Right-wing crap

Dave Neiwert nails it: How right-wing crap polluted Democrats' political waters:

That's how right-wing crap works. It's not meant to advance or even partake of discourse; it's meant to end it. One can argue the worth of Hillary's policies or her voting record or her position on the war till the cows come home; but when she's reduced to being a bitch, that pretty much ends the discussion. And when it's as pervasive as it's become in the past decade, its effects are paralyzingly toxic.

And it's important to remember that the same holds true regarding right-wing attitudes about a black man like Obama winning the White House. The most polite versions of right-wing cant hold that Obama's not experienced enough to be president, but the underlying drumbeat of this meme has been all about his foreign-sounding name or his supposed Muslim ties or his "weakness" on national security ... about his being a black man. ...

Let's all acknowledge some realities here that fly in the face of right-wing bullshit. Hillary is a superb politician and a fighter, a master of policy whose competence and qualifications are unquestionable -- and she is far from the cold, ugly human being the right and now her left-wing critics wish to paint her as. Obama, likewise, is a supremely gifted politician and a natural leader capable of convention-shattering feats, whose qualities in those regards progressives should never underestimate -- though of course, it's our hope that the right will.

The sooner both sides -- not just the leaders at the top, but the rank and file troops -- acknowledge these realities, and reject the right's pervasive and toxic crap, the better off we will all be.

I'm no longer a registered Democrat not because Clinton will not be nominated. The number one reason, rather, is precisely this: Democrats — leaders and rank-and-file — fall for right-wing crap time and again. We've stopped discussing liberal or progressive politics; the discourse is at best sports reporting and at worst just a regurgitation of Rush Limbaugh talking points.

Unlike Dave, I'm not an optimist: I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell that the Democratic party or ordinary liberals and progressives will reject right-wing propaganda. It's not going to do any good whatsoever — none, zero, zilch — to elect a non-batshit-crazy conservative such as Obama if he will serve only as a scapegoat for the conservative catastrophe of the last eight years. It doesn't even buy liberals, progressives and Americans time; it buys the batshit crazy conservatives time to regroup and re-focus their message. They will come back in 2012 (or 2016 only if Obama proves as phenomenally capable as Bill Clinton) with a regime that makes the Cheney Bush administration look sensible, reasonable, tolerant and compassionate.

It may be impossible for the Democratic party to become effective. The mainstream, national media is bought and paid for by conservatives. A national democracy such as the United States stands or falls on its national media. The active hostility of the national media is probably impossible to overcome within the system. Because the media is owned by people who are batshit-crazy, it may be impossible to stave off collapse, despite the best efforts of sensible, intelligent people.

I no longer have any confidence that working within the system in the Democratic party is at all an effective use of my time and energy.

One more time

The Other Hitchens (Peter, not Christopher) on atheism:

Once people don't acknowledge any moral authority outside themselves, they can choose which rules to take seriously and which not to entirely according to their own feelings at any time. ...

There's no rational point, really, in being good in circumstances where being good gets you knifed. It's an irrational act — unless you have been taught to recognise the importance of absolute good.

Sigh. Where to begin?

God doesn't get you to absolute good. It gets you only to a good relative to what God wants. And, amazingly enough, God always wants what the theists want according to their own feelings at any time. And, of course, God doesn't exist, so basing our moral beliefs on the capricious desires of a non-existent being is stupid.

If being "good" really is irrational, what precisely does one mean by "good"? It must mean an act that has absolutely no benefit to the individual whatsoever, concrete or abstract, short or long term. An irrational act cannot have any benefit. If there's some benefit, then the act is a rational means to producing that benefit. The only work this sort of notion of irrational absolute good does is to enable exploitation: to convince someone else to act in my benefit without offering her a compensating benefit in return.

Peter contradicts himself:

One of the key features of atheism is that atheists themselves are unable to grasp this point. We're just as good as religious people, they respond, if not better. Maybe so. Religious people who understand their creeds know perfectly well that they're no better than anyone else. That's not the issue. What is?

I'm still in the dark. If Christians and atheists as individuals are about equally morally good, then in what sense are atheists undermining the "general good"? If the general good is worth having, then it has individual benefit, and it's rational for individual atheists to promote it. If the "general good" doesn't have individual benefit, then in what sense is it the general good?

What Peter seems to miss is authority, the authority of the priesthood. That's the only moral belief that atheists decisively reject. And for good reason: The priesthood is just as prone to the corruption of authority as any other group of human beings.

Priests are perhaps even more susceptible to corruption. Even the worst secular tyrant has to make the trains run on time. (Mussolini was hanged in no small part because he failed to do so.) But an ecclesiastical tyrant, especially one beholden to the apocalyptic scripture that is the Christian bible, doesn't have even that constraint. A secular tyrant can only kill and torture in this life. An ecclesiastical tyrant can threaten eternal damnation; if he's believed, he has more power than any secular tyrant can even dream of.

(h/t to a doofus by way of James F. Elliott)

Other people have opinions!

Shorter Katie Kish [Google cache*]: Like, OMG! some atheists have, you know, opinions that I don't share. That's like SO ANNOYING! OMG!

(h/t to Larry Moran)

*Thanks, Micah!

Capital

Part I: The definition of the village
Part II: Value and cost
Part III: The plow
Part IV: Material bottlenecks
Part V: Capital

Update: Fixed up the numbers

Suppose it takes 10,000 hours (~1,000 days or ~3 years) for a family to make its first plow. The family has learn how to make plows, and create specialized tools. This capital will last about 100,000 hours (~10,000 days or ~30 years), so it can be amortized over ~10,000 plows, adding ~1 hour to the cost of each plow; clearly the investment is worthwhile.

There's a problem, though. While a family can suspend growing food for nine days to create its own plow, there's simply no way for even the most productive family to suspend growing food for almost three years, even if one could store food and other life-support for so long: it would take a lifetime to accumulate that much surplus. The capital requirements for making plows creates a physical bottleneck.

Let's suppose that somehow Alice's family overcomes this physical bottleneck. She has at least three years before anyone can compete with her, which gives her at least the temporary capacity to set the price of plows well above the opportunity-adjusted cost. Since food cannot be accumulated (and, as yet, food is the only medium of exchange) Alice can realize this higher price only by working less and producing fewer plows. This strategy restricts the supply of plows, making demand in excess of supply.

But Alice cannot make this bottleneck permanent. The higher she sets the price of a plow, the more incentive there is for another family to overcome the bottleneck. Instead of amortizing the capital cost over the family's entire lifetime of plow-making, the cost can be amortized over only a portion of the production of plows. For example, if Alice sets the price of a plow at 500 pounds of food, then Bob will realize he can sell plows for 482 pounds of food as well, and amortize the 10,000 capital hours over 25 plows. Since Alice is working at about 1/5 speed, there's room for Charlie, Dave, and Erin to get into the act. Heck, even Frank, Gail, Henry and Irene might try their hands at making plows.

The only way Alice can make it economically infeasible for anyone to compete with her would be to set the price of a plow so low that others cannot recoup their capital investment. But if she does that, she can't recoup her own investment. Sooner or later, there will be too much plow-making knowledge and tools in the village, and the price will drop to the opportunity-adjusted cost, with the capital investment amortized over almost all of the plow-makers' lifetime production.

But there's another problem — a political problem — which I will address in the next installment of the series.

Rah!

Old and busted: Sit down and shut the fuck up. New hotness: Stand up and speak out!

Philosophers’ Carnival #70

Apparently, someone submitted my article on modal logic to the 70th edition of the Philosophers’ Carnival at Big Ideas.

The imprimatur of truth

Leila Hussein — the mother of 17-year-old Rand Abdel-Qader, savagely murdered in an "honor" killing by her unrepentant father, Abdel-Qader Ali, for falling in love with a British soldier — died on May 17, murdered by unknown assailants in a hail of gunfire that also left two women's rights workers injured. [h/t to Pharyngula, twice]

The idea that the murder of young Rand was the aberration of a monster is obviously contradicted by the facts:

[A]s Rand was put into the ground, without ceremony, her uncles spat on her covered corpse because she had brought shame on the family. ...

Her mother, "screamed and called out for her two brothers so they could get their father away from her. But when he told them the reason, instead of saving her they helped him end her life." ...

The murdering father boasts, "The [police] officers were by my side during all the time I was there, congratulating me on what I had done."

And, of course, Abdel-Qader Ali did not himself kill his wife.

It is possibly the case that Leila's murder was incidental.

Police said the incident was a sectarian attack and that there was nothing to link Leila's death to her family. 'Her ex-husband was not in Basra when it happened. We found out he was visiting relatives in Nassiriya with his two sons,' said Hassan Alaa, a senior officer at the local police station in Basra. 'We believe the target was the women activists, rather than Mrs Hussein, and that she was unlucky to be in that place at that time.'

It is plausible. Campaigners for women's' rights are not acceptable to many sections of Iraqi society, especially in Basra where militias have partial control in some districts and impose strict laws on locals, including what clothing they should wear and what religious practice they should follow.

But that's no excuse.

Islamic apologists will (and probably already have) made the argument that it is Iraqi culture, not the Islamic religion, that is responsible for these brutal murders. They are, in a sense, correct. The Islamic religion is not responsible, because there is no such thing as the Islamic religion: there is no such thing as religion.

I mean by "no such thing as religion" that there are no gods. All religion lacks extensional meaning. Religion does not refer to anything at all in objective reality.

But of course there is some such thing as religion. Lacking extensional meaning, religion can have only intensional meaning. Religion refers to a set of ideas within our heads. And the ideas that religion refer to are invariably pernicious: social, cultural constructs that are falsely and fallaciously given the imprimatur of objective truth. And it is precisely this religious component of Islamic culture that is directly responsible for these brutal murders.

Very few people, I would imagine, would be willing to suborn murder, rape, segregation and marginalization on their personal preference. The guy who says, "Women who disgrace and dishonor their families must die because it's the truth that God wants it that way," sounds like a righteous paragon of morality; the guy who says, "Women who don't toe the line should be murdered just because I hate those fucking bitches," just sounds like a complete asshole.

Without the imprimatur of objective truth, when people are forced to take personal responsibility for their moral beliefs, the murderous misogyny of Islamic religious culture would have evaporated five hundred years ago.

The religious "moderates" aid and abet this extremism by supporting and endorsing the idea that there is some definite truth to the way God wants things, as opposed to the way we ourselves want things. It's completely irrelevant that the moderates claim that God wants all the same thing that sensible, civilized, empathic and feeling human beings want. It should be enough just that sensible, civilized, empathic and feeling human beings want something; there's no need to bring God into the discussion.

Worse yet, because this God is kind of shy, all the moderates have are the scriptures, delivered to ancients of a vastly different culture. And the scriptures — Jewish, Christian, and Islamic — are terrible, reflecting as they do the harsh prejudices of ignorant savages living on the edge of starvation and in conditions of brutal exploitation. The extremists have the fundamentals — the literal meaning of the scriptures — on their side. The moderates have to actually do more violence to logic and reason to read a modern, humanistic morality into these ancient mythologies.

People are still, by and large, creepy assholes. Basing our society directly on what people want, rather than what they believe God wants, is not a panacea, not a recipe for instant Utopia. But removing specifically religious belief from our society, undermining the imprimatur of objective truth religion gives to arbitrary social constructs, and forcing people to take personal responsibility for the moral beliefs they wish to impose on their fellow human beings, gives us at least a chance at improving our society.

Elitism

In my extensive travels I recall one curious country where economic and political opportunity and status was strictly allocated by height. Tall people received advanced education and managerial jobs, and the seven footers usually became CEOs. The President of the country was, of course, pushing 8', the tallest man in the country. Short people became janitors and sewage workers.

I remarked to one of the citizens that this arrangement appeared... well... somewhat counterintuitive. He angrily retorted, "What would you have us do? Cut all the tall people off at the knees?"

Of course not.

When I condemn elitism, I am not condemning the fact that people have different abilities and skills. I understand that some people are more industrious than others. I realize that these many of these differences in skill and character have real economic consequences. Being against elitism is not to endorse the idea of making everyone the same. I am against elitism in the sense of being against socially constructed differences in political power and economic wealth.

The primary arguments in favor of elitism are wrong.

The primary argument is that the (innately) "superior" create more value and therefore deserve membership in the (socially constructed) "elite". But as we see time and again, a truly free market does not strongly correlate individual reward to the creation of excess value: excess value becomes more-or-less equally diffused throughout the entire society.

It's also impossible both to unambiguously determine who is actually adding value. Who is responsible for creating the excess value of the plow? The person who makes the plow, or the person who uses the plow to actually grow food?

Value itself, subjective and variable, is itself impossible to determine unambiguously. What is the value of a pound of food? If you're starving, the value of a pound of food is infinite; if you already have more than enough to eat, it's negligible.

In the most extreme case, there is perhaps a hundred-fold difference in individual skill and character that have direct, physical economic consequences; it is implausible to believe there is more than a thousand-fold difference. The difference in actual wealth, however, is many orders of magnitude higher. The idea that people with great wealth innately "deserve" that wealth — by virtue of creating it directly — is clearly ludicrous.

The second argument is that by creating a meritocracy, a set of social constructions that amplify the rewards due to innate skill and character, those with superior skill and character will have an incentive to use their abilities at least to some degree for the mutual benefit of everyone. This is not a terrible argument, but the limits of meritocracy are easy to determine. Economic wealth is a form of indirect political power, and political power — direct or indirect — is a privileged position to shape our social constructions. People who become wealthy and powerful for whatever reason have an obvious incentive to reward being, not becoming, wealthy and powerful. The tendency of every elite in every society to "shut the door behind them" is universal and without exception.

Furthermore, just because people have economically useful skills and abilities does not mean they are wise and intelligent in other matters. All socially constructed elites tend to correlate their power with peripheral non-economic characteristics: race, religion, and, of course, familial relationships. Argument: George W. Bush. Case closed.

The only argument for elitism is the ecological argument: Where you have prey, you will have predators; "there's a sucker born every minute, and two to take him". But this is most definitely not a moral or ethical argument.

So, no, when I argue against elitism, I am not arguing that individual differences should be erased. I argue, rather, that we should not amplify (even at best) these individual differences to economic and political privilege.

The tip of the iceberg

Dave at Orcinus has a long article about the Phineas Priesthood, a Christianist terrorist organization. This organization is well financed, with an extremely well-disciplined cell structure.

The Phineas Priesthood was recently endorsed by Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council.

Link love:

In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest by Dave Neiwert

Mark Kleiman on The Phineas Priesthood
Tony & Phineas
Religious Right, Still Wrong
Holy Hell
Mainstreaming Our Confederate-American Heritage [satire]

Price, value and cost

In my series on economics I'm trying to really nail down the counterintuitive point that in a free market, prices tend downwards towards the cost, not upwards to the value. Even in oddball edge cases, like novelists or NBA players, physical bottlenecks just cause the cost (often externalized) to rise towards the price: So the price of any commodity always tends to be a function of its cost, not its value.

The incredible differences in wealth we see in any elitist society, whether it be the Capitalist societies of the West or the (revisionist) Communist societies of the East, are not because the elites produce more value. Even if they did produce tremendous value, that still would not entail that they receive a price commensurate with the value.

A related myth is that differences in individual skill or character are the cause of vast differences in wealth. This myth is even held by some Communists, who see the eradication of any difference in material wealth due to skill as the key point for creating a classless society. In a free market, differences in price due to differences in skill is not the difference between the most skilled and the least skilled, but rather the difference between the most skilled and the second or third most skilled (i.e. the most skilled who do not produce the commodity, i.e. the opportunity-adjusted cost). In other words, the economic consequences of inherent skill differentials are relatively small. Furthermore, as society becomes more specialized, people will tend to gravitate to the fields for which they have the most skill; most people will be performing the occupations for which they are relatively the most skilled.

In a truly free market, excess value always accrues to the common good, not the purely individual good. A truly free market tends towards communism.

The vast differences in wealth are always due to pure social constructions that at best amplify differences in skill by many orders of magnitude or at worst create vast differences based on non-economically-related qualities (usually birth* and/or religious/ideological conformity).

*Is skill inherited? Compare and contrast Conrad and Paris Hilton. I rest my case.

We ourselves, as sapient beings, create pure social constructions; they are not imposed upon us by objective reality. In ecology — economics with only the most basic, limited social constructions — we see no vast differences in wealth at all. An apex predator, relatively speaking, lives just as close to the edge of starvation as the animals and plants at the bottom of the food chain.

The biological facts of human psychology form the only objective constraints on our pure social constructions, but we already know that human biological psychology is extremely labile. We can and do learn to think mostly not as our brains compel us to think but as we're taught to think.

We are not constrained in our economic arrangements by our brains. We are not constrained by our history. We are constrained only by our own illusions, our own gullibility, and our own fear.