An interesting read.
That is all.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Thought on Gay Marriage
The fact of the matter is, no matter what the law says, two men or two women cannot get married.
Whatever their relationship is, it isn't marriage, and legalizing same-sex "marriage" is simply the same as calling a dog's tail a leg.
In point of fact, the best they can have is some sort of "civil union," a legal arrangement that provides some benefits, but that does not really transcend its status as a legal entity (not, mind you, that I am in favor of civil unions, but they are not as definitionally absurd as same-sex "marriage").
What legalizing same-sex "marriage" ultimately will do is to pull down opposite sex marriage (read real marriage) down to the level of civil union.
That is the true reason to oppose same-sex "marriage." By its very naturre it redefines marriage and removes the transcenent element to it.
Reading back through my archives, I find out that this is not the first time I've made this argument, but I still think that it bears repeating.
That is all.
Whatever their relationship is, it isn't marriage, and legalizing same-sex "marriage" is simply the same as calling a dog's tail a leg.
In point of fact, the best they can have is some sort of "civil union," a legal arrangement that provides some benefits, but that does not really transcend its status as a legal entity (not, mind you, that I am in favor of civil unions, but they are not as definitionally absurd as same-sex "marriage").
What legalizing same-sex "marriage" ultimately will do is to pull down opposite sex marriage (read real marriage) down to the level of civil union.
That is the true reason to oppose same-sex "marriage." By its very naturre it redefines marriage and removes the transcenent element to it.
Reading back through my archives, I find out that this is not the first time I've made this argument, but I still think that it bears repeating.
That is all.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Read Between the Lines
Assuming that there is not anything more that we are not being told, this story about a 6-year-old facing 45 days in reform school for bringing his cub scout knife to class, has an obvious racial subtext.
Education experts say that zero-tolerance policies initially allowed authorities more leeway in punishing students, but were applied in a discriminatory fashion. Many studies indicate that African-Americans were several times more likely to be suspended or expelled than other students for the same offenses.
Translation: African-American students were, on average, less well-behaved, and if people exercised sensible discretion, this fact would actually be reflected in the statistics. So sensible discretion is not allowed.
Update:Why do I have the feeling that "for the same offenses" conflates bringing a cooking utensil to school with, e.g., playing mumblety-peg (link goes to wikipedia article on mumblety-peg, not to any news story)?
That is all.
Education experts say that zero-tolerance policies initially allowed authorities more leeway in punishing students, but were applied in a discriminatory fashion. Many studies indicate that African-Americans were several times more likely to be suspended or expelled than other students for the same offenses.
Translation: African-American students were, on average, less well-behaved, and if people exercised sensible discretion, this fact would actually be reflected in the statistics. So sensible discretion is not allowed.
Update:Why do I have the feeling that "for the same offenses" conflates bringing a cooking utensil to school with, e.g., playing mumblety-peg (link goes to wikipedia article on mumblety-peg, not to any news story)?
That is all.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Austrian Thoughts
I think that Arnold Kling here describes the major problem with most schools of macroeconomic thought:
DeLong is of course living in the macroeconomic world where we do not worry about Recalculation. Instead, we all work in one giant GDP industry, and for some mysterious reason many of our GDP factories have shut down, so that government must build and operate some GDP factories to keep us all employed.
Thanx and a tip o' the hat to Steve Sailer.
That is all.
DeLong is of course living in the macroeconomic world where we do not worry about Recalculation. Instead, we all work in one giant GDP industry, and for some mysterious reason many of our GDP factories have shut down, so that government must build and operate some GDP factories to keep us all employed.
Thanx and a tip o' the hat to Steve Sailer.
That is all.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Liberalism in Full Swing
According to this piece at TPMCafe, opposing same-sex marriage, an idea that was considered joke until, what, ten or fifteen years ago, is comparable to torture.
It is simply amazing how the left has co-opted the issue to make it seem as if being against same-sex marriage is radically reactionary, even though it is not yet legally recognized in most states.
It really seems as if the process ziel describes here is on steroids on this issue.
That is all.
It is simply amazing how the left has co-opted the issue to make it seem as if being against same-sex marriage is radically reactionary, even though it is not yet legally recognized in most states.
It really seems as if the process ziel describes here is on steroids on this issue.
That is all.
Monday, October 05, 2009
Thoughts on the "Conservative Bible Project"
Via TPMCafe, and then BeliefNet, I found out about "The Conservative Bible Project."
According to the Project, the goal of the Conservative Bible Project is to create a Bible which satisfies the gollowing ten guidelines:
(1) Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
(2) Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
(3)Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]
(4)Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;[4] defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle".
(5) Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots";[5] using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census
(6) Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
(7) Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
(8)Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
(9) Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
(10) Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word "Lord" rather than "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" or "Lord God."
So what do I think?
Well, let's deal with this one piece at a time.
(1) It's a good idea to the extent that the goal is to avoid a bias which reinterprets passages away from what they are intendend to mean. However, the goal ought to be to neutralize bias as much as possible to get the the original meaning, not just to eliminate bias in a particular direction; one gets the concern that the goal here is not merely to remove any liberal biases but to add a conservative bias. To the extent that the goal is accuracy, which is what the goal ought to be, one should be less concerned with eliminating any particular bias and should attempt to sort through all of the biases from all directions in order to correctly interpret the Bible. Specifically looking for bias from one direction practically guarantees a bias in the opposite direction.
This is not to say that any translation may not have some biases in it, but one should not deliberately seek to impose their bias on scripture.
(2) Avoiding unisex terms is a good idea if it follows the translation; that is to say that it is a good thing not to unisexualize things that were not originally written as unisex. So this is a good idea (unless of course the translators decide to insert gender into some passage where it isn't mentioned.
Unless there is some inappropriate gender neutralization in the King James Version about which I am unaware, it seems to me that this is simply a matter of not going the route of the more liberal modern translations. It does not require any drastic reinterpretations or re-translations, as this has only been an issue in Bible translations recently.
(3) I agree that the Bible should not be dumbed down. Translations should strive to keep the original nuances to the extent possible.
(4) As with #1, this is a good idea only to the extent that one is trying to correct mistranslations or to clarify translations to get closer to their original meaning. It is also not a bad idea to re-translate terms if the meaning of the terms has changed since the last translation. However, again I think there is a problem in that the goal here is not so much to translate the words correctly as to make certain that the translations are charged in the "correct" way. This could spell trouble.
Moreover, sometimes some terms are best expressed by giving the word a context-dependent meaning; for example, I believe that the reference to Jesus as "the Word," or "logos" has particular overtones in Greek. It may be better to try to understand the Greek concept of "the Word" and to understand that it has a meaning all its own rather than to try to find a more precise English word and then to assume that the new word completely captures the concept being referred to.
(5) There are problems here in that in some cases, using modern terms may help to clarify what is being discussed, but in others, the specific terms and idioms being used are necessary for understanding the context. Substituting "gambling" for "casting lots" may make a passage more understandable, but if "Casting lots" referred to a specific game, we lose some precision.
(6) Accepting the logic of Hell just means not watering down what the Bible already says. We don't need a new translation for that, most modern translations that are not explicitly watered down accept the logic of Hell. This is hardly a universal problem.
(7) Explanations of the parables beyond what Jesus says is best done in commentary. It is a bad idea to try and add interpretation into the text, or to deliberately re-translate a parable with the goal of adding in your political philosophy.
(8) While there is some merit in trying to determine whether some of the disputed passages ought to be included or not, it would be, I think, a mistake to put such passages as the story of the adulterous woman in the same category as modern liberal revisions of the Bible. Put another way, the passage "he who is without sin" should not be regarded in the context of whether it is "liberal" or "conservative." Even if you argue for its exclusion, to label it "liberal" immediately suggests that you are leaving it out for reasons other than scholarship.
(9) I'm not certain what "crediting open-mindedness" means. If he is saying that we need to point out that the disciples were convinced by Jesus' actiosn and that their faith was maintained by his faithfulness rather than by cult loyalty, well, while that is true, I'm not certain why we would want to continually assert references into the text. If there is some other, arcane, policial meaning - well, I have no idea what it is, but I would be cautious about trying to ascribe any modern political stance to the disciples.
(10) The last one is definitely a bad idea. Other than the contradiction with #3 (also pointed out at TPMCafe and by Dreher at BeliefNet), the fact of the matter is that wordiness creates nuance. Yahweh/Jehovah, Adonai, Elohim, all of this terms have different connotations when referring to God. Attempts to make passages concise could distort or remove meaning.
In short, while I am not averse to re-translations of the Bible aimed at improving accuracy and precision and at removing previous distortions, I do not think that doing so should be done explicitly politically, so the general idea of a "Conservative Bible" is very dangerous.
That is all.
According to the Project, the goal of the Conservative Bible Project is to create a Bible which satisfies the gollowing ten guidelines:
(1) Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
(2) Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
(3)Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]
(4)Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;[4] defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle".
(5) Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots";[5] using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census
(6) Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
(7) Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
(8)Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
(9) Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
(10) Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word "Lord" rather than "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" or "Lord God."
So what do I think?
Well, let's deal with this one piece at a time.
(1) It's a good idea to the extent that the goal is to avoid a bias which reinterprets passages away from what they are intendend to mean. However, the goal ought to be to neutralize bias as much as possible to get the the original meaning, not just to eliminate bias in a particular direction; one gets the concern that the goal here is not merely to remove any liberal biases but to add a conservative bias. To the extent that the goal is accuracy, which is what the goal ought to be, one should be less concerned with eliminating any particular bias and should attempt to sort through all of the biases from all directions in order to correctly interpret the Bible. Specifically looking for bias from one direction practically guarantees a bias in the opposite direction.
This is not to say that any translation may not have some biases in it, but one should not deliberately seek to impose their bias on scripture.
(2) Avoiding unisex terms is a good idea if it follows the translation; that is to say that it is a good thing not to unisexualize things that were not originally written as unisex. So this is a good idea (unless of course the translators decide to insert gender into some passage where it isn't mentioned.
Unless there is some inappropriate gender neutralization in the King James Version about which I am unaware, it seems to me that this is simply a matter of not going the route of the more liberal modern translations. It does not require any drastic reinterpretations or re-translations, as this has only been an issue in Bible translations recently.
(3) I agree that the Bible should not be dumbed down. Translations should strive to keep the original nuances to the extent possible.
(4) As with #1, this is a good idea only to the extent that one is trying to correct mistranslations or to clarify translations to get closer to their original meaning. It is also not a bad idea to re-translate terms if the meaning of the terms has changed since the last translation. However, again I think there is a problem in that the goal here is not so much to translate the words correctly as to make certain that the translations are charged in the "correct" way. This could spell trouble.
Moreover, sometimes some terms are best expressed by giving the word a context-dependent meaning; for example, I believe that the reference to Jesus as "the Word," or "logos" has particular overtones in Greek. It may be better to try to understand the Greek concept of "the Word" and to understand that it has a meaning all its own rather than to try to find a more precise English word and then to assume that the new word completely captures the concept being referred to.
(5) There are problems here in that in some cases, using modern terms may help to clarify what is being discussed, but in others, the specific terms and idioms being used are necessary for understanding the context. Substituting "gambling" for "casting lots" may make a passage more understandable, but if "Casting lots" referred to a specific game, we lose some precision.
(6) Accepting the logic of Hell just means not watering down what the Bible already says. We don't need a new translation for that, most modern translations that are not explicitly watered down accept the logic of Hell. This is hardly a universal problem.
(7) Explanations of the parables beyond what Jesus says is best done in commentary. It is a bad idea to try and add interpretation into the text, or to deliberately re-translate a parable with the goal of adding in your political philosophy.
(8) While there is some merit in trying to determine whether some of the disputed passages ought to be included or not, it would be, I think, a mistake to put such passages as the story of the adulterous woman in the same category as modern liberal revisions of the Bible. Put another way, the passage "he who is without sin" should not be regarded in the context of whether it is "liberal" or "conservative." Even if you argue for its exclusion, to label it "liberal" immediately suggests that you are leaving it out for reasons other than scholarship.
(9) I'm not certain what "crediting open-mindedness" means. If he is saying that we need to point out that the disciples were convinced by Jesus' actiosn and that their faith was maintained by his faithfulness rather than by cult loyalty, well, while that is true, I'm not certain why we would want to continually assert references into the text. If there is some other, arcane, policial meaning - well, I have no idea what it is, but I would be cautious about trying to ascribe any modern political stance to the disciples.
(10) The last one is definitely a bad idea. Other than the contradiction with #3 (also pointed out at TPMCafe and by Dreher at BeliefNet), the fact of the matter is that wordiness creates nuance. Yahweh/Jehovah, Adonai, Elohim, all of this terms have different connotations when referring to God. Attempts to make passages concise could distort or remove meaning.
In short, while I am not averse to re-translations of the Bible aimed at improving accuracy and precision and at removing previous distortions, I do not think that doing so should be done explicitly politically, so the general idea of a "Conservative Bible" is very dangerous.
That is all.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Because, You Know, Rapists Want to Prevent Rape
Via Alas, a bunch of rape-prevention tips that are guaranteed to work, because, you know, preventing rape is the foremost goal of the person committing rape.
The reason why most advice on preventing rape is given to potential victims rather than potential rapists is the same reason that advice on preventing computer virus infection is given to potential victims rather than the people writing the virus. Namely, because they are the ones with the incentive to prevent it.
The only situation in which giving a potential rapist rape prevention advice makes sense is if that person is either at risk of raping "accidentally" (i.e. they get so drunk that they atack someone without knowing what they are doing), if they are engaging in activities that make them more aggressive with greater potential for attacking someone (e.g. taking steroids) but are ignorant of how that might affect their sexual behavior, or if they are truly ignorant of the requirements for consent.
For most rapists, who either want to violate their victims or who are simply indifferent to their victims' desires, such advice falls on deaf ears and is more feel-good pablum.
I previously made fun of this sort of thing here.
More on this later.
That is all.
The reason why most advice on preventing rape is given to potential victims rather than potential rapists is the same reason that advice on preventing computer virus infection is given to potential victims rather than the people writing the virus. Namely, because they are the ones with the incentive to prevent it.
The only situation in which giving a potential rapist rape prevention advice makes sense is if that person is either at risk of raping "accidentally" (i.e. they get so drunk that they atack someone without knowing what they are doing), if they are engaging in activities that make them more aggressive with greater potential for attacking someone (e.g. taking steroids) but are ignorant of how that might affect their sexual behavior, or if they are truly ignorant of the requirements for consent.
For most rapists, who either want to violate their victims or who are simply indifferent to their victims' desires, such advice falls on deaf ears and is more feel-good pablum.
I previously made fun of this sort of thing here.
That is all.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Review of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra [SPOILERS]
Overall, it was a very decent film.
It did something that Transformers (the first film, I am not paying for a movie ticket to see the sequel to such trash as the first movie) did not do; namely, it managed to transpose the characters from the cartoon into a slightly more realistic-feeling setting quite believably. And it did not get lost dealing with the exploits of new characters created just for the movie or with unimportant side characters.
The movie is very big on special effects, and not very big on introspection or on the analysis of war, but, if you want to see that, don't go to a movie based on the 80s version of a toy franchise.
However, there were a few flaws.
I didn't like the Baroness' backstory. She should be German/Russian with a heavy accent, and should have chosen to be evil. The idea of her as one of the good guy's former love interests, and as a mind-controlled pawn, really don't do her character any good. She's supposed to be a former sudent radical with the hots for the chrome-domed one, for Pete's sake!
At the end, Cobra Commander was given a voice that should have gone to Destro. Cobra Commander should have had a higher-pitched, whinier voice, like the original Chris Latta voice. That's one of the iconic aspects to the character. But the backstory makes more sense than the Cobra-La backstory of the cartoon.
There is an implication that Cobra Commander's nano-facial surgery put Destro under some form of control at the end - maybe not mind control, but it is implied that he has Destro at his mercy and can give Destro great pain if he so wishes. That would be a bit of character decay, as Destro has always been portrayed as being very independent-minded. But the idea of Destro having a metal face rather than actually wearing a mask makes sense - his original appearance, with a fully-expressive metal mask, realy can only be duplicated by him having a metal face.
Finally, I think that Zartan should have had the mask/eye tattoos/whatever that he had in the original series, and that the long hair/hood that he wore would have been good as well. At least he should have had it in one scene, to make the connection with the cartoon counterpart more explicit.
I hope that if there is a sequel that we can see more of Dr. Mindbender. And he reall does need his monocle and menacing moustache.
That is all.
It did something that Transformers (the first film, I am not paying for a movie ticket to see the sequel to such trash as the first movie) did not do; namely, it managed to transpose the characters from the cartoon into a slightly more realistic-feeling setting quite believably. And it did not get lost dealing with the exploits of new characters created just for the movie or with unimportant side characters.
The movie is very big on special effects, and not very big on introspection or on the analysis of war, but, if you want to see that, don't go to a movie based on the 80s version of a toy franchise.
However, there were a few flaws.
I didn't like the Baroness' backstory. She should be German/Russian with a heavy accent, and should have chosen to be evil. The idea of her as one of the good guy's former love interests, and as a mind-controlled pawn, really don't do her character any good. She's supposed to be a former sudent radical with the hots for the chrome-domed one, for Pete's sake!
At the end, Cobra Commander was given a voice that should have gone to Destro. Cobra Commander should have had a higher-pitched, whinier voice, like the original Chris Latta voice. That's one of the iconic aspects to the character. But the backstory makes more sense than the Cobra-La backstory of the cartoon.
There is an implication that Cobra Commander's nano-facial surgery put Destro under some form of control at the end - maybe not mind control, but it is implied that he has Destro at his mercy and can give Destro great pain if he so wishes. That would be a bit of character decay, as Destro has always been portrayed as being very independent-minded. But the idea of Destro having a metal face rather than actually wearing a mask makes sense - his original appearance, with a fully-expressive metal mask, realy can only be duplicated by him having a metal face.
Finally, I think that Zartan should have had the mask/eye tattoos/whatever that he had in the original series, and that the long hair/hood that he wore would have been good as well. At least he should have had it in one scene, to make the connection with the cartoon counterpart more explicit.
I hope that if there is a sequel that we can see more of Dr. Mindbender. And he reall does need his monocle and menacing moustache.
That is all.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Thinking About The Boondocks
A year or two ago, I watched The Boondocks on Cartoon Network a lot.
One thing that struck me was, for all of the supposed liberal slant of Aaron MacGruder, a whole lot of the commentary seemed to be criticizing the detrimental aspects of black culture and in trying to suggest to black people to get their acts together.
Moreover, a lot of the more biting criticism at white people seemed to be directed particularly at the Stuff White People Like Crowd.
For example, one of my favorite moments occurs after Uncle Ruckus gets up on stage and starts singing "Don't trust them new n*****s over there." All of the white people at the posh garden party stare at each other, and then someone pipes up "I think it's okay when THEY say it." Suddenly everyone looks relieved and begins clapping mindlessly (previously they were all applauding all of Huey's paranoid rants while obviously ignoring their content).
I can think of very little that is as funny as skewering the effete.
That is all.
One thing that struck me was, for all of the supposed liberal slant of Aaron MacGruder, a whole lot of the commentary seemed to be criticizing the detrimental aspects of black culture and in trying to suggest to black people to get their acts together.
Moreover, a lot of the more biting criticism at white people seemed to be directed particularly at the Stuff White People Like Crowd.
For example, one of my favorite moments occurs after Uncle Ruckus gets up on stage and starts singing "Don't trust them new n*****s over there." All of the white people at the posh garden party stare at each other, and then someone pipes up "I think it's okay when THEY say it." Suddenly everyone looks relieved and begins clapping mindlessly (previously they were all applauding all of Huey's paranoid rants while obviously ignoring their content).
I can think of very little that is as funny as skewering the effete.
That is all.
Friday, September 04, 2009
Exceedingly Good News
Canadian court has found "Human Rights Law" (i.e. CrimeSpeak Law) to be unconstitutional.
Comments by Kevin Michael Grace and Lawrence Auster (more from Auster here).
That is all.
Comments by Kevin Michael Grace and Lawrence Auster (more from Auster here).
That is all.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
If You Can't Say Something Nice, Don't Say Anything at All
With that in mind, here are my thoughts on Ted Kennedy:
That is all.
That is all.
Not Getting It about G.I. Joe
I find the last few paragraphs of this piece by Alyssa Rosenberg to be hilarious. Apparently she is criticizing the recent G.I. Joe movie for not portraying war realisitically enough; for ignoring collateral damage, for being too derivative, for making the military organization too independent of government oversight, and for focusing too much on the cool hardware.
Folks, it's a movie based on a cartoon and toy line from the 1980s aimed at boys of single-digit age (yes, I know that the dolls are older than that, but the G.I. Joe characters that we know today basically were not created until the 80s).
I'm not defending the movie. It may be horrible, as the first live-action Transformers was (I'm not looking at the second until it comes out on DVD, and maybe not even then). Buyt Transformers was bad on its own terms; the robots were unrecognizable, too much of the plot revolved around the humans, the human were played too much for comic relief, etc. You don't go to watch Transformers and then claim that it was a bad movie because it had unrealistic giant robots.
And that's the problem. Ms. Rosenberg is looking for a nuanced portrayal of war from a movie that is supposed to be about colorful soldiers with amusing gimmicks fighting over-the-top villain stereotypes. Obviously, the movie will be more sophisticated than the cartoon (although the cartoon was, for what it was, fairly sophisticated (just Google "There's no place like Spingfield"), but first and foremost the movie has to be about the things that make G.I. Joe cool, two of which are the reduced level of moral complexity and the cartoony violence.
That is all.
Folks, it's a movie based on a cartoon and toy line from the 1980s aimed at boys of single-digit age (yes, I know that the dolls are older than that, but the G.I. Joe characters that we know today basically were not created until the 80s).
I'm not defending the movie. It may be horrible, as the first live-action Transformers was (I'm not looking at the second until it comes out on DVD, and maybe not even then). Buyt Transformers was bad on its own terms; the robots were unrecognizable, too much of the plot revolved around the humans, the human were played too much for comic relief, etc. You don't go to watch Transformers and then claim that it was a bad movie because it had unrealistic giant robots.
And that's the problem. Ms. Rosenberg is looking for a nuanced portrayal of war from a movie that is supposed to be about colorful soldiers with amusing gimmicks fighting over-the-top villain stereotypes. Obviously, the movie will be more sophisticated than the cartoon (although the cartoon was, for what it was, fairly sophisticated (just Google "There's no place like Spingfield"), but first and foremost the movie has to be about the things that make G.I. Joe cool, two of which are the reduced level of moral complexity and the cartoony violence.
That is all.
Friday, August 07, 2009
PETER SCHIFF MONEYBOMB!!!!!
The Schiff for Senate 2010 Exploratory Committee has a moneybomb scheduled for today (that's an attempt to raise large amounts of cash on one day).
I gave $50.00. Consider giving as well.
Rand Paul has something going on as well. I'll deal with that soon.
That is all.
I gave $50.00. Consider giving as well.
Rand Paul has something going on as well. I'll deal with that soon.
That is all.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Thought on Hiroshima
As I have said before, I think that the moral rightness of the bomb drop on Hiroshima is contingent upon two issues:
(1) Could we have achieved the surrender of the Japanese without either the bombing or an invasion if we had chosen to negotiate a surrender rather than insisting on an unconditional surrender?
(2) Is there any reason why a conditional surrender that would be acceptable to Japan should not be acceptable to us?
If the bombs were truly the only way to prevent a land invasion, or if a conditional surrender would have had horrible consequences, then the Hiroshima bombing was justified. If the Allies had good reason to assume either of those two things, the bombing was also justified - or, more precisely, the decision to bomb was justified given the knowledge that they had at the time. Otherwise, I think that the bombing was not justified.
There are basically two points that I think are important to consider whenever thinking about Hiroshima )or World War II in general):
(1) Is the demand for unconditional surrender a good thing to have in a war? Perhgaps in some wars it is the right way to fight, but I think that the tendency amongst some philosophers and pundits to look at unconditional surrender as a necessiity in any modern war is rather misguided/
(2) Hiroshima and Nagasaki were extreme decisions under extreme circumstances. They ought not to be considered universal precedents, as some pundits and commentariat would have them be (e.g. the desire to flatten the "Sunni triangle" in Iraq).
That is all.
(1) Could we have achieved the surrender of the Japanese without either the bombing or an invasion if we had chosen to negotiate a surrender rather than insisting on an unconditional surrender?
(2) Is there any reason why a conditional surrender that would be acceptable to Japan should not be acceptable to us?
If the bombs were truly the only way to prevent a land invasion, or if a conditional surrender would have had horrible consequences, then the Hiroshima bombing was justified. If the Allies had good reason to assume either of those two things, the bombing was also justified - or, more precisely, the decision to bomb was justified given the knowledge that they had at the time. Otherwise, I think that the bombing was not justified.
There are basically two points that I think are important to consider whenever thinking about Hiroshima )or World War II in general):
(1) Is the demand for unconditional surrender a good thing to have in a war? Perhgaps in some wars it is the right way to fight, but I think that the tendency amongst some philosophers and pundits to look at unconditional surrender as a necessiity in any modern war is rather misguided/
(2) Hiroshima and Nagasaki were extreme decisions under extreme circumstances. They ought not to be considered universal precedents, as some pundits and commentariat would have them be (e.g. the desire to flatten the "Sunni triangle" in Iraq).
That is all.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Another Flaw of Keynesianism
It recently came to my attention that Keynesianism has a second flaw beyond what I deem "the Keynesian fallacy."
(The Keynesian fallacy is the belief that the circulation of money is the prime determinant of the health of the economy; if money circulates a lot, it creates wealth).
It recently occurred to me that Keynesianism has another fallacy associated with it: the belief that capital goods and labor are completely fungible (or as William Anderson puts it, "homogenous").
Therefore, whenever aggregate demand is too low, the solution is simply to increase aggregate demand, rather than to consider whether the specific demands and productions are miscoordinated or whether production is geared up to meet demand. For example, if there is a glut of rubber tires, the goal becomes to find a way to use all those tires rather than to divert production of tires towards the production of something that is more in demand.
So as a result, you hear statements about how government stimulus will definitely help the economy without costing anything or without crowding out private investment, because there are so many idle resources that will go to waste if they are not used, which the government can use. And, according to this way of thinking, as long as we have high unemployment, there is excess labor so there is no danger of the government diverting resources by employing people.
Generally, this theoretical framework can be summed up by this quote from Dean Baker:
The Post is also worried about the deficit, telling readers that there is a limited supply of capital in the world and that we are borrowing too much. Actually, for practical purposes there is not a limited supply of capital in the world when the United States and most of the other wealthy countries are seeing double-digit unemployment. We can pretty much spend whatever we want without coming up against resource constraints. (Unemployment -- means excess labor supply, get it?)
This, of course, is based on the assumptions that (a) labor is the only resource constraint, and (b) all labor is fungible.
The fact of the matter is that (a), there are raw materials and technological constraints that government can push us to the limit of, regardless of employment, and (b) that a glut in labor does not necessarily mean that there are no labor shortages in certain sectors.
Definitely government can crowd out the use of raw materials, technological infrastructure, and land, even when there is high unemployment. Moreover, government could wind up exacerbating unemployment problems if the stimulus creates demand for jobs that require skills that in short supply. This could, in turn, reduce production at other levels, thus causing the labor glut in other sectors to get worse as demand for jobs declines in that sector.
For an example of the first problem, let's say that the government spends money on building asphalt bike paths and on building new highways into largely untraveled areas (like the famous "bridge to nowhere") in the hopes of getting more settlement in those areas. That could deplete our supplies of the raw materials needed to make asphalt, and thus cost jobs that are involved in making other goods that require those same raw materials. Alternately, the spot the government takes for its road might have been used to build a factory, or some other facility that society might find more useful. This is not to say that spending money on repairing roads or on building new roads in necessarily bad (although what the federal government's role should be in such things is an issue in its own right), but it is untrue to suggest that it is costless and does not represent a drain on other potential uses of resources. In any case, any such project would need to be justified on its own terms, quite apart from its effect as a stimulus.
For an example of the second, let's say that the government decides to put the unemployed to work. There is a glut of people skilled in construction. Therefore, the government sets about trying to create more office buildings to put lots of construction workers back to work. What if, however, it turns out that these buildings also need engineers, and that, due to lots of people with a mathematical background getting into the financial industry instead of engineering (due to the recent investment bubble), there is a shortage of qualified engineers (building houses requiring fewer engineers than building large office buildings), meaning that increasing construction will take the engineers out of other occupations that require them? Then these industries will not be as successful and will lay people off, as they cannot find the number of engineers that they need in order to produce goods and employ people in the other positions in their business.
The obvious solution, of course, would be to get more people to become engineers. But (a) not everyone has the aptidue to become an engineer, and (b) there will be a delay because it takes time to train someone in that field.
In the absence of government intervention, there will still be some maldistribution of resources, as the market process may take time to get things into equilibrium (after all, learning certain professions takes time in any system). But the problem is that the government intervention, being isolated from direct market signals, is as likely to exacerbate a shortage as to solve one.
The problem with Keynesianism in regards to supply and demand ultimately boils down to the fact that it oversimplifies supply and demand into one homogenous mass, therefore eliminating a key element of the economy: diversity of resources. This causes Keynesian policy to become largely about coordinating the overall level of supply and demand, and to assume that all economic problems can be solved by adding or subtracting consumption. This, in turn, leads to all of the nonsense where simply increasing the number of exchanges is seen to be the same things as creating actual goods, which brings us back to the original "Keynesian fallacy."
That is all.
(The Keynesian fallacy is the belief that the circulation of money is the prime determinant of the health of the economy; if money circulates a lot, it creates wealth).
It recently occurred to me that Keynesianism has another fallacy associated with it: the belief that capital goods and labor are completely fungible (or as William Anderson puts it, "homogenous").
Therefore, whenever aggregate demand is too low, the solution is simply to increase aggregate demand, rather than to consider whether the specific demands and productions are miscoordinated or whether production is geared up to meet demand. For example, if there is a glut of rubber tires, the goal becomes to find a way to use all those tires rather than to divert production of tires towards the production of something that is more in demand.
So as a result, you hear statements about how government stimulus will definitely help the economy without costing anything or without crowding out private investment, because there are so many idle resources that will go to waste if they are not used, which the government can use. And, according to this way of thinking, as long as we have high unemployment, there is excess labor so there is no danger of the government diverting resources by employing people.
Generally, this theoretical framework can be summed up by this quote from Dean Baker:
The Post is also worried about the deficit, telling readers that there is a limited supply of capital in the world and that we are borrowing too much. Actually, for practical purposes there is not a limited supply of capital in the world when the United States and most of the other wealthy countries are seeing double-digit unemployment. We can pretty much spend whatever we want without coming up against resource constraints. (Unemployment -- means excess labor supply, get it?)
This, of course, is based on the assumptions that (a) labor is the only resource constraint, and (b) all labor is fungible.
The fact of the matter is that (a), there are raw materials and technological constraints that government can push us to the limit of, regardless of employment, and (b) that a glut in labor does not necessarily mean that there are no labor shortages in certain sectors.
Definitely government can crowd out the use of raw materials, technological infrastructure, and land, even when there is high unemployment. Moreover, government could wind up exacerbating unemployment problems if the stimulus creates demand for jobs that require skills that in short supply. This could, in turn, reduce production at other levels, thus causing the labor glut in other sectors to get worse as demand for jobs declines in that sector.
For an example of the first problem, let's say that the government spends money on building asphalt bike paths and on building new highways into largely untraveled areas (like the famous "bridge to nowhere") in the hopes of getting more settlement in those areas. That could deplete our supplies of the raw materials needed to make asphalt, and thus cost jobs that are involved in making other goods that require those same raw materials. Alternately, the spot the government takes for its road might have been used to build a factory, or some other facility that society might find more useful. This is not to say that spending money on repairing roads or on building new roads in necessarily bad (although what the federal government's role should be in such things is an issue in its own right), but it is untrue to suggest that it is costless and does not represent a drain on other potential uses of resources. In any case, any such project would need to be justified on its own terms, quite apart from its effect as a stimulus.
For an example of the second, let's say that the government decides to put the unemployed to work. There is a glut of people skilled in construction. Therefore, the government sets about trying to create more office buildings to put lots of construction workers back to work. What if, however, it turns out that these buildings also need engineers, and that, due to lots of people with a mathematical background getting into the financial industry instead of engineering (due to the recent investment bubble), there is a shortage of qualified engineers (building houses requiring fewer engineers than building large office buildings), meaning that increasing construction will take the engineers out of other occupations that require them? Then these industries will not be as successful and will lay people off, as they cannot find the number of engineers that they need in order to produce goods and employ people in the other positions in their business.
The obvious solution, of course, would be to get more people to become engineers. But (a) not everyone has the aptidue to become an engineer, and (b) there will be a delay because it takes time to train someone in that field.
In the absence of government intervention, there will still be some maldistribution of resources, as the market process may take time to get things into equilibrium (after all, learning certain professions takes time in any system). But the problem is that the government intervention, being isolated from direct market signals, is as likely to exacerbate a shortage as to solve one.
The problem with Keynesianism in regards to supply and demand ultimately boils down to the fact that it oversimplifies supply and demand into one homogenous mass, therefore eliminating a key element of the economy: diversity of resources. This causes Keynesian policy to become largely about coordinating the overall level of supply and demand, and to assume that all economic problems can be solved by adding or subtracting consumption. This, in turn, leads to all of the nonsense where simply increasing the number of exchanges is seen to be the same things as creating actual goods, which brings us back to the original "Keynesian fallacy."
That is all.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
You Mean You'd Like to See them Nominate Someone Like Ron Paul?
Conor Friedersdorf really ought to at least pay lip service to him in this post at Sully's:
What I'd like to see in 2012 is a Republican nominee willing to apply these insights [e.g. about governmental incompetence and and the limits of human nature] -- all of which he or she will surely profess to believe -- to matters of foreign policy.
That is all.
What I'd like to see in 2012 is a Republican nominee willing to apply these insights [e.g. about governmental incompetence and and the limits of human nature] -- all of which he or she will surely profess to believe -- to matters of foreign policy.
That is all.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
A Good Point
Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau makes a good point, one that occurred to me but that I had never bothered to formulate or blog on:
Essentially, it boils down to if lawyers' legal opinions - later deemed incorrect - on an issue such as torture are used to absolve the people responsible for carrying out the orders of accontability, then the lawyers should be held accountable.
Despite talking points by a lot of neoconservative talk-show hosts about how liberals are trying to censor legal opinions, the fact of the matter is that by offering an opinion in an official capacity that encourages illegal behavior, the lawyer is more or less guilty of legal malpractice.
It is one thing to express an opinion as a private citizen, or to argue as to what the law should be. But to give legal advice with the express intent of making an act okay that would not be okay without the advice - that's not okay.
Of course, we need to see how deep this thing goes. One or two issues can be chalked up to political differences. But if there are consistent issues where a lawyer has advised the government to break the law, at a certain point accountability needs to be had.
That is all.
Essentially, it boils down to if lawyers' legal opinions - later deemed incorrect - on an issue such as torture are used to absolve the people responsible for carrying out the orders of accontability, then the lawyers should be held accountable.
Despite talking points by a lot of neoconservative talk-show hosts about how liberals are trying to censor legal opinions, the fact of the matter is that by offering an opinion in an official capacity that encourages illegal behavior, the lawyer is more or less guilty of legal malpractice.
It is one thing to express an opinion as a private citizen, or to argue as to what the law should be. But to give legal advice with the express intent of making an act okay that would not be okay without the advice - that's not okay.
Of course, we need to see how deep this thing goes. One or two issues can be chalked up to political differences. But if there are consistent issues where a lawyer has advised the government to break the law, at a certain point accountability needs to be had.
That is all.
Do (Did) Criminally-Charged Holocaust Deniers Deserve Asylum?
I'm of two minds on this.
On the one hand, laws prohibiting Holocaust denial are a violation of free speech. The hypocrisy of Judge Peters in giving asylum for a terrorist but not for people whose only "crime" was writing something, however false and horrible, is blatantly apparent.
On the other hand, I vehemently disagree with Holocaust denial and I also believe that the vast majority of Holocaust denial is not done in good faith. While what the British government is doing to Messrs. Sheppard and Whittle is unjust, I am unlikely to shed a tear over them.
Should we have asylumed them? While I am not inclined to say that we should have, they are likely no worse than other people we have asylumed in the past. Perhaps, then, that is the problem; not our unwillingness to asylum people in cases where the issue (free speech for genocide deniers) is politically incorrect, but our willingness to grant asylum when the issue is politically correct.
I would probably be okay with making overall asylum policy much tighter, provided it applied to everyone equally. It may sound selfish, but this is a British problem involving Brits on one side and Brits on the other, and I am not inclined to intervene directly. Definitely I don't feel a sense of owing anything to Messrs. Sheppard and Whittle.
Having said that, I would be much more disturbed if the U.S. adopted similar laws here, ironically enough for the old Martin Niemoller reason, that if we let them (i.e. the government) come for the unpopular, even the evil, in an unjust way, eventually they'll come for us as well. But having said that, I am not terribly inclined to try have us try to deal with other countries' problems on this front, unless of course, it involves the other country enforcing unjust laws against U.S. citizens or, to a lesser extent permanent residents.
That is all.
On the one hand, laws prohibiting Holocaust denial are a violation of free speech. The hypocrisy of Judge Peters in giving asylum for a terrorist but not for people whose only "crime" was writing something, however false and horrible, is blatantly apparent.
On the other hand, I vehemently disagree with Holocaust denial and I also believe that the vast majority of Holocaust denial is not done in good faith. While what the British government is doing to Messrs. Sheppard and Whittle is unjust, I am unlikely to shed a tear over them.
Should we have asylumed them? While I am not inclined to say that we should have, they are likely no worse than other people we have asylumed in the past. Perhaps, then, that is the problem; not our unwillingness to asylum people in cases where the issue (free speech for genocide deniers) is politically incorrect, but our willingness to grant asylum when the issue is politically correct.
I would probably be okay with making overall asylum policy much tighter, provided it applied to everyone equally. It may sound selfish, but this is a British problem involving Brits on one side and Brits on the other, and I am not inclined to intervene directly. Definitely I don't feel a sense of owing anything to Messrs. Sheppard and Whittle.
Having said that, I would be much more disturbed if the U.S. adopted similar laws here, ironically enough for the old Martin Niemoller reason, that if we let them (i.e. the government) come for the unpopular, even the evil, in an unjust way, eventually they'll come for us as well. But having said that, I am not terribly inclined to try have us try to deal with other countries' problems on this front, unless of course, it involves the other country enforcing unjust laws against U.S. citizens or, to a lesser extent permanent residents.
That is all.
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