“Raising awareness” is a weakling’s cop-out

Suppose you’re like, totally concerned about global warming (and, you know, stuff). You would naturally want to make a difference — do something to save the planet. Mother Gaia would burn but for people like you who are willing to translate their — your! — principles into action. Would you:

1. Turn your lights off for an hour every year, or
2. Replace all of your incandescent bulbs with Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs?

I’ve opted for option (2.), because it makes far more sense (and works far better than) option (1.). Nevertheless, the World Wildlife Fund would rather you opt for (1.), because — wait for it! — it raises awareness!

• Earth Hour — March 29th, 8. P.M. (wwf.ca)

Right.

I am sick to fucking death of smug upper middle-class yuppies soothing their perceived generational guilt by “raising awareness” for causes that involve real people dying. You fucking morons are doing even less for whatever you find important than I am doing for Libertarianism by writing my fucking blog.

Here’s a hint, you asshole narcissist progressive fuckpockets — take a cue from the guy you like to quote so much and be the change you wish to see in the world. I wish to see less gunpoint taxation, so I go out and do what my taxes are supposed to accomplish. I give money and stuff and time to food banks and clothing drives and I — honest to balls — help real fucking people. It takes more effort than buying a Che Guevara t-shirt from the local Hot Topic franchise and bitching about how Stephen Harper “hates poor people”, but it’s worth it.

This is the same sort of retardedness that spawned Live Earth — because nothing says “we hate global warming” louder than flying a zillion celebrities around the globe in their own personal private jets. (But never mind — it “raised awareness”!) It’s the same sort of thing that prompts zillions of well-meaning grass-eaters to donate to “for the children” funds that end up lining the pockets of third-world authoritarians.

It is, in essence, the same sort of Quixotic doggedness that keeps modern liberalism (by which I mean left-progressivism, not anything related to honest-to-balls Liberty) alive: the notion that an ineffectual gesture can have a positive effect beyond what it has actually done simply because it was well meant. It’s the same sort of Quixotic doggedness that infests modern conservatism (by which I mean hysterical authoritarian-paternalism, not anything related to the values of the Founding Fathers).

There’s enough material in that little snafu for a generation’s worth of blogs (and my generation is writing those blogs, but that’s another matter).  Let’s get back to the subject at hand: gestures of “awareness” versus acts which make an honest-to-balls difference.

What will you do?

Will you turn off your lights on the 29th, and hope that your neighbours notice?  Will you expect them to feel so guilty as to replace their lightbulbs with CFLs and their refrigerators with newer, more efficient models?  Will you spend the next year feeling smug and self-righteous, secure in the knowledge that you did something to raise awareness of a cause for which you’re not willing to sacrifice your convenience?

Will you, instead, do something yourself?

I’ll keep my lights on.  They’re all CFLs, anyway.

Tasers and Tibet: Government earns its mistrust

You may have heard that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been Tasering people a bit more than some of us taxpayers might like. (I’m of two minds about the whole thing: if J. Random Horsie-cop Tasers someone loud and obnoxious but otherwise nonviolent, that’s one thing; if said officer Tasers an armed and distraught individual rather than shooting him, that’s another. Tasers have their place in the force continuum; I just think they’re far overused.) If you have heard about the RCMP’s record with the catchily-named electrical restraint devices, you’ve probably heard that they’ve recently released a report on the subject.

A report which they rather clumsily scrubbed of significant details — such as whether the Tasered individual was armed or otherwise merited a ticket on the Lightning Express.

• RCMP reviews decision to censor Taser reports (CBC.ca)

Now, stripping out the names of the individuals involved makes perfect sense from a privacy perspective. In that sense, this comment is justified:

Sgt. Sylvie Tremblay said early Wednesday that the Mounties had released all the information they could.

“The RCMP is committed to respecting the public’s right to know while upholding the law and protecting the privacy rights of individuals,” Tremblay said in an interview.

However:

[T]he documents did not include details about whether the people police were stunning were armed or suffering from mental illness. The records were also stripped of information about the precise date of each incident, the actions the officer took before using the Taser, and whether the stun gun caused any injuries.

That might be good stuff to know.

One last comment. We’ll start with a quotation:

The weapon is hugely popular with police who say it’s a much safer and efficient alternative to the handgun, baton or pepper spray.

Tasers are far, far safer to the victim than handguns or batons. Batons in particular are capable of causing much more damage than media zombies who’ve only seen them in movies give them credit for. I can’t speak for pepper spray, but as far as I can tell it’s most useful for creating a short (one to five seconds, maybe?) opening for further action — if you (the officer) have pepper spray in hand and your suspect goes for a knife, you spray him to gain time to go to your handgun; if he throws a punch, you spray him to gain initiative to apply a joint lock (and then handcuffs). It doesn’t look like a fight-stopper by itself. Tasers seem like the same sort of thing, only more so. (Plus, they occasionally kill people, and we don’t really know why.)

So much for Canadian government treating us with suspicion and contempt. Let’s move on to the People’s Republic of China treating us with suspicion and contempt:

• Chinese ambassador slams media, Dalai Lama (CBC.ca)

I’m expected to give a country that censors its citizens’ access to the Internet more credibility than the Dalai Lama?  Bitch, please.

When seconds count, government help is only minutes away

I own a fire extinguisher.

It sits in my kitchen, next to the stove. Every month or two (that is, whenever the mood strikes me), I check the pressure gauge to make sure that it’s still operational. I know how to use it — pull ring, point at base of fire, squeeze lever.

I own a fire extinguisher not because I have a deep-seated repressed urge to put out fires, but because I may have to do so one day. If something catches fire in my apartment, it’s likely to do so in the kitchen, so that’s where I keep the extinguisher. This isn’t just a matter of self-preservation, either — it’s also a matter of courtesy. If I find a fire, I want to be able to put it out while it’s small and confined to being my problem, rather than allow it to grow into a structural fire that menaces the whole building and everyone in it.

Authorities in Britain, however, don’t see things my way:

• Extinguishers banned as a fire risk (Metro.co.uk)

(Hat tip: Tamara)

The problem, you see, is that people might use those extinguishers:

Fire extinguishers could be removed from communal areas in flats throughout the country because they are a safety hazard, it has emerged.

The life-saving devices encourage untrained people to fight a fire rather than leave the building, risk assessors in Bournemouth decided.

(In a related note, the British media have banned multi-sentence paragraphs as a literacy risk.)

Well, we can’t have untrained people using these things. Surely it’s more important that the proper authorities be called to deal with the burning wastebasket (er, dustbin) than to snuff it out before it spreads to the furniture and walls.

Fools.

Merely the best we’ve done so far

To set the stage for this little rant, have a look at Tim Kreider’s latest:

• We Ain’t So Bad (The Pain… When Will it End?)

Did you read the commentary? No? Go back and read it.

Okay, let’s continue.

Being a politics junkie of no clear mainstream ideology, I run into two pervasive fallacies over and over and over again. These fallacies are essentially two sides of the same coin, which amuses me because they’re parroted by ideologically incompatible people. They are:

1. Our (country, economic model, system of government, &c.) is (arguably or demonstrably) better than everyone else’s; therefore, it is above reproach and suggesting that it has flaws is treasonous, seditious, or lunatic.
2. Our (country, economic model, system of government, &c.) is not perfect (or doesn’t make everyone deliriously happy); therefore, we should drop everything and assimilate to someone else’s (whatever).

Er, no.

The first (let’s call it the “pro” fallacy) tends to be committed by hyperpatriots (who tend to be “conservatives” here) who see any admission of fault as (a) treason, (b) the thin edge of a wedge labeled “Marxist revolution”, and (c) frightening and change-inducing. These are the sort of people to whom “it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it” makes straight-faced sense; the sort captured by this quotation from Kreider’s comments:

One of the more oxymoronic arguments you hear made by hawkish conservatives is that we liberals ought to get down on our knees and thank God that we live in a free country where we can piss and moan all we want and not in an authoritarian state where (and you can almost hear them salivating over the details here) we’d be taken out and shot in the back of the head for criticizing the government, and that we should demonstrate this gratitude by shutting the fuck up.

(Emphasis added.)

In all sincerity, I think the whole not-getting-shot-for-sedition bit is pretty nifty.

The second (the “con” fallacy) tends to come from (in this country, and for the most part) guilty rich white “liberals” and middle-class socialists — my stereotype of these people is that they wear $400 worth of clothing from Mountain Equipment Co-op and a Che t-shirt. These folks tend to see any endorsement of The Way Things Are as (a) brutal oppression of anyone who happens to be suffering (or condoning the same), (b) the thin edge of a wedge labeled “capitalist exploitation”, and (c) terrifyingly stagnant. These are the sort of people who can argue with a straight face that Marxism is superior to a loosely-regulated market; dismiss the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and any number of other failed states with a waved hand and “well, they didn’t do it right”; and at the same time insist that only straight white male capitalists can be bigots.

I’m picking on the “liberals” here because that’s what’s around me. I’m sure that there are plenty of “con”-providers in socialist countries who laud Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan in exactly the same bass-ackwards way that my local hippie militia lauds Che, Lenin, and Chavez. The reasoning is just as wrong.

The “pro” fallacy fails for obvious reasons: complacency is death. Geocentrism lost to heliocentrism; Newtonian dynamics lost to general relativity (though physicists, being uncommonly honest folk, have introduced quantum dynamics as a parallel system to general relativity — GR works in some circumstances; QD works in others — and will cheerfully admit that neither one is “right”); mercantilism lost to market capitalism (although you wouldn’t know it by the way people bitch and moan about free trade). There is always room for improvement

The “con” fallacy fails for equally obvious reasons: change isn’t necessarily for the good. Consider, for example, the progression of the colony of Southern Rhodesia to the state of Rhodesia to the nation of Zimbabwe. Independence for the colony? All other things being equal, a good thing. Universal suffrage and majority rule for Rhodesia? All other things being equal, a good thing. Transformation into a brutal Marxist state which has gone from one of the most productive farming states on the continent to a famine magnet with six-digit inflation? Not good. Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980, when it was pretty obvious that collective farming (and Marxism in general) was a throroughgoing disaster. Changing to a method, system, or philosophy which does what you want better than what you have is… well, rational. Changing to a method that’s untried, but based on existing models ought to be better than what you have (for example, anarchocapitalism) is risky but reasonable — it’s either a spectacular fireball or a paradigmatic shift like Pasteur’s germ theory of medicine or the moon landings. Changing to a method that’s known to kill millions of people for no material gain is, uh, ill-advised.

The fundamental flaw in both of these fallacies is the inability to imagine anything better than what presently exists. The “pro” fallacy fails to imagine that its beloved status quo can evolve into something better than it is; the “con” fallacy likewise fails to imagine that there can exist alternatives other than someone else’s method. Proponents of both sides tend to imagine that any putative flaws in their favoured doctrines can be corrected “if only the right people are put in charge” — this last being a prescriptive recipe for fascism.

(The other thing that makes me uncomfortable about both fallacies is too great an emphasis put upon government — which to my mind is entirely counterproductive. The careful reader will recall that governments are responsible for the most hideous atrocities of the 20th Century; as such, I tend to put what little faith I have in individuals and, when absolutely necessary, in private institutions.)

So no, we ain’t so bad… but then again, we’re merely the best we’ve done so far.

TransLink’s tax-hike doublethink

TransLink (that’s the metro Vancouver public transit authority, for those of you who live elsewhere) is in money trouble, despite the fourteen billion dollar payoff promised by the provincial government. See, part of TransLink’s budget (eighteen million dollars worth, in fact) once came from a tax on parking spots — owned by businesses in metro Vancouver. (Government bureaucracies can apparently punish their competitors with arbitrary taxes. This seems like dirty pool to me, but then again I’m just a taxpayer.) Back in November, the province canceled this parking tax. Thus:

• TransLink eyes $18M tax hike for Metro Vancouver residents (CBC.ca)

TransLink is facing an $18-million budget shortfall and residential property owners may be asked to pick up the tab for the transit authority.

[...]

But the chair of TransLink said taxpayers should not see the tax hike as a “new tax” because TransLink was already planning to spend the money long before the tax was considered.

“This is not a ‘new tax.’ It is revenue that TransLink has already factored into its long-term budgeting,” said TransLink chair Dale Parker in a statement released on Friday.

According to Mr. Parker, all taxation equivalent — and from his perspective, that’s probably true. From Parker’s perspective, tax means income, and it doesn’t matter to him whether his income comes from businesses which own parking lots or from residents who own property.

From a home-owner’s perspective, though, this surely is a new tax.

Let’s examine Parker’s mentality. He (well, TransLink) planned to spend a certain amount of money. Part of his income disappeared. Now he feels justified in gouging a new set of people to make up the shortfall — after all, he’s already planned to spend the money. He’s even indignant that these new people would dare to object to being gouged. The possibility of spending less money doesn’t appear to have occurred to him.

Too bad we lowly taxpayers can’t do the same thing.

Clinton and the superdelegates

Time to gloat.

More than a month ago, I opined that if Clinton won the Democratic nomination by superdelegates alone, she’d lose to McCain. In particular:

Now, suppose that Clinton receives the Democratic nomination by a small margin. She’ll have a hard time persuading people that she wasn’t crowned by unelected superdelegates within the party establishment — she is, after all, the establishment candidate. Everyone who voted for someone other than Clinton in the primaries and caucuses will feel cheated, their votes overruled by superdelegates appointed by the Democratic elite.

[...]

Independents gave Obama his early momentum by handing him Iowa and narrowing what seemed like an uncrossable gap between his polls and Clinton’s in the early races, convincing later voters that Obama’s actually electable. (Exactly the opposite happened to Giuliani, and I’m still gloating about that.) Those independents will find McCain much more palatable, and will probably give him the Presidency.

A week and a half ago, Dick Morris over at The Hill noted the same thing:

• It’s over

A perfectly acceptable alternative for most Democrats, McCain would harvest so large a proportion of Obama’s votes if Hillary steals the nomination that he would probably win. Even putting Obama on the ticket would not allay the anger of his supporters; it would just make him complicit in the robbery.

And just yesterday, Nancy Pelosi hinted at it, too:

• Pelosi: Superdelegates may do damage (CNN.com)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says it would be damaging to the Democratic party for its leaders to buck the will of national convention delegates picked in primaries and caucuses, a declaration that gives a boost to Sen. Barack Obama.”If the votes of the superdelegates overturn what’s happened in the elections, it would be harmful to the Democratic party,” Pelosi said in an interview taped Friday for broadcast Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

Aren’t I all clever and stuff.

A free intro to economics

It’s not what I’d call specialized, but as an introduction to economics this website is invaluable:

• CyberEconomics

The world would be a smarter place if more people read stuff like this:

People who do not understand economics still try to make sense of the world around them by trying to see pattern in the facts they observe. Often they use a simplistic “good-versus-bad” model. In a good-versus-bad model there are two conflicting groups who are classified as good people and bad people. These groups are usually involved in a zero-sum game: one person’s gain is another’s loss. Further, evil motives, possessed by the bad people, lead to bad results unless these people are in some way controlled. Good motives lead to good results.

An example of a good-versus-bad viewpoint was expressed at a town meeting of a small Indiana community during the winter of 1977. The meeting focused on the natural-gas shortages that the community was facing. One citizen declared that the town faced not an energy problem, but a pricing problem. He noted that several years previously there had been shortages of gasoline at 40 cents per gallon but no shortages at 60 cents. Therefore, he declared, there must have been a conspiracy at that time by oil companies to increase prices as there was now by gas producers. The events he observed do fit into a good-versus-bad framework. He saw a bad result. He saw a bad motive–the desire for profit seems to many people the same as greed or avarice. To connect motive and result, he inferred the existence of a conspiracy.

Although a good-versus-bad model is sometimes appropriate (especially in small-group situations), economists are very reluctant to use it. The economic model of supply and demand gives a more sophisticated interpretation of the gasoline shortage, one that is depersonalized and unemotional with no bad groups involved. This model suggests that in cases of shortages one should search for government regulation of prices. The good-versus-bad model does not suggest that such regulation is something one should look for. In fact there were price restrictions in place at the time, and such restrictions can lead to shortages. The good-versus-bad view of the world is attractive because we are able to understand the model at a very young age and because we see the model used so often: in fairy tales, in comic books, in movies, and in television shows, among other places. Because we know how to use this model, and because our culture discourages use of alternative explanations such as fate or mystery, it is easy to fall back to this model if we do not have a more sophisticated model to explain our world.

Go thou and read.

A small parody

We take pleasure in answering thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of this publication:

Dear Blogger—

I am 18 years old. Some of my voting friends say there is no Leviathan. Papa says, “If you see it in Blunt Object, it’s so (or at least sarcastic).” Please tell me the truth, is the State evil?

Virginia O’Voter

Virginia, your voting friends are wrong. They have been affected by the jingoism of a jingoistic age. They believe precisely what they are told. They think that nothing can be which is not issued from government. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are wonderful. In this great universe of ours, we are mere insects, merely ants, but our intellects have mastered this boundless world around us, our individual reason capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Leviathan State. It exists as certainly as avarice and envy and lust for power exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its darkest suffering and helplessness. Alas! How beautiful would be the world if there were no Statists! It would be as beautiful as if there were no Presidents! There would be no lock-stepping party politics then, no legislation, no gunpoint taxation to sap the fruits of this existence. We should have but liberty, in thought and deed. The baleful fire with which arbitrary authority scorches this world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Leviathan! You might as well believe in fairies. You might get the government to hire men to watch all the folk in town to catch the terrorists, but even if they did not see a wolf in the fold, what would they claim? “No-one sees the terr’ists, but that is no sign that there are no terr’ists.” The most costly things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that does not mean that the Federal budget does not provide for them. Nobody can conceive or imagine all of the wonders that are procured by the tax dollars with which your papa cannot buy you Christmas gifts.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the government’s doings which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only those that love and abide by liberty, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the basest hate and avarice that lie beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Leviathan! O Woe! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to strike terror in the hearts of the free.

(– fuck Santa Claus)