences/costs come immediately to mind when thinking of the current Health Care bill recently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama.

-We can probably expect new innovations in medical science to stagnate.

We can never know what amazing technology will never be invented simply because the money or the incentive no longer exists to invent that technology. This points to Bastiat’s Broken Window Theory Fallacy, which simply states that though a broken window may unexpectedly enrich the window maker, it impoverishes the person who must now replace the window. His money could have been spent on something else, entirely.

-We can probably expect a new wave of crackdowns on immigration.

Though I have some problems with Milton Friedman, he had it exactly right when he said, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.” I understand that ‘illegal immigrants’ are not explicitly covered under this new legislation, and there is a good deal of economic proof that immigration is a net boon to the economy, but we must face some inconvenient truths. There is a strong movement in this country to give millions of immigrants ‘amnesty’, meaning they will not only be in the country legally, they will be on the first step to obtaining citizenship.

Do not misunderstand me, I applaud the efforts to make this happen as I agree with open borders/immigration. However, as the majority of elected Republicans are against this, if it is passed, it will be because of the Democrats. I do not mean to be cynical here, but the legalization and naturalization of millions of immigrants as a political movement coming from the Left has to be repaid somehow. Namely, there will be millions more in the Democratic party 10 years hence.

This will cause a huge, irrational backlash against immigration. An ‘unintended consequence”. Instead of attacking the welfare state, Republicans and others from the right will score points by fear-mongering and know-nothingness. We can assuredly expect the passage of a National ID bill sometime in the near future, and that’s not even mentioning the hundreds of millions of more dollars that will go towards “protecting the borders”.

It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out.

[Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.]

Sometimes eliminating choices is a business strategy that makes sense. Some restaurants are getting rid of menus, some supermarkets are paring down the number of items on their shelves, and the Internet is filled with advice on how to make decisions effectively — suggesting that there’s a wide range of people out there that needs help coping with the bewildering array of choices life has to offer them.

So, yes, I grant all of this. And yet … it’s easy to forget that the long tail has become the basis for the most valuable new business plans of the Internet age. The idea here is that people have such widely varied tastes that the many items people buy very little of, with low market share, add up to a mass of options that rivals the popular items that nearly everybody buys.

Schwartz coined a couple of terms for different types of deision-makers: "maximizers" and "satisficers."

Maximizers are the people who try to find the best of whatever they’re choosing — the best new car, the best brand of toothpaste, the best hamburger, etc. These people may enjoy their optimal choices more than other people enjoy their subpar choices, but there’s a large opportunity cost in pursuing knowledge of the "best" choice.

Satisficers, on the other hand, choose things that are "good enough." They don’t second-guess whether there’s a better brand of peanut butter if the brand they’ve already purchased results in satisfactory sandwiches.

Schwartz essentially argues that satisficers are happier than maximizers because they don’t expend an inefficient amount of time and energy looking for goods that are only marginally better than things they would be satisfied with. And his argument might make sense if people fit exclusively into one or the other of his categories.

But the fact is that everybody is both a maximizer and a satisficer, just for different sets of choices. As Virginia Postrel argued in Reason:

Since different people care intensely about different things, only a society where choice is abundant everywhere can truly accommodate the variety of human beings. Abundant choice doesn’t force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation, and science fiction.

A world in which there’s an ever-expanding array of choices means I get to maximize my music preferences by listening to Zorn and Zappa while others can satisfice theirs with Lavigne and Timberlake. It also means that some people can maximize their preference for vehicles with luxury BMWs or SUVs, while I can satisfice with my trusty Hyundai Elantra. And it means that while David Stokes can satisfice his baby bottle needs with whatever’s on sale, somebody else who’s looking for certain characteristics in a bottle that David might not care about, or have even considered, can find what they’re looking for as well.

So, I was particularly happy to stumble across this piece from The Onion today. It’s a reminder that most people tend to be maximizers about some aspect of their lives. That line will be drawn in radically different places for different people, but the rest of us frequently benefit from the externalities of their trailblazing obsessions.

There’s not much that can be said here that hasn’t already been said. Evelyn Mastroianni certainly deserves to have her name linked to this in perpetuity. I am often gobsmacked at how utterly evil some adults can be. That’s a good word for Principal Mastroianni…evil. “Bully” and “Coward” don’t quite sum it up nicely enough. If you doubt it, consider the following:

“They made me sign a statement,” the tear-stained fourth-grader said. “She told me to write that I had a gun,” he said. “She said, ‘A gun is a gun’.”

Keep in mind, this child is 9 years old.

I think we can all agree that it is axiomatic that a Lego gun is not, in fact, a real gun. In this case, A is not A. That such a priori knowledge is not evident to a principal (all of whom have Doctorate degrees, if I’m not mistaken), is a perfect example of why we should not mistake education for intelligence or wisdom.

Principal Mastroianni has apologized to the boy, only after the news broke nationally. There is no indication she has lost her job, however. More’s the pity. One can hope that this experience will temper any further idiocy in the future. I’m not hopeful. It is my experience that such evil is not so easily assuaged.

There are other times, however, when my camera feels no more than a brick in my hand. I have no connection to it. No matter what I do to get that shot, the camera will not cooperate.

This has a great deal to do with my personality. I’m much more comfortable in solitary situations than being surrounded by people. When I attempt to immerse myself in those kinds of situations, I find myself completely off center. The concept of taking pictures of perfect strangers (candid or not) is absolutly foreign to me. I envy those who are able/willing to pull that off.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been able to get some pretty good pictures in those situations, but even so, I don’t feel that same special connection to my camera as I would photographing an abandoned barn or a solitary trail in the woods, etc… When doing so, I’m able to take in all of my surroundings. I’m able to hear what is going on around me, breath in the air, feel the soil beneath my feet. I’m able to relax. It is then that my camera and I meld.

I don’t know what’s to be done. I often find myself in chaotic, loud situations, surrounded by chaotic, loud people. The introvert in me can always act the extroverted part, but it becomes much more complicated when one has a camera in one’s hands. The dichotomy becomes ever more strident. The camera either serves to connect you more with people OR to cut yourself off from them. Want to hold a psychological experiment? Put a camera in an introvert’s hands in a room full of people and see what happens. I’m telling you, it could go either way.

Anyway, back to the original point of this post. I don’t like feeling disconnected from my camera. It almost feels like a betrayal. (I know, I know…a bit hyperbolic). This almost leads me to believe that perhaps it’s a good idea to just occasionally leave the camera behind.

I know the camera won’t mind, but I have doubts about myself…

I’m certainly over thirty years old, but I’m no poet. Though, occasionally I’ll jot something down.

I wrote this one several years ago and it’s still my favorite:

Stepping out on the threshold
The jostling of bodies
The whiff of cigarette smoke
The constant negotiations of con artists and whores
Beverly loves the night life

Wandering aimlessly, hardly caring about the destination
Catching a reflection in the Victrola store window
Cheap, sensible shoes
Pleated skirt
Eggshell blouse, a touch of rouge

She pretends to be thrown up against dark buildings
Hair mussed up, blouse ruffled
She speaks coyly to the man next to her
Brushes his hand off her shoulder
Walks away clicking her heels

Flapper girls dancing the Lindy
Gold coins a jinglin’
Pushing and pulling

In her bedroom she lies supine, almost satisfied
She quietly invites him to leave
Sighing, she falls into slumber, a vacant look crosses her face
Beverly loves the night life

Meh, it’s not Wadsworth, but it will do.

One of the most oft’ imitated poems is William Carlos Williams’, “This is Just to Say”:

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Go to Google and type in “This is Just to Say Parody”, and you’ll see what I mean about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.

I guess I’ll add to the corpus:

This is Just to Say (for William Carlos Williams)

I tried to listen
to the poem
you wrote
just for me

and really,
your intonation
was beautifully
melodic

Forgive me
it’s the ADD
look!
there’s a squirrel!

Eat your heart out, Charles Bukowski!

Some might call this a form of agoraphobia, but I’d disagree. I have absolutely no problem with public places, whether they be wide open or not. Neither do I feel claustrophobic or have any anxiety in crowds. It’s difficult to explain. I just feel, well…disjointed, somehow.

While up in Chicago this weekend attending the Camper Van Beethoven/Cracker concert, this feeling came over me very suddenly. For some reason, while standing in the crowd, I just could not figure out what to do with my hands. Do I put them in my pocket? Cross my arms in front of me? Raise them up in the air? Put them behind my back in the position of a modified Parade Rest?

It did not help that the extremely cute girl next to me was dancing lithely, without affectations. She even hip-checked me a few times with a sly, knowing smile. And there I stood, unable to figure out what to do with my hands. The space around me multiplied exponentially until, in a crowd of hundreds, I was alone. At one point, I became so flustered with the odd situation that I actually (God help me) put my hands up in the air and made the “devil horns” sign with my hands while yelling, “Woooooooooooooooooooooo!”.

When the concert was over, the cute girl next to me slid up, put her arm around my waist and half yelled in my ear, “Thanks for hanging out with me! I had a great time! I gotta go home, now!”

And then she was gone.

And I was left there. With my stupid hands. Which I happily put into my pockets, while walking towards the coat check room…smiling all the way.

Alone.

I mean, I have to figure out all this stuff by myself.

Which brings me to a dilemma. Yesterday, while watching the show Man Vs. Wild with the girls, I realized exactly what I did not like about the show (not the genre of show, which I love, but that specific program).

The whole thing is staged.

Unlike some other shows of the same sort, Bear Grylls is never in any real danger. He has a full camera crew stalking him at all times. This is illustrated by the oh, so cleaver ways the editing team makes sure you realize this from show to show (the camera man’s shadow, Bear talking off screen, etc…). This is done (post-edit) so you have a hint that even though there’s all this drama, there’s no real danger. So yeah, when he’s scaling that canyon wall, there’s a guy with a camera right next to him shooting the footage. Which leads me to ask, no matter how dangerous Bear makes his plight out to be, (with dramatic music effects and that heightened, slightly stressed out voice of his) I’m always thinking to myself…”Dude! There’s a guy(s) right next to you filming the whole thing, doing the same things you are..with a camera rig in their hands! How freaking hard can that be?”.

I don’t know if this is fair or not. But, really, it all just points back to my dislike of “staged scenes”. Even in photography, I try to avoid this. I’d rather catch something in its natural state rather than position something to make it look appealing. I’ve seen plenty of breath-taking photographs that, in the end, I’ve devalued simply because they were “staged”. I don’t know what this says about me. I don’t know if this is a simple preference or something much deeper. But, it does present a problem.

There are a couple of scenes I want to film during this upcoming journey of mine that, unfortunately, will require some amount of staging. These will be poignant, slightly emotional vignettes. The only way I can capture these scenes if to set up the camera and “stage the scene”. Something that is meant to be an impromptu moment will actually be planned out. Those heart-felt words or actions will have been thought over for months ahead of time.

That seems like cheating to me. But, pursuing other solo documentaries, I see that this technique is done all the time.

I wonder how they come to terms with it.

The Diana loves the little things. It loves breakfast, your dog, your boyfriend or girlfriend, that crazy hat in the window, the unbelievable morning traffic, those gummed up salt shakers, a blazing afternoon sun, your nose when it’s all close-up an blurry, the shoes that you didn’t buy, and your hamburger-champion uncle. It’s lightweight body feels good next to yours, and it doesn’t bog you down with a lot of weight…

I got one of these beauties about a month ago, but haven’t tried it out, yet. I can’t wait.

In the meantime, there’s always the Diana Gallary. ]]> http://www.shrubbloggers.com/2010/01/03/lomography/feed/ 1 http://www.shrubbloggers.com/2010/01/03/what-did-you-do-today/ http://www.shrubbloggers.com/2010/01/03/what-did-you-do-today/#comments Sun, 03 Jan 2010 17:45:23 +0000 Justin M. Stoddard http://www.shrubbloggers.com/?p=1755 I’ve had this blog since 2003 and have never really thought of it as any more than an outlet for what I may be thinking/feeling at the moment. As I am wont to do, I have engaged in a few abortive attempts at something larger throughout the years (blogging the bible, one photo a day, 1001 Journals project, etc…). I don’t regret that. I often shoot for something and end up wide instead of deep, meaning I gain just enough experience from something to sate me…then I move on. I’ve been this way for as long as I remember and I don’t regret it. My ability to shift focus rapidly has served me well over the years, though it’s been a source of great frustration and amusement for those close to me.

The above, of course, is a symptom of ADD; something I’ve lived with all my life. When I was younger, the condition completely ruled me. A child psychologist once recommended that I be put on Ritalin (something my mother disregarded, thank God) and when in class, a screen be put around me so I would not be distracted by the other children. I repeated the 2nd grade. It seems I had “great potential” but just couldn’t sit still long enough to get through the lessons. I was always the odd one out…the one the other kids beat for sport. That all changed by the time I was 14 or so. I learned to fight back. I learned to use wit and intuition to be likable. Later, I learned to relax and just kind of be myself…a confidence born from bloodied knuckles and a knack for comedy. In those years I made some of the best friends of my life. Friends I still talk with on a weekly basis.

But, nothing has ever cured me of paying attention to things that bore me. And, brother (sister), school bored me. I graduated high school with the lowest GPA possible. I’m still proud of that fact. It was the same with college. I really did try my hardest. I did. But, in the end, it bored me. I realized later that I simply cannot abide being told what I should and should not learn. If something does not interest me, it’s not worth my time. That’s just simply the essence of me.

This is how my mind works. I once saw the line, “Hell is other people”, while reading a newspaper one day. Sure, most anyone educated in the Liberal Arts should understand this reference right off. I, however, did not, but it spoke to the introvert in me. So, being intrigued, I searched the net. I then went out and bought three books by Jean-Paul Sarte and read them all. A week later something else caught my attention. And, so it goes. Like I said, my vision is miles wide.

But, sometimes it’s deep as well. In spite of all this hopping about from one subject to another, I have had some constants in my life. The over-arching constant is a passion for learning. The specific things I focus on more than others are: art, photography, literature, science, languages and traveling. One can see that by looking back on this blog over the past several years. I imagine I’ll be following these pursuits for the rest of my life.

Which kind of brings me back to the beginning of this post. As I said, I never really thought of this blog as anything more than a “snapshot in time”. “Hey! This is what I’m thinking right now!”. But, I’m starting to realize that it can be so much more. It can be used as a tool to help strengthen my focus on those things above that I love so.

There are several projects bouncing around in my head at the moment and I don’t want them to bounce away…they really are great ideas. So, I think I’ll start using this space to document what I’m working on. Perhaps this will keep me on track to completion. Perhaps it will allow others to provide encouragement.

Perhaps.

When dusk starts to encroach, the eyelids get heavy and the labors of the day are behind….when I inevitably ask myself, “What did you do today”.

I don’t ever want the answer to be, “Not much”.

 
-Jam Master J wants to know — “What Did You Do Today?”

For those of you not on Facebook…I’m home! And none to soon as a winter storm came in last night while I was sleeping.

I’ll write more later. For now, I have to figure out how to go get some food. :)

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Greetings, all!
Well, tonight is my last night in Kabul. I’m catching a flight out of here tomorrow. The next challenge is to get from here to Qatar, which could take a couple of days. Once I’m in Qatar, I’ll be looking at changing my flight so I can get to the states a little earlier than I expected. Christmas, anyone?

So, I spent the past two days saying my good-byes and getting everything in order here. I’ve made a ton of new friends here…and I’m very sad to be leaving them. I am, however, excited to be coming home to my old friends (and some new ones).

Thank you everyone for making my deployment that much easier by staying in touch and giving me well-wishes when they were needed.

I can’t wait to see and talk to you all when I get back.

Merry Christmas!!

And, to that little red-headed girl…write me back! :P

Just so everyone knows, I’m fine. There was an explosion this morning about 1/2 a kilometer away from where I’m stationed. The news is sketchy right now and we’re still waiting for info. I’m fine, though I’d rather not have these sorts of events happen so close to me leving country. Well, I’d rather not have these sorts of events happen at all, but you get my drift…

I know I said I’d probably be writing less now that I’m so close to leaving country, but I have found myself with a bit of free time and some ideas on my mind.

First, I’m not sure if you are all aware, but all of these letters have been put on my blog: www.shrubbloggers.com. Eric took the initiative to do this, as I could not get the blogging interface to work from here. So, you’re always free to go back and read about this whole journey from the beginning.

Speaking of blogging, I think I’ll be paying much more attention to it once I get home. There are about a dozen projects I have in the back of my head that I’d like to see come to fruition…and blogging about them seems like a good idea.

I’ve been pre-approved for a mortgage, so house-hunting will be in my immediate schedule the first few months home. Ideally, I’d like to get a place that’s in the same general location but is out of the control of a neighborhood association. I’ll cut my grass when I damn well want to, thank you very much. My ideal house will have a full basement in which to build an ad-hoc, DIY digital/music studio. Nothing fancy, just a nice quiet corner where I can start working on all the things I want to work on.

Eric and I have been talking a great deal lately of starting to play music again. I have no idea where this will lead, though I have my ideas. As eclectic and varied as our musical tastes are, this should be a lot of fun. In that vein, I’ll be buying a tuba within the next couple of months. Most of you know that I played the tuba for a few years in high school, but I’ve always suspected that that instrument can do much more than any lay person may guess. I don’t know what to tell you what to expect…I can only advise that everyone “stay tuned”. Whatever happens, it’s gonna be a lot of fun.

I have several ideas for documentary photo/audio work, but my thoughts have also been branching out to film. More to follow on this, as well. I’ve been talking to Eric about this on and off over the past few months…perhaps he can post something on his side of the blog explaining his thoughts.

It’s nice to finally get out of the “dreaming” phase and to actually start work on something you’ve thought about for years. Oh, I’ll keep my day job, but I look forward to adding lines of definitions to myself via these projects.

So, anyway…8 days to go until I fly out of Kabul!

So, if I go by my calender, I have 12 days left until I leave Kabul. Depending on how long it takes to get a flight out of Afghanistan, I may or may not be home in time for Christmas. Only time will tell.

This will probably be my last long email to everyone before I leave as I expect I’ll be farily busy preparing for my replacement and getting all packed up. I just wanted to write down some thoughts I’ve been having.

• The Day Care project we undertook here was successful beyond what I could have imagined. So far, we’ve received well over 50 boxes of supplies ranging from pens and pencils to winter hats and gloves to clothes to cool toys. To date, we’ve delivered about half of those supplies. We are planning on another run down next week. We have also received about $1,500. This was completely unexpected to me. At best I thought we would be able to get MAYBE $100 for various supplies. Though I won’t be here to see what that money is used for, I suspect we can now seriously start thinking about rebuilding the classroom that was mortared several years ago. At the very least, we can get their building repainted and work on some basic repairs.
  
  I know I’ve said it before, but thank you to everyone who took time out of their lives to help out. I’ve always believed in a a sort of “cosmic” underlying benevolence (those that really know me, know how silly that sounds coming from me, but there’s no real good way of putting that thought into words in such a medium) and you have all validated that belief. Since I’m leaving soon, I’ll be passing everything over to my friend, Scott Poole. He will be here until March. I will also be asking my replacement if he would like to take up the cause when I leave. Again, thank you. I hope that I’ll be able to see each of you in person soon to pass on my gratitude.
• There are a couple of projects I want to work on when I get back home. Some of you know that I’ve spent the past four months purchasing equipment needed to do photography/film/audio documentary work. I’ve had a fascination with my family (both sides) for some time, now. I’ve always warned my mom that someday I was going to write a book about my family. I think she has always been amused and slightly horrified at that prospect. I don’t believe I have the talent needed to write any sort of book, but I do seem to have a knack and a passion for documentation (through photographs, video and audio). Over the next couple of years, I’d like to travel around the states and get an oral history of my family…but that’s only half of what I want to do. While out and about, I think it would be fun to be the modern day John Steinbeck and just experience America. I couldn’t verbalize what I have in mind, but it’s all in the back of my head…swirling.
• (Those of you who are uncomfortable with personal stuff may stop reading now, but you are all friends and family…so I don’t think you’ll have a problem with this). It’s time for me to find my partner in crime, so to speak. I recently watched a video from the Rev. Tom Honey (a Vicar in the Church of England). In it, he was discussing the “nature of God”. He had some rather surprising things to say and I would encourage anyone to watch the clip, as it was rather moving to me (an avowed Agnostic/sometimes Atheist).
  
  In it, he said (and I’m paraphrasing here), in order to know the nature of God, we must cultivate our own inwardness, through quiet meditation and gently setting aside our passing thoughts. This, of course, speaks to the introvert inside of me. I’ve spent years “cultivating my own inwardness”. What he said next was profound to me…though not overly profound as an overall thought. Once we have cultivated our own inwardness, once we have recognized the God inside of ourselves, we must move out into the world and establish intimate connections with others. We must allow our inwardness to touch the inwardness of others. We must allow the God inside ourselves to touch the God inside others.
  
  Of course, I don’t do this thought justice. Rev. Honey explains it much better than I. And, I know to many of you, this probably sounds like metaphysical claptrap. Perhaps. But, I find it an utterly beautiful thought. There is an Indian (the sub Continent) custom where two newlyweds will look at each other for hours (days) to attempt to recognize the God within them, therefore recognizing the God within themselves. I believe this transcends what we know about our own trifecta in the field of psychology (the sex drive, romantic love and long-term attachment).
  
  So, where was I before I went off on what seems like a “self help” lecture? :P Oh, yes…a partner in crime. One wonders….one wonders…
• There’s a good chance that I may be coming back here for a few weeks next year to conduct more training. But, I think this will be my last deployment for a long while. Though I had a wonderful time over here, I just hate to be away from my daughters for such a long period of time. But, we are going to have a good time getting to know each other again when I get back.

So, that’s it for now. With any luck, I’ll be back in the states in two weeks time. It’s going to be great getting back into a regular routine…warm showers, a variety of food, supermarkets, etc…

Have a wonderful day! As always, I love getting emails from all of you.

Talk to you soon!

The second time, an experimental stab at Atkins, is partly chronicled in three blog entries from 2004, a series continued in both concept and number by this very post. I didn’t have the tools to measure my progress accurately at the time, but I think I lost about 60 pounds in four months, then took a break while visiting home on vacation, used the short-term break as an excuse to take a longer break and cram in some of my favorite foods as long as I was temporarily off the wagon, and didn’t start back up again.

The third time is currently ongoing. I’d been contemplating another diet for a while until last fall, when I stayed with my pals James and Rachel during a work-related trip to D.C. I discovered that James had been adhering to the paleo diet, which is low-carb and similar in some ways to Atkins. I’d read about it before, and it always made evolutionary sense to me. But truth is often counterintuitive, so I checked out the research. I’d read pretty much every criticism of low-carb diets I could find before I started Atkins back in the day, although I was ultimately swayed in favor of at least trying out the approach by Jim Henley’s blog.

James sent me links to a lecture and book by Gary Taubes, who I’d read back in 2004 but had kept collating research in the interim. His 2008 book is an amazing survey of how nutritional data has been systematically massaged for decades in ways that are entirely incompatible with the scientific method. From Overcoming Bias:

For several decades, it has been the conventional wisdom that dietary fat (and especially saturated fat) contributes to obesity, heart disease, and cancer. Judging from Taubes’ exhaustive research — indeed, I’d be surprised if any other book examined bias within a particular scientific field in such detail — the conventional wisdom was based on unreliable and slender evidence that, once established and institutionalized in government funding, set a pattern of confirmation bias by which further research was judged (or ignored).

It’s a great read, and I find it convincing. Of course, the theory also fits perfectly with my own anecdotal experience — so that helps. When I started Atkins for the second time in February 2009, I realized that I’d forgotten how great it felt the first time. No more low-blood-sugar crashes or moments of panicky hunger. Increased energy, deeper sleep. My occasional acid reflux vanished. And as the weight dropped, everything became easier — less mass that needs to be serviced by oxygenated blood flow, less effort required to move the mass that remains.

I think the primary reason I ultimately failed to stick to the diet in 2004 was that I never fully committed. I viewed it as more or less a neat metabolic trick to lose weight without much physical effort, and I always planned to go back to eating all my favorite foods once I’d lost weight — but keep it off with exercise rather than with what I still regarded as a fad diet. Now that I’m convinced by the science, though, it’s no longer even really a diet to me. This is not a temporary change of behavior; there’s no going back. It’s just a healthier way to eat, and that won’t change if I manage to once again reach my long-lost skinny days. The term “lifestyle change” gets thrown around a lot in nutritional literature, and in my case it’s true — that’s what it takes. No breaks for vacation, no falling off the wagon to succumb to a momentary indulgence. It’s a complete shift in outlook.

I’ve found that it’s pretty easy to give something up once I’ve psychologically committed to the decision. Giving up starchy/sugary food for my diet entailed a shift in the way I view food. I see a heaping bowl of mashed potatoes or a plate of cookies, for instance, and no longer regard them as edible. They hold so little power of temptation anymore that they may as well be made out of plastic. Similarly, ruling out the possibility of dating more than a decade ago also turned out to be surprisingly easy. I mean, self-acceptance is one thing, but I labor under no illusions that women are dying to have bald fat dudes crushing on them — in either sense of the term. Not that you can really help developing a crush on somebody, but you can resign yourself to the fact that it’s hopeless and leave it at that; the idea is off the table.

I’m reminded of when the sitcom “King of Queens” came up as the subject of a trivia question not too long ago. A friend pointed out that she thought the show’s basic premise was not believable. Ain’t that the truth. It’s simply a fact of life that I’ve long been resigned to. Way back before the turn of the 21st century, my mind raced through a bajillion losing scenarios like a 1980s Department of Defense supercomputer before concluding that “the only winning move is not to play.” And, after such a point of psychological commitment, other doors open; other opportunity sets arise (although, granted, not necessarily better ones). A “Seinfeld” plot framed this in a cruder but much funnier way — although I’m not sure I’ve been more productive than I otherwise might have been, a la George Costanza, because my OCD tendencies can make even largely unproductive activities seem to carry a veneer of accomplishment when I fall into a rhythm of doing them exhaustively.

Path dependence is an ongoing marginal process. It’s easy to maintain the status quo for another day, week, month, etc., while telling yourself that substantial change is just around the corner. But making that change takes effort, an investment in a new set of sunk costs that require time in order to develop into a new, more rewarding future path. The small immediate payoffs that come from minimal effort can be an attractive alternative to a larger distant payoff that comes only after the difficult initial steps of change. Even though an expanded time preference is one of the hallmarks of success throughout life, it took me this long to consistently forgo the marshmallow of immediate gustatory gratification.

But, again, once actual psychological commitment takes hold, the new path becomes easy to sustain in much the same way as the old one: inertia works in either case. I never intended my absence from the world of relationships to last so long, but I kept telling myself that I’d change next month, next year . . . and that sort of extended procrastination adds up. At times, now that I’ve ventured this far down a new path away from the darkness of self-imposed exile, I catch a glipse of a light at the end of the tunnel — but it’s still distant. So, I remind myself that it’s still hopeless. But maybe it won’t be in another year or so: There’ll be no more marshmallows for me.

There’s no fixed end game that I hope to reach via substantial weight loss, but already, even with 150ish pounds left to go, I can do far more things more easily and readily than I could last year. Losing weight means becoming a dramatically more functional human being, in any number of ways. Whatever comes after that is uncertain, but — ceteris paribus (I know, I know, ceteris is never paribus) — the range of possibilities will expand in positive ways.

Even though I more or less know what I’m doing this time around, this blog entry still lives up to the “incompetent” designation I began back in 2004, because I haven’t been keeping a systematic record of my progress. When I finally got around to writing all of this down, I realized that the only written record I have of my 2009 weight loss milestones comes from Facebook status updates. I’ve compiled the data I posted there for the past several months into the following table that’s interesting (to me) but still incompetent in its inconsistency of measurement: