China is a recurring subject in the Republican debates. National debt is given a sinister character by the suggestion that the Chinese own much of it (they own some of it, but by far not most). Here’s Romney from one of the debates:

China is playing by different rules. One, they are stealing intellectual property. Number two, they’re hacking into our computer systems, both government and corporate they are manipulating their currency, and by doing so, holding down the price of Chinese goods, and making sure their products are artificially low-priced. It’s predatory pricing, it’s killing jobs in America I would do something this president should have done a long time ago, which is to label China a currency manipulator. And then I would bring in action at the WTO level, charging them with being a currency manipulator.

Romney’s China rhetoric is relatively more sophisticated and fact-based than many other Republicans’ and yet here we have bad economics. They’re stealing our intellectual property? You mean they refuse to strangle their progress with our monopolies and artificial scarcity? What predators. And here we have the false notion of zero-sum trade, coming from the party that is ostensibly for free trade.

Obama isn’t much better. In his last SOTU, Obama mentioned China 5 times and counted blocking Chinese tires from entering our market as a victory for American workers. Sure, it’s a victory for some workers but on the whole, it’s not a benefit for the American people. Obama knows better and his economic advisers certainly do. But appealing to peoples’ [false] intuitions and paleolithic fear of outsiders is always a politically winning strategy.

The growing consensus, as far as I can tell, among those on the mainstream Left who understand economics is that we shouldn’t stop free trade but rather ensure an ample safety net for the minority who does suffer from the workings of the global market.

China sacrifices her citizens’ subjects’ wealth to make products cheaper for us. This isn’t to the benefit of the Chinese people over the American people. It’s to the benefit of certain Chinese manufacturers over the Chinese people. Countering that with tighter trade restrictions won’t restore the balance in favor of the American people, but rather benefit domestic producers at the expense of everyone else. Tariffs should be seen for what they are – a regressive tax.

Pete Hoekstra may be stupid and he may be blatantly playing off of xenophobia and discredited folk economic beliefs, but he is far from alone.

The beginning of wisdom here is to note that pollution isn’t “bad for the planet.” The planet is a gigantic roughly spherical chunk of rocks that can easily survive whatever level of greenhouse gas emissions or whatever else we care to pump into the atmosphere. The big picture ecological threat is a threat to human beings [...] Radical population reduction would sharply reduce the quantity of anthropogenic ecological impacts, but to what end? The goal needs to be to reconfigure human activity in order to make it sustainable over a longer time horizon.

I won’t get into how I feel about the conservative notion that it’s the government’s job to encourage people to live the standard American lifestyle – suburbs, cars and kids – or, indeed, any lifestyle* beyond to say that I’m not exactly a fan and that he neglects that lower population is a saner alternative to lifestyle adjustments alone for ecological issues. I’ll just address the specieism his post espouses and the oversimplification of what exactly our planet is and does.

If you take a raccoon from the woods, take it into your home and then drown it, you will rightly face animal cruelty charges (among others)**. If you purchase property that is habitat to a hundred raccoons and flood it to provide a reservoir, somehow the mass cruelty flies under the radar. This of course makes no sense. If cruelty to one animal is indefensible, then cruelty to many is more so.

Biodiversity itself may only be of instrumental value. Just like there isn’t much of a difference morally between a mass murder of 1000 individuals and genocide consisting of 1000 individuals, there isn’t that much of a reason to get worked up about minor biodiversity loss itself so long as it is eventually recovered and there remains enough in the present time. However, habitat destruction and the reduction of numbers means that individual sentient organisms are starving to death or otherwise dying in a bad way or living a more impoverished existence. For this reason, any environmentalism that doesn’t make the welfare/rights of all beings, not just humans, central isn’t worth discussing. Matt Yglesias seems to be suggesting we all need to do our part to use less resources to make room for more people. This fails because as we can see it disregards the welfare of wildlife and it also fails because it takes a total view of happiness. Two people living okay existences aren’t really better than one person living a fabulous existence. In a true eco-utopia, everyone will have plenty of unharmed wilderness to explore and achieve oneness.

Another minor point is his assertion that the planet is just “a spherical chunk of rocks.” Clearly, when people say planet, they are not referring to its geology, though the bulk of the mass is, indeed, lifeless silica and minerals. They are referring, of course, to the ecosphere, which supports us and all the other life on the planet. It is perhaps of only instrumental value but very great value indeed. If we fix up Señor Yglesias’ comments accordingly, we still don’t see a powerful argument to reduce humanity to the stone age nor to view children as little packets of evil (however annoying they may be), but you also certainly don’t come to the conclusion that child rearing, something people gladly voluntarily do anyway, needs to be subsidized so as to encourage it anymore than our biology and existing social pressures already do.

* I don’t want zen fascists telling me to live in an apartment, ride the bus and not have kids either.
** Actually, this depends on the jurisdiction. If you at least feed the raccoon first, it will then be your [illegal] pet that you are being cruel to. If you at least agree that someone ought to get in trouble for kidnapping, then drowning a raccoon, then you should agree with my logic, even if the law isn’t quite like I make it sound.

Indeed, the main argument made by the reasonroids’ side of the debate isn’t that we need to set salaries or incentives for teachers differently. If we really are simply thinking in terms of incentive or the “MBA mentality,” we’d rightly conclude that Damon, however smart he is, is wrong to downplay the importance of salary and job security and raise salaries in order to attract more and better teachers. The argument is, or should be, that it is highly paternalistic to put teachers in a position that their job security, perks and even wages are at the mercy of taxpayers. The problem is taxpayers are stingy assholes.

People on reason.tv’s side of the debate trap themselves into a corner arguing for less cushy jobs for teachers when the free market very well could offer better working conditions for all we know. The fat seems not to be in teachers’ salaries and perks, but in supporting the various parasites that feed off the system*. If giving teachers rock star salaries brings more students to your school, then teachers will have rock star salaries. So let’s free teachers from the tyranny of the taxpayer**.

I’m suspicious of Milt Friedman’s idea of the school voucher. In many other 1st world welfare states, public schools are not free. If we do require people to pay what they can afford (with the rich paying the full costs), we can reduce the stress on the general fund and remove one subsidy for having kids. Welfare for the poor, not the absolutely rich. This will bring more money in so it is easier to pay teachers well and make it more worthwhile for private enterprise to enter the education (less crowd-out effect; hard to compete with free) without the free handouts vouchers would constitute. It would be important, though, to modernize accreditation requirements so as to allow actual competition between different approaches. That’s what education needs above all.

* Consultants and vendors gouging the district for their often worthless wares.. that’s what the artificial scarcity of the complex procurement process gets us

** Enter the tyranny of the customer. Still more tolerable since they have kids they care about. ‘Taxpayers’ includes these parents, plus everyone else

What most bothers me about the whole concept isn’t the empty symbolism; I’m used to that and expect such from facebookistan. It is that it is yet another example of this cognitive dissonance I too often see in our movement – conflating the very different concerns of the health of the planet on one hand with very separate egalitarian goals, however laudable, on the other. The protest is about gas prices. If the prices are high, great. Maybe alternatives will finally be viable in the market. Don’t get me wrong; there is reason for environmentalists to protest gas prices – for being too low. It’s time to end the gas subsidies, end our oil diplomacy (and “diplomacy”) and end the socialization of costs where otherwise Americans’ stinginess (a force that knows no parallel) might otherwise prevent unwise use of scarce resources.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=158856697501684

Am I on crazy pills? Everyone I know misses that he's obviously a sea sponge made out to look like a household sponge. It's called artistic license!

Many people say that the best salve for environmental issues is strict enforcement of property rights with activists legally assisting those affected by pollution, etc. It’s worth a try as state environmentalism causes people who otherwise would want to do their part to protect the planet to instead resent the whole movement and feel as if it were forced upon them*. If our system was just, it should be possible for everyone along the gulf coast (and not just in America, but even in other islands sufficiently close to be affected) to do a class-action lawsuit against BP and actually get compensated for the damages. If BP truly believed this was possible, they would have made sure no one cut any corners in meeting safety regulations or, in the absence of safety regulations, would probably have paid to develop their own. Experience tells us that instead of this happening, the rabid pragmatists in our legal system won’t allow for a company that’s an important part of the economy to be utterly destroyed by mere tort. Exxon managed to delay and delay having to pay and managed to get only a slap on the wrist in the end, despite decimating an entire community and doing untold damages to wildlife. Even the ship is alive and well, living on as the the Dong Fang Ocean. This, however isn’t the bigger problem since it’s “simply” a matter of not having a state that claims to act in the interests of the people, but instead acts in the interests of the bureaucrats’ friends. No, the bigger problem is that cases like this amount to such a tiny fraction of the depreciation of natural resources. Wetlands, for example, that make up the invisible bedrock to our economy by performing services we’d pay as much as necessary to get if it wasn’t free, are being nickel and dimed to oblivion by numerous polluters and it’s affects are divided equally by everyone in the vicinity.

You may own a piece of property and essentially do with it as you wish, but on what grounds can you be said to own the air above it or the water below it? These things are passing through and as you use and abuse these things, you automatically damage everyone else’s property. Everyone’s part of the burden is sufficiently small that it’s not worth it for them to seek damages. If that alone were the problem, I think we would have a problem that everyone can live with. Of course the market is going to have negative externalities and if it’s sufficiently minor, there’s no need to bother addressing it. However, not just what I do on my property to the air, but what every single manufacturer contributes to the air adds up to something that harms peoples’ health and destroys the beauty of un”improved” land. Though I said I’ll defer the issue, let’s not forget what we do to creatures who no doubt can suffer, but lack the ability to legally defend themselves. To such situations, I propose an alternative.

Earlier, I blogged about my idea of EcoTax, which turns out to be very similar to Henry George’s idea, though with important differences. I’ll post later with an updated version of my idea, but to summarize, I propose as a practical alternative to numerous mini-torts the government** having an alternate plan for companies (or individuals – a company is just a bunch of individuals) that must pollute as part of their operations. For such companies, they can opt to, instead of being subject to numerous torts, which they will then be forced to actually pay up on, they can simply pay in proportion to how much they pollute, and the funds shared with everyone. This will make it cost to pollute and it will make products that carry a heavier eco-burden to reflect more accurately their ecological costs. The market, which is to say, the creativity of everyone working together, will then work towards solving ecological problems in a bottom-up way, instead of us hoping that the commands from a distant bureaucracy, funded and controlled by elites is the right one, as it would be the one we’ll all be stuck with. Furthermore, it will let people have their freedom to live as they choose rather than a specific brand of green living forced on them.

** The government or whatever legal order(s) there may be. My basic idea is perfectly compatible with a libertarian society. It doesn’t need an army to prop it up!

http://www.city-data.com/top2/h39.html

Here’s a post I expect to be quartered or crucified for writing. So be it.

Japan has always had more lax child pornography laws than much of the Western world. Mere possession is not a crime; only creation is. Also, unlike America, but like some Western countries (including Australia, I believe), virtual child pornography is perfectly legal. Here we have a case where two very important goals, the safety of children and the freedoms of expression, come into direct conflict. The problem, however, is since it’s just viewed as the right of some scoundrels, I fear that Japan will follow the unfortunate model of the West and give no weight to the latter. In the wise words of H.L. Menken:

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

We’ll, if we value liberty, here is a class of scoundrels we must defend – pedophiles. No, there’s no need to defend monsters who prey on children; to call them pedophiles is to trivialize what they are. No, we need to defend people who, due to whatever developmental or other abnormality, are attracted to prepubescence and only want visual materials to go along with their abnormal fantasies. For that matter, also normal males who are attracted to 16-year olds and want visuals to go with their perfectly normal fantasies*.

I don’t know the details yet because the diet hasn’t come to an agreement yet, but I hope that they don’t make virtual child pornography illegal. This is important. We cannot allow “don’t even think about it” laws to exist and crush them where they already do. As Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” I would also say being human means you can have a thought and not act on it. People believe it is okay to make exceptions to fundamental freedoms if it is only creeps who misuse it, but they are making two big, fatal mistakes.

Firstly, there is the belief that the only consequences of a law are from the enacting of the law itself. In fact, a law begets other, similar laws – precedence – and once nations are allowed to make thoughts crimes (like religions do), it is a slippery slope to tyranny. You can’t neatly divide “bad” from “good”. If you think it’s possible to only stop “bad” uses of free speech, etc., then I challenge you to find a weed killer that doesn’t kill pretty weeds. Note the quagmire Europeans have gotten themselves into by thinking its appropriate to regulate speech just because it’s anti-Semitic. Now the Islamofascists have them morally by the balls when they demand censorship against speech they find offensive (e.g., depictions of Mohamed). We must attack this mentality and expose it for what it is.

Secondly, there is the mistaken belief that curtailing freedoms does make us safer in the long run. I won’t trivially reject this, but humor the notion for a second. It may well be in some cases that we are less safe because of freedoms people have. If people can move freely without harassment, ostensibly it will be more difficult to track down and preemptively arrest terrorist. A super-intelligent, benevolent robot controlling the money supply could make us safer financially than if people are free to use their moneys as they please (in extremely hypothetical theory). And yes, it certainly could be that some children are being harmed who wouldn’t be if we could just break into mere users’ computers to track down the peddlers. Think about it for a second. Isn’t this the line of reasoning that oppressive regimes use? People sponsor their own captors because they genuinely believe they are being protected from foreign barbarians. It is naïve to think that the ability to criminalize behavior seen as a some sort of precursor to real crime is going to be used for good ends most of the time. Once we’re allowed to arrest people because “he was shady” or “he was thinking about it” we will have successfully retreated hundreds of years worth of advancement in civil liberties.

For the specific case of child pornography, I still wonder what the real reason is we absolutely have to criminalize possession? I think this is cultural imperialism on our part towards Japan. It’s absolutely not necessary. The law could provide for law enforcement to be able to search suspected customers’ computers for the express purpose of finding the peddlers. As it so turns out, criminalizing kiddie porn doesn’t help gather evidence. It actually makes users (and non-users who have a healthy distrust of both the internet and the authorities) paranoid and practice continual deletion of history, cache, etc. The last thing you want to do is create an incentive to destroy evidence! Let people be relaxed, but if they’re suspected of possessing real child porn**, their punishment should be having to endure a search through their personal property as the real criminal is hunted down.

One last note, a diversion into counter-economics – here is also an opportunity for a peaceful black market. Boycott our corporatist economy by making your own 3d child porn and selling it. Please pedophiles without hurting a single hair on a child. Not into kiddie porn? Me neither. Draw a picture of a hot naked chick (or dude, whatever you’re into) and say she’s 17.

** Don’t get me wrong about people who enjoy kiddie porn. If you enjoy something that someone had to get hurt to make, you’re still a monster. If you are attracted to children, the right thing to do is of course boycott any real kiddie porn and only download virtual (e.g., computer-generated or cartoons). However, even if you are such a monster, I don’t think you should be put in the same category as someone who actually rapes children or creates this grotesque pornography.

Prop 13 – Yes. This is one of those “closing the donut hole” laws. They exempt certain types of earthquake repairs from triggering property value reassessments but not others and this law fixes it so that all earthquake repairs are exempt.

Prop 14 – No. It’s great that you can vote for any party’s primary. It’s great that candidates are not required to list their party, but this prop has a glaring flaw – only two candidates can be selected between and there will be no write-ins. I double-checked to see if this wasn’t just hype by the opposition, but the text clearly states that it eliminates the write-ins. What we need is clean elections and a better system, like approval/disapproval or instant runoff. Why do no propositions to this effect end up on our ballots?

Prop 15 – Yes… This proposition isn’t perfect either. It should have only lifted the ban on public funds provided the funds come from the pool generated from lobbyist fees. Given that omission, I can only offer a timid support of this law on the theory that we’re never going to get true election reform on the ballot and this is the closest we’ll get anytime soon. Corporations and unions run politics and it shouldn’t be so. Ideally, public funds shouldn’t be part of it either.

Prop 16 – No. Whether or not you think local governments should get into the electricity business, voters should have a say. That’s why I oppose this law. I don’t think a 2/3rds vote is reasonable. Also keep in mind that “private” utility providers benefit just as much as state-run from regional monopolies (government granted and “natural”) so I regard the investor owned concerns to be a type of government-sponsored utility that voters have less control over. As the technology improves, we can evolve away from natural energy monopolies and have real competition – it happened with telephone service. Also note that wind, solar is exempted only if it’s 100% of the source. That’s unrealistic and stupid. We need to tax environmental degradation and, beyond that, allow real free-market competition on energy. We don’t need this corporatist neo-mercantilist prop. Pass!

Prop 17 – Yes. There are flaws, however. I read the text of the law (what will be added/deleted) and I definitely support insurance companies being able to take into account things that are going to cost them money so there’s incentive to drop prices. There should be an incentive to continuously have auto insurance as long as you have a car (read on for why I italicized this part of the sentence). For me, I wasn’t able to put me and my wife on the same insurance because it would be more expensive. Yes, that’s right. The lady at AAA couldn’t figure out why their estimate was higher than I pay, but it’s obvious – State Farm is giving me a long-time customer discount.

For this law to be more attractive, it should require a grace period of at least 30 days (in practice, auto insurance companies usually do anyway, but just to make sure) before insurance is to be considered lapsed and allow for lapses if it’s where the person simply didn’t own a car. Choosing to break the law and drive uninsured is irresponsible, but people who chose to not have cars for a while (or have no choice but to do so) shouldn’t be additionally penalized.

spoiler alert ** do not continue if you don’t want the plot revealed (this is really intended reading for people who watched the movie anyway, not a proper review; I don’t do movie reviews)

I’m not a movie critic, but an appreciator of Sci-Fi, so I’ll focus mostly on the alien biology and “anthropology” of the aliens themselves. The movie had all the things that make American movies frustrating – the overused noble savage against technology plot (think Dances With Wolves or Ferngully… anyone remember Ferngully?) and the handlebar mustache-twisting (figuratively) villain that you can never find in real life. Yes, people are greedy, incompetent or just plain wrong about the world around them, but people aren’t motivated by evil (‘What about Hitler?,’ you ask? Yes, file Hitler under wrong about the world around him – deeply wrong about what is right but he fought for what he believed to be right). The movie also had what makes American movies great and particularly well suited to their often blue-collar audience – wish fulfillment. Who doesn’t want to be 10 feet tall, blue and run around an idyllic wilderness half-naked and ride alien Pterodactyls? Oh, and the guy lands himself a hot alien chick. Double-score. There’s also the interconnectedness – with nature and with the tribe, that modern Americans lack severely. People secretly yearn for that as they spend more and more money to be further and further from dirt and from their relatives.

I could go on and on about inaccuracies, but what’s the point? Sci-fi is about changing reality, holding certain fantastic things for granted and, outside of that, have an internally consistent universe. I could just grant all sorts of sillinesses and that, by wild coincidence, the aliens on Pandora happen to be astonishingly humanoid (maybe they are of Terrestrial origin or vice versa – panspermia) and I think I will. What interests me, though, is the biology of the planet. How and why the synergy between all life forms on Pandora happened is an interesting question. I find myself wondering if the Navi began having that bio communication port in their ponytails and bred various animals and plants to interact with it, in much the same way dogs, though slightly dumber than wolves can understand human language better (I am told). It’s hard to imagine life evolving towards standardizing on a way of exchanging information, but then again bacteria have just that (with plasmids) and benefit greatly. The Gaea Hypothesis holds that natural selection has applied not just to individuals, but to the ecosphere herself. Indeed, we metazoans are symbiosis of countless eukaryotic cells (and, for that matter, prokaryotic cells) which earlier in evolutionary history would have only existed singly and for their own purposes. For this synergy to have happened, however, all the cells must come from the same genes. That is key. So, for the world of Pandora to exist, the rest of the ecosphere and at least the Navi themselves must share DNA to some degree. Maybe there is rogue genes or viruses that infect all of life with cooperation genes. Maybe that connection port is a sort of zoological plasmid they share?

Also of interest and an area where the movie lets me down is the religion of the people. Indeed, very seldom is religion treated fairly and realistically in sci-fi or fantasy. It’s often superficially glazed over without people putting their minds into the believers themselves. If you ask me, it’s one of the more fascinating aspects of a culture and playing with hypothetical religions (and asking why they don’t exist) is probably one of the next great frontiers in the world of sci-fi. What you see in the movie is essentially a Christian attempt at Paganism, crossed with Earth (or Pandora)-worshipping deep green religion. When you die, you go to heaven, but heaven exists in the ecosphere’s data storage. There’s a God, but she’s a woman who doesn’t take sides (except in the epic battle in the movie). It’s even interesting how what they believe in is fully naturalistic, but I’m afraid the movie captures the typical liberal naive idealizations about tribal peoples’ spirituality. Yes, people who live in nature love and worship nature, but it is a very different kind of biophilia than what is found among us cosmopolitans. Nature isn’t a relaxing vacation – it is everything. It is all the good and all the bad in the world. To understand how their beliefs really would have been, one need only look back in time and keep in mind “God fearing Christian” – Pagans are Nature fearing Pagans! Jór provided for her worshipers and protected them from outsiders, but she also greedily demanded human sacrifice – as countless well-preserved bog bodies will attest – on threat of more famine and harsher storms. It makes sense that the “Great Mother” protected the Navi, knowing that Humans would do to her what they did to their “mother” but this also means that she is prepared to keep the Navi in check by disease and famine, should they live beyond her means. If you want to see how more beautiful it is with the dark side left intact, see any of Miyazaki’s movies. He makes nature out to be what she really is – both beautiful and scary. He adds the supernatural element for entertainment and effect, but there’s something real about his surreal worlds.

My wife was irritated at the ending. Why did he choose to live with the aliens? He’s from such a different world. My thinking is it’s going to be an adjustment, but what would have made me feel better is if they exposed wrongs and injustices within the tribe. Their extreme idealization of these noble savages actually makes their culture less appealing. If I could see the ways in which we know cultures that emphasize connectedness and tribal solidarity also squelch the individual or that the Navi too are capable of wrongheadedness, their culture would appeal so much more to me by seeming real. That’s what I wanted to see. Their world would be more beautiful if it was less like a paradise and more like something that almost could be, with even its pitfalls laid out before me. That’s what I wanted to see. This movie is Earth-worship without the soul. But the graphics were awesome. I definitely recommend seeing it.