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News Archives - Posts #80-86, 5-30 to 6-13
#86
2004-6-13, 12:00 PDT
Read my essay on abortion, which is actually a dialog and not an essay. I think that the dialog format delivers the point even better, though, by responding directly to anti-abortion claims. I'm going to send this to OSP after I finish writing this post; if I get hate mail or hate comments from conservatives, I'm going to lose my already tenuous faith in the goodwill of American conservatives, and the result ain't gonna be pretty.
#85
2004-6-10, 01:50 PDT
As you have probably heard, Ronald Reagan died. Now people want to put him on the $10 bill. I think it's idiotic... Reagan doesn't *deserve* being on the currency - though unlike some of the people on it, he never owned slaves, which is to his credit (though he probably would have had he lived in a time and place where slavery was legal).
Let's see what some of the people on the currency did. Washington was the first fuckin' president (not Bill Clinton...) and enjoyed support and legitimacy that Reagan could've only dreamed on. Jefferson wrote the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence and was one of the key thinkers in the founding of the USA. Franklin was a key thinker in the American Revolution. Lincoln was there when slavery ended and is responsible for the fact that the south is still part of the country, for better and for worse. Even Jackson was more important than Reagan - and the number of native Americans Jackson murdered is, I suspect, lower than the number of Latin Americans Reagan murdered (plus, it was under Reagan that the USA trained Bin Laden to fight the Soviet, even though political Islam had already begun its resurgence with the Iranian revolution).
When I was still a DUer, I read a certain post that, among other things, recommended overhauling the currency's faces and replacing past presidents with social activists like Susan B. Anthony and Eugene Debs. At least to some extent, I don't object. Communist as he was, Debs was instrumental in achieving some key labor protections in the USA. Susan B. Anthony deserves more than the silver dollar that nobody uses. Franklin, Grant, Jackson, and Hamilton should be kicked out... MLK should replace Hamilton. Anthony should replace Jackson. DuBois should replace Grant. Debs should replace Franklin. Being on a higher currency doesn't mean that one is more important; on the contrary, as high currencies are pretty rare and many don't accept them, I assigned the four personalities to the bills so that those I think "deserve" it the most get the lowest bills.
I'd ask, "any thoughts?" but I don't get any, so there's no point.
#84
2004-6-8, 02:39 PDT
Suppose that you are in a class of 50 people, and that the grades are out of 100. Now, at the end of the class, after all the assignments and the final exam, you get your grade, and it's 100, the highest in the class. Obviously, you are going to be proud of your achievement, especially if the class was hard. Now, what if you and 15 other people get 100? In that case, it makes far less sense to be proud. If the other 49 people are quite average, then getting 100 shouldn't be very hard if you're good, so there's little point to being proud. If you're going to Princeton's grad school and getting average grades, then maybe you can be proud that you're on a par with Princeton grad students. If you're getting average grades in a community college, you'll be an egghead to be proud, and indeed very few people will be proud of that.
Now, suppose that you and the same 49 other people go to a total of 5 classes. If you get an average of 100 over these 5 classes, beating everyone else, then you have grounds to be proud: you know you're good. However, if you and everyone else gets 100, then it's stupid to be proud unless you know everyone else is very smart, and even then you should be suspicious. Similarly, if you get 100 in one class, beating everyone else, and 75 in all others, being just below average, then there's little reason to be proud because overall you're average, and what's the point of getting one 100 if it's normal to be very good at one subject and average at all the others? Again, this assumes the people you're dealing with are normal. This doesn't apply if you're competing in math with winners of the Mathematics Olympiad; in that case you'd be proud for being on a par with such people.
Why is all that relevant, you ask? It means that when someone's proud of something, s/he's proud because that something is better than others. When Jews tell you that they're proud of being Jews, they are essentially saying that Jews are better than non-Jews (let's forget for a moment that they're taking credit for something other people did). When Germans are proud of being German, it means that they think that Germans are better than other people. When Chinese are proud of being Chinese, they think that Chiense are better than other people.
Think about it.
#83
2004-6-4, 05:37 PDT
*Finally* - installment #2 of Freedom is Slavery is up. I'm planning on finishing one chapter every two weeks - there're going to be 20-something chapters. In addition, expect an article on why abortion should be legal shortly.
#82
2004-6-2, 04:31 PDT
I forgot to write about this two days ago, and then my computer developed a class consciousness and went on strike and my laptop refused to work. Stacie Whitacre talks about a letter writer who supports nuking countries that support Al Qaida...
I don't remember if it was Gandhi or Martin Luther King who said, "an eye for an eye and we'll all be blind." Whichever of them it was, he was right. On a practical level, nuking will only create the USA more enemies. People in the world not only hate random violence, but also support its victims, regardless of whether it's justified. After 9/11, even Saddam Hussein only called for "restraint." When the Iraq war was nigh, the only people who remained pro-American were a handful of leaders in several countries, all insignificant except Britain and perhaps Spain; the people in Britain, Spain, Bulgaria, Poland, etc. were clearly anti-war.
Further, there's an ethical dimension here. Different people justify violence in different ways; blanket condemnations are rare because they conflict with taking sides, which few can avoid. Americans do it by thinking that the world doesn't exist, i.e. by using an extreme form of dehumanization of "them." Neither the left-wing "necessary violence" nor the right-wing "they're untermensch" has any basis in logic or reality. The idea that killing several hundred thousands is justifiable ranks up there with the ideas that Jews are taking over Germany, that aliens landed in Roswell in 1947, that the moon landing was faked, and that the UN and IMF are conspiring to become a global tyranny.
They say that condemnation of murder is global. But so is making numerous exceptions for dissidents, people of other colors/cultures, people who don't obey by local codes of conduct, etc. (Europeans don't directly murder, but they don't care about it when the victims are not white - cf. the West's non-reaction to the Rwanda genocide).
#81
2004-5-30, 06:00 PDT
Sorry for taking 50 minutes rather than 20-30 to write this... Anyway:
What's the point of having a stronger USA? The RNC ads on Blogspot are entitled "Build a Stronger America" or "Building a Stronger America" - I'm not sure which. Progressives talk of energy independence. I ask, what's the point?
It's not exactly a big secret that the USA does what it wants. Bush spat on everyone in the world when he invaded Iraq, ostensibly "doing the right thing." If India tried to "do the right thing" and occupy Pakistan, or if Indonesia tried to "do the right thing" and invade Malaysia, this would not be tolerated. Clinton was different from Bush in that he convinced the world that bombing countries for no good reason was a good idea, but that, too, was part of the too-strong-a-country syndrome.
A weaker USA means less unilateralism and more cooperation. Neo-conservatives object to everything that weakens their ability to do whatever they like, but that doesn't mean that they're right, at least until they show that murdering tens of thousands of innocent civilians and destabilizing an already-explosive region of the world (pun intended) is good for the world. This brings me to another point: what's good for the USA is not necessarily what's good for the world. In fact, I believe that in international relations, what's good for the USA is bad for the world and vice versa, with the fight against international terrorism being a big exception. But even with Al Qaida, what's needed is not a strong USA or a militarily strong West - what's needed is intelligence in the short run and humanitarian aid in the medium and long runs.
One thing that will certainly strengthen the USA is drilling in ANWR - though, oilmen's claims to the contrary, the amount of oil produced won't be enough to achieve energy independence. In the short run, however, it's the only way to reduce oil imports. The question that nobody asks is, "Will it be good if the USA stops importing oil?" Some say that this will reduce American bombings of third-world countries. This is false. The Iraq invasion was about oil only for a small minority of the people who pushed for it - namely, those who were oil crooks more than anyone else, and I can't think of anyone who fits this criterion other than Cheney. For Bush this was a family vendetta. For the neo-cons it was about regime change, WMD or not WMD.
On the other hand, the more the USA needs the world, the less likely it is to defy it. A self-sufficient country is very hard to pressure - just look at China and Russia - and has enough power to kill large numbers of people, and, as history teaches us, whoever has this power uses it. Canada is also self-sufficient, but with 30 million people, it's hardly a potential threat to the world; but the USA, China, and Russia all are. Energy independence is good insofar as it helps defunding terrorism, but the damage to Al Qaida's ability to kill and oppress will probably pale in comaprison to the increase in the USA's ability to kill and oppress.
So, "building a stronger America" is a bad idea. I don't know how bad it is to Americans, but to people in the third world it means less development (the weaker the USA is, the more it needs to help people develop to prevent 9/11-like attacks on its people), more war, and in general, less life and a lower quality of life. A weaker United States will have less power to spit at Europe and bomb third-world countries of choice, and will need to use more cooperation and less confrontation.
#80
2004-5-30, 05:11 PDT
Natasha Celine has an excellent point about environmentalism. She says:
[I have to say here that the death of environmentalism might not be an entirely bad thing. Put a nail in the coffin already. Bollocks to people who want to spread a message of brotherhood with the animals, and double bollocks to those who like to talk about the sacredness of untouched nature. Kill environmentalism, and bring on the environmental science.
We don't need to protect the animals because they're cute, or unique, or interesting. We need to protect them because they keep us alive. We don't need to protect the trees because they're sacred and old, but because they filter our water, maintain our atmosphere, and keep our topsoil in place. Coral reefs shouldn't be protected because they're fun to visit, but because populations will starve and the reefs will cease to protect coasts from the full force of storms. The earth doesn't need us, we need it.]
Right on. There's a qualitative difference between environmental science and environmental fanaticism. Trying to prevent global warming is science. The theory that global warming is caused by human intervention is scientific: it makes falsifiable predictions. That there exist greenhouse gases is indisputable; were it not for it, average temperature on earth's surface would be -15 rather than +15. But anthropogenic global warming theories makes falsifiable predictions that CO2 emissions contribute to the greenhouse effect, and so far they've not been falsified.
A good example of environmental fanaticism that is not based on science is opposition to drilling in ANWR for environmental reasons. There are reasonable arguments against drilling; I'll explain these in my next post, which should come in 20-30 minutes. But that it will kill polar bears is not one of them - especially given that no species will become extinct. Similarly, veganism is not based on scientific reasoning, or even on sound ethical reasoning (for a start, many animals do not have a sufficiently advanced nervous system to feel pain, e.g. lobsters) - eating meat is a lot less efficient than eating vegetables directly, but since globally there are food surpluses, it doesn't matter unless you're a malnourished subsistence farmer, in which case you can't afford eating meat anyway.
I think I'm going to start a trend here - whenever I'm in a factual argument, I'm going to ask opponents to make falsifiable predictions. I know I can.
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