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News Archives - Posts #71-79, 5-8 to 5-26
#79
2004-5-26, 01:50 PDT
Check out The Yorkshire Ranter, a left-wing British blog that looks very promising and attacks neo-conservative dogma a lot better than any blog I've seen so far. Good stuff... And, as a bonus, he has an RSS feed from OSP :-).
#78
2004-5-25, 23:10 PDT
Has anyone who might be reading this checked my site's stats? Because you'll see a pretty clear negative correlation between frequency of updates and traffic. That goes to show that my 50 unique visitors per day are for shit if 48 of them find this site by mistake and never go back. The number of people who read this page is something like 2 per day when I'm lucky, 0 when I'm not.
On a rare occasion, I'm going to do a service to the mainstream American left now. I'm going to explain why one shouldn't vote for Nader. Nader is of course a hardcore leftist who believes in values of green democracy; this itself is not a problem because the more idiotic aspects of green democracy are impossible to pass or implement in the United States, so the Greens will need to manage with only implementing the more issue-based points of their platform (ending the war on drugs, withdrawing from Iraq, etc.). Nader, however, and I think the Green Party in general too, is a fanatic. Not just about green democracy, but also and much more importantly about globalization. It is true that globalization hurts workers, but only if one believes in the American ideal of non-Americans being untermensch. Otherwise, sweatshops greatly increase the living standard in the third world; the conditions in them are bad, but working in agriculture is worse. In The Great Unraveling, Paul Krugman makes a condemning case against anti-globalization and its fanatical proponents such as Ralph Nader.
#77
2004-5-22, 23:08 PDT
As my governor says, I'm back. First, during the time I was gone, Stacie Whitacre linked to me. Yay. Her blog gets several times the number of regular readers I do (I have 2-3 and she has ~10, last time I checked, though a more inclusive definition would bump me up to 4-5 and her probably to 20+)... But then again OSP gets a thousand hits a day and it's hardly given me any referrals, let alone regular readers. Bah.
Anyway, two things about recent news:
1. Congress kicked the BJP's ass in India. The BJP's economic reforms (which Congress had started) never reached the villages, so if you were a programmer your life was made, but otherwise you were on the verge of starvation. Now, add to that the fact that the BJP defunded welfare in favor of defense spending... I mean, in a dictatorship the elite can freely screw the people. But what did the middle-class in India think - that they could just screw the majority and get away with it? The poor villagers outnumber and outvote them, after all. In the West, the right and center have learned that to screw the poor effectively, they should really screw only the bottom 30-40% and at least throw bones to the rest. That's exactly how Thatcher and Reagan could do what they did.
2. About the recent atrocity in Iraq (firing a missile into a wedding party): I'm really not impressed. After all, I've known that the USA has been doing such or similar things for a while (they did exactly the same thing in Afghanistan a while ago, IIRC). When a mass murderer murders another victim, I feel angry and sad, but hardly surprised. I reserve the surprise to times when new ground is broken - when someone I thought was not a murderer murders, or when a murderer does something new. Same goes for Israel's firing of missiles into a non-violent civilian demonstration, killing 10-20 people. I'm saddened, but not surprised.
#76
2004-5-17, 08:49 PDT
Forgive me for posting before the 23rd ;-). I got woken up something like an hour and a half ago with a phone call from my dad informing me that WMD were found in Iraq, namely a single shell explosion that contained sarin gas (the explosion was meant to hit an American convoy; nobody was hurt, fortunately).
However, reading AP's press release, one can find a pretty good argument why this doesn't mean Saddam had WMD - namely, that sarin gas was also used in the Tokyo subway attack of 1995. In other words, this is something that a terrorist group can produce at home, import easily (especially considering that you can get past border control across many borders in the Middle East by paying bribes), or steal from a lab. Alternatively, if nothing else is found, and if tracing the shell to whoever laid it leads to a dead end, an alternative reason for that will be that either someone in the Iraqi army didn't destroy everything (not necessarily with Saddam's knowledge) or a terrorist organization had stolen it before WMD were destroyed, and there were several fundamentalist terrorist groups in Iraq that terrorized Saddam's regime.
#75
2004-5-13, 03:01 PDT
This is going to be my last post for the next ten days...
1. Installment #1 of Freedom is Slavery is up; note that this is not the whole first chapter, which I will add to the same page in due course, but just roughly its first half.
2. I've found a great logical fallacies resource online... namely, the Black Identity flamefest. The people arguing with me make almost every major logical fallacy known to man. Examples include:
Ad hominem - people attack me because I'm white (e.g. "white privilege").
Ad nauseam - people repeat the same buzzwords, e.g. "white privilege" again, without explaining and even after I rebuked them, as if saying a falsity many times makes it true.
Ad populum - people basically say "we're many and you're one, so you're wrong."
Non sequitur - people try to say that the fact that blacks are oppressed justifies black nationalism.
Strawman - people apparently think that I'm saying that there's no racism in the USA.
Resistance to facts - people ignore my evidence that Malcolm X was a terrorist (they don't even try rebuking it...).
A few more stupidities include resistance to logic (e.g. people try to actually justify use of known fallacies... reference McCandlish's third corollary to the Wilcox-McCandlish law). And people wonder why I give up... whoever said it was impossible to debate idiots was right. I guess it's not just fascists and fundamentalists who are so impervious to logic :-(.
#74
2004-5-12, 09:21 PDT
Well, I'm signing off this evening, so the only thing you're going to see from me between now and the 23rd is the first part of the first chapter of the capitalism novel, Freedom is Slavery.
Three small treat before I go away:
1. Yesterday, I bought The Great Unraveling by Paul Krugman and Fanatics and Fools by Arianna Huffington, so expect a review sometime after my exams end.
2. Check out The Iron Blog, a place where people can challenge one of four Iron Bloggers, including Jay "Folkbum" Bullock.
3. It appears as though the BJP may lose in the election... Prime Minister Vajpayee says that he might opt to stay in opposition if the BJP and its National Democratic Alliance receive fewer than 250 Lok Sabha seats (out of 543), which it might. The election's very close, though, which means that whoever wins will have to represent a nation half of whose voters voted for a fundamentalist party.
#73
2004-5-10, 19:43 PDT
Remember what I said a few tens of posts below about my OSP posts generating an amount of comment material inversely proportional to my constructiveness? Well, the comment thread of a cross-posting of post #72 below has generated 29 comments so far, of which 7 are mine and 21 are attacks with tones ranging from extremely negative (e.g. Kenneth Quinnell's reply) to flames (e.g. Lauren's reply).
The bright side of this is that I've just gotten a reply from Earl Dunovant that doesn't attack (the reply settles a misunderstanding concerning what I said about his blog's post being primarily non-original material).
Still... when I talk about how American soldiers "only followed orders" or bash libertarianism I get zero feedback. When I bash black pride, I get a long flame thread.
Also, I have good news and bad news. The bad news are that beginning in the evening of the 13th and ending in the morning of the 23rd, I won't be able to post because that's my exam period. The good news are that I promise that the first installement of the fiction novel about capitalism I promised a while ago will come before I log off.
#72
2004-5-9, 05:47 PDT
While doing my part of the Around the OSP Blogs column, I read Earl Dunovant's site. Now, I don't think that P6 ever got on the Around the OSP Blogs column, the main reason being that it comprises almost solely of news copied-and-pasted from news sources with evry little original material (this also goes to other blogs with little original content).
Anyway, Earl Dunovant is black. He's not black like some people I know, who simply have a black skin; Earl is a self-professed "black partisan" who has a strong black identity. He quotes Malcolm X: "Who taught you, please, who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin, to such extent that you bleach, to get like the white man? ... Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate, the race that you belong to?"
Now, Malcolm X is an interesting figure. Reverse everything he says - i.e. replace white with black, etc. - and you get something that David Duke et al would say. What I quote above is pure, unadulterated racism; if a white person talked to the same extent about a "white identity" and "getting like the black man," he'd be correctly branded as a total racist. But I know that few people will say the same thing about similar statements when made by black nationalists.
The concept of a black identity is as racist as this of a white identity. Blacks aren't different from whites in mental and physical capabilities, unless one counts the fact that blacks are more resistant to sunburn. A racial identity has to be manufactured and exclusive and contradicts reality, regardless of the race or ethnic group involved.
Some people are oppressed because they're black or homosexual or atheist or whatever. That doesn't justify turning this into a culture identity or crusading for ethno-nationalism. It makes sense to the same degree as becoming a Christian theocracy in order to prevent becoming a Muslim theocracy. Ask me what race I am, and I'll tell you that unfortunately, I'm human. I'm saying that black nationalists should cut the racism and the racist propaganda, and I'm further saying that liberals should stop cutting them slack that hardly anyone would cut the KKK just because they're "minorities."
Race, unfortunately, is not something that can be ignored by masking, like sexual orientation; the minute a person walks into, say, an interview, the interviewer knows what race and sex he or she is. But it can and should be masked on the Internet, when filling out forms, etc. There's a problem in the United States of blacks being disfavored in work solely due to race, but it should be solved by integration, not racial separatism. People who have close friends of different races (not the "black friends" everyone immediately talks about apologetically), have dated people of different races, went to integrated schools, and aren't brought up to think in terms of race and/or ethnicity, will not discriminate on the basis of race.
If you're oppressed, end the oppression and move on, but for fuck's sake, don't consider yourself different than whoever oppresses you because you have a different skin color. And even if you are different, due to, say, sexual orientation, or social class, then don't think for a moment that being a minority or just plain oppressed makes you somehow better. When your oppressor does that to you, you rightly accuse him of bigotry; and yet you applaud such behavior when you do it.
#71
2004-5-8, 22:49 PDT
On libertarianism... Some libertarians claim that libertarianism is classical liberalism. I disagree. First, even if classical liberalism was identical to what libertarianism is today, one must remember that there have been important events since 1800 that have changed politics. What libertarians do is akin to saying that the age of the earth is a few million years, as thought by early evolutionists, and claim Darwin as a proponent of this view.
Second, classical liberalism really is two different liberalisms, one more libertarian (Lockian) and one more authoritarian (moralistic). Moralistic liberalism talks too much about the social contract and how rights and duties are derived from it to be libertarian. Lockian liberalism has several important differences with libertarianism - namely, that its brand of individualism is much closer to modern liberalism than to libertarianism.
Third, much of classical liberalism is pre-capitalist in the sense that Locke supports an individual's right to the fruits of his labor and Adam Smith and David Ricardo regard labor as far more important than capital.
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