Human Advancement

This is going to blow the minds of a lot of people I've been arguing with about anarchy.

No society worth having can function without some malum prohibitum rules.

Now, most of those I've been arguing with should agree with that. In fact, one of the objections I get over and over again stems from equating anarchy with the a-priori absence of all such rules. I'd like to see them try to reconcile what they're arguing against, what they think I am arguing for, with that statement. It can't be done.

For those of you willing to proceed with the understanding that I believe that to be true, I offer the following hypothesis: Government is incapable of generating rational mala prohibitum laws. Not pathologically incapable, but that its very nature contradicts the possibility of doing so. Federalism was, in fact, an attempt (unknowingly) to get around that fundamental flaw in the nature of government, but it merely reduced and masked the effects, it did not address the flaw itself. It was a band-aid over the sores produced by a genetic defect.

Proving it requires a bit more groundwork, and so I'll leave it at that for the moment, as an assertion to be backed up later.

Damn straight

Billy's one of the most educated people I know. If you read enough of his comments here and there, or even just look at how the little "off the shelves" blurb at the top of his blog changes over time, you get a sense of the depth of his reading. I won't go all gushy and say "he taught me everything I know", mostly because it's not true - I've done a hell of a lot of it on my own, and from picking little bits here and there from a lot of people, and figuring out how they all fit together - but I have learned a hell of a lot from him.

His "crazy" idea to hang out a shingle as "Philosopher at Large" isn't so crazy. Back when I was involved in Second Life, I considered doing just that in there, for pay. The problem with doing it in "First Life" is that there's probably a total of about 14 adults in my town who would even consider such a thing, and so the internet is a much more target-rich environment.

On the other hand, I've had some recent contact with the local homeschoolers. I decided to clean out my bookshelves - there simply isn't room to even store the entire collection - and so I donated 12 file boxes full of them to the group. It got me thinking that they are probably a market for just this sort of thing. I was thinking more in terms of teaching some C++, or at least basic programming, but they'd probably eat up some formal teaching in philosophy, or even informal discussions. And I've still got enough books left to run a lending library to some tens of these intelligent kids.

Just a quick note, regarding some arguments I've been watching around...

A position, even the most obstinately held one, is not a principle. Principles support positions. Principles are facts that can be traced all the way back, with the best logic you can muster, to things you can see, touch, taste, smell or hear, with your very own eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin. "Gun rights" is no more a principle, and no less a mere position, than "Britney Spears is, like, the best singer evurrrrr!". except that only one of them is based on true principles.

Note to Representative Jim Moran, Commiecrat, Virginia:

Fuck You.



You can have my wealth when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Your power doesn't come from the office, it comes from the respect and fear Americans have for it. It's an important distinction, you'd do well to understand it fully before undermining both any more than they already are. Be very careful pushing productive people to the point where they have nothing to lose, old man.

The tree of liberty may be wilted and in tatters, but it's heart still lives.

Email out just now to Deborah Howell, Ombudsman of the Washington Post, regarding her admission that her paper was biased for Barak Obama during the recent campaign.

Ms Howell,

In reference to your online article of Saturday, November 9, referenced to page B06 of the print edition, thank you for coming clean about your paper's shortcomings in this election cycle. While it is refreshing to see the bias that has long been noticed, not only in you paper, but others, finally acknowledged publicly, I can't help but notice the timing of this admission.

Like it or not, you must realize that news outlets such as yours, which have a national readership, not only report the news, but they influence it. News institutions such as yours, sometimes disparagingly referred to as "Mainstream Media", or "Legacy Media", are looked to by many people as the primary, or even only, source of information in shaping their opinions.

You may reasonably argue that it is not your fault that so many people allow your information to not only inform their choices, but in some cases to form them. That is their failing, not yours. Yet there are many who believe that you, and others, court and carefully cultivate this influence. The long-standing claims of major newspapers to the status of distributors of unbiased and objective news and analysis must, if believed, carry with them some level of trust and a willingness to defer to your judgment in complex matters.

Your bias, or "tilt", intentional or not, and even when acknowledged later, is a misuse of this trust in a way that affects all of us. While it is not likely that your newspaper alone substantially determined the outcome of this election, the cumulative effect of decades of this abuse of public trust by institutional news sources in the aggregate has likely significantly colored public opinion to the extent that our political landscape is now quite different than it may otherwise have been.

In making this admission just after a major election, you leave yourself open to accusations that you seek not to remedy your errors, but to provide cover against future accusations, while doing so early enough that the admission will be long forgotten when the time comes for you to influence, intentionally or not, the next election. I hope this is not the case. I hope that this is the beginning of a concerted effort by your paper to lead by example the effort to reform the general news media in this country back to one of fairness, objectivity, and the honored place that the nation's newspapers hold in all of our memories. I would be more hopeful in that if you had put this story on the front page, rather than page B06, and done so prior to the election so that all of those you have misled would have had a chance to rethink the choices they were about to make.

Short of that, I think it is perfectly reasonable and proper for a news source to have a bias, so long as that bias is clearly enunciated directly and prominently in every issue, accompanying every online story, so that your readers may weigh that bias in evaluating the quality of the information you present. Everyone has some bias, it is impossible not to. Perhaps fair and objective is too high a standard to hold a newspaper, or any news service, to. If so, you would best serve the public by carefully examining your news staff's culture and personnel for hidden or veiled biases, and make this information widely and prominently available. In that way, you may be able to regain the stature and respect that so many feel you have squandered over the years.

God DAMN America...

God damn you, Barak Obama...

God damn each and every one of you who voted for him...



Planet of the Apes indeed. "Man is the only animal that can sink below his nature" --Ayn Rand

Alea iacta est. III

There is much truth here, and much childishness. But hey, there's worse crimes than childishness.

I may have spoken positively of Molyneux at some point in the past. I probably didn't, because there were plenty of red flags prior to fully figuring him out, but if so, I apologize for misleading. After a short while, I pretty much pegged him the same as the guys at the link, and promptly forgot all about him. Just remember that, when he makes the news some day.

See why first hand.

Take the day off to vote.

The General Strike is a standard move in the socialist labor playbook. It's a relatively benign show of power, meant to imply numbers by their absence. It creates a minor disruption, expresses an implied threat of what those numbers might be willing to do, and proves the leader's power to direct that power. It also strengthens the bond of the workers to each other and to the leader, as well as providing opportunities for planning, preparation, and "direct action".

This isn't so much a ploy to gain votes as a flexing of the muscles he thinks he'll have after the vote. It's also a telegraphing of what we can expect from the Obamanation.

You're right, it's not a corner. But every curved path has a singular point at which the view of that thin sliver of light from which we came becomes fully occluded. Obama is an effect, not a cause, but that makes him no less "transitional". Alea iacta est.

I watched the debate yesterday. No, just kidding. I had it on in the background while I read Neal Stephenson's "Anathem". It was powerful and engrossing, deeply edifying in a way that helps me make sense of my world. The debate, on the other hand would have bored me to tears if I had looked up from the book for more than a total of 60 seconds. The one impression I got from it, and I think it sums up the entire campaign, is that those of you who have been watching have seen John McCain turn into Bob Dole right there before your eyes.

It got very nasty over there at SOLO. (Comments are in reverse order, newest first, so scroll down and click "last" if you want to read from the start.)

It's usually the case that there's one guy who is as slimy as they come, wants to be the alpha male, and continually tries to cover his malice with pleas for civility and, in this case "benevolence". If you want the details, go read the thread, I told him all about it, and there's no need to repeat it here.

As nasty as it got, I was always alert for rational argument - it's the reason I do things like this, not to convince the slimeballs, but to find the ones who can rise above it. I was rewarded in that as well.

What they don't know about me, and, to be honest, I gave them little explicit reason to believe it, is that I am sometimes convinced by these arguments. But you'd think that lawyer-boy over there would be familiar with the adversarial approach to finding truth, as it is the basis for his profession.

I used to be involved in a forum that was frequently got very close to these levels of vitriol, but my participation went on for years. I was wet behind the ears then, in the art of internet argument, and made some mistakes, but I think I did pretty well overall.

There was one case where an argument very much like the one at SOLO raged for, I don't know, it must have been weeks, and on the very same subject, minarchy vs anarchy. Except I was then on the minarchy side.

There was one guy, Eric something, I have no idea who he is anymore, who I went around with over and over again. It got heated, but I do recall that it stayed rational and largely impersonal. One day, in the kind of frustration I fully understand now, he told me that he was done with me, that I was beyond the reach of rational argument.

I responded with something like the following: "That's too bad, because you were two, at most three posts from convincing me. But that's OK, I can do the rest on my own. " And I did. I was convinced.

Except that I wasn't, at least not as fully as I thought I was at the moment. For years, I went back and forth over the fence from minarchist to anarchist, without settling on a satisfying reason to decide one or the other was clearly correct.

I was OK with that, these things take time, and it wasn't like I had to make a life-or-death decision based on it any time soon. Meanwhile, I had spent a lot of time pondering, arguing, and studying objectivism and related philosophies, as well as figuring some stuff out on my own.

One day I sat down with pen and paper, and collected the various pieces I had put together. I started with "Reality exists, consciousness exists, and A is A", which I still believe to be the fundamental basis of all philosophy. But I did something more, something Rand never did, and, really, no philosopher in the history of mankind has done, at least to my own satisfaction. I defined consciousness.

"That which can conceptually place itself in alternative future contexts and weigh the outcomes against its values"

The definition might not mean much to you, nor its importance (which includes the core of an argument for how consciousness can evolve from non-conscious matter, a significant historical stumbling block). There's a lot of philosophical mass resting on those few words. I also had to define "context" and "value", and more, which I did, but won't bore you with the details of right now. There's also corollaries about conceptually placing itself in actual and alternative past contexts, but that too is beyond the scope here, and not really necessary to my point.

The point is that I had created a philosophy that, while technically new and unique (as far as I know), is really just built on the shoulders of giants, one horribly stunted giant in particular, Ayn Rand. And in this new framework, one thing became obvious: government itself is an utter contradiction of basic principles, principles deeper than the non-initiation of force.

Add in a little network theory from computer science, and spontaneous order theory (such as natural selection or free markets), and it also became apparent that man is capable of effective self-governance, so long as he cannot isolate himself from the consequences of his actions - and that a network, rather than a hierarchy, is the means by which all can be held to those consequences even when substantial parts of that network fail to do so, and when no part of the network has the intention to do so.

So, with the zeal of a zealot, (the one accusation I faced at SOLO that has a kernel of truth to it, and tacitly admitted so in a way I'm sure was far too subtle for the particular lightweight intellect that made it), I proceeded to make sure everybody who wanted to listen, and some who didn't, were aware that from now on self-governance is known for a fact to be the only viable means for social and political organization.

I ran up against an interesting phenomenon. The smarter someone is, the harder it is - in general, not always - to get them to see it. Now, that would normally be a giant red flag that there was something wrong with the theory. But there was a pattern to their objections. The more intelligent someone is, the more likely he has actually worked out a lot of their philosophy explicitly. With these people, I would run up against some premise that they held firmly to, with good reason, that seemed to contradict my conclusions. Except it didn't. It only contradicted a conclusion they had heard over and over again (being intellectually curious, thoughtful, and well-read people), that sounded like mine but wasn't.

The difficulty here is that my conclusions depend heavily on what I refer to as meta-context. It's hard enough to get people to understand context, but it can be done. I can explain meta-context to intelligent people as well, but it takes a lot of time and patience, on both sides, and then a hefty commitment of time and energy to actually argue within it. If context is like the physics of motion and acceleration, meta context is like the physics of relativistic space-time, black holes, and quantum mechanics. By the time I get their attention well enough to get that time, they've already evaluated and rejected my conclusions.

So I'm faced with a dilemma. Either figure out a way to reach intelligent people in a way that breaks the usual cycle of presenting conclusions in order to get their attention, with the result that the conclusions short-circuit the argument I really wanted to make in the first place - or start working on unintelligent people. The latter leaves a really bad taste in my mouth, so I have a lot more work to do.

I'm just gonna have to write a book, dammit.

It's getting to where I brace myself before clicking on any links that Billy puts up, because too often all that is at the other end is people who ought to know better letting me down, again.

It's said that all that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing. This time, it's so-called Objectivists going above and beyond the call. Note to the crowd at SOLO: besides the now officially ironic handle, be aware that the opposite of "doing nothing" is not, in this context, "doing anything".

Hey, all you Votistas out there! Can't decide who to vote for this November? Got a problem with both parties, both candidates, that leaves a seemingly insoluble dilemma? Still believe that voting is an effective way to send a message?

Which kind of voter are you....

Are you a Hillary! supporter who wants to slap Obama for snubbing a strong, independent woman, but can't bring yourself to help put McCain in the White House?

Are you a conservative who wants to vote for a real conservative, but doesn't want to reward your fellow spaghetti-spined Republicans for nominating a liberal loser?

Are you a Libertarian who knows there's not a clothespin in the world strong enough to protect your nose while voting for the former Head Cheerleader of the war on (some) drugs?

Are you a Ron Paul supporter who was already planning to throw your vote away anyway?

Are you a disgruntled ex-voter who wants the establishment to know that you're tired of being told you have to pick from a pair of evils who seem to get less and less lesser every year?

Are you a feminist who wants to send a strong message that women don't need to ride on a man's coattails to reach the highest positions?

Are you an Anarchist, Discordian, or follower of the Right Reverend Bob Dobbs who just wants to throw a monkey wrench in the gears?

Are you an anti-voter who wants to use your vote to announce that voting is pointless?

Did you swear to your friends that you would rather sit this one out than vote for Obama or McCain, but now really want to vote, and need a way to save face?

Are you an Alaskan who is proud that your governor was chosen to be the Republican nominee for VP, but would rather keep her up North where she can actually get something done, instead of seeing her shipped off to represent the US at Mozambique's President's granddaughter's wedding?

Do you need to practice your penmanship, and punching out a chad isn't challenging enough anymore?

Do you want an alternative candidate that is taken seriously by the media, the power brokers, and the judges at the annual Anchorage State Fair Moose Chili Cook-Off?

Why not write in Sarah Palin? For President.

It won't put her in the White House, but it sure would send a message, wouldn't it? And isn't that what really counts?

There's three ways somebody can lie to you: They can make a statement that is factually untrue; they can make a statement that is factually true but place it in a context that makes its meaning untrue; and they can be a stopped clock.

The first is a child's lie. "No, I didn't take a cookie out of the cookie jar." This kind of lie is subject to objective refutation, and is mostly avoided by the most sophisticated liars.

The second is much more sophisticated. It is context that provides the meaning for any statement, and a factual statement placed in the wrong context becomes a non-factual statement.

"George Bush is just like Hitler". What is the context of that statement? There is none, so you are left to fill in your own context, and most people would assume the context in which those two figures are most often discussed, that of being the top leader of a country. Leaving the context undefined, implying the widest possible context, is often a form of lie, when it isn't just the result of sloppy speaking.

But it's a factually correct statement, given the right context. Bush is of the species Homo Sapiens. So was Hitler. Of course, that context is one nobody would bother working in. There are policies Bush has pursued that are similar enough to some policies Hitler pursued that the statement could be considered factually correct in the narrow context of those policies as well. But that still leaves the statement in full context of the leadership of a country untrue.

A stopped clock is right twice a day. But still, even on those two minutes each day when it, through sheer coincidence, is reporting the correct time, it is lying to you. Coincidental correspondence to fact is not the same thing as truth.

You have no way to know when the stopped clock is right. You know that for 1438 minutes of the day it is lying, and for two minutes it is correct, but the only way you can know which two minutes are the correct ones is to trust that the clock is always giving the correct time. If you always checked it against another clock, the first clock's statements about the time would be redundant and useless. Once a clock's veracity is determined, it becomes its own standard of truth.

Until it is caught in a lie, that is. From that point on, everything it says has to again be considered a lie. An intelligent and malicious clock, one determined to mislead you about the real time, would realize that it could occasionally give you the correct time, yet still be providing misleading information. The bonus is that if you called it out on one of those statements, it could claim "See, I was telling the truth.". And a really clever clock could claim that the time it gave was correct, in some context other than the one you assumed it was working in. The time was correct in Singapore, so technically, the clock wasn't lying. But now you know that it is always lying.

Well, she did it. Hillary's purpose today required somebody who could speak out of both sides of their mouth simultaneously, who could look you in the eye while stabbing you in the back, who could undermine while staying on the high road. She rose to the occasion as I knew she would.

The whole speech was damning by faint praise. The pundits pretty much covered that. I didn't count, but I think she mentioned McCain's name more often than she mentioned Obama's, and there was as little fire in her condemnation of McCain as there was in her praise of Obama.

But did you see what she did to Michelle? I've never seen anyone at a political event such as this throw more overt hatred toward the podium than the little Missus did tonight. If there was any purpose besides self aggrandizement and firing up her base to that introductory video, it could only have been to piss off Michelle. Then, right off the bat, the fourth line of the speech: "I'm a proud American." It wasn't the words, but the blatantly mocking tone. It was a shot fired across Michelle's bow.

Why piss off Michelle? Watch for it in the next few days, the next time they let her speak publicly after they think she's cooled off a bit. That look in her eyes tonight said she'll never forget, and never forgive. Hillary!'s hoping the vision of an angry black woman on everybody's TeeVees will put McCain in the White House and leave the 2012 nomination without an incumbent presumptive.

That mission accomplished, she turned her attention and simultaneous lack of attention on Barack. I'm sure that if this speech hadn't been so carefully crafted for other purposes, she could have found the bulk of it on the net complete with "Fill in candidate name here" blanks. A political Mad Lib.

When she wasn't making everybody's eyes glaze over in preparation for losing the next Barack mention in white noise, she was busy reminding us of Barack's "57 states" gaffe with her emphasis on having been to all 50 states plus Guam and the territories. Again, watch for the tone of that if you see a clip later.

Then, and this was a master stroke:

"John McCain is a friend, and he's served this country with honor and courage, but we don't need ...." beat .... "four more years..."

What do you think the people in that audience, and the millions on TV filled in that beat with? I know I did. Talk about damning with faint praise: "Vote for Obama because we don't need honor and courage." And she never had to say it out loud.

Oh the subtlety - sheer genius. She knew she only had to turn a few of her supporters over to McCain, and maybe convince a few more that they have better things to do on the first Tuesday in November, in order to have a clear shot four years from now. That she did it without once getting her hands dirty was quite an accomplishment.

UPDATE: Evidence that she nailed it. Of course, it's reported as evidence that she fell short of what she was trying to accomplish, but that's because everybody was reporting that her purpose was to "heal" the divisions, rather than deepen them. I'm sure the leaders of all those pro Hillary groups that suddenly sprung up out of nowhere (wink wink, nudge nudge) after she lost the primary were told to keep up the good work. The WaPo article is part and parcel of that.